Once, sitting under the grapevine, emboldened by his kindness, she spoke of herself, as if she were at home and at confession.
Father, I too am ill –
In what way, child?
I am visited. The zar comes – I drink coffee in the morning, when I ought to be fasting. The zar requires it.
Ayzosh. My mother used to suffer the same.
The next day a huge sack of coffee arrived at Basha Deneqè’s gate. Speaking of this over half a century later she remembered what became of Theophilos, his awful death, and cried out in sudden anguish, hands raised to the heavens: why, why, why?
When she took her leave, bowing to kiss his cross, bowing to the ladies, and went out into the street, her steps were lighter, her head a little higher. The sky was hazed with dusk and smoke from evening fires. Children called, their voices tinny with clarity and distance, dogs wheezed and barked. And above them all a lone kite sailed, at ease on invisible updraughts, impossible wingspan utterly still.
* * *
—
Within a week word came from the bishop’s house. The emperor is at his court tomorrow. He will see you.
She hardly knew how they got there, hardly knew how they passed through the blur of uniforms and capes, gardens and crested archways. Up steps. Along cool halls.
A large room and at its far end a small figure – how small! – standing. Head almost too big for narrow shoulders. A long flared nose. A wide brow scrawled with lines. Sunken cheeks. Did he not sleep properly, or eat?
Instantly she directed her eyes downwards, at the carpet, her head and all her body bowing. When she was told to speak she did so without looking up.
His voice, when at long last it came, had a displeasing, shredded quality. It was as noncommittal as his bearing.
‘Let him come here. We will hear the case.’
* * *
—
A smoky room and a terrible blind dance. Dancing and dancing and wild harsh voices, full of malediction and prophecy. Eventually the tongues ceased and the women looked up. Her hair had been dragged out of its scarf and stood ragged and torn from the back of her head. Dread tightened their chests and caught their breath.
Sleep, deep and dreamless, for a day and a long, long night.
* * *
—
Another room. She had been ill for two weeks, unable to eat, her insides water. They fed her sunflower seeds, thinking these at least she could keep down, but they only made her worse. When, finally, she began to improve, a man came to her, a relative, and she sat, weak, to receive him. How are you? Well, thank the Lord. And the children? They are well, may His honour increase. A long pause. Your husband is ill, madam. Yes. He is ill and he has been released. Released! Oh, thanks be to God! And you must go, now, to care for him. Yes, yes of course. Thank you, for bringing such good news. You will excuse me – And she called servants to her, and began to pack.
* * *
—
A room, and Edemariam, dreaming. He dreamt of his father, who turned, and walked away.
They woke him an hour later.
* * *
—
Rivers shrunken, sloughed snakeskin laid down in hollows across the brown land. Flat-topped acacia cresting the near hills, and euphorbia, and in the distance, climbing into hot blue sky, the mountains she had always known. The horse’s hooves clopped steady over the dry wheel-ruts in the airport road, and the garri jounced in response. After four long months she was going to see her children again. Her husband, and her children. The children must have grown.
There was the gate. Quick, open it.
She lifted her skirt to her calves and stepped through, into her own compound.
A das. Why a das? Why a das?
‘NOW WHEN THEY SEE ME COMING TO THE TOMB AND PRAYING, THEY REVILE ME, AND MAGNIFY THEMSELVES AGAINST ME.’
– LEGENDS
Oh my people why sit so silent?
Let us weep together.
There is not one among us
Who has not lost a brother, or a sister.
Oh let us weep together.
The mourner’s voice cracked into tears, successfully taking everyone else in the das with her. For a long moment they sobbed and murmured before lapsing again into quiet. The das was almost full. For days she had sat under the eucalyptus joists and boughs as people arrived, to sit with her for a while, to weep with her, and then to leave. Every so often a verse would arise, from a professional mourner, from a gifted relative, from anyone who felt so moved.
Who says Bitwoded Tsega is dead?
We saw him with Abraham in heaven.
And the weeping would begin again. When she first arrived and understood her husband was gone she had been insensible for three days. Now she was largely conscious, but inert. She picked at pieces of bread, turned crumbs round and round in her mouth, struggled to swallow, failed. She felt light-headed, and the days were unending, or suddenly over, twisting and passing in ways she could not understand and did not have the energy to follow. The nights, spent on the floor with her arms around her children, were full of tears and bitter prayer. Her eldest son had had to stay at school in Addis. The two younger boys, who had watched their father decline in hospital, now followed her with serious eyes. The girls clung, the baby was ill – her belly was puffed up, tight, while the rest of her was bones, poking through a bag of skin. Yetemegnu’s voice rose, hoarse.
He was a man, but after I gave birth
He cooked meat for me,
He did not let me sleep.
Caring for me like a woman, day and night.
Alemitu was exhausted and overwhelmed from running the house alone. And she had her own griefs. When her mother had left for Addis Alemitu was still producing milk, so she had fed both her own child and her youngest sister. Then they had all caught whooping cough. Eventually seven corpses were carried out of the big house – relatives, tenants, and Alemitu’s small son. Her youngest sister would feel guilty about surviving well into adulthood.
