The Wife's Tale Page 9
Meetings, meetings, meetings – and then one day a silence that made her look up. He was holding a piece of paper in one hand and a dense dark object in the other. Of course she could not read the writing, and he did not explain. But she could see the double circle stamped in ink at the bottom of the paper, that within the circle strode the muscular marching body of the imperial lion.
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When the food began to run out the Italians could no longer deny that the hills crawled with guerrillas who watched the roads and owned the villages and backed them into the dusty lanes of Gondar, where they began to protest against their own leaders. Five small pieces of bread had cost a lira when the Italians arrived five years ago; they now cost fifty. A quintal of teff, once ten or fifteen lira, was rising toward two thousand. The markets flapped with Italian uniforms, sold for cabbage or for grain. When she heard the foreign soldiers had been seen eyeing donkeys and mules, considering what flavour of meat they might provide, her fear of them began to shade into what she one day recognised was pity.
For months the city had simmered with rumours. That Hailè Selassie might return from exile in England after all. That Italy had declared war on Britain, its ally in the Horn of Africa, and the British government had suddenly seen its way to helping an Ethiopian emperor to whom it had given safe harbour but otherwise frustrated and ignored. That Hailè Selassie, after five years’ exile, had travelled to Khartoum. That Ras Kassa and his only surviving son had left Jerusalem to join their emperor. That British troops were organising in the Sudan. That together all had crossed the border and entered Gojjam.
Her husband redoubled his absences, preaching in the villages, in the hamlets, in the open country; preaching his monarch’s message of qualified forgiveness, hope, ultimatum (no mention of regret, however, and certainly no apology): ‘My people, lacking me, went to the enemy,’ ran the lion-sealed letter. ‘Let them know that We are coming. Let them know that their land and arms will not be touched if they return to me. Muslim, Falasha, Qimant, Raya-Azebo, Adel, Denqala or Somali – all are sons of Ethiopia. Tell them to arise. Persuade them to fight for Us.’ And many of these sons were, with belated vigour, doing as they were told.
One night, in the chill hours before a clear dry-season dawn drew open the receding veils of stars, her husband left their compound, made his way to the new church, and stepped inside. The painters had done well. The canvases glowed in the taper-light. Behind the biblical stories – and one panel in which he himself appeared, paler-skinned and splendid in a cape of indigo trimmed with gold – were walls so strong, stones so tight-joined they could, he hoped, withstand anything. It was a pity he had not yet been able to build the final, outer circle, but the stone had been quarried, and lay in heaps under the trees.
After the vigil and the benediction, after communion, he and his priests emerged blinking into the sunshine, and he saw they were waiting under the trees as promised: the Italian deputy, and Yohannes the new archbishop, white-bearded and severe under a burnished turban. The priests had danced: bare feet on now-warm earth, eyes holding eyes, so they sank and rose as one, sank and rose until another priest appeared, a flat weight covered in rich cloth balanced on his head. Ililililil! cried the women as the tabot, Ba’ata’s replica of the Ark of the Covenant, began its first circuit, echoing the diurnal round of the sun. Ililililil! as it was taken into the new building and placed on the new altar, consecrating it. After the archbishop’s speech, after the thanks directed by the archbishop at the Italian deputy, after the Italian had left, Tsega stood at the top of the clean new steps. Come, he said to all before him. Come and help me to celebrate this feast of Her Presentation and Entry into the Tabernacle. Come to my house, there is food waiting.
Two weeks after Emperor Hailè Selassie regained Addis Ababa, Gondar acquired a new Italian governor, who took office just as the small rains began and the farmers started to turn and soften the earth, preparing it for seeding. Guglielmo Nasi made it clear he would expand the policy already tested by his predecessors: trust local leaders, or give the impression of trusting them, respect custom and due process, and they will reward you with loyalty – or, more likely, the impression of loyalty. And he had had some success, so that when the old Shoan general Birru Woldè-Gabriel, reputed to be an illegitimate son of Emperor Menelik, returned from Jerusalem and camped with a British detachment at Denqez, many Gondarés were wary. They had heard the British were more zealous than the Italians when it came to exclusions and condescensions based on skin colour – why invite that upon themselves? Furthermore, the British might be hailed as saviours now, but it was only a few months since they had been the opposite. Rather the devil they knew, given the choice. Some, waiting to see how the balance of power would tip, even smuggled food into the city at night.
