The Wife’s Tale: A Personal History

As dawn slipped through the high windows and traced bright lines across the carpeted floor, cutting through thick eddies of incense, dispersing the blurred yellow light of hundreds of beeswax tapers, the chanting and the prayer intensified. The deacons danced before their king, before the holy of holies and its sanctified replica of the Ark, as if for the first time; dancing as David danced in the temple of Jerusalem – sistra clashing, drums beating, bare feet stepping, serious and joyful.

Outside the cathedral two open-sided coronet-topped tents had been erected within a far larger tent that held the most important members of the congregation. This tent was filled with alien regalia, for apart from the great rases and court officials, few Ethiopians had been invited. When the priests accompanied Negus Tafari out of the church, they stared amazed into this spectacle. And the spectacle stared back. Politely it looked, and less politely it assessed: strengths, weaknesses, allegiances. Behind puffed-out chests and polished medals, under topis and busbies, calculations in English, Italian, French, German; calculations of land, export capabilities, porosity of borders, military prowess. Many of their Ethiopian hosts knew this, and if they didn’t know, guessed, for how did that proverb go? Oh yes – foreigners enter like thread into a needle then branch out like a sycamore fig. Why, only six years ago Ras Tafari, touring Europe, had had to use Ethiopia’s new membership of the League of Nations to shame Britain and Italy into dropping a plan to divide influence over his country (they drew up another a year later). Italy, surely, should have known better: had it really forgotten Adwa, where, only thirty-three years ago, Menelik II and his empress Taitu had routed the Italian army? No, no one had forgotten that; some sitting here had even fought in that war. The Italians had had to content themselves with retreating to their colony in Eritrea, and with fantasies of revenge.

All the more important, then, that the foreigners should see this show of pomp and power. And that they should be well acquainted with this new leader, who had so steadily extinguished all internal opposition: in war, as had happened with Ras Gugsa; around the council table; by sheer attrition: Empress Zewditu, for all her supposedly final word, and for all her manifest reluctance to promote her busy regent to negus, had eventually found she had no other choice, for he worked as tirelessly and invisibly and patiently as the weather. And then she had died, suddenly.

Now Negus Tafari bowed low, touched his forehead to the stone of the cathedral, kissed it, bowed, kissed, stood. ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.’ A clear, controlled voice, with a hint of a rasp. ‘My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.’ Archbishop Kyrillos moved to the table to begin the coronation proper. ‘Now, according to God’s will and goodness I am going to crown him, and anoint him king of kings, so he will work with all his body and soul to spread religion and increase education, and Ethiopia will rise in wisdom and in knowledge, and her flag will be laid down from border to border. And we charge that you will be ruled by him and help him in this good work.’ When the reply came, in a rumble from all around, from the chairs, from under the trees, from among the graves, ‘May God help our emperor do as you say. Amen,’ he placed his hands on the Bible and turned to the king. ‘Will you, in your authority and power, and in all your works, watch over the people of Ethiopia with patience and compassion, and keep their wellbeing in mind always, according to the law?’ ‘These words shall lead to good works, so, insofar as I am able, yes, I will.’

And so the service, in which each accoutrement – sceptre, orb, spear, ring, crown – was blessed by the archbishop and by a scholar of the north, of the south, of the east and of the west, a service interspersed by the voices of ten deacons handing their chants back and forth, back and forth, unspooled with the solemnity and intimacy of a wedding. (Though no weddings would have been accompanied, as midday approached, by a vast roaring in the sky as Tafari’s beloved aeroplanes swooped and looped in fealty.) As in a teklil wedding the vows were followed by a mass; as in a wedding the ceremony included communion, for which Tafari and his wife were required to return to the sanctuary and replace their rich robes with something simpler. As in a wedding the service was brought to a close by qiné after rich dense qiné, one of which was delivered by Aleqa Tsega. And then Emperor Hailè Selassie I, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, King of Kings of Ethiopia, elect of God, climbed into a horse-drawn carriage and was driven away.

