The Wife's Tale Read online

  More usually she would feed the children, put them to bed, and wait for him. She had said she would not eat until he came home, and he had said he would do the same for her. But it was he who was often late. And when they finally sat down he would delay them further, wrapping sauce and injera into big mouthfuls and carrying them into the room where his children slept, waking and trying to feed the sleepy forms, forcing mouthfuls on them even if they twisted away, blinking at him with sleep-red eyes and tight-shut mouths.

  And she would have a sudden memory, of when she first came to live with him herself, and a complicated anger. She should be happy he was so solicitous, so tender toward his children. So many men were not. But what did he think, that she was like a stepmother, uncaring? That she had not fed them?

  * * *

  —

  A terrible pregnancy.

  She could not face food, so every day she walked out into the garden and fed her share to their new calf.

  A terrible pregnancy, but a good birth.

  She called the girl Zenna-Mariam. News of Mary.

  * * *

  —

  On market mornings her house would fill with running feet as the bigger children leapt from their beds and raced past the smaller ones to take up their places on the outside wall. She did not follow them, but if she stood at the window she could see into the market too, see the egg-sellers and drovers, the chilli and butter merchants, the peasant women guarding little heaps of spices. The morning sun shone off the high pale minaret of the new mosque – built on land given to the Muslims of Gondar by the Italians – and set aflame the perfect dome beneath it. It sparked off the buttons and belt buckles of the soldiers, and of the officers from the prison, which had been moved to the former Italian consulate just around the corner. And it lit the municipal gallows, and the men these soldiers and officers were bringing to the gallows.

  Sometimes she watched, unable to look away as their bowels failed or they cried out blessings and imprecations, confessions and protestations, cried out to the skies or to their milling half-interested audiences, I found him with my wife, he deserved to die, no blood will spill, only milk, I am innocent, I am innocent, as God is my witness I am innocent. Sometimes she too cried out, involuntarily, Oh, think of your mother, think of your mother, where is she now? But mostly she would throw herself onto the bed and cover her eyes and stop up her ears and pray until that week’s executions had ended.

  Even before the Italians had finally surrendered, the emperor, knowing that his absence meant loyalties were even more fractured and contingent than they had been before, prosecuted with zeal the process of centralisation he had begun before the war. Menelik II, Empress Zewditu’s father, had been the first sovereign to require taxes to be paid to the state as well as to regional lords, but some sacks of grain and hours of labour were nothing compared to what Hailè Selassie, after a short initial period of caution, now required, and in cash rather than kind, cash which no longer flowed through church and lords, but directly to Addis Ababa. Diligently he drew to himself economic control; assiduously he tightened his command over individuals, reinstating powerful nobles even if they had fled when most needed; sending trusted allies into the regions; promoting those who had abandoned him or been tempted to abandon him, bridling them with their own guilt and holding them close; playing, with a shifting mixture of flattery, reward and force, on the vanities of the men, often humbly born, who had become (often well-loved, well-respected) leaders in his absence.

  When Emperor Teklè-Haimanot built Ba’ata and settled upon it the rich lands of Bisnit, of Dembiya and Deresgé, he had also given its aleqa the job of judge in the Saturday market, with the right to claim a third of all tax income from goods sold there. Under the Italians such taxes had ceased, and then her husband had, of course, lost his aleqa-ship. Within a year, however, the emperor, recognising that her husband had, during his decades of training, learned all the books of the Fit’ha Negest by heart, appointed him a judge in the provincial criminal court.

  Now every Saturday after breakfast her husband took his seat beneath the huge sycamore fig on the western edge of the market, and litigants came to stand before him, shoulders thrown back, right feet forward, grasping the tied-together tips of their shemmas, hands trembling with emphasis. ‘May God show you!’ – that the cow was really theirs, or the money; that it was they who had received the criminal insult, not given it. That the land was theirs, and the tributes from it – in Gondar the emperor’s new ideas were still often treated as inconvenient distractions from the main business of enforcing rights that had existed for centuries. Those particularly convinced of their position might throw their shemmas off their shoulders as if readying themselves for a flogging. See? Look what I am prepared to suffer. And Aleqa Tsega would pass his judgements, imposing fines, jail terms, taking as payment whatever the litigants could offer: teff, a sheep, a couple of chickens, a promise of wheat at harvest time, or a handful of well-worn silver thalers.