Not that it helped much. Nasi minted coins and printed banknotes near the airport at Azezo, but the only difference anyone could see was they had to use larger and larger piles of cash for scarcer and scarcer goods. The pack animals were slaughtered and made into stews. She heard some soldiers had even tried to eat grass. She heard they wept with hunger, and she wept too, taken by a kind of rushing grief for young men far from their mothers, lost and afraid in a country that was starving them into submission.
The patriots, emboldened, gave out titles and fiefdoms as rewards and incentives to fight. And Nasi, watching intently, learning fast that in this country office and rank were potent currency, did the same. Legions of men from all stations of life were called to the castles and awarded titles by this worried-looking little man whose eagle-embossed cap was an overwrought weight resting on round spectacles and a very sharp nose. On one day alone he awarded 110 titles, from generals to aleqas, commanders of the vanguard to lord chief justices. Another day, it was said, he stopped to watch some farmers harvesting teff with sickles in the fields. After a while he ordered them to divide into three groups. This group, he announced, are henceforth Commanders of the Right. This group, Commanders of the Left. And this group, Commanders of the Fort. Ayalew Birru became a ras, a duke and head of the army. And her husband was named bitwoded, or chief of the counsellors and beloved of the realm.
As for her, little changed until one day he raised a stick again.
She spoke before she could think: Raise your head. Let me have a good look at you.
The rod paused, quivering just beyond her vision. At last he said, What do you want to see?
She did not answer, but met his eyes, steady.
The silence rose and spread. At last, when she felt she could be still no longer, his arm dropped, and he turned away.
AND WHILST WE WERE IN JUDAH THE OLD MAN, JOSEPH THE CARPENTER, MINISTERED TO US AND FED US. AND BEHOLD THE ANGEL GABRIEL APPEARED UNTO HIM, SAYING, ‘RISE UP, TAKE THE CHILD AND HIS MOTHER, AND DEPART TO THE LAND OF EGYPT, FOR THEY ARE SEEKING FOR THE CHILD TO DESTROY HIM.’…AND WE WERE ON THE ROAD TO DEBRÈ KUSKUAM. NOW WHEN WE ARRIVED THERE WE WENT HITHER AND THITHER SO THAT WE MIGHT PERCHANCE FIND A GOOD PLACE WHEREIN WE MIGHT DWELL…
– THE HISTORY OF THE VIRGIN MARY RELATED BY TIMOTHY, PATRIARCH OF ALEXANDRIA
And then one day aeroplanes roared back into the skies above Gondar. They were followed by a thick white rain that resolved itself, on the ground, on the roofs, in the trees, into sheets of paper. Those who could read explained to those who could not – ‘We are coming,’ it says, the emperor is coming, the planes are British planes – but she refused to believe in friendship that arrived in such a way. Every time the planes returned the fear incapacitated her, and they returned so often she became ill, so that at last her husband took her back to Gonderoch Mariam. But here too the dark deliberate wings passed overhead.
Eventually, early one morning, her husband and a cousin and a manservant lifted her, pregnant again, onto a mule. She stretched out her arms for the baby and waited as mules and donkeys were loaded with the older children, with clothes and cooking pots; with a hundredweight of the whitest teff, with for
ty kilos of dried spiced chilli and a generous measure of shirro. Her husband kissed each child goodbye. When they finally set off, a single manservant trotted alongside.
