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The Wife’s Tale: A Personal History
Aida Edemariam
The extraordinary story of an indomitable 95-year-old woman – and of the most extraordinary century in Ethiopia’s history. A new Wild SwansA hundred years ago, a girl was born in the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar. Before she was ten years old, Yetemegnu was married to a man two decades her senior, an ambitious poet-priest. Over the next century her world changed beyond recognition. She witnessed Fascist invasion and occupation, Allied bombardment and exile from her city, the ascent and fall of Emperor Haile Selassie, revolution and civil war. She endured all these things alongside parenthood, widowhood and the death of children.The Wife’s Tale is an intimate memoir, both of a life and of a country. In prose steeped in Yetemegnu’s distinctive voice and point of view, Aida Edemariam retells her grandmother’s stories of a childhood surrounded by proud priests and soldiers, of her husband’s imprisonment, of her fight for justice – all of it played out against an ancient cycle of festivals and the rhythms of the seasons. She introduces us to a rich cast of characters – emperors and empresses, scholars and nuns, Marxist revolutionaries and wartime double agents. And through these encounters she takes us deep into the landscape and culture of this many-layered, often mis-characterised country – and the heart of one indomitable woman.



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COPYRIGHT (#u70a193b3-1e4b-54d0-bd79-b09c07c0d761)
4th Estate
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018
Copyright © Aida Edemariam 2018
Cover photograph by an unknown Italian, reproduced by permission of Professor Edemariam Tsega and Dr Frances Lester
Aida Edemariam asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007459605
Ebook edition: February 2018 ISBN: 9780007459612
Version: 2018-01-03

DEDICATION (#u70a193b3-1e4b-54d0-bd79-b09c07c0d761)
For Rahel

CONTENTS
Cover (#u55d4265a-d1d0-53d7-994c-26be101c23df)
Title Page (#u8b0caae5-05fc-59a0-840e-fe124be8f68d)
Copyright (#u29ab08da-2581-5f44-85f9-133899a39246)
Dedication (#u691495aa-741e-5849-b0f1-e67a4f008787)
Map (#u50c4d638-99e3-56fd-a323-68d80b57eebd)
PAGUMÉ: The Thirteenth Month (#ue9b62080-1199-59db-a5f5-4e8da73a3876)
BOOK I: 1916–1930 (#u4270b6da-06bf-5eec-aa7f-1bb503465f48)
MESKEREM: The First Month (#u34f9338b-697d-5f92-a088-66182fb101f2)
TIQIMT: The Second Month (#ub0d4b6a2-8610-5cbe-9d47-d5ee597dad31)
BOOK II: 1931–1941 (#ud22c6b72-3982-5767-bc81-fa0f15f3c655)
HIDAR: The Third Month (#u33bc8de8-24ff-5e19-ab01-38e818eddda8)
BOOK III: 1942–1953 (#litres_trial_promo)
TAHSAS: The Fourth Month (#litres_trial_promo)
BOOK IV: 1953–c.1958 (#litres_trial_promo)
TIRR: The Fifth Month (#litres_trial_promo)
BOOK V: 1959–1989 (#litres_trial_promo)
YEKATIT: The Sixth Month (#litres_trial_promo)
MEGABIT: The Seventh Month (#litres_trial_promo)
MIYAZIA: The Eighth Month (#litres_trial_promo)
GINBOT: The Ninth Month (#litres_trial_promo)
SENÉ: The Tenth Month (#litres_trial_promo)
HAMLÉ: The Eleventh Month (#litres_trial_promo)
NEHASSÉ: The Twelfth Month (#litres_trial_promo)
PAGUMÉ: The Thirteenth Month (#litres_trial_promo)
Chronology (#litres_trial_promo)
Glossary (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

MAP (#u70a193b3-1e4b-54d0-bd79-b09c07c0d761)



PAGUMÉ (#u70a193b3-1e4b-54d0-bd79-b09c07c0d761)
THE THIRTEENTH MONTH
Rains broken by occasional sunshine. Examination of boys in church school to decide who will be deacons. End of fiscal year. New Year’s Eve.


Four coals huddled into a low clay pot, glowing red through their films of ash. My grandmother reached in among the folds of her shawl and drew from a small pouch a kernel of frankincense. She dropped it among the coals and at once it melted, hissing, releasing sweet smoke that rose and tangled with the smell of roasting coffee, of rain gathering beyond the open door, of unfurling earth.
If it rains on Ruphael’s Day, my grandmother said, the water is holy. When we were children we’d tear off our clothes and dance through it singing. And if there was a rainbow it was as though Mary’s sash had been thrown across the sky.
Above our heads, on the corrugated-iron roof, the rain began. Thud. Thud. Thud-thud. Each drop carrying with it a sense of great chill distances travelled, of interrupted speed.
And all through Pagumé anyone young went down to the rivers before dawn, said my grandmother. You had to get to the water before the birds could taste it. She held the round-bellied pot high, so the coffee clattered into the little porcelain cups. Added sugar, or salt, or tiny tear-shaped leaves of rue, passed the cups around. I’ve never liked rivers, though, nor lakes, she said, not since I was a small child.
But even though I was afraid I begged to be allowed to go. I was staying with my grandmother. She was kinder than my aunt, especially when I wet the bed. She’d just turn the jendi over, change the bedclothes. She was patient with me, and loving. Like my mother – and at once my own grandmother was crying, tears spilling into her shawl.
Ayzosh, Nannyé, I said. Ayzosh. Take heart. Yibejish, lijé, she answered. Yes, child, may you be saved. Ayzosh. Yibejish, wiping the wet away. I miss my mother, she said. I know, I answered, I know. So what happened at the river? Steering her back, to distract her as much as anything. Pushing her on, as I did more and more often, knowing many of the stories, but knowing also that there were more, told and retold for decades, shaped, reshaped – or sometimes, when enough time had passed – cracked open in the telling. What did you say? How did you feel, and what do you feel, now?
Sometimes the answers were immediate. Well, I said this, of course, or no, I don’t remember the date, or the time, only that the feast of St John was approaching, and I had so much work to do. Or not now, or I’ve told you that before – though often you could tell it was a rote demurral, that she wanted to continue. Other times the reply was a small smile and a twist into shyness, no, no, those things are not spoken of. When were you happy? I asked once. I’m never happy, came the answer, I’m always crying. All of my life is painted in tears.
The third round of coffee had been drunk, the dregs slopped out into the yard. The smoke drifted into the corners and disappeared. Nannyé held out her hands, palms heavenward. May He bring justice to the wronged, to the poor, to the oppressed. May He clothe the naked and liberate the crucified. May He protect us, and bless us.
I dipped my head. Amen. We watched as sunlight flared through the steam rising from the wet ground, and through the open door. Birds sang.
At last I was allowed to go, she said. We left our houses excited, in the dark, and walked down into the valley. The Qeha had been filling all the rainy season, it moved fast and deep. The other children took off their clothes and jumped in. They cupped the water in their hands and threw it high. They laughed and splashed and wrestled. I edged forward. The water crept toward my toes. I started to move forward again, but I couldn’t bear it. I screamed. And I ran.
She laughed, a laugh that took her over as utterly as her tears had a moment earlier. A complicated laugh, deep and delighted but serious also, for in fact she was still afraid and always would be; because she remembered the child she had been so clearly; because in many ways she was still that child.

BOOK I (#u70a193b3-1e4b-54d0-bd79-b09c07c0d761)

1916–1930


Gondar in 1905, from Ethiopia Photographed: Historic Photos of the Country and its People Taken between 1867 and 1935, ed. Richard Pankhurst and Denis Gerard.

MESKEREM (#u70a193b3-1e4b-54d0-bd79-b09c07c0d761)
THE FIRST MONTH
Floods recede. Yellow masqal daisies cover the land. New and fallow fields ploughed for cultivation.


