The Wife’s Tale: A Personal History

Houses with doorways open onto the street began to give way to homesteads encircled by fences of lashed-together eucalyptus and euphorbia. Flowering bushes crowded in on them, wild roses, creamy yellow crotons. They began to pass women in white shawls returning from church, stepping easy, quiet among the rocks, their long shadows mingling and moving together. When the women saw her husband they came close to ask for his blessing, touching forehead and chin to the cross he disentangled from the folds of the gabi he had wrapped around his shoulders for warmth. May God bless you and keep you. Amen.

At the sides of the path thistle flowers, white and purple starbursts nestled in green-pointed ruffs, drew level with the tops of the eucalyptus trees on the hillside below. Lammergeyers wheeled, then sloped down out of sight. The far ridges of the mountains were grey-blue steps ascending into a sky undisturbed by any clouds at all. The mules’ hooves crunched against the rubble on the path and the sound seemed suddenly smaller, bare, but also hard and bright, as though it could travel forever through the clear air above the valley. As they rounded a bend she turned slightly, and saw Gondar spread out below them.

Ever since the beginning of the dry season, as the ground hardened, the green meadows began to yellow, as the rivers shrank and became passable, she had felt the city change around her. Her husband did not think to tell her much about the wider world, but she saw and heard enough. She knew that in the market there were more people, more strangers, sensed a darker, harsher mood. The servants came in and out with water and wood and shreds of news. Thousands of men and women, their mules, their children, their slaves, were walking in daily from the mountains. They carried muskets, spears, shields, lion’s mane headdresses; grinding stones bent the women’s backs, and great hide-covered food baskets chafed the donkeys’ flanks. At night the mead-houses rang with war chants, with boasting and with burnished memory. The emperor’s cousin Ras Kassa, appointed governor of Begemdir and Semien after Ras Gugsa Wulé’s death, was calling his armies in.

Kassa was as pious as Ras Gugsa had been, and known for his mastery of theology, but though he had fought in the battle of Adwa as a teenager and been victorious against Negus Mikael of Wollo since, he was not necessarily known for his mastery of war. He was steady and loyal, and a trusted adviser to the emperor – even though he had a better claim to the throne. When he became governor he had preferred to stay at the court in Addis Ababa and delegated the administration of Gondar to the eldest of his four sons. She would hear, decades later, that on one of her husband’s trips to Addis he had been charged with a message for the new emperor: Gondar and the provinces of which it was capital were too important to be treated in this way. He had been seriously heard, apparently, but for years felt resented by Ras Kassa’s sons.

They were travelling between scrubby fields now, scattered with yellow stones, the occasional bush a dark jewel set in dry gold land. Now the path was runnelled and gullied, scoured and scored by the daily deluges of the rainy season, and the mules slowed, picking their way along tracks that narrowed sometimes to a single hoof’s width, a steep drop on one side, rough drystone wall or the long unforgiving thorns of an acacia on the other. Or they cast, wary, around the occasional darker section of ground, where the earth was still soggy and pockmarked by previous traffic. Step there and the likelihood was a broken leg, and the mules knew that as well as their riders. Often the animals paused, thinking for a second or two, scanning the ground ahead before stepping on. They sighed, huge, gusty sighs. Their mouths dripped, and their haunches were glossed with sweat that soaked through her dress and warmed her calves and thighs.

Gondar dropped out of sight.

The town had emptied of people as abruptly as it had filled, and for a few weeks had felt quiet but stretched out of shape, waiting, but uncertain what it was waiting for.

And then one day an answer: six specks in the sky, specks moving faster and straighter than any bird, growing bigger and bigger, until she could hear them roar.

Oh mother of God, what is this? Snatching up her daughter, the baby, looking frantic about for somewhere to hide. Oh daughter of David, save us.

Closer and closer the specks came. They looked like crosses now, stubby dark crosses, trailing smoke. The streets ran with women, children, clergy, the infirm – anyone able-bodied had marched away with Ras Kassa or quietly disappeared. As the thundering drew near they threw themselves into ditches, huddled against walls, behind trees. Oh Queen of Heaven, save us.

Around again. She didn’t see but was soon told how on the second pass, over the castles, a dark rain fell from them, a hail of metal that exploded with a terrible noise as it hit the ground. How many huts caught fire, and the women and children inside them.

That was when the order came from the emperor, who when the Italians invaded, marching over the border and finally taking Adwa, had headquartered at Dessié: evacuate Gondar during daylight hours, every day.

