The Wife's Tale

by Aida Edemariam

  Nearly every day now she pulled her shemma over her hair, smoothed the fringed border carefully across her chest, indicated to the servant to follow her with the basket, and stepped out of the main gate. As she passed the two rows of rooms her husband had built and entered the street into the market she dropped her shoulders and lifted her head. Let them whisper. Let them stare.

  If it was a Saturday, progress was slow. They would thread their way through tanners and drovers, blacksmiths and farmers’ wives and all their customers: lean men peering into the mouths of mules for sale, women sniffing at spices, butter, Sudanese perfume, or making calculated flounces away from grain they needed, holding out for lower prices. On weekdays they could move faster, stepping across rocks worn flat by generations of market-going feet, scattered with kernels of barley, corn husks, chewed sugar cane. Dark crows pecking at the roots of the sycamore fig under which Aleqa Tsega had spent so many hours passing judgement.

  Usually when she approached the tree she turned right, directly up the slope to the prison. Other times, needing succour, she continued along the brow of the hill to Ba’ata, bowing to kiss the dear walls before turning back. Oh Lady of Sorrows, help us. You who as a child were fed by angels in the temple, whose girlhood and whose motherhood we honour in this place, help us, please.

  At the prison door she tried to ignore the eyes watching from the sentry-house above her, waiting until the Gojjamé guard could come to her and she could hand over the injera and the chicken stew she now made almost every day. It was only a month or so since he had given her his news, but it seemed like years.

  Every few days she was allowed in herself, to sit with the other wives, to chat as normally as possible about children and cooking and neighbours, to sift her husband’s expressions for signs of ill-treatment and indications of mood. At first prison appeared to suit him: his face filled out, and his dark skin smoothed.

  And they talked. Or he talked, always across the same ground, obsessive, outraged, unsurprised. They hate me. This is what they’ve always wanted. Yes, she said. They hate anyone from Gojjam anyway, but then I was promoted, and promoted again, and they had to answer to me. They’re jealous. Yes, of course. I suggested the priesthood should be salaried; that no one should profit from church lands who wasn’t trained, who didn’t serve – that was a good idea. Well, they hate me for that too.

  They say our little group of Gojjamés is a conclave of traitors, that I spent my days weaving plots against the emperor. She looked straight at him. No. They swore in court that when we help each other and encourage trade between Gojjam and Eritrea it’s a pretence – that actually we agitate for federation and constitutional monarchy. No. When the judge sent them away for having no proof they went to the governor. It’s Asratè Kassa, you know. He’s back. The emperor has reappointed him. They asked him to take away some of my responsibility; he told me to share my duties with another priest, but I said my office was in the gift of the emperor, and I would not comply. That too will have offended him. They know what they’re doing. But they are all lying. Lying before God.

  She could say nothing. Her hand moved on the swell at her waist and she could not tell who was failing to comfort whom.

  * * *

  —

  My lord!

  She darted forward along with everyone else who had been waiting under the trees. Her eldest son leapt forward with her.

  My lord!

  She might as well have been a pipit dipping and twittering across the valley that dropped away from the church walls.

  My lord! May the reason for my husband’s imprisonment be known?

  Asratè Kassa kept walking. He was a man of about her own age. Strong-featured, straight-backed, dark-skinned. Taller than most around him. A full moustache and a receding hairline. Utterly assured of his station.

  In the name of the Saviour, may I speak?

  Nothing. He was nearing the gate, and now she was wailing. Please, in the name of Hailè Selassie, upon his life and his death, may we know what my husband is accused of, that he may receive justice?

  At last he turned and looked at her. Through her, it almost felt, the heavy eyes seemed to register so little of her presence. And then he turned away.

  * * *

  —

  So her visits to the prison continued. Food, carafes of mead and beer, so he would not have to use the gourds that the guards provided for drinking, for eating or, in the reeking night, for other bodily functions. His litanies of accusation, counter-accusation, protest, self-pity, continued, held him in a grip he could not seem to loose.