AND WHEN THE MAIDEN WAS THREE YEARS OLD IYAKEM CALLED HIS PURE, HEBREW MAIDSERVANTS AND PUT CANDLESTICKS WITH WAX CANDLES IN THEIR HANDS, AND THEY WALKED BEFORE THE MAIDEN AND BROUGHT HER INTO THE HOUSE OF THE SANCTUARY … THEN THE PRIESTS TOOK HER, AND ESTABLISHED HER IN THE THIRD STOREY OF THE HOUSE OF THE SANCTUARY … AND HER KINSFOLK AND THE PEOPLE OF HER HOUSEHOLD TURNED AND WENT BACK TO THEIR HOUSES IN GREAT JOYFULNESS, AND THEY PRAISED THE LORD GOD, AND GAVE THANKS UNTO HIM BECAUSE SHE HAD NOT TURNED BACK … AND MARY DWELT IN THE HOUSE OF THE SANCTUARY OF GOD LIKE A PURE DOVE, AND THE ANGEL OF THE LORD BROUGHT FOOD DOWN FOR HER AT ALL TIMES.
– LEGENDS OF OUR LADY MARY THE PERPETUAL VIRGIN AND HER MOTHER HANNA
By the time the attention turned to her, she was in an agony of restlessness. She had tried to concentrate, to follow the familiar shapes of words she did not expect to understand, to feel their practised roll and pitch, to distinguish between the voices, now muttering, now confident and clear. She had tried to stand still; the effort made her aware of each limb, each finger and toe, of her head balanced on her neck, of the netela, so fine it was near weightless, that covered her head like a cowl. If she moved it gave off a faint scent, of sunshine and new-spun cotton, a wide, outside smell that cut across the eddying incense like an opened window.
She wished she was out there now, playing. Sitting on her haunches to throw a smooth round stone into the air, using the same hand to pick up more stones, then intercept the first stone’s descent. Or games that went on and on, till bats swooped and looped through the dusk. Coo-coo-loo! the other children would call, speeding to hiding places. Not yet! she would call back, from her perch on a pile of rocks. Coo-coo-loo! Not yet! Coo-coo-loo – Now! And they would race toward her, vying to touch her skirt and claim themselves safe, making her laugh and laugh. A far better feeling than the time she had ripped up a perfectly good dress to make herself a doll, thinking to strap it to her back as if it were a child. Oh, the whipping she had got then! And the doll had felt too light, lacking the heft of a real baby. It was more fun to play mother with the neighbourhood children. Or weddings, wrapping dolls in scraps of red and green silk and walking them bandy-legged to church.
She shifted, stood still again. The long black cape was lined, the gold filigree around the collar and down the front made it heavy, and it was getting heavier. She hugged herself tight, underneath it. Her stomach was so empty.
The wall of clergy changed position. A book was opened, one wave-edged vellum page at a time. A pause, and a priest looked at her. At once she looked down. Bare toes on a faded, fraying carpet. Hers, theirs. So many of theirs.
Repeat after me. If he is ill – if he is ill. The fact of her voice loud to her. Her breath warm tendrils moving across dry lips, dust swirled along the ground by an afternoon breeze. If he grows thin – if he grows thin. Or darkens – or darkens. If he suffers – if he suffers. Or is in trouble – or is in trouble. If he becomes poor – if he becomes poor. Even if he dies – even if he dies. I will not betray him – I will not betray him. A turn away from her, and another voice, a man’s. If she is ill – if she is ill. If she grows thin – if she grows thin. Or darkens – or darkens. The priest took her right hand and placed it on his cross. Then he took another hand and placed it on hers. I will not betray her.
A ring was threaded onto her third finger, another onto the man’s. It would be years before she understood what she had promised. For the moment all she knew was a thickening of the air, a seriousness, a flutter of – what? Apprehension, perhaps.
More prayers. A prayer for the rings, and a prayer over their capes. A thumb slick with holy oil tracing a rough cross onto her forehead, and a prayer over that. Hands bearing cushions, and on the cushions crowns, high straight-sided traceries of gold. A priest held one aloft for a long moment, then settled it on her head. She stepped back under the weight. Felt the figure next to her receive the weight too. The prayer of the crowns, and only then the church service.
After the bread and the raisin wine, taken under a tilting roof of heavy brocade; after they had bowed to kiss the threshold of the holy of holies; after they had walked slowly around it, once, the priest extended his cross for them to kiss. It was cold, and smelled of earth after rain.
Ililililil! cried the women.
The sun had burned the mist out of the cedars and hurt her eyes, so she had to use her feet to search for the steps of the low, humped building.
Ililililil!
Out here the trilling was thin, echo-less. Cockerels crowed, and crows answered. Kwaa. Kwaa.
Ililililil!
The congregation assembled at the bottom of the steps and began a slow procession around the churchyard. Past the bethlehem, with its protective ring of dark evergreens, its nuns picking through baskets of wheat for the eucharist bread; past a young olive tree, leaves quivering silver. A long, stately walk around a central absence: the foundations of the main church were partly covered over with vines and moss, partly naked, as though they had been exposed yesterday. When the circuit was over the congregation settled under trees to listen to the sermon, and to praise-couplets composed for this day. Then, finally, ‘May He bless you. May He multiply your seed as the stars in the sky, as the sand of the sea. May He make your house rich as the house of Abraham.’
Ililililil! Ililililil!
As they picked their way out of the gate and started down the road she noticed that the streets and alleyways, usually so busy, were silent, that doors were shut tight. Wobbles of woodsmoke, the odd dog foraging among the stones and bones, roosters crowing as always, but otherwise an unnatural hush.
She began to see the holes – ragged holes, punched through sturdy mud walls – and to glimpse the homes inside: raised wooden beds strung with leather, pots and pans, dividing curtains. Once she saw directly through to a front door, barricaded against the disease until the house’s inhabitants could fashion their escape. The women noticed her looking. They drew the netela further about her face, and hurried her on.
And then the feasting began. She knew – because she had helped, or been told to run off and play because she was getting in the way – that the women had been cooking for weeks. She had watched the huge earthenware gans of grain in the storehouse deplete, and those of mead and beer multiply, had watched the pounding, the chopping, the sifting, the kneading, had stared as shouting men whipped and dragged five bullocks through the narrow gate. The blood had dried into dark tributaries around the stones in the yard, and now in a corner a dog gnawed at a horned skull.
She was used to eating separately from the adults, to being silent unless spoken to. Silent she was still, but in a confusion of pride and worry. Here was all the attention she had ever wanted – but in such an inversion of her usual state! Everyone made a fuss of her, kissed her, hugged her; even her aunt coaxed her to take sips of mead or, collecting together a little heap of the best pieces of meat, the whitest injera, fed her. She opened her mouth politely, tried not to gag.
Poems again, more joy-cries. Someone beat a drum and was instantly shushed. At this her whole body rose in protest. She thrilled to drums, to music; hearing even the most distant party would slip down the lanes to join in. Why could she not do this now the drummers were in her own home? Her mother noticed. ‘My heart, please understand. It draws attention. If we play the kebero, if we dance, the evil eye will notice us and the disease will come here. It’s killing people. Remember that lady from the market? She said her waist ached, she had a headache, she rattled with fever. She died yesterday. We cannot risk that. Please understand, child.’
She would always remember no one danced at her wedding. And for the rest of her life she would try to make up for it, threading her way into the centre of the room, placing her hands on her hips, crooking her neck and – especially after her husband died – showing everyone how it ought to be done.
The next morning she was given a new underdress. Then another, for warmth and volume. The main dress was a mass of soft white muslin edged in red. A necklace, corded black silk wound round with delicate gold chains, so long on her eight-year-old body that its two stubby gold crowns swung well below her waist. Silver anklets. A wide, light netela, draped generous around her shoulders and chest, up over her head, then around her shoulders again to secure it.
‘Nigisté,’ said her mother. ‘My queen.’
A scatter of hooves, footsteps, a tumble of voices, and then one of the groomsmen, a relative of theirs, bowing in through the door, bowing to the women. How did you spend the night? Well, the women answered, thanks be to God, and you? Well, well, may His name be praised, may He be thanked for bringing us this day, may His honour and glory increase, and she was lifted up, up through a welter of hugs and kisses, prayers and instruction, into the brightness outside.
The elders were waiting. Past the women, first. Past her smiling grandmother, her aunt. Then the men. May you be given a long life. May He watch over you and keep you, rain blessings down upon you. Her father kissed her. May He go with you, child, all the days of your life.
Gently the groomsman placed her on a waiting mule. Then, because she was too young to control it, he mounted too, and, passing an arm around her waist, grasped the reins. Firmly he pulled the animal’s head round; slowly they moved out of the compound, and left her family behind.
At first she concentrated on their mount, on the animal’s rough narrow back, the part in its mane a dark bolt of lightning. The balls of red wool sewn to bit and bridle that shook at every step. The embroidered saddlecloth. The side of its face, unfeasibly long lashes blinking away flies. The uneven rocking as it searched a path through the stony streets.
After a while she became aware of the running children, the women on errands, the yodelling calls of door-to-door salesmen, the compounds whose walls reflected the sound of their mule’s hooves back to them. And the other hooves, too, clopping out a ragged counterpoint. She knew what they carried: narrow embroidered dresses she could wear now; big square dresses, for when she was older; a length of perfectly white, perfectly even cotton; delicate shemmas; thicker shawls edged with wide red bands; fine basketwork woven by cousins over the long rainy season; twelve grey-tinged salt amolés in lieu of silver; gans of dark beer; a case of cured goat hide, just the right shape for a psalter. The slave girl, Wulé, walked alongside them. Another groomsman. And him.
They were led not to the wide das, where, under a temporary roof of saplings and branches, the wedding guests had already gathered, but to the bridal hut nearby. She felt him sit, felt the groomsmen take their places, took her own.
