The Wife's Tale

by Aida Edemariam

  One afternoon she was sitting as usual on the daybed when she heard someone calling, from outside the house. The voice was urgent, frightened, but also somehow thrilled. She pulled herself upright and tugged at her dress to right it. Because the feast of St John was approaching it was a new dress, embroidered down the front and at the hem, which rose in a curve that echoed her growing belly. She made her way outside, to one of the shacks in the compound they often lent to visiting relatives or to acquaintances in need. Except for pinpoints of sunlight that had forced their way around the nail-holes in the tin roof and walls, the shack was dark when she went in, pushing past holiday torches of bound sticks that rested against the doorway, rushes tied with yellow masqal flowers. When her eyes had adjusted she saw the still shape in the bed, a length of greater darkness solid in the gloom. She bent over her half-sister and listened for breath.

  She dropped to her knees. Bring coals, incense! Perhaps they would help to revive her. Duly they were brought, and she set about organising them, praying aloud. Oh Mary mother of light, come to us now. Queen of Heaven, help us. The lit coals revealed ritual detritus: a coffee tray, cups smeared with dregs, grass on the floor, a dropped necklace of coloured beads. The incense rose, sweet and strong. She felt herself swaying; her own voice, praying, seemed suddenly far away. Pain stabbed through her flanks.

  When eventually she woke she woke slowly. She swallowed, and her throat was dry. Her knees throbbed. Her stomach growled. Her neck ached, and her shoulders. She felt incredibly tired; depleted, scooped out. But light, too, as if she had been dragging a heavy load up a mountain and it had been lifted from her, so now she was standing in her shift in the high bright air.

  She became aware of someone sitting in the corner, and lifted her eyes to her husband’s. Worry, and a deep irritation, stared back at her. But something else looked out at her too, something she had not seen before. Was it fear? Respect? She registered it and stored it away, taking it out every so often over the weeks and months that followed, turning it over and over, holding it up to the light.

  * * *

  —

  Finally cooking began. The first dish was shirro mixed with berberé, onions, niger oil and a little water – no butter, because the actual festival always fell in fasting season. She stirred it on a flat clay pan over the fire, stirred until the shirro was absorbed, added more. Stirred until it was absorbed, added more. Again and again, until it sat in soft, crumbling piles.

  She measured out flours, barley, wheat, broad beans, and beat them with oil and water. Siljo could not be granular, it could not be watery; it had to be delicately spiced with red onion, garlic, ginger; pungent cabbage seed, coriander, rue; then berberé and sweet basil and crushed mustard seed, added right at the end. By the time it was poured into a madiga and sealed for six days, her waist hurt. Her arms hurt. It hurt to lift her children.

  * * *

  —

  When he went out each morning he would say, Make coffee. And she would do so and wait for him. She would make the breakfast he loved, too: torn-up pancake, thin, almost as thin as injera, softened with butter and spices, making it as tasty as she knew how. And then he would take hours to come and she would swear under her breath, God roast you, is this how you treat me?

  When at last he arrived he gave no explanation, and she said nothing either, but reheated his breakfast and placed it before him with a slight bang.

  It was weeks before she discovered what he had been doing, when she walked with her servant to a communal well to get extra water and said to the other women, surprised, Where’s all this from? Who’s been building rooms on our land? And they said, ‘Why, they’re yours – didn’t you know?’

  So that was what you were doing while I was sitting at home cursing you, she said to him. Why didn’t you tell me? What are they for? They’re for you, he answered. You can rent them out for income, when I am gone.

  * * *

  —

  A girl was born to them, keen-eyed, good-tempered. Yetemegnu called her Maré, my honey. And a boy to Alemitu. Her first grandchild.

  Edemariam graduated from grade eight and boarded an aeroplane for Addis Ababa because there was no school in Gondar that could educate him further. She dressed him in a new wool suit; she slaughtered a sheep and fed him his favourite dishes. The entire neighbourhood came to see him off.

  * * *

  —

  Outside they were building the das. The skeleton was nearly assembled – tough slim poles of eucalyptus cut from their own trees and lashed together with fresh eucalyptus bark: uprights, horizontals, beams waiting for their blanket of branches and cured hides. Rattling leaves covered the ground; anyone who entered could not help but crush them underfoot. The earthy, clarifying smell was everywhere.

  The mead was ready. She placed a piece of fresh muslin over the mouth of the gan, but it took several people to tilt the huge vessel and pour it into demijohns. When they were finished the glass containers sat in amicable rows, their bases smooth globes charged with liquid gold.

  * * *

  —

  Now whenever she began to yawn, great yawns that took over her face and stretched her shoulders tight, when he saw that though she was there in body everything else was withdrawing, curling away, out of his reach, he would say, spread grass for her, give her incense. Then he would pick up his gabi and walk out the door, into the drawing dusk.

  The younger children would huddle at the edges of the room, wary and fidgeting. Sometimes there were neighbours too. They would watch as she set out the coffee tray, counting out the little cups, arranging them just so, pausing to yawn, again, and again. Incense coiled through the roof beams and coffee beans popped on the fire. She knew the children were observing every move, registered one or two beginning to whimper, but exhaustion was stealing through each sinew. It dragged a mist through her mind and held her down.