  The children are well? Yes. They’re studying? Yes. From across the market came the emphatic rise and long fall of the muezzin’s call to prayer. Allahu akbaaaaaar! – they cannot go to church school. They must not become priests or work with priests. Look what priests have done to me.

  The initial hectic flush of health faded. One day, watching him cross the floor, and then cross the floor again, she noticed he was shaking. Sit down, master, sit down. He shook his head. She let him be. But it happened often after that. He ate less. He stood, and shook, all at once looking all of his sixty years, but refused to sit. Please sit? No, it hurts too much. Tears knotted in his eyes.

  And then a day when he was sitting, on a pallet, pale. Yetemegnu, I can’t stand. Here, let me help. No, no. The tears broke through. Let me help you up – no, I can’t stand. He came to visit, and now I can’t stand. Who came? That witness who testified against me. That churchman. And now my body is heavy to me, and I can’t stand.

  Oh my heart, she cried, ayzoh. What shall I do for you? What can I do? Then an idea so outlandish, so sure to be rejected, she spoke it aloud. Shall I go to Addis? Shall I try the higher courts?

  He did not immediately dismiss it. She watched as it gained flesh in his mind. Perhaps – perhaps you should. Yes. Go to Addis Ababa. Go to the highest court. Go to the emperor. Tell him what has been done to me. Free me.

  When she got home she could not be still for worry and fear. She paced through the rooms, picking things up, putting things down, kissing children, putting them down. How could she go? What about all these children? How could she go so far away, to such a big city? But she had to go, she had to free him. For him, for all of them.

  ‘I have a relative in Addis, near their market, he will help you.’ The neighbours had heard what she was about, and unable to resist the excitement, found reasons to drop by. ‘You must take gifts, money. Everyone will want bribes.’ Eventually her youngest daughter’s godmother spoke. ‘But madam, you must feed him yourself. Otherwise how will you know they are not poisoning him?’

  But he said to go. I must free him. ‘Don’t go. Stay here. Look after him.’

  She stayed away from the prison for three days, thinking about what to do. Then she pulled her shemma over her head as usual and stepped out of the gate. A man bowed to her from across the roadway. She had begun to respond in kind when she saw who it was and stopped, raw with anger. The man, who had testified against her husband in court, gestured at her. Stay, he seemed to her to be saying. You should stay.

  She described the encounter to her husband. So they are going to humiliate me like that, are they? By kidnapping you, violating you, ruining you? How dare they! I have no doubts now. Go to Addis Ababa, immediately.

  How can I leave you? I have to feed you! I have to make sure they don’t poison you! I have to keep you safe!

  Go! Now! Then, softening somewhat, Please go.

  And again she said, Yes. Ayzoh. Yes of course.

  She was still repeating it when she got home and began to pack. What would she need? Dresses, good dresses, ayzoh, I’ll help you, ayzoh, I’ll go, I’ll go, headscarves, good headscarves, I’ll go to the emperor and get you freed, her best shemmas, ayzoh, don’t worry, I am here for you, still repeating it when she felt something snap within her, snap and then release, shocking her into stillness. And in the stillness she felt it begin, a soft warmth first, a gentleness belyin
g implacability, and then the pain, arriving as if from a distance, coming closer and closer, then in waves, successive regiments assailing a fastness. Trickles became rills that coursed down her legs and pooled at her feet. The pain gathered itself, focused. She looked down. There it was, as deep a red as everything that surrounded it, all stomach and all head, limbs tiny as afterthoughts, stopped-up mouth and fused-blind eyes. A boy.

  Everything about her was closing in, darkening. But the blood flowed on and on, through the receiving room and out of the door.