Ilililililililil! Ilililililililil! She recognised none of the women, but the sound was the same.
The noise from the das rose and rose. Rushes of music, a drum – there was no illness in this part of town. Every so often men came to the door, carrying fluttering chickens as offerings to be made into stew for the bridal party; women with fistfuls of pancake and butter, rich food they held direct to her mouth. But she was not hungry. And she still could not trust that she would not wet her bed at night. So she shook her head and refused it all.
The second day. In the das a minstrel sawed at his jasmine-wood masinqo and tossed rhymes like spears into the crowd. Guffaws of recognition only underscored her distance from home. She heard clapping, ililta. They were dancing! Tears dropped onto her hands. The groomsman who had come to fetch her from her family noticed. He caught her small feet in his hands and drew a finger over her anklets. Who bought you these? Do you know how to clean silver? She shook her head.
The third day. Her mouth stuck shut with thirst but she took only the tiniest sips of water, to loosen it. In the das they danced and sang and clapped and cheered but in the little hut, where if she had been old enough the marriage would have been consummated, no one spoke. Then, ‘Listen. Have you heard the story of the hawk and the tortoise?’ No. ‘Shall I tell you?’ A slight nod. For the rest of the day the groomsman dredged his memory: The monkey king. The tortoise and the hare.
The fourth day. ‘A cat and a mouse were getting married. On the day of the wedding the cat’s groomsmen gathered and together they made for the bride’s house, dancing and singing in anticipation of a feast. The mouse, like all brides, waited amongst her kinsfolk to be taken away to her new life. Then one of the other mice piped up – “You know, cats can’t be trusted. Let’s dig holes in the ground, just in case.” So they set to it, scrabbling out deep tunnels with hidden entrances. Finally the cats came into view, chanting “Ho – pick one up here, ho, pick one up there, ho.” When the mice saw them approaching they turned as one and plopped into their holes. And the cats, who thought they’d been so clever, didn’t catch a single mouse.’ His laugh wilted into the silence.
The fifth day. ‘Aleqa Gebrè-hanna, the famous wit – he was also leader of the church in which you were just married, did you know that? – was walking along the road when he met a donkey-driver. He greeted the peasant with unusual politeness for someone of his high status, even bowing low. In the mead-house later that evening the donkey-driver regaled his friends with his tale of a grand personage who had deigned to speak to him so kindly. But his friends were sharper than he was, and asked for the scholar’s precise words. “How are ye?” he repeated, realising, as he did so, that he had been included with his donkeys.’
She laughed. Her head tipped back, her veil slipped off, and for the first time she saw properly the man who had sat there all along. Pure white jodhpurs, wound tight around his calves. A wide sash around his waist. A cape of thick black wool falling from thin shoulders in generous folds. And under the white turban a small dark face and a tiny, straight nose. Awiy! she said in a low voice to the groomsman next to her. When I have children they’re going to look like that! He laughed, but she was serious. She dragged the material back over her face.
When, after nearly two weeks, the feasting was finally over, the little party left the bridal hut and walked into the das. It smelled of incense, of food and stale beer. The reeds and wildflowers that had been strewn across the ground were bruised and limp. Even under her netela she felt the expectant eyes; when it was lifted away so the guests could see her it was like a blinding.
AND HE TOOK THE MAIDEN TO HIMSELF, AND HE SAID UNTO HER, ‘BEHOLD, O MARY, I HAVE TAKEN THEE FROM THE HOUSE OF THE SANCTUARY OF GOD, BUT I WISH TO GO ON A JOURNEY. TAKE CARE OF THYSELF UNTIL I RETURN TO THEE, AND I WILL ASK THE LORD GOD TO PROTECT THEE AND BE WITH THEE.’
– LEGENDS
The tree was a green cave, full of shifting underwater light. And so quiet. She drew bare soles along the rough branch and resettled her spine against the trunk. In a minute she would climb down, hugging a bounty of peaches in the lap of her dress. But in a minute. First she wanted just to sit here, in the bird-sewn silence.
When, inevitably, she heard her name called, she didn’t answer. Maybe if she was really still – but the calls came closer, till they were beneath her feet. ‘Come down. Please come down?’ A pause. ‘You’re the wife of a big man now. You must come down.’
But he’s away, she replied fiercely, though only to herself. And I wish he’d never come back.
‘That’s right, careful.’ She shrugged away the proffered hand, and made for the house.
They were preparing for a visit from her father. Her aunt, Tirunesh, presided. Woizero Tirunesh, in her layers of white shawls, sitting stately, giving orders. Woizero Tirunesh, with her ever-present horn of dark beer, stirring up yet another domestic storm.
She was ambivalent about her father, Tirunesh’s younger brother. Mekonnen Yilma was proud, tall, a fast walker, a fast talker, a natural soldier. A good storyteller, too, and committed to witty conversation. Listening to the thrust and flash of his talk, his quick laughter and tight puns, or watching him settle himself onto a stool, take a sip of mead, then lean into his high ten-string lyre to sing slow low Lenten songs, she could almost forget she was afraid of him; almost forget the terror with which she watched him punish the other children, the spell of the thin hide whip curving through the air and kissing the backs of their legs.
Her father was proud, yes, but not too proud to beg. Over the years, from story after story – not all his – she had pieced together how she came to be. When Setechign – pale, beautiful, much-sought-after – first married Mekonnen the expected children did not arrive, so Tirunesh had taken herself off to church to have words with God about the situation. A boy was duly born, and named Nega, for the dawn.
Then Setechign left. No matter that Mekonnen was now a customs officer on the long lawless border with the Sudan. No matter that his immediate master was married to the empress’s sister. No matter that he regularly returned from military skirmishes laden with trophies and prisoners of war who often became valuable slaves, and that to this was added the tithes of the peasants who farmed his lands. Nor did it matter that – as Mekonnen, fond of genealogy (particularly his own) and possessed of a preternatural memory for names, made a point of reminding her – he could claim descent from at least three emperors and an empress, Taitu, and would thus give her offspring royal blood. No. His family was too big, there were too many hangers-on, it was all too much. So Setechign went.
He pleaded. He sent emissaries: his sister, his mother, elder after elder. They applied all the subtle pressures of home and hearth, and it took a couple of years, but eventually she returned, and they conceived a daughter.
In gratefulness Mekonnen plied his wife with gifts: trains of donkeys laden with wheat, barley, the whitest teff; pots of spiced butter, baskets of deep-red dried chillis, of cardamom, frankincense and rue.
Their daughter arrived the day before Christmas, on the feast of Ammanuel. There was no disagreement about what her baptismal name ought to be – Weletè Amanuel, daughter of Amanuel – but her daily name was another issue altogether. Her maternal grandmother favoured Genet, for the garden of Eden; her paternal grandmother Gedamenesh, or my sanctuary; while her mother called her Nigisté, my queen. Tirunesh and her father, however, chose Yetemegnu, or ‘those who believe’, and it was they who prevailed.
Again Setechign left. Distressed and in spiritual need she walked to Infiraz, where she had heard there was a great zar doctor. Perhaps he could heal her. But when she met him she was afraid. A huge, powerful man, he had once, when he was nineteen, crossed the high Simien on foot, scrambling down gorges and tramping over plains looking for his own mother, who had been abducted by a Tigréan lord. He found her, but could not release her, and on his way back had become possessed by a spirit that had never left him. He had learned instead to control it, and now his home was filled with incense and the smell of roasting coffee, with women speaking in tongues or stamping out their individual spirit dances; dancing, often, to his personal bidding too.
And this particular woman, with her tight-braided hair and neck so long it could take seven rings of tattoos – the zar doctor liked this particular woman. And the more Setechign fought him, the more she hated him, the more he liked her. She hated him so much that when she became pregnant with his child she tried to kill it, standing for hours under a waterfall in the hope of dislodging the growing thing. But it would not leave before it was ready and when it was born she called the boy ‘imbi alè’, or ‘he said no’. Not until he went away to school was his name changed, to Gebrè-Selassie.
Only Setechign’s third union, to a rich trader, gave her a measure of calm. The home she made with him was a place of dancing and honey wine, where an animal was slaughtered nearly every week, and parties included the neighbourhood poor, invited to eat their fill. Of warmth and love, where special meals were cooked for a shy daughter who basked in the unaccustomed glow of feeling singular, precious; who had gently to be encouraged to eat and was seldom allowed to stay. Yetemegnu made little protest, but every time she was taken away the grief curled deeper into her heart.
At her aunt’s there were fewer parties. Tirunesh was pious and severe, a disciplinarian who had little patience for a child who lost herself in games and dreams. But she made sure Yetemegnu learned to spin, and to cook. Every morning the child was required in the kitchen, to watch and to learn, and at last to try a few things herself – to feel the exact point at which it was best to add spices to onions and garlic turning gold in the pot; to judge just how thin to make the sourdough, so the injera would be delicate and light.
Their work was accompanied by a drone of words, but Yetemegnu never listened in any conscious way. Nor did she take much notice of the slight deacon who appeared after church each day, read from the homilies of Ruphael or of Mikael, then, having been fed, slipped away again, while the women turned to drinking coffee and pronouncing on the generally disappointing ways of the world.
Tirunesh had been watching the deacon, however. She questioned him about his education, his ambitions, and liked his considered answers. ‘If I had a daughter,’ she said to her husband one day, ‘I would marry her to this man.’