So here they were, travelling away from Gondar, as they had travelled yesterday, as they would travel tomorrow, and the day after that. They had crested a long rise and were looking down toward the Shinta river. Vegetable plots had been planted along its banks, and neat rows of silver-green kale rose up the slopes. They picked their way down to the water and dismounted under a stand of bayberry trees. The mules’ necks shivered, and their tails swished at the heavy flies. Most of the river had shrunk to mud, but a small stream still trickled through the main channel. Green algae waved around rocks like hair in a breeze. White and yellow butterflies flicked above the water; the mules’ muzzles dipped down, then away again, disdainful. Distant children called to cattle.

When the mules were rested they began to climb again, into rich farmland in harvest time. Everywhere pale gold domes of teff waited to be threshed, peas and beans hung heavy on vines, plots of glossy green chillis, of kale and tomato, bustled in toward each other. Men trotted past, staffs supporting on their heads piles of straw nearly as high as themselves. The ground grew steeper and rockier as the riverbed fell away. The mules’ mouths dripped.

A circle of dark trees crowned the hill, and within the circle stood a low church. Tethering the mules outside in the shade, they stepped under the acacia guarding the entrance. It was cool and calm inside the perimeter walls, under junipers and olive trees so old they towered above the church’s thatched roof. Dry leaves cracked underfoot, turtledoves cooed, bees buzzed around a hive. She bowed, made the sign of the cross. Made her way forward and bowed again, so her forehead touched the walls of the church, then her lips, forehead, lips.

Gonderoch Mariam, which her husband had led for eight years now, was old, far older than many churches in Gondar. Thirteenth-century, said the more historically inclined priests. Originally named Debrè-Genet, or Mount of Paradise, by the king who built it, it had long since been rechristened Gonderoch because so many people from Gondar were moved to walk up the mountain, to pray under its kind trees. Often when she and Tsega came here the younger deacons and priests would drop to the ground, making to kiss her husband’s feet. He would bend before they could do so, cupping their faces, raising them up, presenting his cross instead.

As they left the church compound she looked across the valley, back toward Gondar. The Italian aeroplanes had not merely terrified her, and her children and her neighbours; they had underscored, emphatically, that while churches, and especially churches at this height, had been always places of safety, they were safe no longer. She thought of their nearly two-hour-long treks back to Gondar in the evenings. Their occasional sightings of hyena droppings. The night she and the children had watched her husband climb up and shove his old rifle deep into the thatch. The day the dark dots had appeared again. She had never felt such fear, fear that was a kind of pure pain, which tightened her chest and loosened her bowels so she had to run behind a tree to empty them. For endless minutes they hardly breathed, waiting for the explosions. But they did not come, and the plane continued on its way.

Sometimes they did not go back down the mountain but stayed overnight with a patron of her husband’s, who owned land all around the church and had settled some on him. They could see it from her doorway: seven terraces divided by low stone walls dropping in wide steps down from the house, which was on the north-eastern brow of the mountain. Barley grew here. From the bottom of the terrace stretched the flat summit, shared with other landowners and planted with teff. Past the church, down the rocky slopes toward the Shinta, was more barley, of which they also received a share. Beyond the fields she could see the river valley, and Gondar, and then, in the hazed distance, the mountains that surrounded Gondar.

The dry season wore on. The farmers brought their tithes down the mountain. Wild figs darkened in the trees. The peaches mellowed, the potatoes and tomatoes, the gourds and chickpeas and peas ripened and were harvested. In the hollows jasmine bloomed. The caravans rattled through the markets, rushing before the rains. And with them came news. Ras Kassa had engaged the Italians at Tembien, in the mountains between Gondar and eastern Eritrea, but had been unable to push them back. Two months later he had been forced out of those peaks altogether. There were whispers about sheets of rain falling from aeroplanes, rain that stripped and burned and blinded, that dripped from the bushes and poisoned the lakes, that sent even the very bravest fleeing. The emperor gathering around him a vast and growing army.

We must join him, said her husband. I will not fight, being a priest, but I can minister to the soldiers. You will come with me. You will not blow trumpets or clean rifles or sharpen swords, as the wives of soldiers do, but like them you will bring your servants, and cook food. Gather provisions and prepare the household.

She bowed, yes, and did as she was told, struggling to seem calm despite her fear. But the days passed, and they did not leave. She watched as priests came and went, served them as they talked, listened and watched, and eventually gathered that many did not agree with him. He was their leader, they argued. Surely he should stay, to protect them?

And so they were still at Gonderoch Mariam when the Italians entered Gondar. Dejazmatch Ayalew Birru, Ras Kassa’s son-in-law, had declined to engage in guerrilla tactics that might have stalled them, and the foreigners had simply walked in, hundreds and hundreds of them, following vehicle after vehicle.

The small rains began. The giddying smell of fresh-wetted earth rose from the fields and, despite everything, ploughing had to begin.