The eaves of my master’s house are leaking,
The rain is pouring through.
It has not been standing for long
But already it is falling into ruins.
The mourners attempted comfort. He was a great man. He was well loved. She had her own opinions on the latter, but for the moment she held her peace and listened while they told her of the funeral she had missed. Rites were read for him in the forty-four churches of Gondar. So many people came – Gojjamé soldiers from the barracks at Azezo, Muslims from Addis Alem, civil servants from offices closed for the occasion, priests from throughout Begemdir and Semien – that the funeral had to be held in shifts. Ba’ata was full. Ba’ata’s grounds were full. The streets between Ba’ata and the house were full; there was nowhere to put one’s feet. People spilled out of their compound and down the slope into the Saturday market. Even the governor came. When he arrived, they told her, her half-sister had looked straight at him and spat out an old verse.
They hacked at him, sawed at him
As if he was an elephant.
Look! There! He’s felled for you now
If you want to consume him.
It was months before she was told that at his sickest an order had come to the hospital, to let him go home. But he had flatly refused to do so until it was explained, officially and in public, why he been imprisoned in the first place; until it was proclaimed that he was innocent. That in his last days her half-brother Gebrè-Selassie, now a tax collector in Dembiya, had said to him, ‘Your wife should be with you now. Let her return from Addis and care for you.’ That her husband had snapped back, ‘Don’t be in such a rush. You’ll be able to marry her off to someone else soon enough.’ And Gebrè-Selassie, disappointed and angry, had in silence turned away.
I will never, ever divorce my husband.
My husband, who when I was a child braided my hair,
Trimming the rough edges, teaching me manners.
My husb
and, who raised me.
She watched everyone, all the time, feared all but the closest to her, feared poison especially. The children were no longer allowed to eat anything but food supervised by herself or Alemitu, in their own home.
Where is he? she said to Gebrè-Selassie one day, all of a sudden remembering the wild teenager who had leapt to the defence of his mother all those years ago, nearly killing all of them. He had ranged through the hills as a bandit for a while, and now spent his days hunting game. Could he help me? If I pointed out each false witness? For days she hovered on the edge of sending a messenger, but never quite shored up the courage.
Please bring me a flat basket
With which I may winnow the earth.
All that learning, all that intellect,
Where was it spilled?
Some mornings she woke at cockcrow – some mornings she hadn’t slept – and slipped out of the house. Habit directed her feet north-west, toward Ba’ata, but she refused habit and instead turned north-east, toward the castles and Gimja-bet Mariam. Under the cedars she bowed and tried to pray, but her mind could not let go of the other church – he suffered for you, he carried rocks, he laid your foundations, you were his life’s work, and my life’s work, everything we did was for you, why did you kill him? Why? Of course she knew it was not Ba’ata that had killed him; betrayal had struck so deep, however, that it did not matter. Could you not have let him finish? I will never kiss your walls again, never, do you hear? I will not bow to you, I will not bring my children to you, you are dead to me.
Honourable Aleqa Tsega, favourite of governments,
Beloved of God and friend of the people,
He is still to be found
At the entrance to the sanctuary.
Because he had made her swear she would never do something so financially ruinous she did not hold the traditional memorial banquet, but at forty days his relatives killed an ox and fed the priests. She was not required to cook and so she sat and watched and thought, How can you know your real friends? How can you ever know?
Oh all you people, let me tell you,
Before a judge, before the saviour,
What will become of me.
Sorrow does not kill.
If sorrow killed, how willingly I would die!
And yet still I live, burning with fire.
Gradually she began to disentangle their various sources of income. The rooms her husband had constructed along the outer wall were rented, and so there was money from that. There was wheat and barley from Gonderoch Mariam. The Jews who farmed it had recently objected to giving up a third of their produce each year, so the tribute had been reduced, but was still very useful. The land in Dembiya belonged to the church, of course, and thus reverted to the church, but they still had Bisnit. And Bisnit was beautiful land, nearly a hundred acres rustling with green in all its shapes and shades, cabbages and kale close to the ground, false banana leaves like ripped flags, darker bushes leaning over a spring that spilled into a creek that at this time of year took barely a stride to cross. Each harvest season they hired two oxen to plough it, but it was too big for them, and so her husband had invited another man, a merchant, to farm it with them and share the proceeds: teff, linseed, peas, beans. More recently they had decided to plant trees on it, a thousand valuable eucalyptus. Her husband had suggested the merchant’s daughter marry their eldest son.
But when, thinking that these trees might pay for her children’s schooling, she began to make enquiries, she discovered that as soon as her husband had died a group of monks from a remote northern monastery had claimed his share. And that they had been negotiating with the merchant, who had promptly passed on the half she thought was hers. She was, at one level, unsurprised – was she not a defenceless woman, sheltered and easy to take advantage of? But she was also entirely outraged. How could they do this to a widow with seven children?