So when the deacon’s patron, a friend of hers, approached her with the news that the deacon was nearing the end of his training and looking for a wife, the suggestion that this wife be Yetemegnu fell on receptive ears.
‘He’s just another student from God knows where,’ said Mekonnen, disgusted. ‘Able, maybe, but so what? There are hundreds like him, cluttering up the churches. Absolutely not.’
‘He would be a good husband, perhaps the best she could have.’ To Mekonnen this was patently untrue. He could not believe his own sister could so easily squander their lineage on a nonentity; a nonentity, moreover, from Gojjam, an entirely different province, and thus foreign. ‘We don’t know anything about him. We don’t even know who his father is. No.’
‘Setechign,’ said Tirunesh on a visit one day, as gently as she knew how. ‘Isn’t it time your daughter was betrothed? The deacon who reads to me –’
‘She’s a child. She’s barely eight years old. I will not give my daughter to a man of thirty who has no women in his household, no mother in evidence, no nurse to care for her. How can you think of such a thing?’
Tirunesh turned to the elders. Deputations arrived at Mekonnen’s house, bearing blandishments, arguments, testimonies of character. Mekonnen listened, resisted all of them.
‘Look at me!’ cried his sister. ‘Look at me! I’m barren. Is that what you want for her? I’ll curse you for your cruelty!’
‘Now, now, no need –’
But she would not hear. ‘If you do not marry her to this man I will hate you forever. As Mary is my witness I will never visit your graveside. And you will never stand at mine.’
It was the strongest threat in the armoury, and her brother acceded with an angry sigh. ‘Very well. She can marry the student.’
His relenting made it harder for Setechign to hold fast. And different arguments were used with her. Of course the girl was young, but that was common and had its advantages: she could be moulded to her husband’s ways, she would grow up in an educated, pious house. It would be good for her. As for the lack of nurturing women, a nurse could be hired, servants, she could be given an experienced female slave.
No one told Yetemegnu what had been decided. Why would anyone bother to tell a girl child?
COME, O JEREMIAH, AND MAKE A LAMENTATION FOR MY MOTHER HANNA, FOR SHE HATH FORSAKEN ME, AND I AM ALONE IN THE HOUSE OF BRASS. WHO WILL POUR WATER ON MY HANDS? AND THE TEARS START IN MY EYES.
– LEGENDS
Before her husband left for Addis Ababa to petition for a parish, he had gone to see the governor of Gondar, to tell him of his marriage, and through his marriage, of his promotion both in Gondar society and from deacon to priest; to tell him that his wife was young and he a man who owned nothing. The governor had responded as the new priest hoped, awarding him a salary of twelve quintals of grain, teff and barley, a quintal of chillis, a generous measure of butter. Every month these things arrived on donkey-back and were received by her maternal grandmother, into whose care she had been returned. Here, too, they sometimes reminded her to put away childish things, but her life was really not so different from that of other children her age. She settled in quickly, helping around the house, visiting neighbours, family friends, sometimes forgetting, for hours at a time, that she could not stay. Now she really learned to dance, watching women at the weddings of her grandmother’s friends and relations, then slipping in among them and echoing every move. And when they saw how she loved it, how well and naturally it came to her, they circled her, and clapped and trilled and sang, encouraging her, laughing as she responded with tighter, more demanding movements, improving from day to day until she was nearly as good as some of the more accomplished adults.
One day she was passing the receiving room when she saw her grandmother had a visitor. This was nothing more than routine – incense, roast chickpeas, coffee, questions, how are you, and how are you, and well, thanks be to God. But something made her hesitate in the doorway. The visitor looked at her and set down her cup. ‘Your mother is tiring. You must come at once.’
Setechign had been ailing for months. On Yetemegnu’s last few visits she had sat by her mother’s bedside, trying to manage the fear that rose through her body when her mother complained of what felt like knives cutting through her stomach and refused to eat. Then, three weeks ago, her brother Nega had taken a month’s supply of food to their father Mekonnen, who, having come off worst in a dispute with a rival, was imprisoned in Debrè Tabor. On the way home the boy had had to swim across a river; that night a fever clenched his teeth and threw his head back in a rictus of pain. Holy water, administered in dousings and drenchings and trickles through rigid jaws, did not help, and he died the next midnight. The governor took pity on his prisoner and released Mekonnen so he could mourn his son. For three days Mekonnen had sat with his lyre, weeping, singing of his beautiful swimming boy. Setechign simply weakened, disappearing further and further into the hollow under the blankets.
Her mother’s house was full of people when Yetemegnu arrived. They cried in the corners and wept through the receiving rooms. They held her, and led her into the bedroom.
Setechign had already been washed and laid out. Her big toes had been tied together, as was done for Lazarus, and her thumbs, so her arms ended in a spear-point aimed at her feet. She had been wrapped in a winding sheet of rough white cotton, and then in a palm shroud. The child drew near, and stood by her mother’s head. The hair was glossy, the eyes closed. They would not open – decades later Yetemegnu would remember and weep as if it had just happened.
After the short service, and the first prayer for absolution, scores of people – priests and deacons, relatives and neighbours who had eaten Setechign’s injera and drunk her mead – followed the bier out of the house and down the road toward the church. The bearers had not travelled far, pacing slow, leading a low hubbub of gossip and care, when they set her down. At once the chat stopped, and the crying began again, the women leading. The deaths Setechign had suffered, the lives she had brought into being. Her loves, her lineage, her generosity, called out, rhymed out, echoed in chorus. Then the deacons sang another prayer, the bier was lifted, and they carried on. Seven times, so all the thoroughfare knew of her passing.
In the churchyard she was set down while her male relations dug into the ground. A smell rose, of loam and of rain. Yetemegnu was brought to the front. Now she could see the priest who clambered into the shallow grave; see his censer swinging, one corner, another, another, overlaying earth with pious perfume. Hear the final prayers. Watch the bending backs lower their freight into the ground, head to the east, feet to the west, feel, like a blow to her own body, the first handful of soil land upon her mother.
In the waning years of the Gondarine age, when emperors became puppets and warlords danced them on and off their thrones as mood and circumstance took them, Emperor Teklè-Haimanot II, godly, handsome (and not a little vain), tried to live up to his name by planting seeds of piety wherever he went. By the end of the eighteenth century, when he was ushered into a monastery by a brother eager to take his turn as puppet-in-chief, he had established six churches, among them a structure he at first called Debrè-hail-wa-debrè-tebab, mount of might and mount of wisdom, and then, because it was consecrated on the feast of Mary’s Presentation to the Temple, Ba’ata Mariam.
Ba’ata was, from the beginning, well endowed. Teklè-Haimanot settled upon it fertile lands that stretched down into the Bisnit and Qeha valleys, into Gabriel, and even to the districts of Dembiya and Deresgé, a whole day’s journey away – lands from which a fifth of all harvests flowed back to the church. A spring was discovered and designated holy. Ba’ata’s tabot, its life-giving replica of the Ark of the Covenant, was of marble, and the emperor commissioned the best of fresco-painters to illuminate its walls. By the early 1800s Ba’ata was among the richest, most powerful, and, some said, most beautiful of the forty-four churches in Gondar. Students walked for days to study under its dark trees, learning the syllabary, the psalms, the homilies of Mary, and especially the aquaquam, the slow dance of David before the Ark, of which Ba’ata claimed 276 masters.
When, some fifty years later, Emperor Tewodros II’s chronicler described the capital’s priests as debauched occultists (and his liege, of course, as the opposite of these things), there was perhaps something in it. Certainly they were not accustomed to being gainsaid, and especially not by a brawling upstart they mocked for being born to a mother so poor she’d had to sell purgative kosso to survive; so poor, one story went, the priests of Ba’ata turned her away when she brought her son to be baptised: she could not afford the two jars of dark beer, two bowls of stew and forty injera they demanded in payment.
But they would have done well to remember that this so-called upstart had also defeated lord after warlord to become emperor in act as well as in name, because they soon found that the churches, with their vast tracts of land and internecine theological disputes, were next. Five years later Tewodros stripped Gondar of its status as capital; ten years after that he seized from its churches any land he deemed surplus to requirements; finally, on the sixth day of the third month, when, wrote his chronicler, the very stars ‘began to fly about as though struck by fear’, Tewodros sacked the sanctuaries and set fire to the city. Castles, homes, churches – everything burned. Bells, chalices, drums, censers, crosses, manuscripts were torn out of their places and taken for his treasuries. Priests who fought to keep them were fed to the pyres.
In the silence after Tewodros and his soldiers were gone, as embers flickered against the dark like so many more burning towns, Ba’ata counted its blessings. The grand outer circles, the frescoes and the holy of holies smouldered and smoked, but the tabot, being marble, had not been consumed, and so the heart of the church was intact. The vestments encrusted in gold and silver, the sistra and the drums, the illuminated manuscripts, had been hidden underground, in a chamber below the holy of holies, and they too had survived. The priests built a temporary hut in the grounds and continued their ministry.
But they were again besieged. ‘Oh master!’ they wrote to Tewodros’s successor, Emperor Yohannes IV, borrowing from Psalm 79, ‘The heathen have come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled; they have laid Gondar in heaps.’ But Yohannes was already occupied, leading an eighty-thousand-strong force against Italian armies threatening to take the Eritrean highlands, so he asked Menelik, king of Shewa (and his chief rival) to intercept the Sudanese Mahdists advancing on Gondar. Menelik did not arrive in time: the jihadists razed nearly every remaining church to the ground. Only two escaped – Medhané-Alem and Debrè-Birhan Selassie, the latter protected, people said, by a swarm of holy bees.