The news grew worse and worse.

The emperor was defeated. Routed. Listening aghast they could almost see the terrible disordered retreat, the mountain passes jammed with fleeing men and women. Imagined the aeroplanes chugging through the air above, the fire they dealt, the terrible unnatural rain. The vultures circling across the day and the hyenas laughing through the night.

And then, at first almost incomprehensible – because wasn’t that one of the most fundamental expectations of a leader, that he should stay with his people, and die on the battlefield if need be? – the knowledge that Emperor Hailè Selassie had fled. He had taken his family and boarded a train to Djibouti. Ras Kassa and his youngest son had left for Europe too. Three days later, Italian columns entered Addis.

In Gondar the foreigners began building at once. Roads, hotels, banks. A rifle factory and two hospitals. An airstrip. An avenue of shops and hotels unfurling southward, down toward the castles. Water began to flow through narrow metal pipes, and at night the streets were strung with small glowing orbs. The city rang with the sound of hammers and chisels wielded by local workmen on higher wages than they had ever seen before. And in more than one mind grew the unspoken question – or if it was spoken, uttered only at home, looking about, over shoulders and across rooms – who else ever did such things for us?

Some days after the Italians entered, another deputation of priests, leaders of some of the forty-four churches, climbed the mountain. The foreigners have asked to see you, they said to her husband.

Have they.

You are our leader, and they have asked to see you.

In that first meeting ranks of foreign soldiers in tight-collared black shirts and shining black boots faced ranks of priests in their whitest turbans and brightest embroidered robes. The Italian leader, a red plume dropping full over an eagle perched on the front of his hat, declared Victor Emmanuel III of Italy emperor of Ethiopia and required all present to sign a statement acceding to that fact. After the signing, after the priests had danced and the uncomprehending foreigners had smiled, her husband had stepped forward and requested that the Italians return to the churches all rights and lands they had confiscated. But the request was either misunderstood – the translator’s street Italian being no match for a churchman’s careful perorations – or simply ignored. For not only did the foreigners not return the land, they took churches for garrisons and moved into the homes of evicted or suddenly absent aristocrats.

Some castles became offices, others headquarters for the carabinieri. A smooth dark road poured past the hotels, the new cinema, the shops, but stopped abruptly at the castles; below that, where the city continued into the Saturday market and the bluffs overlooking the Qeha, everything was still bare earth. Electricity stopped there too, and piped water. For a long time she did not notice. Now that they were back in the city everything for her remained as it had always been, sweet water available from her well, the market outside healthy and bustling and equal to her needs. Even the talk of deliberate division – whites here, locals there, a school and a hospital and a courthouse each, no locals allowed in cinemas at all – made little impression on her. Gondar had always been a divided city, between Muslim, Christian and Jewish quarters, between aristocracy, gentry, artisans and peasants, and who wanted anything to do with these foreigners anyway? It was they who often insisted on crossing over, chasing women, living with them, defying orders from their superiors.

Other orders were more efficiently upheld. The death penalty for men caught possessing arms, for instance, a quixotic aim in a land where bearing arms was a necessary adjunct to any claim to be taken seriously, where manliness and honour were synonymous with physical courage and the willingness to go to war. Summary executions, then, often on testimony of nothing more than a rival with a grudge; imprisonment and flogging of families which refused to give up weapons or state the whereabouts of those who carried them. Terrified whispers of a portable gallows, dragged from village to village. Of decapitated heads held high. The death penalty for anyone suspected of supporting the absent emperor.

Her husband shut his face, and with a gift of a thousand Maria Theresa thalers he had received from Emperor Hailè Selassie before the war, with the income from Ba’ata’s holy water, the tithes from Bisnit and Dembiya, the income from church arbitration, market dues, the sale of the gold-filigreed capes and robes Empress Zewditu had given him on his first promotion, set about building his church as if the end against which it was spiritual insurance could arrive any day.

The inner circle, the holy of holies, was held together with mud, trampled by labourers’ feet over and over for three or four days, but the meqdes, the priests’ domain, was to be constructed of stone only, cut so carefully no mortar would be needed. All day new-quarried pink tufa arrived from Qusquam, a quiet hilltop north-west of the city, carried between pairs of former slaves, or on the backs of donkeys. All day, in between prayers and sermons and confessions, between the endless questions and supplications visited upon an administrator of forty-four churches, he wove among the labourers, correcting a cut of rock here, a misunderstanding about size there, cajoling, ordering, threatening, driving the work as fast as he knew how.

