The Wife's Tale Page 10

  They travelled for hours, through fields and up rocky slopes, picking a way through forests and splashing through streams, aiming, like so many other refugees from Gondar, for Denqez.

  After a while she began to notice the absences. Every house they passed was empty, the hamlets silent. Fresh graves crowded the churchyards, and dogs slunk intent among them. When they arrived in Denqez, the watchman tried to turn them away.

  Let us in, don’t you know who we are?

  ‘I don’t know and I don’t care. You can’t stay here.’

  He’s a priest. Show some respect!

  ‘Shut up, you.’

  Her husband sighed, and out of his shemma drew a letter with a seal, this time Dejazmatch Birru’s. Impatient, the watchman examined it; brusque, he waved them through.

  That night they stayed in a house from which they could tell the family had recently fled. Exhausted, she slept.

  And she dreamed – of the road they had just travelled, and of a crowd of women in their finest white dresses. They shaded their faces with bright umbrellas, and walked lightly, joyfully, as though it were a holiday. As she looked back at them first one and then another raised their voices and called, ililililil! ililililil! until all of them were ululating, high and continuous, and her head rang with their trilling and she wanted to hide or to stop up her ears but could not.

  They’re diseases, she said to him when she woke. I know they’re diseases. And they’re happy, because we’ve brought them with us.

  * * *

  —

  It began as a lassitude, a greyness of countenance and spirit. The children stopped playing, they stopped talking, and worst of all they stopped eating. She made them barley porridge, dripping with butter, but they would not touch it. She made honey-laced gruel, because it was easier to slip between their lips, but it dribbled back out again.

  She sat by them, the new baby strapped tight inside the front of her dress so the diseases would not know he was there, and prayed, desperately. Oh my Lady, help us please.

  They knew no one in this land, she felt there was no one she could call on. She crushed wild olive bark into a powder and put it in water for them to drink, she rubbed their bodies with healing leaves, but none of her medicines made any difference. Then her husband, already ailing, worsened. He drank a horn of water, and his urine was blood.

  Every morning Alemitu, who was still well, helped her clean the vomit of the night before from the younger children’s mouths. They swept the floor and strewed it with fresh grass to lighten the air. Every noon the fever took hold of her sons and shook them as if it would never let go. And at night it visited her husband, whirling him into deliriums in which he chanted out blank-eyed liturgies. When he woke he would ask how she had slept, and she could not answer, well, by the grace of God, as she would usually have done. Instead she would say, I could not sleep, I kept calling your name and you didn’t answer; it was as though I had become a plaything of the spirits, and I did not know what to do.

  Three months after they had begun the fevers eased, and Teklé and her husband began to sit up, to look about and talk, and to eat. Spring warmed the ground and dried out the riverbanks and the hut filled with heavy black flies, bumping around the patients’ heads, settling at the corners of their mouths. Her husband was well enough to eat by then, but he would not eat during the day, because of the flies.

  But Yohannes, her beautiful Yohannes, who they had said looked like her father’s father, who had almost killed her when he was born, he did not rally. He lay in his bed, getting steadily weaker, his stomach growing into a taut mound under the gabi while the rest of him wasted away.

  One morning she told her husband she had had a terrible dream and she knew this son would not survive. He looked at her for a long moment and replied, I dreamt that too.

  Because the church of Mary in Denqez was too far for her to walk to, she had formed the habit of going out into the yard and, bowing her head in its general direction, praying for their health in the open air. This time her prayer was different.

  Oh Mary, mother of God, I place my trust in you. If this child must die, please may he die at home, in my own country, where there are kin to bury him, and where he can rest in the church that we have made. Oh Queen of Heaven, I implore you. Please ensure we do not have to leave him here alone. Amen.

  And she walked slowly back into the house.

  BOOK III

  1942–1953

  Credit 3

  TAHSAS

  THE FOURTH MONTH

  Summer. Hot and sunny with occasional light rains. Red aloes and thorny plants dominate scorched landscape. Rivers become brooks, brooks go dry. Main harvests finished. Peasants take teff to market and seed summer barley in irrigated fields. Traders load caravans with produce and hides to exchange for salt and imports; cattle pastured in the valleys. Judges begin riding circuits to hear litigation.

  When finally they heard it was safe to return they gathered up their children, their animals and their belongings and walked over the hills into Gondar. They avoided the Saturday market. Their house had been squatted by Sudanese soldiers, long gone, who had sold the corrugated iron from the roof and torn out the doors for firewood; a family they knew huddled in the lower rooms, and their bedroom yawned at the sky. They avoided the church, too. It belonged, now, to a priest who had gone to see Emperor Hailè Selassie in the Sudan, a canny petitioner whose name meant ‘he stole the light’.

  On, up through the city, past the royal enclosure. Over the next couple of months, they would hear about the battle for Gondar, which had turned out to be the last major battle for Ethiopia. Thousands of warriors had stormed down the mountains, careering over minefields that had accidentally been cleared by a herd of stampeding cattle, and taken back their city in a tumult of fire and drunkenness. The Italians had retreated, with all the city’s petrol, into the castle grounds, then spent an anxious night lobbing the burning flares thrown at them back over the walls.