When at last Aleqa Tsega returned to Gondar his coming was heralded by a warning: you are the wife of a great man now. The emperor has tied a circlet of gold about his head. When most of the foreigners had departed and the daily banquets and firework displays were tapering off Aleqa Tsega had answered a summons to the palace, where he joined whispering huddles of clerics and lords, all wondering why they were there. Promotion, it transpired: Emperor Hailè Selassie, who knew well how favour, generously bestowed, tightened the reins of loyalty and obligation (especially in those of humble birth), was parcelling out authority over sections of his realm. Aleqa Tsega returned a liqè-kahinat, chief of the learned, of all of Semien and Begemdir. But at the time she understood only that she would have been happier if he had not come back at all.

BOOK II

1931–1941

The landscape around Gonderoch Mariam. Photograph by the author.

HIDAR

THE THIRD MONTH

Ripening of later cereal grains, sunny, occasional mists. Harvest, especially of early teff. Boys take cattle from sun-scorched uplands to green valleys. Flirting season.

Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam, dirèshilin.

O Lady Lady Lady Lady Lady, come to our aid.

Her next labour went quickly, and twelve ililta rang out before dawn. A boy.

She basked in congratulations. Her husband basked in congratulations.

On the third day a family friend came to visit, ululating. This friend knew how the first birth had gone; that Yetemegnu had not been able to sit for months. That they had kept trying to feed her barley gruel sweetened with honey, and when that failed honey with water, but she didn’t like honey, and again and again she had closed her lips tight and turned away.

This time they brought her wheat porridge full of fortifying butter, and this she had accepted.

She smiled at their friend. The boy has not yet been washed – would you do the honours? His skin is darker on one side than the other, don’t be surprised.

‘Of course.’ And their friend had fetched Lux and water and rearranged her shawl, freeing her arms to work.

‘Oh!’

What is it?

‘She’s a girl, not a boy!’

No. No – can I see?

The child’s umbilicus had been cut long, and an attendant, glancing cursorily, taken at her mistaken word.

Oh no! The father was so pleased to have a boy! I was so pleased to have a boy!

And then, desperate, How do I tell him?

Their friend considered her. ‘Take your time, and do it carefully.’ She smiled. ‘Wait until he’s had his lunch, at least.’

Preparations for the christening party were nearly complete when, just under three months later, the girl died, under a light shawl Yetemegnu had placed over her to protect her as she slept.

They had left the house near Ba’ata because there was no water. No pipes serving it, no springs save the holy springs, no well. Only the Qeha river, close enough as the kite flies but down and then, carrying the big-bellied madigas on their backs, back up such steep paths that the slaves she sent were exhausted for the rest of the day. Sometimes she took pity on them and went to the water-sellers instead. Then they heard that a man who owned a plot of land on the edge of the Saturday market had committed a murder and fled. They were all pleased when her husband paid a messenger twenty pieces of raw silver to track the murderer down and make him an offer. Sixty silver thalers for the land, then; and a hundred to sink a well.

Her husband built a house of hewn stone, held together with trampled mud and straw, with stairs at each end and in front a round hall in which to receive visitors. A little building off to the side for grinding grain, and on the ground floor of the main structure rooms to keep it in; rooms for fermenting beer, for storing mead, and above them a private living room and their bedroom, with low wooden chests and their clothes hanging on hooks on the wall. The windows on this floor faced sunset and sunrise, and when she was alone she could stare out the west window, over the roofs and into the valley, where in the dry season the Qeha crawled sluggish with algae, and in the wet season rushed wild, a muddy and perilous torrent. If she turned a little, toward the north, she could see a darker circle of high old trees, which always meant, here is consecrated ground.

If her second daughter really had been a boy, he would already have been baptised, and named, at forty days; girls, however, were baptised at eighty, and so the tiny body had had to be laid in unmarked earth just outside Ba’ata’s walls. She had not been allowed to attend the burial, mothers in her position rarely were, and consequently she had been denied a formal farewell. Now, standing at the window or bending over the fire or walking through the wide rooms of her new dominion, she often found herself in tears. Sometimes she knew she wept for her unnamed daughter, lying in the cold outside the church, sometimes for her mother, sometimes for herself. Sometimes she was not sure what she wept for, only that the tears leaked silent down her face and would not stop.