The sun was high when they came to a scattering of neat thatched huts. A couple of cows stared at them, and a busy goat or two; chickens scratched, and the bustling headman-tax collector hovered and bowed and ensured the little group knew they had the best possible beds, and the best possible food. After a few days they moved on, picking their way between fields of tender green chickpeas, golden teff, sorghum, millet, maize, over earth by turns red, brown, and a deep rich black. They were in Dembiya now, a wide plain, famously fertile, that dropped gradually toward Lake Tana. Emperors had holidayed here between military campaigns, or used this as a base from which to launch them; Ahmed the Left-Handed had built a home here at the height of his jihad; caravans of Muslim slave traders had crawled through during the dry seasons; monasteries were established, palaces, churches, everyone in their pleasure and greed attempting to ignore the region’s great drawback: malaria. The little party climbed up scrubby slopes, past high euphorbia trees, each thick-ribbed and scalloped branch tipped with incongruously delicate blossom, up to the brow of a low hill and the hamlet of Atakilt Giorgis, where her father came out to meet her.
Gondar had been attacked in earnest, he said. British planes were raining bombs, not paper now, on the airport, on the mountain passes, and on the anti-aircraft guns guarding the north of the city. The Italians had sent up aircraft of their own, but these had been shot out of the sky, so when, every day, the air raid sirens howled out their warning, Italians and locals alike ran to hide in holes dug into the ground. Many new buildings were in partial ruins and Iyasu’s castle had suffered a direct hit. And her husband had gone to join the soldiers of Dejazmatch Birru, now engaged at Denqez and at Degoma.
And so in Atakilt Giorgis she settled down to make a home. A small home, unlike the one she had become used to, but satisfactory – curved mud walls, a packed-earth floor, a thatched roof, a bit of land, all for only thirty coins of silver. As the situation worsened her husband had converted all their money from lira back to thalers. Now she took the bag of remaining silver and buried it, making sure to scratch out the evidence.
Atakilt Giorgis was a beautiful place, even though in his cups her father swore up and down that while circumstances might dictate he had to live here for a while, he could never be buried among the animals in such a wilderness. If she stood in her new doorway and looked back the way she had come she could see the plains, and then, on the horizon, the long high plateau, flat as a tabot. Before her the land sloped down to a small river, Qench Wiha, and then, close-dotted with simiza bushes and acacia trees, leisurely up again. To her left, on a slight rise, stood the vast sycamore fig under which the farmers met to discuss seed prices and cattle sales, or for long raucous parties. Sometimes they saw monkeys leaping through the tree’s sturdy branches, or, underneath it, earth fresh-turned by rootling aardvarks. At night they all heard the squeaking, whistling cries of jackals, and the unhinged chuckles of hyenas. Once she saw an unfamiliar figure standing under the tree. A sun-darkened, wind-cracked face. Hair a wild abundance of matted points. Clothes white at some point, but now a muddy shade of grey. Sleeves tight to the elbow, jodhpurs ending in naked ground-broadened feet. A wide belt of dull gold bullets, and a rifle nearly as long as he was tall. Quickly she retreated into the house.
Her father had remarried and she knew she had to tread with care. She gave freely of the food she had brought from Gondar, and when one of her half-brothers arrived trailing donkeys loaded with spices and more teff and two full madigas of fixings for barley beer, she gave of those too. The gifts were eagerly received, but when they were finished, she felt they were not reciprocated in kind. Used to the finest grain and knowing the bounty of the surrounding countryside, she was quietly dismayed by the rough bread her new stepmother provided, by the flimsy tales of storehouses filled with infected crops.
One day she was folding clothes into a wooden chest when her stepmother accosted her. ‘Who do you think you are? Why are you throwing the gifts my mother gave me onto the ground?’ She looked up. Her stepmother was holding a short necklace of black silk and gold filigree. ‘Why are you using this chest, anyway? Did you come to inherit this place and everything in it?’
As the birth of her sixth baby approached she became aware that her father saw the tension between the two women and was trying to protect her. He directed a trusted servant to override his wife and give his daughter and her children only the best of food, butter and milk. She said little, not wishing to draw attention, but made sure he knew she was grateful.
Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam, dirèshilin.
O Lady Lady Lady Lady Lady, come to our aid.
‘Yetemegnu,’ said the maidservant. ‘Strong beer is good in labour. Drink a bit of this.’ She didn’t like beer, but she assented. The woman poured her a full horn. After a while she accepted another.
Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam, dirèshilin.
O Lady Lady Lady Lady Lady, come to our aid.