  * * *

  —

  Later she was told that when she lost consciousness the women had panicked. They had tried to lift her, hauling her from room to room – ‘Seven rooms!’ they cried. ‘It must be seven rooms!’ – leaving blood everywhere, streaked across furniture, soaking through their white dresses, trailing behind them. They took up their pestles and beat them against any metal they could find, roof tin, barrels, pots. Someone rushed to the grain store, grabbed handfuls of linseed and threw them onto a pan on the fire, where the grains popped and hissed in demented answer to the arrhythmic crash of metal.

  ‘What’s all this?’ It was the Muslim man to whom she and her husband had rented one of their new rooms. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘This woman is terribly ill, look, she’s dying, we must scare the devil away –’

  ‘Why didn’t you call me? Now, go, bring me a new length of cloth, a piece that hasn’t been touched by water –’ He produced a long, narrow piece of vellum and leaning over it began to write. They stood back. Under his concentrating hands suns appeared, and crosses and moons; horns and burning eyes, hasty letters, letters and more letters. He wrote and wrote until the vellum was filled, then, rolling it into the fresh cloth, tied it securely to her left thigh. Immediately, the women told her later, the bleeding slowed. But it was a night and a day and a night before she woke, cursing the fact that she had not simply been allowed to die.

  When she was able to stand, they took her to the prison to see her husband, who thought he had lost her. He wept to see her, and she wept, and they wept again when she rose to leave. They held each other for a long moment before she disentangled herself. Ayzoh. I am going now to free you, and I will be back soon.

  * * *

  —

  In that country and in that time, when every thoroughfare still had its litigants, bringing earnest complaint before a kerbstone judge (often appointed on the spot for the purpose); where the ability to argue brilliantly for oneself in court was more respected than business acumen or craftsmanship or musicality; where justice was held so dear that most would countenance a lifetime of court appearances rather than feel it left undone; there everyone, however humble, had the right to bring his or her case before higher and higher courts, and eventually, if necessary, before the emperor, the final arbiter between them and God.

  And so each morning she set off for the High Court, accompanied by Meto-aleqa Tirfé, a kindly lieutenant who it was said might have been a general had he not displeased his superiors. She was staying with another army man and relative of her husband’s, an old Gojjamé commander. Basha Deneqè and his wife could not have been kinder, providing advice, a bed for Edemariam when he visited from boarding school, meals at all times of day, but she could not eat for nerves. A cup or two of coffee only, before wrapping herself in layers of shawls and going out into the streets.

  Nearly thirty years of diurnal rounds consisting (except during the war) of her house, its grounds, the market, Ba’ata, and latterly the prison had fixed her horizons close. The skies felt different in Addis, the mountains higher and farther away; she felt somehow naked, and yet at the same time jostled and distressed, even when no one was walking too close. There were so many cars, honking, rattling over ruts, nudging through so many knots of people and mules, sheep, donkeys, that at any moment she expected one to creep up behind her and drag her under its wheels.

  Within the court compound things were not much easier. So many people, all aiming for the same thing: a chance to put their story to the judge. They milled, and waited, and milled and waited, until waiting became a way of life. Every so often a name was called, an answer shouted, and the lucky person hurried up the stairs. By noon it would be obvious that her turn would not come that day, and so she would walk slowly home.

  The sun was at its zenith. It blazed down on the rubbled asphalt of the roads, on the top of her head, on the umbrella she raised for shade. When she first arrived, still bleeding, breasts hard with milk, the rainy season had not yet ended, and so she had often glanced up to see an advancing wall of silver-grey raindrops falling straight and heavy as spears, churning the dust before them into crowns of mud. When the clouds had passed, as swiftly as they had come, the ditches would run with white-pointed brown torrents and the flotsam of the city: sandals made of car tyres, sodden paper, vegetables, rags, bones, excreta. The roads would steam in the sunshine, the birds singing out, her nostrils filling with the smell of wetted earth, of bruised green and mountain air.