Of course she also knew how often deaths like this happened – why else were mothers not allowed to leave the house until the eighty days were up, but to keep a baby safe from illness, from strangers, from the evil eye? Except she felt that it was she, sitting at home, who had caused the danger, and she who now checked and rechecked every blanket, every shawl placed near Alemitu, waking in a panic in the middle of the night to check again. Why else did fathers so often keep their distance through the first years, afraid of attachment to a child who might not survive? Well, there was no problem with that – she kept her distance from him, speaking only when spoken to, and often not then.

But at fifteen she was still so young, and Alemitu – raised on rich butter from Qimant country, and still feeding from breasts now heavy with milk for the absent child – Alemitu was growing fast. They played together, running through the wide yard, and she would laugh at the attempts at language, laugh at the serious, halting explorations, slap hands away from danger, wonder at each small important thing learned, existing only in the bright present of both their childhoods.

And there was now so much work. Every morning she woke as the sun began to crest the mountains. Quiet, in near-dark, she would slip out from under her blankets and shiver over to the madiga, dipping a gourd into cold clear well water and splashing her face awake. From the silhouettes of the other houses would come the scrunch of stone against stone as the first grain was ground, and the smell of sleeping fires blown back into flame. Roosters crowed into thin mountain air. The occasional dog barked. Figures wrapped tight against the chill hurried back from the woods.

Her husband would be up by then too, sometimes taking breakfast, more often not, pulling on jodhpurs, a long shirt with tight embroidered wrists, full black cape, turban. Other priests took their time, winding the lengths of white cotton just so, but he was impatient with it, and she, who was so particular and neat about her person, would glance at the mess on his head in silent irritation.

If she ate breakfast she ate it alone. Light began to fill the big house, and the sound of chopping; the smell of onions frying, and Alemitu running, or crying. Sometimes there would be the guttural bleat of a sheep, suddenly cut off, or the flapping screech of a chicken losing its head, but more often it was pulses and spices and vegetables that required cleaning, pounding, mixing, bubbling for hours over the fire. A pause at nine, for fresh-roasted coffee with the servants, a basket of delicate sorghum popcorn, a knobble of incense dropped onto red coals, and then it was back to the dark kitchen hut, to lean over the flat clay pan, pouring thin sourdough in quick, even spirals so it made the thinnest, whitest possible injera.

Just before he came home at one she would take the ilbet from the side, where it had cooled, and beat it into a savoury paste. She would heat the sauces she had made that morning, roll fresh injera – always far more than she needed for the two of them, because she never knew who he was going to bring home. She never sat with them, of course, but as she came back and forth from the kitchen, serving them, she caught snatches of talk. Church politics, the whereabouts and doings of the new emperor. Those Italians at the new consulate up the road: employees were given better housing and their own school, and many townsfolk were envious. Now someone had attacked the foreigners’ telegraph station, because, they said, it was the work of the devil.

Occasionally she raised her eyes from the ground or the dish she was serving to glance at her husband. She saw that he was a listener, and a watcher, a man who knew the power of silence and of a quiet, steady voice. She saw his thoughtful courtesy, in these days when he was working assiduously to consolidate his position; saw his veiled pride; knew, even if he did not show it, his foreigner’s anxiety, the insecurity of recent arrival (though he had now been in Gondar for over two decades), his need to prove himself better, worthier, accepted.

He was not always home. He had obligations at Gonderoch Mariam, where he led the church as well as owning land; in the capital, where it was useful to keep his face fresh in the right minds; for one too-short month in Gojjam, where, much later, when she actually cared enough to notice and ask about such things, she learned he had pitched a tent outside his childhood church to teach poetry and church administration.

Her own limits were established now – these cool rooms, the expanse of fenced ground around them, the narrow gateway through which she could see snatches of activity in the market – and she no longer dared to venture beyond them. She did not invite anyone round – and anyway, who would she ask? He could not forget how her father had so looked down on him, and now they had their own house he had made it clear her family were not welcome. Neither were girls her own age, being potential agents of temptation.