By the early years of the twentieth century, when Tsega first followed his teacher of scriptures through the fields and thick woods, Gondar, which at its zenith had held up to seven thousand souls, was home to less than a tenth of that number. The castles, once hung with silk and ivory, chalcedony and Venetian glass, were bare and cold, fluttering with bats and pigeons. Thatched huts huddled as if for warmth against the outer walls. Only on Saturday, market day, did the town manage to summon up something of its former bustle.
Though Ba’ata, just up from the main market, had suffered an inevitable winnowing of its congregation, the itinerant students came still, and Tsega joined them. In the little village in Gojjam where he was born he had gone to church school with all the other wide-eyed boys, learning his alphabet in sing-song call and response. He had learned to write, shaping his letters so they fitted onto the bleached shoulderblades of sheep, because these were plentiful, especially after feast days, and vellum was not; and then he had been taught how to scrape and cure sheepskin to make his own parchment. He enjoyed all this, and found it easy, until one day his father, a priest, came upon him and a young male relative, a chorister, concentrating on a long scroll held down between them: crude archangels, demons, horned women; spells in angular letters, all red. How dare you! His father’s hand had twisted his ear until it burned. How dare you corrupt your learning, your soul, with – this, this dragging of Satan out from where he belongs! I forbid you to pick up a pen and write, ever again. May curses rain down upon you if you even think of tracing anything other than your name!
All the students had to learn most things by heart, but after that Tsega had to commit everything to memory: the divine offices and the book of hours, the antiphonaries, all of David’s psalms. When he graduated to the school of qiné, church poetry, he pulled his head through a rough sheepskin cape, picked up his leather book case, and left for a nearby village, where he had heard a respected teacher was working. A handful of others had done the same, walking in through the valleys and the mountain passes, choosing mastery of poetry in Ge’ez, the church language, over homes that they often never saw again. For five years the sun rose to find them gathered around their teacher, listening to him describe stanza forms, explain particularly pleasing metaphors, recite useful examples. They memorised model qiné and with his help peeled back their punning layers, looking for the gold hidden within the wax mould, the meaning nestling at the centre like the dark hard core of an olive tree. The church told them they were training their minds and souls, opening themselves up to apprehensions of divinity, but Tsega was learning worldlier things too: how to smuggle deniable meanings into seemingly innocuous conversation; how, because qiné carried with it so much prestige, it might be a way for a village boy disinclined to soldiery to chase social advancement.
During the day the students scattered across the countryside, composing their own poetry and begging, as the church provided no food. Tsega hated this aspect of his calling. He was proud, afraid of dogs, and quickly resorted to tall heart-tugging tales. In the late afternoon the students returned to their teacher, who listened to their verses, then easily, deflatingly, disassembled them. Near the end of the five years Memhir Hiruy, famed throughout the country for his skill with qiné, visited the Gojjam school to teach. The students vied amongst each other to impress the master, who after a couple of weeks singled Tsega out for praise. Would he like to come to Gondar to continue his studies? Of course he would. And, ignoring the protestations of his mother, he went.
Not long after they arrived at Ba’ata, the priests asked Memhir Hiruy to perform a qiné. ‘Ask him,’ replied the scholar, pointing to his new acolyte. They were insulted. Recent experience had only confirmed their deep suspicion of outsiders. And who was this anyway? A youth from the sticks – from Gojjam, no less, where everyone knew the evil eye flourished. Why was he here, assessing them with his noncommittal gaze, threatening them with his very presence? Why, he hadn’t even finished his studies. But after a glance at Memhir Hiruy for reassurance, Tsega stepped forward to puncture their scorn.
When Memhir Hiruy left for the new capital, Addis Ababa, Tsega stayed, learning the recondite church dances and committing to memory all the books of the Bible, the Old and New Testaments, their interpretations and commentaries, and the books of the Fit’ha Negest, the law of kings handed down from Byzantium and from medieval Egypt. He became a teacher himself, and, ambitious in the way of people who know they have only themselves to depend upon, quietly but steadily made connections, travelling across the city after church services to read to the families of increasingly important personages; for Tirunesh’s husband, among them, and for her oblivious niece.
Less than a year after his wedding, Tsega deposited his young bride at her grandmother’s house and was on his way south. The mules were watchful on the long trek down into the Lake Tana basin. Their riders, too, looked around, into shaded copses, up at the lips of ravines, and once they had arrived at the Blue Nile gorge and were picking their way down its steep sides, into anything that even suggested it might be a cave. Everyone knew, from childhood stories, from scarred survivors, that this fertile country ran with bandits who regularly stripped mule-trains of their valuables then pushed off in low reed boats, poling them through the mud-coloured lake to islands and promontories, or disappeared into caves. They were all grateful when they scrambled up onto the wide cool highland plateau and then down, through aromatic juniper and newly imported eucalyptus, down into Addis Ababa.
Once there her husband took his time, acclimatising, visiting Memhir Hiruy, attending services, listening to gossip about the empress, and especially about her subtle regent Ras Tafari, who had recently returned from an extended tour of Egypt, Jerusalem, and the European capitals (where, among other things, he had wisely declined to sign a treaty that would have allowed Italy to build roads, rails, and a port into Ethiopia). The regent also managed – daily, it sometimes seemed – to announce the institution of new-fangled things: a modern school, a printing press, a newspaper. Every decision of any importance passed through his hands, which was a useful thing to know, but for the moment was not what most interested the new-minted priest. Tsega presented himself at the head offices of the church, and was given the care of a country parish called Gonderoch Mariam. He travelled the city to read aloud in the households of great men, among them Ras Kassa, the regent’s pious cousin. And he joined the throngs that arrived daily at the palace, looking for an audience with the empress.
Menelik’s daughter Zewditu, crowned after the brief reign and ruthless deposition of Menelik’s grandson Iyasu, was phlegmatic, conservative, uncomfortable in the presence of men and overwhelmingly pious, and had only once bowed to pressure to preside at the courts that operated in her name; she had hated the work, and never returned. She preferred, wrote her chronicler, kindly, to confine herself to ‘spreading spiritual wisdom by fasting, prayer, prostrations, and by almsgiving’. She read the histories of the female saints, ‘and a spiritual envy [to be like them] was stamped on her heart’. Each day she rose early and prayed into the afternoon, eating nothing, outdoing many of her monks and nuns.
Zewditu’s self-denial was matched by generosity – socially required, an expression of pride and status as well as charity, but prodigal nonetheless. Hardly a month went by without a banquet given to soldiers, to clergy, to the nobility or the impoverished laity, and late one November, after Tsega had been in the capital for nearly two years, he was invited to one. The floor of the great hall was laid with hundreds of carpets, some of wool, others of silk. Guests filled the vast space, seated according to their rank: the empress, her regent and senior princes of the blood on a raised platform at one end, surrounded by curtains, then, when they had eaten, the curtains drawn back so they could look down at long low tables filled with lesser notables, ranks of clergy in high white turbans and glowing white shemmas, straight-backed soldiers. Crosses blinked in the lamplight, phalanxes of servants and slaves brought horns of mead and baskets piled high with injera. The smell of dark red chicken stew; of zign, beef in ginger and cardamom and bishop’s weed; the sight of entire sides of fresh-slaughtered oxen carried on poles balanced on the shoulders of slaves so anyone could take a knife and help themselves, made him ravenous, but he ate nothing at all.
Eventually one of the higher-ranking servants enquired why. ‘Because this is the day the Ark of the Covenant, captured by the Philistines, was returned by God,’ he replied. ‘I am fasting in celebration of Zion.’ The servant, knowing this was the kind of thing that interested Empress Zewditu, told her there was a priest in her hall observing the fast of Zion, and who therefore could not partake of the abundance of meat on offer.
She turned out to be observing it too. She had had fasting food cooked for her, pulses and vegetables rather than meat, and she sent the young priest a portion of it. When he had eaten he stood and addressed to her a qiné of praise he had composed in preparation for just such an eventuality, a poem playing upon the biblical echoes of her baptismal name and lauding her holy magnanimity. She inclined her head in thanks. ‘And what can I do for you?’
This was why he had come to the capital, the moment he had been working toward for years. ‘I would like to lead Ba’ata Mariam church in Gondar,’ he replied. ‘And I would like to rebuild it to the glory of God.’
‘Of course,’ she replied. And she ordered the provision of all the accoutrements the new aleqa would require: a cape worked over in gilt, a tunic with a wide coloured band embroidered at the hem, a sash; bags of Maria Theresa silver.
Half of Gondar, it seemed, came out to meet him, ululating praise of their new chief priest. Aleqa Tsega accepted the celebrations calmly, savouring his sudden leap above those who had denied him welcome, noting the practised tributes from his fellow clergy, the underlying silences, the curdled smiles.
At her aunt’s house a feast was waiting. There too he looked about him – at the told-you-so pleasure of Tirunesh, the reluctant approval of Mekonnen. At the narrow-hipped girl in black who hung back, shaven head held low.