  Away from the centre, toward the north-west, and into the neighbourhood now called Otto Barco because that was where the Italians had kept their cars. As they retook the city, patriot leaders had claimed and then begun to parcel out choice areas and buildings; her new neighbours were military men and minor princelings, and their temporary home a six-room villa with an indoor toilet and running water. There were still streetlamps in the Italian quarter, and in the evenings she marvelled at their steady light, at the impression they gave of advancement and of order.

  But the markets were full of weapons, of rifles and grenades, deliberately left by the retreating foreigners so order would be the last thing possible in the city they had hoped would become a showpiece of their empire. The slave trade had begun again: day after day there were stories of children disappearing and traders proliferating, picking off the darker-skinned, promising marriage to naïve young women, then selling them in the border towns, in Welqait, under the fig trees in the north-west corner of the Saturday market. Selling them for thalers, or bartering them for guns.

  There was very little food, and so the returning exiles cooked together, each providing what they could – one family donating a clay pot of shirro, another of hot meat stew. She had brought with her from Denqez a madiga of teff, and another of wheat flour, and so she provided wheat bread, pancakes, and injera.

  Indoors, however, Yohannes could not eat. The glossy hair she used to cut with such care was rough and dusty-looking, and the whites of his eyes had yellowed. Holy water did not help; the hospital for locals was a ruin, that for the Italians damaged. So she sat by him and held his hands and kissed him, and washed his face, which memory would make the most beautiful of all her children, and prayed over him, to the guardian angels, to Mary, to Mary’s son. She sat by him in the days and through the nights, listening to his shallow breath against the dark, or to the sudden rifle shots and shouts from the mead-houses. The fights over women or plunder or allegiance-in-hindsight: who resisted for all five years, who for t
hree, who for a few months, who resisted not at all.

  The city was a scavengers’ playground. Vehicles littered the streets. Many had already been gutted for parts, but others still functioned, and in the daytime her older children, Edemariam now back among them, took to climbing up into abandoned lorry cabins, turning keys in their ignitions, driving the hulks forward for a few yards, then leaping out and running away, giddy with transgression. She herself kept an eye out for barrels and for sheets of corrugated iron. She knew how useful these things would be, for beer-making, for water-collection, for mending their roof, and when the overworked police tried to stop her, she ran to their confessor to borrow money she could slip into the policemen’s hands, persuading them to turn away and allow her to remove her booty in peace. In this way they rebuilt their own home, and were in such a hurry to return they moved in when only one big room was habitable.

  But still the fevers took Yohannes, shaking his body, engulfing him in sweat, sinking him so far into exhaustion that he could respond to nothing; taking him again and again and again. His breathing became laboured, hoarse and irregular, and then one day Edemariam, sitting at the foot of the bed watching his older brother struggle, realised that he was still.

  At once they took her away, and shut up the room, and held her as she rocked and keened. He’s well, he’s well, they said, he’s in safe hands, he’s well, but she would not be calmed, because she knew that well meant dead, that she was being held here because a mother cannot be allowed to see the corpse of her child, that what they were doing in that room was washing the small tormented body, wrapping it up tight, closing its eyes.

  In Gondar the custom was that the dead were waked for seven days. But after they had buried Yohannes in a quiet corner of Ba’ata the receiving room filled with mourners for a full fortnight. Those who had been in exile, those who had gone into hiding all over the city, people they had not seen for years came bearing food and sat to weep with them.

  She felt her own grief as a pain that stopped her breath and raked through her like a kind of insanity, but she was horrified by her husband’s sadness, frightened by it. He would shut himself in their bedroom, and when she tiptoed to the door, worried he had not eaten, she heard the harsh sobs of someone unaccustomed to crying, and turned away. When he came out he was dark and bitter, as though he had been scorched.

  I thought he would be my brother, he said to her once. That he would be my country and my shield. One of her half-brothers took her aside. ‘This man is going to die on you,’ he said. ‘I saw my father die of grief like this. You need to stop grieving yourself, and take him in hand.’

  So she opened the door and watched him for a moment, and, remembering her own mother, said to him, Ayzoh, grief dulls as time goes on. But he did not seem to hear. So she spoke again, Please stop. I’ll die if this continues.

  The next time she went in he said, We must have another child. Remember we have all these children already, she said – Alemitu, and Edemariam, and Teklé, and Molla. But yes, we’ll have another. Please stop.

  Eventually his tears eased, and, outwardly at least, the self-contained man she was accustomed to was restored, and returned to his work.

  So when the crown prince, round of jaw, bulbous of eye and, being fresh from military training, upright of bearing, came with the British forces to take official charge of Gondar, her husband was there to welcome him. And after the ceremonial retaking of the castles, after the bowing and the ululation, Tsega stood again at the head of his priests, a black-caped liqè-kahinat, to incant in Ge’ez the necessary qiné of blandishment and fealty.

  The sky may fall or the earth rise

  But David’s son Hailè Selassie will not be dethroned.