  Now, in the afternoons, she began to pursue other avenues of redress. She recalled her father’s interminable counting of houses, that she was distantly related to the empress, and thus to the empress’s eldest daughter, Princess Tenagnewerq. She knew that of all the emperor’s children it was probably this daughter, not the crown prince, who had the most influence on their father. Moreover, the princess’s husband had only just been transferred to Eritrea after six years as governor of Gondar. He had met her husband, had dealt with him officially.

  Of course, she also knew other things. She knew the couple, like much of the royal family, had business interests everywhere. She had heard whispers, she had no idea if they were true, about his roving eye. But mostly she remembered that in the free-for-all that followed the Italian retreat, the princess and her husband had acquired large swathes of land in Gondar city. That some of that land belonged to her own father; that her husband had asked for it back and had instead been offered forty hectares nearly five hundred kilometres south, in the Rift Valley. She had heard it was decent land, arable, but what in the name of the Trinity were they supposed to do with it?

  But she had to set that aside, for the moment. Or perhaps here was a way in which she could be repaid? So she began to walk through the lunchtime streets, and to take up a position outside the high stone walls of the princess’s residence. She was not the only person to have this idea, but then she would never have expected otherwise: every great man or woman in the country trailed a penumbra of petitioners from all walks of life, often felt harried by them, but would be outraged, take it as a slackening of power and status, if ever they melted away. And so she took up a place among everyone else who stood, or sat, or paced, waiting for a pause, a glimmer of permission to speak, for hours and days and weeks.

  On other afternoons she went to see her husband’s friend the bishop, and this she much preferred. Abunè Theophilos was a busy man, increasingly powerful, concerned, she would much later discover, with reorganising how the church was run, shoring up its ability to help the stricken, a supporter of modern education and a scholar in his own right. But he found time for her, leading her to a seat under a grapevine in the garden, asking after her health, her children, her husband.

  No change, she would say. No change, may the Lord bless us and keep us. But then, one day, I have had a phone call, they have taken him away! They have taken him away! Where? Please try to be calm, my child. Where have they taken him? They took him in chains! Soldiers took him, in a big car! – to Wegera, in the Simien mountains, where he was now under house arrest. She could not understand. Was it because the governor had heard she was here, trying to go above his head? Did he want to make sure he didn’t lose his prisoner? Had there been pressure from Addis? She could not know. All she knew was that Wegera, set amongst some of the highest mountains in the country, was remote and at this time of year, when dry-season sunshine gave way to clear-skied nights, laceratingly cold. She also knew t
hat her husband was increasingly unwell, that he was bleeding, awful private bleeding –

  ‘Ayzosh. Ayzosh. There will be an answer. He will not be there long.’ She looked up at him, wanting to believe. Abunè Theophilos was tall, handsome, with a long nose and slightly hooded eyes, high cheekbones swooping down toward a short squared-off beard. Two women of his household sat a short distance away, looking askance. She saw the question in their faces – what was he doing, talking for so long to this Gondaré girl, so thin and weak from childbearing and breastfeeding and weeping and not eating that her hips jutted out against her dress like guns?

  The next time she came she was even more distressed. Her husband was sicker. He had been transferred back to Gondar, to the hospital. He had been placed first in an open ward, but the hospital director said he could not allow it, not for a man like Aleqa Tsega, and so he was moved to a private room. He would not eat, though that was more from anger than from illness: he was consumed by anger, riven with it. Everyone who visited brought food, as tempting as they could make it – buttery gruel, porridge, rich stews – each dish tasted by someone else first, to set his mind at rest. His two youngest sons were often at his bedside. But still he would not eat.

  She had been going to court every day, she told Theophilos, desperate to move things on, and she had had some success – she had been called before the judge not once, but twice. The first time she was trembling so much with nerves the judge had had to rush from behind his desk to catch her before she hit the floor, lifting up her chattering bones and setting them down on a chair. Both times she had eventually been able to speak for herself, and two separate letters had been sent to the governor in Gondar, ordering her husband be brought south and tried in the capital. But so far there had been no response.