  Often he took Edemariam along, to help, and watch, and learn. Edemariam was nine years old now, with a dark thin face and a solemn gaze. He had begun his alphabet five years earlier, sitting cross-legged with the other four-year-olds under a tree at Ba’ata and singing the letters in a ragged echo-chorus. Ha-hu. Ha-hu. Lè Lu. Lè Lu, while the priest-teacher paced before them, stick at the ready. Ha-hu. Ha-hu. Lè Lu. Lè Lu. The alphabet, the Apostles Alphabet, the first epistle general of St John. The psalms of David, written on goatskin, wrapped in a leather carrying case and hung around his neck – when he learned to sing these, she had cooked him a small feast in celebration.

  They had hired a tutor who came to their home, a man with a pronounced limp who arrived each morning to lead Edemariam through the chants composed in the sixth century by Yared, a man so holy and with a voice so luminous it was said his king, listening, had leant on his spear and pierced his foot and neither man had noticed. She kept an eye on her son as she went about the household chores, and saw a healthy boy with a sensitive side who, especially when he began to join a few other children at the teacher’s small house in the grounds of Abiyè Egzi church, did not hide that he was afraid. It was the dead people in the cemetery, he told her, weeping. He expected them to rise out of the ground to chase him. She wasn’t surprised when one day he refused to go at all. And because she believed it was not helpful to gainsay a father’s discipline she tried not to show the empathy that rang through her when her husband found out and dragged Edemariam, over and over again, through a bed of nettles. But it was cruel. Really it was cruel. (A thought that did not stop her when one day some years later she found Edemariam had stolen a coin and used it to shoot air rifles instead of going to school. She had dragged him home, whipped him, and tied him to a chair in a storeroom before presenting him with the family confessor, who extracted a promise that it would never happen again.)

  She tried to fix her mind, instead, on the intense pride with which her husband watched Edemariam, sitting beside him in the market, fill out receipts and copy court documents. When he came home full of his pleasure, however, she listened and frowned, and said, you must not tell him. He will become conceited; love him silently, in your heart. She did not tell him that her own heart had brimmed with a delight that echoed his.

  But even Edemariam’s ready help – and, eventually, a trip to their confessor to get her father-in-law’s curse exorcised, so her husband could finally write – was not enough to get through all the work, because while the mayhem after the war had changed character, it showed little sign of abating. True, they had a new governor; the emperor had appointed Ras Kassa’s only surviving son. Asratè, however, who had spent the war in England and Jerusalem, was very young, and his concern was not always with a city whose roads were potholed by tanks and the floods of the rainy season; whose bridges had been blown up by retreating Italians; whose banks did not function; whose municipal buildings were being used as byres and lavatories; and whose hospitals, already stripped by the B
ritish (arguing Africans had no mechanical aptitude, they had taken equipment and medicines, along with most of the contents of Italian-built factories, to their colonies), were now required to send many of their remaining beds to Addis Ababa. Asratè was proud of his lineage, well aware of his family’s claim to the throne and of the power it thus held in the country and, however subtly, potentially over the emperor. And unlike his father, he was inclined to test it: he was rumoured to have joined in the general seizure of corrugated iron, and when the crown prince sent 10,000 thalers with which to repair Gondar’s roads Asratè appropriated the money for himself.