TIQIMT (#ulink_5ee61a70-5985-571f-831d-f4e3af97722c)
THE SECOND MONTH
Sunny growing and ripening season. Honey removed from hives. The first barley threshed and winnowed for roasting and beer-making. Children play outdoor games; girls dance and greet storks arriving ‘from Jerusalem’.


She no longer hid as she had before he left, running to the storeroom, burrowing in among the wheat and split peas, the dusty green-smelling, crackling hops. Breathing shallow so no one could hear, crouching down behind a high basket or clay waterpot, willing herself invisible. If he found her he had chastised her, playfully. What, hiding again?
Now, nearly four years older, she did not hide, but still she retreated to the back rooms, to sit on a low stool among the comforting grains and watch the days crawl across the floor. She would have spent the nights there, if she could. She did not look up at him, or speak to him; even if she had been expected to, she could not.
When he was out the servants took charge, bossing her about the house like the child she still was, letting her help, yet refusing to play games with her because, being married, she was no longer a child. So she played alone, making a head from bunched-up cloth, a body from a dress, and rocking the form to sleep. Sometimes she heard children’s voices beyond the walls, whispering, calling – ‘coo-coo-loo!’ – and swallowed the voice that itched to answer.
Other times she sat at the window, craning for glimpses of life. Morose donkeys clopped by, or women doubled over beneath wide loads of firewood. Slaves with high packs balanced on their heads, nuns in yellow caps, children running errands. Once she saw a great lord riding in the direction of Ba’ata. His mule clashed and jingled with embellishments and the sun lit the dull barrel of a rifle. Retainers scurried to clear the way.
How handsome he was. ‘Who’s that?’ she asked the slave girl, who shook her head, and ran to see.
‘Ras Gugsa,’ she reported. Ras Gugsa. Their governor! From her father she knew she was distantly related to him, and even here, shut up among the servants, she had heard the rhymes and the gossip. He was pious, as required, a poet and a fair administrator, but somewhat hidebound, too, and a melancholy and determined drinker. He had been married to the empress, who, it was said, still loved him, but they had been forced to separate when she was crowned; it was no secret he blamed his loss of power on the regent. Just over a year later he would be tricked into battle against Ras Tafari and die on the fields of Anchem, his soldiers having scattered in fear of the regent’s most recent toy, the aeroplane. But for now he carried all the sheen of high office.
When they were first married her husband had hired a blind abba to lead her, singing, through the alphabet, the set texts of early church school, the psalms her mother had hummed to her. She found the abba kind, loving, but soon he was reporting that she was too impressionable, too prone to tears. And too quick to learn, too. ‘If you correct her or do her wrong,’ he said to her husband, ‘she will quote David at you. She will cry to God and God will listen to her. Do not teach her to read.’ So the lessons stopped, and she sat out her hours spinning thread from tight bolls of cotton, twisting coloured yarn around narrow bundles of straw to make serving baskets, or picking crumbs of dark earth out of quintal after quintal of wheat kernels, lentils, teff.
Sometimes, still, in a sudden access of spirit, she would run to the neighbours’, climb up into their peach tree, fill her skirts with the biggest fruits she could find, and slink back to enjoy them. Once she left the main door open by accident. A sheep had just been slaughtered and a dog crept in and got hold of one of the back legs. Heart thumping so hard it seemed it might deafen her, she managed to startle the animal into dropping it.
Other times she acted willingly enough in the play that had been written for her. Not that she necessarily knew the words, or her exits and her entrances. So at harvest time, after the peasants had delivered their tithes – two-thirds of the barley and wheat from the Jews who farmed at Gonderoch Mariam, the smaller church her husband administered; chickpeas and chilli peppers, peas and broad beans and teff from Ba’ata’s lands in Dembiya and Bisnit – she handed skiffs of wheat and barley, balls of butter, strips of beef jerky and cobs of corn out to anyone who looked as if they needed it. There was so much she felt it wouldn’t be missed.
Or guests dropped by. ‘Where’s your father?’ Sometimes she could not help but laugh. ‘Oh, you’re mistress here!’ By the time she turned twelve she was becoming accustomed to being called woizero. Lady. Enjoying it, even.
As such she was not expected to grind grain or collect water, but she was expected to be able to cook, to provide handsomely for the priests, the merchants, the visiting dignitaries her husband brought to the house almost daily. Sometimes, knowing her instruction had been interrupted, he helped her, tasting, suggesting, demonstrating, assuming she knew this had to be a secret held between them lest it diminish his station. Until one lunchtime he criticised her: the fish in the wat had been overcooked and was breaking up, there was not enough sauce. Child, he said, this is a bit dry. But we made it together! she protested, before she could think.
The next time she was brought fish, five fresh silvery creatures from the Angereb river, she was extra careful, stripping them, washing them, removing every bone, rubbing the pieces with spice. The resulting wat was succulent, perfect, and when that day’s guests arrived, and took too long at their conversational preliminaries, Tsega was impatient. ‘Never mind, sit down and eat.’ There was no feigning their enjoyment of what had been put before them. After they left he took her small hands and kissed them, over and over, until she thought he might swallow them.
He took a keen interest in her deportment. It wasn’t enough to wash her hands before and after meals; she had to scrub her arms up to the elbows. When her official mourning for her mother and brother was ended she had begun to grow her hair again and braid it back from her forehead. Other girls put silver rings in the plaits, but he would not allow it. Soon he found even the shining braids too much, and told her to hide them under a scarf.
She understood her new state meant she was to stay at home, but initially she did not understand how absolutely he meant it. She had always previously been allowed to run over to a neighbour’s to borrow pots, or muslin to strain butter, or a few shallots, and she still did so. One afternoon when she returned, however, he was waiting for her.
Come here. Her stomach seemed suddenly to have slid to somewhere around her feet. Come here, I said. He raised a stick, and he did not stint. At first she was so shocked she could not cry, but then the sobs arrived, deep and gusty so she could hardly breathe.
But with him it was as if a tempest had passed. Anxiously he stroked her head and picked at her shawl, straightening it, smoothing it over her shoulders. My heart, don’t cry. Don’t cry. Here. Here’s some money. Pressing silver thalers into limp hands. Get the servants to buy you something nice. Not jewellery, you know I don’t like jewellery, but something nice.
Sometimes he worried whether she ate enough. Lijé, he’d say. My child. My child is hungry. And at night especially, when there were no strangers about, he would draw her close and feed her from his side of the mesob. The portions were too big, so she would intercept his hand and break them up into smaller pieces, eating what she could, then closing her mouth tight.
Not infrequently he would arrive home to find her in a corner, weeping. Child, he would say gently, why are you crying? Who has harmed you? And at last the answer would come. My mother. My mother is dead.
Ayzosh, ayzosh, he would murmur, drawing her to him. He dipped a hand into a wooden vessel that had held butter from Asmara. When he drew it out it glistened with the remains of the butter, and with it he would wipe away her tears and gently soften her taut and salty face. Ayzosh. I will be like a mother to you.
After one of these moments he seemed to be concentrating on her longer than usual, drawing dark fingers down her neck. They stopped at the centre, traced a spot low on her throat. Are you growing a goitre? he said, almost to himself. She had little idea what a goitre was, so as usual she said nothing, and soon forgot he had asked the question at all.
But some days later a servant came to her to say, that lady the master asked for, she has come. What lady? But she greeted the woman, and watched as the woman set about heating oil-seeds over a low fire, stirring them until they smoked and burned. Watched as she scraped the soot off the sides of the gas lamps and added that to the black residue. A bit of kohl, too, so the mixture glistered and plopped on the heat.
The woman set it aside to cool, then walked over and took her by the hand. ‘Now, sit still.’ She took up a narrow stick, dipped it into the cooling mess, and began to draw a line around Yetemegnu’s neck, parallel to her collarbone. As suddenly as she understood she was on her feet. But the servants held her down as the woman drew another line, and then another and another, and at the ends of the longest, just under her ears, risen suns.
‘Araqi?’ Alcohol would numb her, but she could not assent to any part of this. She shook her head, a sharp snap of refusal. ‘Don’t move!’ She closed her eyes.
When the needle punctured her skin, she exploded, biting and scratching and writhing. But they held her tight, across her body, by her head, so nothing could stir – only her tears, streaming down her face. And her mouth, screaming. What had she done to God to deserve this?
After the scabs had hardened and fallen off, after she had spent two months delirious and burning with infection, she looked and saw she was imprinted with the tracks of her own tears.
In her first pregnancy she slept all the time. They fed her and she accepted it, and they fed her more. And when finally they wrapped her up tight and sent her on slow mule-back to her father’s home in the countryside she felt only relief, to be away from the big house, even though her husband had already left some months before, taking the road south to Addis Ababa as soon as he had heard word the empress was dead.