She was on her knees when her fourth son arrived, so big that her father exclaimed in surprise that he had not killed her, but so fast, in comparison to the other births, that it seemed only a moment before Molla was stretched out, lusty and yowling, in the midwife’s arms.
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A couple of days later she was woken by a commotion in the yard and walked gingerly to the doorway to see what was going on. A lunch of greens gurgled on the fire and over it her father and stepmother stood facing each other, stark with rage. She had thought her father was at a funeral in a neighbouring village; obviously he was back early, and just as obviously had taken beer. Her stepmother had been to market for fresh butter and, it transpired later, had stopped off at a friend’s for a measure of araqi, leaving herself no time to add spices to the pot.
‘How dare you! Did you think I wouldn’t notice?’
‘Oh, go away, you slave of a consul!’ his wife snapped back. ‘You corpse!’
He snatched a smouldering stick from the edge of the fire and cracked his wife across the head with it. Blood bloomed from the gash and flowed down her face.
Yetemegnu rushed forward, objecting, but her father turned, making to hit her too. She screamed, the new baby wailed, the other children cried, and in the commotion she did not at first see her stepmother’s older son advancing, rifle cocked.
She rushed forward again. No! Kill me instead!
‘Sit down, girl,’ said her father. ‘Go and sit down!’
He dashed into his house and brought out his own gun, by which time half the neighbourhood was in attendance, and the two men were forcibly disarmed.
Back straight, head held high, her stepmother walked out of the compound, sowing blood as she went.
The next few weeks were quiet and in many ways contented. She recovered from the birth and began to cook for her father and for her stepmother’s children as well as her own. Sometimes she walked to the little round church perched on a crest of land above the plain, where the calm was only emphasised by the number of birds that hooped and chattered through the olive trees and fern pines, and in the euphorbia planted to mark the graves. Red ants scuttled through the couch grass. Yellow butterflies turned and darted. She would kiss the little arched doorways, feeling how worn they were, how softened by age and veneration, and slowly make her way back to the house. Often she found herself thinking about her stepmother, and eventually asked her father if she might return. ‘It’s up to her,’ came the gruff response. ‘I didn’t send her away.’
She went to the village elders and asked them to intervene. The devil has entered our lives. Please help us. Finally, on the morning of her son’s christening, her stepmother walked back into the compound and took up her duties as if nothing had ever happened.
Yetemegnu only saw the patriots a couple more times, but she knew they were about. Everyone talke
d about them, all the time, with an indistinguishable mixture of thrill, admiration, disapproval and fear. Often with an amused understanding, too, that while many really did fight for their country, or for their country and for revenge, the war had also given inveterate brigands a cause with which to ennoble ongoing feuds and the hunt for personal gain.
Over coffee, or while they picked through grain, cleaning it, the women told stories – about famous brigands of the past: of Shiguté, who with his two-hundred-strong band had ruled the lands west of Lake Tana; or of Tewodros and Yohannes, brigands first and emperors after. They dropped their voices and spoke of brigands present: ‘Did you hear who’s joined the fighters around here?’ ‘That’s no surprise. He always had that tendency. But he’s kind, unlike their leader.’ ‘Yes – their leader is dark, and cruel. He steals cattle and grain. He abducts women.’ They turned toward her. ‘Come to think of it, someone overheard them talking the other day, and he’s interested in you.’ Her heart skipped. ‘Yes, you. He says he likes the light one’ – that was her stepsister, who had also just given birth – ‘and the little dark one.’
After that she was terrified whenever she heard they were near. She knew what they would have seen: that she glowed with youth, and with the richnesses of recent motherhood, and finally she sent a message to her husband on the battlefield. Lord, I am in danger. The cord that was tied about my neck at my christening, binding me to a blameless life, is about to be snapped. They are going to kidnap me. Come quickly.
He came at once.
She was shocked when she saw him. He was slumped toward the neck of his mule, exhausted, unwell. She watched anxiously as he helped her to gather up her household, directing the servants in their packing, selling the little thatched hut, working out what they could and could not carry; she would always remember they had to leave all their teff behind. They sent Edemariam to a monastery so he could continue his education. And then they mounted their mules again and clopped down onto the open plain.