  Within a couple of years Asratè was replaced by Ras Imru, the emperor’s second cousin. Aleqa Tsega bought an ox; she supervised its slaughter and an arrangement of choice cuts to send to the palace in welcome. They knew Imru and the emperor had been raised together, that both were described as modernisers, that in his postings before the war Imru had attempted to institute fairer taxation and encourage modern education, with some success – except in Gojjam, where he was resented as an outsider, and his attempts to rule by consensus disregarded until he resorted to force. Gondar, which refused to forget that it had run the empire for hundreds of years, was proving equally insular and reactionary. Imru’s census was sabotaged, his proposals for reform fell on politely deaf ears.

  No one could ignore, however, his method of dealing with looters and brigands, the way he took on the slave traders.

  The bodies were often left hanging in the market for days.

  * * *

  —

  Even those who had not known that the emperor was due to visit Gondar were left in no doubt when, five years after the Italians fell, certain roads suddenly improved beyond all recognition. Tarmac swept from the Piassa down to the Saturday market, then curled back up to the castle compound and into town. Side roads were swept, trees planted and watered, and her husband and his colleagues composed wide welcome banners in Ge’ez to hang at the entrance to the castles, across the municipality buildings, across Samuna Ber, the Gate of Soap at the south-west corner of the city, and over the entrance to the new airport building whose delayed opening was ostensibly one reason the emperor had not come until now.

  ‘Emperor Fasil took a year to reach Gondar,’ proclaimed her husband, at the airport to welcome his liege, yet again at the head of his priests. ‘He stayed three months at Yibaba, three months at Irengo, three months at Denqez, and then finally three months in Gondar, but your majesty has been seen in both Addis Ababa and in Gondar within the hour! The king of kings has pierced the clouds and arrived among us, and our joy has no limit. Long live Emperor Hailè Selassie! May the kingdom of Ethiopia endure forever!’

  The students clapped and sang, the women trilled their ililta, the patriots discharged their rifles into the air, and the emperor and his empress processed into town, where they feasted Gondar’s notables with all the generosity required of them.

  She was not there, of course, but she paid close attention to the imperial movements. She knew that sometime in the quieter days of the two-week visit, the empress, who like her husband had to be seen to be pious, would come to Ba’ata to pay her respects, and she wanted her daughter to be ready.

  Alemitu was nearly sixteen, a tall fierce girl beginning to possess a commanding beauty. She was beautiful and she was bright, and Yetemegnu had taught her to sew and spin and embroider, to weave baskets tight and gleaming. She had tried to protect her, refusing to let her play with other children because she saw how they bullied her and called her names she couldn’t hear, dragging her away when she approached the fire. ‘You’re already deaf! You can’t burn yourself as well!’ And then she heard the empress had established a school for handicrafts in Addis Ababa. She could not think how to enrol Alemitu – until the imperial visit was announced, when she went to their confessor. Tell the empress my daughter is deaf, she said to him. Ask her to take Alemitu to Addis and educate her. And he had promised, yes, of course I will do that.

  Now she would have to do something she had never done before, loiter with all the other petitioners in the churchyard for a scrap of the empress’s attention, but she had confidence that at least the ground had been prepared. Carefully she and Alemitu arrayed themselves in the whitest of white dresses, the best necklaces, the finest shawls. Then they walked to Ba’ata and found a spot under the trees where they could wait.

  They watched as the empress arrived and Alemitu’s father stood in the knot of priests and nuns that came forward to greet the empress’s retinue, watched him stand silent as the new aleqa, and then a priest, interrupting the aleqa, and then her husband, talked and bowed and talked. The empress stood listening. A pale woman, big, with wide shoulders and hooded eyes. Full lips, a short neck, and double chin. Not handsome, but a strong presence. When the men were finally silent, their empress walked up to the unfinished church, bowed her head, and kissed its walls.

  When at last the empress moved toward the gate Yetemegnu pressed forward and bowed. She is deaf, madam, she said, pushing the teenager in front of her. It is this child who is deaf. The empress looked straight at Alemitu. Yetemegnu was so pleased and relieved that for a moment she did not notice the woman was already turning away, that an attendant was holding out a hand, and that in the hand was money. When at last she bowed her head and put her own hands together to receive it she was staring at a ground she could not see, for rage, and for humiliation.