One morning she felt a trickle down her thighs.
The women gathered, aunts, grandmother, neighbours. None seemed especially concerned, though they did become quite busy. Some raised a dividing curtain across the main room, others began to roast and pound and boil coffee. Charcoal was brought in on a small stand and blown into redness. Incense curled into the rafters. Watchful laughter, and chat.
Yetemegnu, now fourteen, had been told birth would feel something like it did when she went to the grove behind the house at dawn and squatted to relieve herself, so she had thought of it as that painless and that quick. All she could think, as the contractions tightened and tightened their grip, was no, this didn’t feel like that at all. She gasped, and the women’s voices rose to meet her, to share her pain, to distribute it between them.
Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam, dirèshilin.
O Lady Lady Lady Lady Lady, come to our aid.
Outside the sun shone on fields vivid with young crops, yellow oil-seed, blue flax, the nodding, dewy greens of new barley, broad beans, wheat. The air, washed bright after months of storms, picked out every tree on the hill that rose behind the house, every silver leaf in the eucalyptus brakes.
But inside it was dark with people and smoke and low talk. In the doorway, behind the curtain, a deacon read from the homilies of Ruphael. Listen, the women said. Listen, because Ruphael opens our wombs.
She sat at the centre, on a low stool. One woman stood behind her, strong arms clasped across her narrow chest. Another sat at her feet. They told stories, asked her questions, tried to divert her, but she sank further and further into herself, dreading the next visitation.
Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam, dirèshilin.
O Lady Lady Lady Lady Lady, come to our aid.
They told her she was not meant to cry out, but she couldn’t help it. Oh Mary, mother of God, relieve me! Ayzosh, they said. Ayzosh.
She made wild and breathless promises, about the prayers, the fasting she would undergo if only this could stop. One of the women laughed. Oh, you’ll forget. And you’ll be having another soon enough.
The deacon read on, a baseline whose timbre changed only when he shifted in his seat, or coughed.
Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam, dirèshilin.
O Lady Lady Lady Lady Lady, come to our aid.
An endless night, and another day. The women had put down a mattress so she could curl up on her side, but she was now back on the stool. They took turns holding her and drank cup after cup of coffee, but no one ate.
The deacon read on.
Another night, and another day. St Mikael’s Day, bathed in birdsong and sunlight.
Eventually the deacon put Ruphael aside and took another battered book out of its hide case.
‘NOW THERE WAS A CERTAIN CITY WHEREIN A CHURCH HAD BEEN BUILT, AND THE CHURCH WAS BUILT IN THE NAME OF THE ARCHANGEL MIKAEL, AND EACH YEAR, ON THE TWELFTH DAY OF THE MONTH OF HIDAR, WHICH IS THE DAY OF THE ARCHANGEL MIKAEL, GREAT NUMBERS OF THE INHABITANTS OF THE CITY DID NOT FAIL TO VISIT HIS CHURCH – MAY HIS INTERCESSION AND HIS SUPPLICATION KEEP OUR KING DAVID FROM THE EVIL ENEMY!’
The baby crowned. She was beyond pain, beyond comprehension. She felt her spirit departing, the world about her fading. The women’s voices rose.
Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam, dirèshilin.
O Lady Lady Lady Lady Lady, come to our aid.
‘AND BEHOLD IT CAME TO PASS ONE DAY WHEN THE PEOPLE WERE JOURNEYING ALONG THE ROAD TO COME TO THAT CHURCH, THAT A MIGHTY ROARING RUSH OF WATERS CAME FROM THE SEA, AND IT BURST UPON THE PEOPLE AND ALARMED AND TERRIFIED THEM EXCEEDINGLY, AND DROVE THEM OUT OF THEIR SENSES; AND THE WATER SURROUNDED THAT PLACE AND ROSE TO THE HEIGHT OF ABOUT TWO MEASURES, AND THE PEOPLE WERE WELLNIGH DROWNED.’
And with a great tearing and an onrush of fluid, the baby arrived, pouring into the arms of the midwife at her feet. She fell back and they caught her and laid her down to rest.
When the placenta had safely followed they took a pat of butter and rubbed the newborn’s head. They pinched its nose, smoothing it, pulling at it, so it would grow long and narrow. And their ililta rose, loud and joyous.
Nine times. A messenger was dispatched to Addis Ababa, to tell Aleqa Tsega his first child was a girl, and that she was named Alemitu.
In her father’s village the feasting began. Araqi and tella flowed like water. Injera arrived by the mesob. Five sheep were slaughtered, and then someone brought four more. All who attended the birth and fasted for the duration ate their fill. But the new mother took nothing at all. They gave her honey, and buttered oatmeal gruel, but she would not touch it. She lay curled on the floor, hugging herself, trying to sleep.
It was only when, decades later, she herself beat through the streets of Addis Ababa in supplication that she began to get an inkling of where her husband had been when Alemitu was born: under a colder sky, walking raw avenues that criss-crossed the bottom of a green bowl surrounded by mountains. The city had been capital for only forty years, and they were still building it. Donkeys trotted through the main streets as they would in any town in the country, carrying firewood, dried discs of cow-dung, baskets for market, but here they also hauled scaffolding, sheets of corrugated iron, drew telegraph poles rattle-bouncing through the dust. Everywhere a new structure was going up, a road being metalled, cable installed, or a ragged work gang being whipped into a semblance of efficiency. Rumours eddied through the thoroughfares: that Tafari was overseeing every detail of the preparations himself; that every day he appeared, a small long-nosed black-caped figure, at a hotel, or the market, or the telegraph office or on the wide sweep of road leading from the railway station, checking on the quality of asphalt or of uniform or of welcome; on the impression his city would make on the foreign guests who had already begun to arrive.
As the coronation neared, the donkeys were joined by horses and mules, trotting footsore in from all across the empire. They carried warriors and their generals; lords of the north, the south, the east and the west, princes who owned more land than the regent, who commanded armies as big as or bigger than his. Princes and priests, priests and more priests, from Aksum and Debrè Libanos and Meqellé, from Sidamo and Harar and Debrè Marqos, or, like her husband, from Gondar, priests in white turbans, black capes, long self-regarding beards; monks and nuns in turmeric yellow, gold-red amber necklaces hanging heavy on breastbones. Prayer sticks and crosses everywhere, crosses of gold and silver, of brass and of humble wood. And Tsega moved proud amongst them, listening to them jostle over the niceties of hierarchy and opportunity afforded by Tafari’s achievement the previous year, of finally beginning to bring independence to their sixteen-hundred-year-old church.
Over sixteen hundred years since a ship on the Red Sea coast was attacked, leaving two Christian boys from the Phoenician city of Tyre to find their way to the Aksumite court where they became companions of Ezana, the emperor’s son. Sixteen hundred years since one of the brothers, Frumentius, now grown, travelled to Alexandria to tell the leadership of the Egyptian church that Christian merchants from across the Roman empire congregated in Aksum and needed a bishop. Frumentius himself seemed best qualified for the job so they consecrated him and dispatched him back to Aksum, where he converted his childhood friend (who, now emperor, well understood the usefulness of such ties with Rome, his chief market for ivory, tortoiseshell, gold, rhinoceros horn). The Ethiopian church had been led, in name at least, by an Egyptian monk ever since, but when Empress Zewditu promoted Ras Tafari to negus, or king, of Gondar, he had moved at once to free it. Assiduous diplomacy produced, within a year, a promising first step – division of the empire into dioceses led by five Ethiopian bishops, among them Abunè Abraham of Gojjam and Begemdir.
Eventually, seven days before the coronation, the milling priests resolved into an expectant phalanx. Serried rows of eyes, her husband’s among them, watched as an honour guard marched through the gates of St George’s Cathedral and up the steps. Rows of eyes watched the reverent handing over of robes, of a sceptre and an orb, of gold rings and spears, of a sword sheathed in gold and diamonds, of a gold-encrusted Bible and two heavy gold crowns. Then, for seven days and seven nights, seven times seven priests sang David’s psalms and the Book of the Praise of Mary, cycling again and again through all their strophes of light.
The words, of course, were familiar to all the men, who had each spent decades studying their order and their intent; so familiar they were all too often muttered and gabbled, boredom taking precedence, minds drifting to other things; but when, in the dark hours after midnight on the seventh day, Negus Tafari and his wife arrived at the cathedral to begin their vigil, it was as though the phrases had been renewed, charged with present meaning. Also that of the past: this coronation drew much of its power from the Kibrè Negest, the Book of the Glory of Kings, in which, as all here knew, it was told how Solomon of Israel was visited in Jerusalem by Makda, queen of Sheba. Solomon, who would eventually number among his consorts seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, was attracted to Makda, but she was a virgin and disinclined to yield, so he tricked her, feeding her spiced food and ensuring the only water in the palace was by his bed.
Solomon and Makda conceived a child, whom she called Menelik. Thus, claimed the chronicles, did the pearl God tucked into Adam’s body at the beginning of the world, the pearl which had been passed down through the children of Abraham to David and to Solomon (and would eventually arrive in Mary, and in her son), pass into Menelik also. When Menelik was grown, he travelled to see his father in Jerusalem. Solomon anointed him king of Ethiopia despite a troubling dream he had had, of a bright sun blazing over Israel then departing south. When Menelik I at last left for home he did so in the dead of night, taking the Ark of the Covenant with him.
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 (#ulink_d72e1574-e366-55d3-aa88-0ae16ff69a8b)

