The Wife's Tale Read online

  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.

  But when she made to go he said, you are not leaving.

  Why? They are like family, nothing will happen to me there.

  Stay here.

  She knew what he wanted, but pretended not to. I must go – Stay here!

  In the silence after the pain she felt the blood tip, cool, down her forehead. It dripped off her eyebrow and traced the side of her nose.

  She turned, picked up her children, and left.

  He sent a deputation of elders. ‘Come, you must be friends,’ they said. ‘All marriages have their difficulties.’ It was a metal belt buckle! He could have blinded me! ‘In that he was not right, we will tell him he was not right. For your part, you know what it says in the book, that women must obey their husbands, as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him Lord.’ But he could have blinded me! ‘He will not do it again.’ She was tight with protest and anger, but she did as she was told.

  Eventually Alemitu’s fever ebbed, but it was as if the child had gone too. Previously curious and high-spirited, she was silent and withdrawn. Sullen, her mother thought, as yet another comment or request for help went unheeded. She watched everyone and everything as though from across a plain, as though she were not really there.

  One day Yetemegnu took Alemitu on a visit to her aunt Tirunesh, and when she had to return to look after her husband, left her in the older woman’s care. It was some time before she pieced together what then happened. Tirunesh, accustomed as she was to unquestioning obedience, had become increasingly impatient. She would say Alemitu’s name and there would be no answer. ‘Come here, child.’ No reply. ‘Sit there.’ Nothing. One afternoon one of her brother’s tenant farmers, a Muslim from Simano, came to visit and she regaled him with the problem. ‘The parents are nice enough, but this girl, quite rude.’ ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘you do understand she’s deaf. The holy water has made her deaf.’

  She was at Ba’ata when she heard, and the crows rose out of the junipers and flapped and cawed at her screaming. And then she was running, pulling at her dress, her girdle, tearing them with her nails, ripping the soft fabric, scratching at her face, crying erri, erri, erri, hoarse with bitterness and grief, crying as if someone had died.

  She ran to the house and snatched up her daughter. She could not, would not go home until she was healed. From church to church, from Ba’ata to Medhané-Alem, from
John Son of Thunder to Gabriel, to Ruphael, to St George. Stumbling from spring to spring, with this awkward bundle in her arms, or tied to her back like a baby. Presenting her to priest after priest, begging them to touch her ears with the Gospel. Oh Lord, open her ears. Oh God in heaven, hear my prayer.

  To the springs at Wanzayé, which steamed into the morning. Three days there, receiving water that flowed so hot from the ground it was said King Woldè-Giorgis once had a piece of meat thrown into it that came out cooked. Three days, praying that water people said had once opened a grown woman’s ears would do the same for her daughter. Three days of easing into small enclosures, where sweat dripped off their faces and stung her healing brow, and three nights sleeping in the open, drawing her shemma over and under them, shivering as the temperature dropped, listening to the rustle of sheep against eucalyptus and the occasional call of a jackal. And on one of those nights, a deep, sharp pain in her leg. When they rose in the morning the limb had swollen to twice its normal size.

  They tied it tight, hoping to prevent the spider’s poison from going up any further, then when that did not work they wrapped her in a gabi and carried her home. For three months she dipped between fever and waking, and waking would call out her daughter’s name, to be answered only with silence.

  * * *

  —

  It had been a difficult pregnancy, and now it was a difficult labour. She did not scream, but she could not suppress a bitten-down hum.

  Hmmmm.

  Behind the curtain her husband prayed.

  Hmmmm.

  The women held her tight across her chest as she crouched and strained.

  Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam dirèshilin.

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

  Hmm. Hmmmmmm.

  Tiny wrinkled feet, and a complete change in the quality of attention from the women surrounding her.

  Hmmmmmmmm.

  Hips.

  Hmmmm. Hmmmm. Hmmmm.

  Finally, finally, a head. Quickly the women lifted the baby, took soot from the fire and anointed its face with a cross.

  Twelve ililta. Another boy.

  The exhaustion lasted for weeks. One morning her husband came to her having been up all night cooking, as carefully as he knew how, a freshly slaughtered sheep. Gently he sat down beside her, tried to feed her the watery sauce, picking out pieces of meat so overcooked they had fallen into strands. Eat, my heart, eat. But she kept shaking her head, all she wanted was sleep, could he not let her sleep?

  Losing patience, he called her aunt, who laughed. She can’t eat something cooked like that! But even a day’s worth of remedial spicing and simmering could not tempt her, and eventually all the neighbours who had assisted at the birth were invited to feast instead.

  The child thrived. His hair curled and his face filled, and he basked in the attention of a household that knew him to be especially precious, because of the manner of his coming. When forty days had passed they christened him Yohannes, after the feast day on which he was born.

  * * *

  —

  Her husband was away when the woman came. The palm branches were brittle over the lintel, and a sheep fossicked in the yard.

  ‘Where is he?’

  The lack of preliminaries, a serious sharpness, startled her out of her diffidence. She looked up. In Belesa with the priests. Talking to the shifta.

  The woman, a friend of the family, nodded. It was an increasingly common species of trip for senior clergy, whom the Italians were sending into the countryside, into Mamara and Qimant and Quoleña country, with orders to make contact with the patriots (or bandits, or shifta, depending on who was describing them, and to whom). Tell them, they said, to return to the city. Persuade them not to fight us. She didn’t think her husband did any persuading, or that anyone ever came back with him. But for the moment he went as he was told.