But local matrons sometimes bowed through the doorway, nuns, a kind hunchbacked priest, and she sat before them, heels tucked under her, pouring coffee, occasionally suckling the child, silent but for murmured rote responses, while in her mind questions nudged toward clarity. There was tradition, she knew that – how many times had she heard a chuckling elder say it, that women and donkeys need the stick? Then there was the fact that, as her husband had pointed out more than once, you were an unformed child entrusted to my care, and all children must take correction. There was their specific circumstance, which over and over he explained. You cannot be gadding about and blackening my name. A priest must be blameless, and so must his family, they cannot be accused of luxury or lechery or stubbornness, they must be seen to be obedient. You cannot damage my position. And: our vow was for life, made in the church; you risk your soul. And: aqwatiré yizishalehu. I will care for you, look out for you; I will gather you up and hold you close.

One afternoon when she was about nineteen, two young men, strangers, came to see her husband on business. She was in the back yard when they left and one of them darted over to grab her hands in his. ‘Come, come with us.’ Startled, giggling, she snatched them away. Where? Why? Unable to explain to someone so uncomprehending, he dropped her hands and took hurried leave. Did you see, master? she said later. How good-looking they were? She meant it innocently, would have said the same, she told herself, if they were women and beautiful; she was admiring God’s work, what else could she possibly mean?

Why did you not go with them, then? He smiled, but at once she saw herself through his narrowed eyes, and through theirs. Long lashes, decent teeth, a slender, mobile, fertile body. A high forehead and long nose. Skin alight with youth.

The next time he punished her she ran away. Ran panting to her grandmother’s house, was received with hugs, with good food, with comfort – Ayzosh, enaté, ayzosh, my heart. Ayzosh. And was, a few days later, returned to her husband. You are friends again now, aren’t you? Good.

Again she slept a great deal. She prayed. And she dreamed.

One night she dreamed that the bishop Abunè Abraham came to her, slipping into the bedroom at the top of the house. She watched him, unable to stir or speak. A shiny black hat, a nice face, she thought, at least from what she could see between hat and beard, but she was afraid to look too close. There was a huge metal-bound chest in the room, a present from her grandmother, who had bought it from traders from Tripoli. The bishop reached for the heavy clasp at the centre. He fed a key into the lock and turned it. Slowly he raised the lid. Then he bent down and lifted out an umbrella of rare beauty. It was topped by a cross, as on the roof of a church, and so laden with gold and silver that when he opened it out – kwa! – it trembled and rang. ‘Take this,’ he said, turning the handle toward her. ‘It’s yours.’ And then he was gone.

When she woke she asked her husband what the dream could mean.

You will give birth to a son, he replied. And he will be a shade and a protection in the world.

‘AND BEHOLD THERE WAS A CERTAIN WOMAN TRAVELLING WITH THE COMPANY WHO WAS WITH CHILD, AND HER TIME FOR BRINGING FORTH WAS NIGH, AND SHE WAS UNABLE TO RUN AWAY WITH THE OTHER PEOPLE. AND SHE CRIED OUT AFTER THOSE WHO HAD FORSAKEN HER AND FLED, BUT NO MAN TURNED BACK TO HAVE REGARD UNTO HER, AND SHE FOUND NONE TO HELP HER, AND DESPAIRED UTTERLY OF OBTAINING HELP FROM MAN.’

She had been labouring for two days already, and the priests had been reading in turn, from the Dirsanè Ruphael, and now from the Miracles of Mary.

‘AND IT CAME TO PASS THAT, WHEN THOSE WHO HAD TAKEN FLIGHT ARRIVED AT THE SEASHORE, SHE STRETCHED OUT HER HANDS, AND RAISED HER EYES TO GOD IN HEAVEN, AND MADE SUPPLICATION TO OUR LADY MARY WITH GREAT OUTCRY AND WITH MUCH WEEPING AND LAMENTATION.’

Her husband, appalled by her labour, had remained in the room – the receiving room, this time; so many people were attending this birth there was no space for them in the main house. He bowed to the ground in prayer and wept so much he asked for a cup to be brought, a dark cup, hollowed out of cow horn. His tears dripped into the rough bottom and when he had collected a finger’s height he handed it to one of the women. Give her this to drink. Maybe it will hasten the birth.

Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam, dirèshilin.

O Lady Lady Lady Lady Lady, come to our aid.