For he saw, moving about the city, how in the Italians the need to prove superiority over those they had vanquished, and increasingly over their fear of those they had vanquished, had resulted in an overreaching brutality. Fear of the nobles and village elders, whom they relieved of their positions, replacing them with Italian or Eritrean mercenaries, and not infrequently sending them ‘to Rome’ – bundling them into cars and aeroplanes and from thence to either prison or death. And beyond all this a kind of ancient dream-fear, too, of the Orthodox Church’s ancillaries: its deacons and monks, its soothsayers and its wild-haired travelling hermits, who looked on the surface to have little power but transmitted information faster, it sometimes seemed, than any telephone.

They feared the priests too. Or, at least, were deeply suspicious of them – though in that they were not unusual. Even amongst their own colleagues and parishioners priests often had a venal reputation, of being concerned more with status and possessions than with matters holy; of being inveterate, individualist schemers. For in the way that the emperor had total power over every aspect of his subjects’ lives, priests had power over their spiritual weather. They received confessions, they punished and they forgave, they controlled access to the written word and thus to the Bible and all its interpretations. To this was added, through tithes, the possibility of worldly riches, and even more temptation. The Italians saw this power and its possible uses (openness to influence, a source of spies) – they also saw that priests were either unreliable, or an active, potent threat. Both sides had only to think of the days after the fall of Addis Ababa, when it quickly became clear that by shooting Abunè Petros, bishop of eastern Ethiopia, the Italians had created a martyr.

Exactly a year after the Italians first bombed Gondar, they hunted down and shot Ras Kassa’s eldest son. Two of his younger brothers were lured into submission ten days later. They had been promised safety but were promptly executed.

And in Gondar her husband was again ordered to bring his priests to the main square.

Not far from the huge sycamore fig stood two clerics, facing Italian guns. The leader of the church of Gana Yohannes stood still, the priest beside him babbled and shook. We grew up together, we were children together, will we die together? But the aleqa of Gana Yohannes said nothing, and then the friend of his childhood said nothing either.

When he returned to her she thought, this is how the dead must look. His face was like soot. He did not seem to see her. For two full weeks he could not be persuaded to eat.

She had been at it for a while, chopping the ginger and garlic, mixing it with cardamom and basil and rue, stirring it through simmering butter. The sun was warm on her head and on the baby sleeping in the shawl on her back. She glanced over at her eldest daughter, sitting in the doorway of the house. Her worries about how her children would look had not applied to this child, at least. Alemitu, six years old now, already had a nice long nose and wide brow, a graceful neck.

Are you hungry?

She took a spoonful of the freshly spiced butter and, mixing it with some berberé, poured it over a piece of injera, soaking it and tearing it into rich bite-size pieces. Here. It will make you grow.

The afternoon wore on. The sun seemed, if anything, hotter. Sounds receded. The corners of her daughter’s mouth glistened. She kept working.

The next time she looked over she was at her daughter’s side almost in the same motion. Hands like startled butterflies, loosening the neck of the child’s dress, feeling her face, which burned, a small dark sun. Cradling her, calling her name. Feeling it in every sliver of herself when Alemitu’s body snapped rigid as a hide left out to dry. Her chin flung back. White eyes stared at the sky. Oh Mary mother of God, what is it? What is it?

Bring her clothes! A shawl! But her husband had just returned from a trip to Addis Ababa, and everything was down at the river with the menservants, being beaten clean. There was only a thin muslin veil with which to cover her daughter and lift her into the cool of the house.

Go get her father.

When he came, he had a friend with him, and the two men exchanged fierce whispers over the child’s inert body. She must take holy water, said her husband. ‘Holy water won’t work.’ Only the devil could do something like this to her, look at her body, how stiff and contorted it is. She must be taken to holy water immediately. ‘It won’t work.’ Yes, it will.

Her husband prevailed.

A neighbour offered to help, and every morning, for two times seven days, the small group set off into the dawn, heading for the little old church of Teklè-Haimanot. For two times seven days they sat amongst all the other supplicants, waiting their turn. So much sadness in the world, she thought, looking at the array of bodies before her. So much care. The stripped flanks of farmers accustomed to sparing food and abundant labour. The much-suckled breasts hanging flat and soft. The warped and twisted young limbs. The torsos shining with wellbeing, their specific curses invisible. The underdresses sticking to bodies dripping, bodies drying, bodies inward-looking under the sun. And above them all the perfunctory deacons crouching, pouring the blessed water, and then, as midday approached, intoning – one eye on the takings and another on lunch – the acts of the saints and the Miracles of Mary.

On one of these days her neighbour invited her to stay overnight, so they could go to the church together in the morning. She was a member of an association that met once a month and it was her turn as host; Yetemegnu could sit and chat for a while if she wished, before she went to bed. She accepted, and made sure to prepare all the food her husband would need the next day.

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