  For things were changing. From Addis Ababa came accounts of grenades thrown, missing their Italian target. And of the viceroy’s three days of revenge: streets full of running, of blood and fire. Of bodies thrown over bridges or dragged behind lorries. Of women raped, disembowelled, of children torched in their homes. Of monks shot en masse. Of a cathedral, and a monastery, burning. By the end of that rainy season the new Roman province of Amhara, so easily taken and so far so peacefully ruled, was blooming with revolt: revolt overt, in the form of ragtag warriors massing in the surrounding hills, and revolt covert, in the form of people like the woman before her, a comfortable, kind lady who was trusted by the Italians, but who everyone knew worked against them too.

  The viceroy was recalled, and replaced by one with somewhat subtler tactics. The Duke of Aosta had seen the pride with which the Ethiopian church claimed its five bishops, and now saw also how it could be used. Of the five, Abunè Petros was dead, as was Abunè Mikael. Abunè Saurios had fled to Jerusalem, and Abunè Isaac was in prison. Only Abunè Abraham, who served flamboyant, insurrectionary Ras Hailu of Gojjam, had followed his temporal master and formally submitted. Aosta offered full separation from Egypt, with Abunè Abraham as archbishop. And Abunè Abraham accepted.

  Oh the fuss the priests made when their new prelate arrived in Gondar by aeroplane shortly afterwards. And the numbers who had listened to his sermon! ‘Gondar is famed for its scholars, for its population by you, the learned. And yet you stand by and tolerate the impertinence of the farmers at Armachiho, who live so close to you! Why do you not advise them to stop fighting? Should you not be spending your hours thinking about how to repay the Italians, who have done so much for our church?’ When he had finished, and was turning away, her husband spoke. ‘The best time to influence the farmers is after the harvest. Then they might even be persuaded to become monks, let alone to stop fighting.’

  All the next morning Abunè Abraham toured the market, reiterating his message.

  ‘It is a sin to refuse this government God has bestowed upon us, this government that has freed our church. If you accept the foreigners, you will gain riches on earth and inherit the kingdom of heaven. But if you do not listen to these orders from me, your spiritual father, you will be punished on earth then consigned to hellfire.’ Again and again, working himself up into righteous paroxysms, until finally the Italian colonel who had brought him took him to the new airstrip, from thence to Gojjam, and finally back to Addis Ababa, where he further proclaimed the government would protect the churches, rebuild those that had been destroyed, and restore property and estates.

  Not long after, her husband, like all the other priests and imams, began receiving a salary, 10,000 lira, which he added to the remains of the imperial gifts, the rent, the sale of livestock, and spent on the church. He hired Italian workmen. Although she didn’t cook for them – she thought pasta looked like hookworm and was baffled by galeta, eventually grinding the biscuits with spices and mixing them with butter to make a surprisingly tasty paste for her own family – she sent servants out to them with eggs and goat meat from Gonderoch Mariam, so that they would eat well, and finish faster. Occasionally they got a sheep, too.

  * * *

  —

  They were obviously skilled, and useful, but she was afraid of these red-faced men who made themselves at home so easily, and looked at her so assessingly. One morning a foreign man had wandered into their compound.

  ‘Anchi!’ You! The familiar form, rather than the respectful form which was her due. ‘Any eggs?’

  Non ché, she replied, reaching for something that sounded like no.

  ‘Niq niq ché!’ he replied. A rude gesture.

  What? You donkey! Get out. Get out!

  If she had had a stone within reach, she would have thrown it. Not that it would necessarily have been a deterrent. He returned often when she was alone – except for the servants and children, of course – each time sending her rushing about the house, locking the doors, then running up the stairs to peer at him from a window.

  Another day she needed some logs split, and accomp
anied her servants to the church to ensure it was efficiently done. The Italian foreman had grabbed her small hand in both of his, and begun to stroke it. She snatched it back.

  Min abatih! You bastard! What do you think you’re doing?

  ‘Anchi buono,’ he replied. ‘Anchi buono.’

  Much later she would laugh about it, but then what she mostly felt was an almost physical wave of danger. There were so many stories. How at dawn the roads around the garrisons filled with women going home. How queues led to brothels demarcated by colour: yellow for officers, green for soldiers, black for local troops. But also how many Ethiopian women lived as wives with Italian men. (And how a few of these men were imprisoned for declaring love, thereby breaking Italian law, which allowed only for sexual necessity.) Only the other morning she had come down the stairs to an unwonted silence in the kitchen hut, and shadows on the floor in the corner where the servant girl used to sleep. She had had to grind her own teff ever since.

  They had tempted and spoiled so many clergymen’s wives. And what if her husband, eyes permanently alive to the possibility of betrayal, jealous, it sometimes seemed to her, of the very air, what if her husband saw? It wasn’t that long since they had had an important guest for lunch. She had thought she had served everything necessary, that all was as it should be, but when she left the room, she had felt her husband behind her. Had felt his presence, and then cold metal, pressing hard into the back of her neck. She hissed a breath in through her teeth. He pressed harder, and she understood he was using the base of his prayer stick. Did you not realise you could have killed me? she asked afterwards, when the guest was gone and the dregs of fear had turned to anger and goaded her into speech. I would have died and you would have gone to prison. Who would have raised all these children then?