  Down, down, down.

  Take your shawl. Cover your head, cover your face. Sink.

  Her neighbours told her what would happen next. She would climb off the daybed and onto the earthen floor and then, slowly, would begin to move, almost imperceptibly at first, then faster, shoulders revolving about the fixed point of her waist, faster and faster until she tipped forward onto her knees. Faster and faster and faster, until her torso scrawled ellipses through the thickened air, head following a half-beat behind, back arching like a horse ridden hard across a plain, a horse responding to the sting of a whip on his hindquarters, curving sharply in then out again, galloping on and on and on.

  And then the sounds would begin, cries harsh and urgent, turning to fierce song deep in her throat, songs like nothing in the daylight world, or even in the dark mead huts or the smoky churches. Songs and poems full of wilderness and nights in the open, of words that promised familiarity, but slipped out of comprehension. Songs tender and loving that curled around the children and brought their mother close, to touch their shoulders, to kiss and bless them. Songs shredded by declamations, a staccato of demands and sometimes of prophecy.

  Once her husband had been present when the zar took her, as it had begun to do more and more frequently since the day she had found her half-sister possessed and, in running to help her, become infected herself. He had watched until he was on his knees too, on his black cape spread out across the floor, begging God and all the saints to free her from this satanic thing, for who but the devil could play upon a woman in this way?

  But the spells continued, and he acceded to the zar’s requests, buying her fine shawls, a necklace of black silk wound with gold filigree, the finest coffee. He could not but notice she was beautiful after the spirit had taken her, that a private calm brightened her face, but noticing only deepened his distress and his dislike. Here he was, a priest and scholar, a man wanting to bring modern ways to a hidebound clergy, and here was his wife, dancing with pagan spirits, speaking their tongues, ecstatic in places into which he could not follow. And he would kneel in his church, praying and wee
ping, or beg their confessor to help.

  She took holy water as the confessor prescribed, asked Mary for help again and again, but still the zar came, and took her away from him, shaking her slight body, calling through her voice, leaving her limp and exhausted the next morning, unable to remember what she had said or what she had done but knowing, even if she could not say it to herself, that what she felt was a kind of release.

  * * *

  —

  She looked across at her husband. Under the untidy turban shadows deepened his eye sockets and lengthened his nose.

  The lamp guttered. His turban climbed up the wall, then dropped. When he took another page from the sheaf of papers before him she saw his hand was shaking. He said nothing. Had said nothing, for hours, just leafed again and again through those papers. Outside in the star-hung dark a dog howled.

  Let’s sleep, she said. It’s nearly eleven, and we should get some rest. Let’s douse the lamp and sleep.

  It took a moment to feel the sting of the slap, she was so shocked, and then another moment to react.

  She sprang to her feet. Really? Really? And still he said nothing.

  * * *

  —

  The fishermen were a procession of walking scales: long rods balanced on shoulders, at each bobbing end a full basket. A mass of eyes and tails, of silver and grey and dots and stripes. The smell of wild fresh water.

  She divided the fish into three piles and started washing their slippery bodies, splitting them open, dragging out their guts, cutting the flesh up small, removing every bone. It was close work, messy. Her arms flashed with scales and her fingers wrinkled in the constant wet.

  Around her the noise levels rose. Almost every woman she knew was here to help. Neighbours, relatives from the country, their neighbours, their servants. They came with supplies on their heads, children on their backs and at their skirts, and divided the cooking between them. Peeling, pounding, sifting, chopping. Especially chopping. Quintals and quintals of shallots, ginger and garlic.

  It took her a while to sort the fish, because she kept being interrupted. Where was the salt? How spicy did she want the pumpkin? Could she taste this? Did it lack anything? She gave each query her full attention, thanked each messenger graciously, intervened without compunction if she felt something was going awry, dispatched servants hither and yon.

  When they first began having these yearly parties relatives had taken over, bossing her about as they would any other child. But as she grew into her role, and especially since her husband was re-awarded Ba’ata, they had retreated. Now it was she and only she who directed operations, who knew herself to be in charge even when all she was doing was chopping garlic and listening, to the chat, the gossip, the songs. Would that every day could contain such camaraderie, such company! And, if she was honest, such a public stage for her skills and her position.

  By the time she moved on to the last pile of fish, to dip them in seasoned flour for frying, the sun had set. The women had decamped into the das. There was less talk now. Oil lamps shhhhed into the silences and cast giants on the walls. The corners filled with dark.

  It was near midnight when they finished, and the food was set out in row upon row of clay pots and baskets and trays and bowls. Those women who could not go home found beds in the main house or sank down where they were, pulling white shawls over their heads. She waited until they were asleep, stirring this, tasting that, covering everything to protect it from flies. But finally she stopped, and took one last look around.

  Then she blew out the lamps.

  * * *

  —

  They are all risen against me, he explained, weeks later. I have already protested my innocence before a judge, who believed me, that’s what the papers were, but they are coming for me again. What shall I do?