  * * *

  —

  She was becoming accustomed to a bit more freedom. Partly it was that her husband was again often away. Sometimes their son went with him, describing on his return rowing across Lake Tana in low reed boats and scrambling ashore to talk to the abbots of quiet churches and quieter monasteries. Or her husband went on long trips into the interior to do she knew not what, only that sometimes he took with him large amounts of money, which she assumed were from the emperor. There were mornings that began with clopping and whinnying and milling priests, and one man carefully balancing a tabot on his head; then everyone knew Aleqa Tsega was travelling to the Qimants and the Jews, to summon them down to a river with the blare of a trumpet and baptise them. She had even heard one story of so many coming to take their first communion – because otherwise they would not be allowed to own land – that her husband had gathered them into groups and given all in each group the same christening name.

  He made frequent journeys to Gonderoch Mariam and to Addis Ababa, where he haunted the church headquarters and palaces and spent hours talking church politics and poetry with his childhood friend the dean, who had just been promoted to bishop of Harar and renamed Theophilos. She did not know that at this time her husband proposed the idea (controversial generally, but in certain quarters of Gondar anathema) that church tithe income should be converted to cash and paid as salary to church employees rather than to anyone who might lay claim by reason of birth. She did know, however – if only because he glowed with righteous vindication – that he had asked for the return of Ba’ata, and the request had been granted.

  His jealousy, if not exactly easing, was, after the moment when she had faced him down, no longer expressed in blows. She could even have her own visitors now, and she came to love the point at mid-morning when she could turn away from chores, take a handful of green coffee beans, release them rattling onto a flat metal pan, and settle it onto the low fire. Gradually the smell of roasting coffee would lift and weave through the house, a pleasure heralding pleasure, cut through with the scent of fresh grass and wildflowers, the outdoors brought inside and strewn across the floors. When the visitors arrived a servant would carry the pan in for a moment and with a cupped palm direct the smoke toward each person, so that they could smell it. Then the beans were taken away and a muffled pounding underlined the preliminaries of conversation: Are you well? I am well, thanks be to God. And your husband? Very well, may His honour increase. Are the children well? All well, all well, may His name be praised.

  For a long time she just l
istened, pouring coffee, or, growing into her role as host, nudging the conversation along – And what happened then? Oh, may the Lord keep them safe! – watching faces, listening to the sometimes dissonant interplay of voice and expression and story, hoarding everything away. Who had fallen out with whom, who was related to such and such; who was ill and who looked unfeasibly happy; who had been seen at church and who had not. And did you hear what she said to him? It seemed so innocent, and yet he caught the hidden meaning, and it drew such blood. And she would laugh, released into a kind of pure appreciation.

  As the second and third cups were passed around she sometimes joined in the conversation herself – tentative at first, but with a growing realisation that she was mistress here, and they duty-bound to listen. And as she became surer of her stage, she began to feel her father’s skills surfacing – to discover that language came easy to her; that she could spin out a tale, and, drawing her listeners along with her, wrap their companionship about her for that much longer.

  But she also began to learn she had to be wary: that her position, and particularly her husband’s, meant those she thought were just neighbours, thoughtful and generous, often wanted something: preferment, connections, favourable judgements. Sometimes it was easy to tell. When donkeys appeared at the entrance, for instance, carrying firewood, honey, butter, the softest, whitest cotton blankets, quintals of raw green coffee, or a sheep she did not expect was dragged bleating through the gate.

  She had seen how her husband reacted to this largesse. She had tried to intervene as he shouted at a cowering monk, threatening to throw his hundred paper notes – enough for more than thirty fat sheep – onto the fire because he had had the temerity to attempt to bribe his way into a job as a vicar. A murderer’s brother had his hundred notes flung into the air. She had joined the entire household in dropping to her hands and knees and picking them up for him before he scuttled out.