  The fertile vine of Menelik will bear the fruit of wisdom

  For the Italians have been weakened, and are caught in a snare.

  A long road ran before her, cutting through the countryside, through irrigation green and insistent against the dry brown land. The road ran before her, narrowing, until it faded to a mote at the horizon. She was being pulled along it, faster and faster, her feet barely touching the ground, her right arm outstretched, and at the end of her right arm – Yohannes, holding her hand and running before her, bright-eyed as he had been before the fevers took him, and when she saw him she cried out.

  And woke. I’m going to die! I’m going to die before this baby is born.

  Ayzosh, ayzosh. What is it?

  So she told him, sobbing, and he said, Ayzosh. The long road means you’ll enjoy a long life. That’s your age. It’s not death. Ayzosh.

  At first she was calmed, but over the next days she could not shake the foreboding. He encouraged her to fast, but still she was unassuaged, and on the third day she went to him and said, I’m going to mass.

  How can you do that? We have no servants, what will we eat? I will go to Mary for you, and tell her your fears.

  But she said no, no, and the next day rose early to bake the injera and cook the greens and split-pea sauce of fasting season, and was finished just in time to hook her shemma over her head, climb onto a mule, and clop up to the Church of the Treasury of Mary, Gimja-bet Mariam, a little old building set into the castle walls. She was so pregnant she couldn’t stand for long, so she sank to her knees and prayed there, twisting and turning on the floor in search of a comfortable position, until mid-afternoon, when the service was over and she mounted the mule again and re-entering her own home took her first meal of the day.

  She did this for two or three days, but then she thought, if I go on a mule, in luxury, Mary will not listen to me, so the next morning she walked up the hill.

  After a week her confessor, who had been watching her prostrations and how often they were accompanied by weeping, asked the priests of Gimja-bet Mariam to go into their sanctuary and to bring out one of their treasures. ‘Here,’ he said, placing before her a picture of Mary, ‘this was painted with the tears of Emperor Yohannes the Just. Cry to this, and the Virgin will hear you.’

  She did as he said, and toward the end of the two weeks another dream came to her. She was standing in a building with a woman who looked like one of her aunts. The woman turned and eased herself through a tiny window, and, once outside, beckoned to her, come, come to me. But she could see only windows, no doors, and she said, I can’t, look, my belly is too big. The woman kept beckoning, come, come, and finally she put her head through the window, and then her shoulders, and suddenly she was outside too, in clear air. The woman held out a length of bamboo. She grasped it and followed, walking until they came to a deep fast-flowing river. She was terrified of water, had always been terrified of water, and she refused to go on, but the woman said, ayzosh, step where I step, and nothing will happen to you. So she followed, placing trembling feet on one stone at a time. Once on the other side they walked until they came to a bubbling spring in a wide meadow, a hot spring that steamed into grass covered with tiny white flowers and touched by the wind. The woman said, this is your place. And she sat her down in the quiet and left her.

  In the morning, when she woke, she knew the danger had passed. She told her husband what she had seen, and he said, the meadows are the world, and the water is sustenance. You will live for many years. You will have many children, and you will see much.

  The sun came out when her seventh child, Tiruworq, was born.

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes now, in the calm after supper, when the low basketwork tables were cleared away and her husband, or increasingly Edemariam, had said the closing blessing, she told stories.

  Have you heard the one about the partridge and the rooster? And they would turn, expectant, her husband too sometimes, if he was home. All right.

  The partridge and the rooster became friends. First the partridge invited the rooster to her house in a lush green tree. It was beautiful, there was no smoke or dark, just great hospitality, and he spent the night. The next morning when they woke the rooster said, let me show you my h
ome now, and the partridge agreed, and off they went together. He gave her food and water and was chatting away when he realised the partridge wasn’t answering. He turned to remonstrate, but stopped mid-sentence. She had been hung by her neck from the rafters. Oh, the sorrow of that discovery! And for ever after the rooster has cried qo-qo-oh!, qo-qo-oh!

  Another story. There was once a hermit, a holy man who had left the world to travel alone through the wilderness. He had no grain to eat, no bread, but every nightfall, wherever he had travelled and whatever time of year it happened to be, he would find a partridge caught in a snare. And he’d give thanks for her, cut her throat, pull out her innards, wash her, then roast her over the fire, and that would be his food for the day. One morning he met two hermits who had been travelling for years. They walked on together, but all the while he was worrying – what shall I feed them? One partridge isn’t enough for all of us. And so they walked and walked, and when night fell they found not one, but three partridges in a snare. They gave thanks and began to cut their throats, peel off their crowns of feathers, pull out the innards, ready to cook them over a fire of sweet wood from the forest and share out the meat. But as they were doing this one of the new hermits said, ‘But it’s a fasting day! We can’t eat meat.’ In an instant two of the partridges rose into the air and flew away. The hermit realised what he had done and fell to his knees, sobbing, ‘We didn’t know! We didn’t know! We didn’t know it was a gift from the Lord. Oh, we have insulted Him!’ They bowed down and begged His forgiveness, and then they rose and returned to their homes.