1931–1941


The landscape around Gonderoch Mariam. Photograph by the author.

HIDAR (#ulink_d8955b01-dec3-55b1-ad87-dcb770c5a39a)
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.
Houses with doorways open onto the street began to give way to homesteads encircled by fences of lashed-together eucalyptus and euphorbia. Flowering bushes crowded in on them, wild roses, creamy yellow crotons. They began to pass women in white shawls returning from church, stepping easy, quiet among the rocks, their long shadows mingling and moving together. When the women saw her husband they came close to ask for his blessing, touching forehead and chin to the cross he disentangled from the folds of the gabi he had wrapped around his shoulders for warmth. May God bless you and keep you. Amen.
At the sides of the path thistle flowers, white and purple starbursts nestled in green-pointed ruffs, drew level with the tops of the eucalyptus trees on the hillside below. Lammergeyers wheeled, then sloped down out of sight. The far ridges of the mountains were grey-blue steps ascending into a sky undisturbed by any clouds at all. The mules’ hooves crunched against the rubble on the path and the sound seemed suddenly smaller, bare, but also hard and bright, as though it could travel forever through the clear air above the valley. As they rounded a bend she turned slightly, and saw Gondar spread out below them.
Ever since the beginning of the dry season, as the ground hardened, the green meadows began to yellow, as the rivers shrank and became passable, she had felt the city change around her. Her husband did not think to tell her much about the wider world, but she saw and heard enough. She knew that in the market there were more people, more strangers, sensed a darker, harsher mood. The servants came in and out with water and wood and shreds of news. Thousands of men and women, their mules, their children, their slaves, were walking in daily from the mountains. They carried muskets, spears, shields, lion’s mane headdresses; grinding stones bent the women’s backs, and great hide-covered food baskets chafed the donkeys’ flanks. At night the mead-houses rang with war chants, with boasting and with burnished memory. The emperor’s cousin Ras Kassa, appointed governor of Begemdir and Semien after Ras Gugsa Wulé’s death, was calling his armies in.
Kassa was as pious as Ras Gugsa had been, and known for his mastery of theology, but though he had fought in the battle of Adwa as a teenager and been victorious against Negus Mikael of Wollo since, he was not necessarily known for his mastery of war. He was steady and loyal, and a trusted adviser to the emperor – even though he had a better claim to the throne. When he became governor he had preferred to stay at the court in Addis Ababa and delegated the administration of Gondar to the eldest of his four sons. She would hear, decades later, that on one of her husband’s trips to Addis he had been charged with a message for the new emperor: Gondar and the provinces of which it was capital were too important to be treated in this way. He had been seriously heard, apparently, but for years felt resented by Ras Kassa’s sons.
They were travelling between scrubby fields now, scattered with yellow stones, the occasional bush a dark jewel set in dry gold land. Now the path was runnelled and gullied, scoured and scored by the daily deluges of the rainy season, and the mules slowed, picking their way along tracks that narrowed sometimes to a single hoof’s width, a steep drop on one side, rough drystone wall or the long unforgiving thorns of an acacia on the other. Or they cast, wary, around the occasional darker section of ground, where the earth was still soggy and pockmarked by previous traffic. Step there and the likelihood was a broken leg, and the mules knew that as well as their riders. Often the animals paused, thinking for a second or two, scanning the ground ahead before stepping on. They sighed, huge, gusty sighs. Their mouths dripped, and their haunches were glossed with sweat that soaked through her dress and warmed her calves and thighs.
Gondar dropped out of sight.
The town had emptied of people as abruptly as it had filled, and for a few weeks had felt quiet but stretched out of shape, waiting, but uncertain what it was waiting for.
And then one day an answer: six specks in the sky, specks moving faster and straighter than any bird, growing bigger and bigger, until she could hear them roar.
Oh mother of God, what is this? Snatching up her daughter, the baby, looking frantic about for somewhere to hide. Oh daughter of David, save us.
Closer and closer the specks came. They looked like crosses now, stubby dark crosses, trailing smoke. The streets ran with women, children, clergy, the infirm – anyone able-bodied had marched away with Ras Kassa or quietly disappeared. As the thundering drew near they threw themselves into ditches, huddled against walls, behind trees. Oh Queen of Heaven, save us.
Around again. She didn’t see but was soon told how on the second pass, over the castles, a dark rain fell from them, a hail of metal that exploded with a terrible noise as it hit the ground. How many huts caught fire, and the women and children inside them.
That was when the order came from the emperor, who when the Italians invaded, marching over the border and finally taking Adwa, had headquartered at Dessié: evacuate Gondar during daylight hours, every day.
So here they were, travelling away from Gondar, as they had travelled yesterday, as they would travel tomorrow, and the day after that. They had crested a long rise and were looking down toward the Shinta river. Vegetable plots had been planted along its banks, and neat rows of silver-green kale rose up the slopes. They picked their way down to the water and dismounted under a stand of bayberry trees. The mules’ necks shivered, and their tails swished at the heavy flies. Most of the river had shrunk to mud, but a small stream still trickled through the main channel. Green algae waved around rocks like hair in a breeze. White and yellow butterflies flicked above the water; the mules’ muzzles dipped down, then away again, disdainful. Distant children called to cattle.
When the mules were rested they began to climb again, into rich farmland in harvest time. Everywhere pale gold domes of teff waited to be threshed, peas and beans hung heavy on vines, plots of glossy green chillis, of kale and tomato, bustled in toward each other. Men trotted past, staffs supporting on their heads piles of straw nearly as high as themselves. The ground grew steeper and rockier as the riverbed fell away. The mules’ mouths dripped.
A circle of dark trees crowned the hill, and within the circle stood a low church. Tethering the mules outside in the shade, they stepped under the acacia guarding the entrance. It was cool and calm inside the perimeter walls, under junipers and olive trees so old they towered above the church’s thatched roof. Dry leaves cracked underfoot, turtledoves cooed, bees buzzed around a hive. She bowed, made the sign of the cross. Made her way forward and bowed again, so her forehead touched the walls of the church, then her lips, forehead, lips.
Gonderoch Mariam, which her husband had led for eight years now, was old, far older than many churches in Gondar. Thirteenth-century, said the more historically inclined priests. Originally named Debrè-Genet, or Mount of Paradise, by the king who built it, it had long since been rechristened Gonderoch because so many people from Gondar were moved to walk up the mountain, to pray under its kind trees. Often when she and Tsega came here the younger deacons and priests would drop to the ground, making to kiss her husband’s feet. He would bend before they could do so, cupping their faces, raising them up, presenting his cross instead.
As they left the church compound she looked across the valley, back toward Gondar. The Italian aeroplanes had not merely terrified her, and her children and her neighbours; they had underscored, emphatically, that while churches, and especially churches at this height, had been always places of safety, they were safe no longer. She thought of their nearly two-hour-long treks back to Gondar in the evenings. Their occasional sightings of hyena droppings. The night she and the children had watched her husband climb up and shove his old rifle deep into the thatch. The day the dark dots had appeared again. She had never felt such fear, fear that was a kind of pure pain, which tightened her chest and loosened her bowels so she had to run behind a tree to empty them. For endless minutes they hardly breathed, waiting for the explosions. But they did not come, and the plane continued on its way.
Sometimes they did not go back down the mountain but stayed overnight with a patron of her husband’s, who owned land all around the church and had settled some on him. They could see it from her doorway: seven terraces divided by low stone walls dropping in wide steps down from the house, which was on the north-eastern brow of the mountain. Barley grew here. From the bottom of the terrace stretched the flat summit, shared with other landowners and planted with teff. Past the church, down the rocky slopes toward the Shinta, was more barley, of which they also received a share. Beyond the fields she could see the river valley, and Gondar, and then, in the hazed distance, the mountains that surrounded Gondar.
The dry season wore on. The farmers brought their tithes down the mountain. Wild figs darkened in the trees. The peaches mellowed, the potatoes and tomatoes, the gourds and chickpeas and peas ripened and were harvested. In the hollows jasmine bloomed. The caravans rattled through the markets, rushing before the rains. And with them came news. Ras Kassa had engaged the Italians at Tembien, in the mountains between Gondar and eastern Eritrea, but had been unable to push them back. Two months later he had been forced out of those peaks altogether. There were whispers about sheets of rain falling from aeroplanes, rain that stripped and burned and blinded, that dripped from the bushes and poisoned the lakes, that sent even the very bravest fleeing. The emperor gathering around him a vast and growing army.
We must join him, said her husband. I will not fight, being a priest, but I can minister to the soldiers. You will come with me. You will not blow trumpets or clean rifles or sharpen swords, as the wives of soldiers do, but like them you will bring your servants, and cook food. Gather provisions and prepare the household.
She bowed, yes, and did as she was told, struggling to seem calm despite her fear. But the days passed, and they did not leave. She watched as priests came and went, served them as they talked, listened and watched, and eventually gathered that many did not agree with him. He was their leader, they argued. Surely he should stay, to protect them?
And so they were still at Gonderoch Mariam when the Italians entered Gondar. Dejazmatch Ayalew Birru, Ras Kassa’s son-in-law, had declined to engage in guerrilla tactics that might have stalled them, and the foreigners had simply walked in, hundreds and hundreds of them, following vehicle after vehicle.
The small rains began. The giddying smell of fresh-wetted earth rose from the fields and, despite everything, ploughing had to begin.
The news grew worse and worse.
The emperor was defeated. Routed. Listening aghast they could almost see the terrible disordered retreat, the mountain passes jammed with fleeing men and women. Imagined the aeroplanes chugging through the air above, the fire they dealt, the terrible unnatural rain. The vultures circling across the day and the hyenas laughing through the night.
And then, at first almost incomprehensible – because wasn’t that one of the most fundamental expectations of a leader, that he should stay with his people, and die on the battlefield if need be? – the knowledge that Emperor Hailè Selassie had fled. He had taken his family and boarded a train to Djibouti. Ras Kassa and his youngest son had left for Europe too. Three days later, Italian columns entered Addis.
In Gondar the foreigners began building at once. Roads, hotels, banks. A rifle factory and two hospitals. An airstrip. An avenue of shops and hotels unfurling southward, down toward the castles. Water began to flow through narrow metal pipes, and at night the streets were strung with small glowing orbs. The city rang with the sound of hammers and chisels wielded by local workmen on higher wages than they had ever seen before. And in more than one mind grew the unspoken question – or if it was spoken, uttered only at home, looking about, over shoulders and across rooms – who else ever did such things for us?
Some days after the Italians entered, another deputation of priests, leaders of some of the forty-four churches, climbed the mountain. The foreigners have asked to see you, they said to her husband.
Have they.
You are our leader, and they have asked to see you.
In that first meeting ranks of foreign soldiers in tight-collared black shirts and shining black boots faced ranks of priests in their whitest turbans and brightest embroidered robes. The Italian leader, a red plume dropping full over an eagle perched on the front of his hat, declared Victor Emmanuel III of Italy emperor of Ethiopia and required all present to sign a statement acceding to that fact. After the signing, after the priests had danced and the uncomprehending foreigners had smiled, her husband had stepped forward and requested that the Italians return to the churches all rights and lands they had confiscated. But the request was either misunderstood – the translator’s street Italian being no match for a churchman’s careful perorations – or simply ignored. For not only did the foreigners not return the land, they took churches for garrisons and moved into the homes of evicted or suddenly absent aristocrats.
Some castles became offices, others headquarters for the carabinieri. A smooth dark road poured past the hotels, the new cinema, the shops, but stopped abruptly at the castles; below that, where the city continued into the Saturday market and the bluffs overlooking the Qeha, everything was still bare earth. Electricity stopped there too, and piped water. For a long time she did not notice. Now that they were back in the city everything for her remained as it had always been, sweet water available from her well, the market outside healthy and bustling and equal to her needs. Even the talk of deliberate division – whites here, locals there, a school and a hospital and a courthouse each, no locals allowed in cinemas at all – made little impression on her. Gondar had always been a divided city, between Muslim, Christian and Jewish quarters, between aristocracy, gentry, artisans and peasants, and who wanted anything to do with these foreigners anyway? It was they who often insisted on crossing over, chasing women, living with them, defying orders from their superiors.
Other orders were more efficiently upheld. The death penalty for men caught possessing arms, for instance, a quixotic aim in a land where bearing arms was a necessary adjunct to any claim to be taken seriously, where manliness and honour were synonymous with physical courage and the willingness to go to war. Summary executions, then, often on testimony of nothing more than a rival with a grudge; imprisonment and flogging of families which refused to give up weapons or state the whereabouts of those who carried them. Terrified whispers of a portable gallows, dragged from village to village. Of decapitated heads held high. The death penalty for anyone suspected of supporting the absent emperor.
Her husband shut his face, and with a gift of a thousand Maria Theresa thalers he had received from Emperor Hailè Selassie before the war, with the income from Ba’ata’s holy water, the tithes from Bisnit and Dembiya, the income from church arbitration, market dues, the sale of the gold-filigreed capes and robes Empress Zewditu had given him on his first promotion, set about building his church as if the end against which it was spiritual insurance could arrive any day.
The inner circle, the holy of holies, was held together with mud, trampled by labourers’ feet over and over for three or four days, but the meqdes, the priests’ domain, was to be constructed of stone only, cut so carefully no mortar would be needed. All day new-quarried pink tufa arrived from Qusquam, a quiet hilltop north-west of the city, carried between pairs of former slaves, or on the backs of donkeys. All day, in between prayers and sermons and confessions, between the endless questions and supplications visited upon an administrator of forty-four churches, he wove among the labourers, correcting a cut of rock here, a misunderstanding about size there, cajoling, ordering, threatening, driving the work as fast as he knew how.
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.

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