As dusk drew in on the third day she slipped, exhausted, into a state between sleeping and waking. And in that state it seemed to her that she had gently taken leave of herself, but was watching herself at the same time, that she lay quiet on her side near the fire, and that a young girl approached her, a girl of about six years old. The child was beautiful. She had an oval face, with perfect skin and a small straight nose, full lips, and tumbling, glossy hair. Silver chains spilled down the front of her long dress. The child came close and stretching out a small hand stroked her belly and her straining back. And it seemed as though her loins responded to the child’s touch, easing and calming, and to the child’s voice, which felt as if it came both from outside her, and from within her own heart. ‘Ayzosh. You will be safely delivered.’ But when she turned to give her thanks the child was gone.

‘THEN WHILST SHE WAS IN THE MIDST OF THE SEA THE PAINS OF CHILDBIRTH TOOK HOLD UPON HER, AND OUR LADY MARY TOOK THE CHILD FROM HER WOMB; AND SHE GAVE BIRTH TO A FINE BOY. AND HIS MOTHER CALLED HER BOY “ABRASKIROSPAS” [WHICH MEANS] IN GREEK AND HEBREW “THE HAND OF MARY TOUCHED HIM AND BLESSED HIM IN THE WOMB OF HIS MOTHER”. NOW NEITHER PAIN NOR FLOW OF BLOOD CAME TO HIS MOTHER.’

At midnight, in the third night after the third day, the baby, a boy, was born.

He was completely silent. His eyes were closed, and there seemed to be no life in him. Memories of the last death twisted through her and she cried to the midwife, Madam, have I laboured and laboured in vain?

‘Quiet,’ answered the midwife, sharply. Then, more kindly, ‘Ayzosh. He’s probably just tired.’

A big bowl was filled with water, and soap brought, and clean clothes to receive the child, and the room stretched taut with watching. As soon as he touched the water he heaved a great sigh and began to suck his fingers. And it was as if her spirit flowed back into her body, as if she had suddenly come back to life herself.

‘AND IT CAME TO PASS THAT, WHEN THE SEA RETURNED TO ITS OWN PLACE, AND THE WATERS THEREOF BECAME QUIET, AND THE WAVES WENT DOWN, THE WOMAN WENT FORTH FROM IT CARRYING HER CHILD IN HER ARMS. AND WHEN THE PEOPLE SAW HER MANY OF THEM MARVELLED AND BECAME SPEECHLESS BY REASON OF THIS GREAT AND MIRACULOUS THING.’

For three days after her son’s birth she slept on the floor, on a thin pallet surrounded by strewn grass and tracked-in rainy season mud, welcoming the cold wind that gusted under the door in the darkest hour before dawn, offering her body and her comfort to Mary, who had heard her in her greatest distress.

When forty days had passed and he was taken to be baptised she would name her first son Edemariam, or hand of Mary, but in the meantime she reached for him and held him close. Looking down at the flattened curls of wet dark hair, the breathing, fragile skull, she knew suddenly that this too was a kind of salvation; that these small forms that emerged from her buffeted body might be an answer to her loneliness, the depth of which she was only now beginning to comprehend.

The sun was just beginning to touch the tops of the furthest mountains when they set out, but the city was still in shade, the air clear and chill. She tightened her arms around the baby, and shifted her weight. Breastfeeding had further stripped her already slight figure, and the bright cloth decorating her mule did nothing to soften the saddle. The sound of their mules’ hooves – hers, Alemitu’s, his – echoed against the walls of the houses, but their servants’ bare feet, trotting alongside, made no sound at all. Above them the curved swords of eucalyptus leaves soughed in the breeze, bowed, crossed each other, bowed again.

She leaned forward and grasped the pommel as they began to climb, and watched as the sun slid down the slopes to meet them. It lit the tops of the trees and picked out the straw and pebbles in the mud walls of the houses, which glinted it back. Along the roadside the grass had dried to feathery fringes of pale gold, cool in the dapple of early morning. Woodsmoke rose tentative into the air, and crows argued themselves hoarse over rubbish heaps. Women stood in doorways, beating basketwork clean with branches. Hens scratched at their feet, and cockerels. Her mule’s ears twitched, pointed forward again.