  It was she who was silent this time, though the tears flowed down her cheeks.

  Come with me, she said at last. Come with me to Ba’ata.

  They made their way to the far wall and roused the hermit who lived there, in a lean-to of rocks and branches. She had been here before, when the zar first took her, had stood before him, knees knocking, saying, this thing is persecuting me. She had stared at the ragged animal skins he had jabbed into a cape with conker-berry thorns, his dirt-dulled, matted hair. Eventually, when she had begun to think there would be no answer, he had spoken:

  Wild animals were chasing me, harrying me, tormenting me,

  Yet the innocence of the dove brought her to my side

  There was nothing more, but she had returned home wrapped in fragile hope, she could not have said for what.

  So now she returned with her husband, looking for more reassurance. This time the hermit had scarcely seen them approach before he drew the hides across his face and muttered into his chest:

  Alas, alas, the matter of my brother worries me, it worries me. The figs are nearly ripe, ripe and ready to fall. They will scatter across the ground. They are nearly ripe, they are nearly ripe and they are ready to fall.

  Again and again, until she drowned him out with her weeping.

  * * *

  —

  The rush always began an hour or two before noon. After the long vigil he would stand on the steps of the church and say to everyone, Come. Come with me. Let us celebrate. Let us celebrate the day after which our church was named, the day when the child Mary came to the Sanctuary and did not turn back. And everyone took him up on it. Priest after priest; monks, nuns, deacons came stepping through their gate. Everywhere she looked were white turbans, yellow skullcaps, prayer sticks, horsehair fly-whisks. Woodsmoke and cooking smells began to mingle with incense and stale night-breath, dust and sweat.

  In Addis the motor car might have been in the ascendant but in Gondar the grander people, the landowners, aristocracy, the wealthiest merchants, still arrived on brightly caparisoned mules, manservants running alongside, clearing the path. They were invited individually; it took three messengers a few days to get through the whole list. Her husband bowed and thanked them for coming and ushered them into the das. His face was composed but she knew there was pride and pleasure behind it; that his stance, outwardly deferential, rested on a foundation of defiance: See? Look who comes to my home. See how emphatically I have arrived.

  In the das, which was now carpeted with rich rugs and meadow flowers and fresh grass, the chairs were arranged in order of hierarchy: antique wooden seats at the top for the nobility; somewhat lesser chairs for the head priests; carved stools for the common priests; benches for the deacons, the students, the male laity, and a handful of elderly nuns. On this first day, no other women would sit with the guests to eat. Yetemegnu remained in the kitchen, but she knew her husband would spend the afternoon circulating. And that considering the number of people, the rapidly depleting gans of beer, the steadily shrinking store of golden demijohns, it would be remarkably quiet as everyone attended to eating.

  Another great wave rolled through their compound in the mid-afternoon, as the first shift departed and the second took its place. Not everyone left: the church students especially, young and spirited and far from home – they lingered, and drank, and as they became merrier and more crumpled began to test lines of qiné, flinging out rhymes and ditties, about the food, the beer, the mead, the holiday.

  But eventually the shadows lengthened and the crowd thinned. She and her helpers began to turn their attention to the next day, and the day after, and the day after that, when more students, priests, relatives and acquaintances from throughout Gondar and the countryside, however poor and lowly, would come and bow and eat their fill. Sometimes it could take six, seven, even eight days before the flow of guests slowed; more before people stopped dropping by for a tipple and a chat – did you see who came the first day? I didn’t think he could show his face. Wasn’t that fish good? You really surpassed yourself! But at the end of the first day she loosened her girdle and sat down with a sigh, for the first time, it seemed to her, in weeks.

&
nbsp; * * *

  —

  The man came through the gate bowing. Madam, how are you? How are the children? All well? Are you well? How are you? Well?

  I am well, she answered, thanks be to God, we are all well, may His works be praised, and you? Are you well? Your wife well? But she felt his agitation, and she waited for the niceties to be over, until he could decently say why he had come, in the middle of the working day and in such a rush.

  I have come from the prison. Yes, you are a guard there, I know, how is the work treating you? Well, madam, well. I have asked someone to stand in my place. I had to come because I am Gojjamé too and what they are doing is not right. It is not right. They have taken your husband, madam. They took him in the street. It isn’t just him, they took all four from the Gojjamé association. Madam, if you bring food I will take it in, I will make sure he gets it. Madam, ayzot, don’t be scared, please don’t be scared, I’m sure he’ll be out soon.

  She saw as if from a great distance that she was wringing her hands and pacing and standing up and sitting down and wringing her hands again. There was screaming in her ears, too, and she realised the screaming was coming from her.

  BOOK IV

  1953–c.1958

  Credit 4

  TIRR

  THE FIFTH MONTH

  Height of summer. Some sluggish rivers considered poisonous for cattle. Harvesting of irrigated garden crops. Selling of produce to buy salt, chillis, coffee. Tax gatherers collect taxes for the government, for landlords, and for church tithes.