Oh remember Master Aleqa Tsega,
Recollect his good character.
Where are you going,
Now that your children are growing up?
There is a man from the Sudanese borders, they told her, who specialises in casting the evil eye. He will lay waste to your enemies.
And in her grief and anger she sent for him and led him into the little alcove at the back of the house. She poured him a horn of beer, and asked him to be seated. Eventually she sat too, and among the grain and onions, under the strings of drying beef, spoke nervously of this and that. How was your journey? Do you have family? How are your children?
They spoke of her own children – her oldest son in Addis, the boys who were still at home, her daughters. And then, in a rush, of her husband, how he died in agony and of those she thought – she insisted – were responsible. She could not bring herself to say exactly what she had in mind, but she looked at the man intently and said, Do – what you do. I will give you eight of my rental rooms if you…do as you would do.
He sipped his beer and looked at her. And she looked back, shaky, defiant. He said nothing. The quiet stretched, solidified. A rooster crowed in the garden, and children scuffled. But in the little room there was only silence.
At last, when she thought she could bear it no longer, he spoke. Madam.
Yes?
Aleqa Tsega is in heaven. He has been sanctified. We all know how Christian he was. And you – by association with him you are the same. You are Christian too, and your soul is still pure. I cannot do this for you.
What? she started. What? I asked you here – but even as she began her words emptied of conviction, and the tears arrived.
He saved my soul, she told her children when they were grown, part-laughing, because her behaviour had been so entirely uncharacteristic, but part-serious too. I thanked him, because he saved my soul.
It doesn’t seem so to him,
But the harm done to one hurts the other.
The pain of the retainer
Diminishes the king.
Some time afterwards there was another visitor. A man she knew this time, a careful, short-sighted civil servant who had risen to be secretary-general of Begemdir and Semien.
After the many conversational necessities – and this very proper man would always observe every single one – there was a pause, and then he said, ‘You know the governor –’
The mortification of her encounter with Asratè Kassa was as intense as if it had happened yesterday. Yes, I know the governor.
‘I was there, madam, when the letters arrived from the courts and from the emperor’s offices, ordering that Aleqa Tsega be brought to Addis Ababa to be tried. I watched the governor open them, and read them.’
Yes?
‘He ripped them up, and threw them to the ground.’
* * *
—
This time she left for the capital laden: grain and coffee and spices, scrubbed white clothes. And two of the three littlest girls: the youngest, now nearly a year old, and Tiruworq, not very much older, to help look after her.
A small place had been prepared for them at the home of her husband’s first teacher, Memhir Hiruy. He lived, now, in the palace grounds, and had given his home over to another priest, a bent-over little man who had served at Ba’ata, and had often been a guest in her mother’s house. When this aleqa was not at the palace himself, manoeuvring, he ran a church school in the compound, and so she set up home to the fluting sound of small boys reciting psalms.
Night-time was a different matter. The compound was near Trinity Cathedral, with its pale bombastic arches and dark onion domes, and to the parliament building, where members debated constitutions they knew would almost always be overruled, but it was also close to a vast slum, known to all as Erri bè kentu, or A Cry for Help in Vain. When the sun had set and the main roads held only scavenging dogs and the occasional loping hyena, they could hear it: erratic music, laughter, shouts, crashes, screaming, and then bated, waiting silences. She hugged the girls close to her and prayed aloud, a separate prayer for each
individual child, for her dead husband, for herself. For the swiftest possible justice.
Everyone had advised her not to come, especially when she told them exactly what she wanted, which was not just the land, but the clearing of her husband’s name, for his sake and hers but above all for the sake of her children; she wanted blood, and as the blood she wanted was Asratè Kassa’s, she intended to ask the emperor for it. You can’t do that! Quick glances, around the room, out the window. Everyone knew the emperor had spies, and not just in important places. If they find out they’ll kill you! She had listened, polite, then proceeded with her preparations.
* * *
—
Because her nights were restless and spent in prayer and weeping, weeping; because in those sleepless hours she rehearsed the endless steps she would have to take, the favours she would have to beg, the days and months of waiting and contention, and she was afraid.
Already men were circling, eyes not just on her land but on her person as a candidate for marriage. Considerable men, qengaz-matches, minor royalty, one or two of them handsome (and she had always appreciated a handsome man), others promising to set her aflame with gold.
But how could she give in? How could she bring another man into her home, to watch the hands of her children as they ate? To insist on offspring of his own? – for of course a good part of her attraction was her abundantly proven fertility, and though she was now in her mid-thirties children were still possible. The children she had already would, in another man’s house, inevitably come second. Why would she do that?
All her life she had listened, rapt, to the lives of the female saints, of Zenna Mariam, Fiqirtè Christos, Weletè Petros – fierce women, many of them, beautiful and well-born, pious mothers who left their children and the world to become nuns. And especially Christos Semra, mother to eleven, who after she became a nun at the monastery of Debrè Libanos submerged herself entire in the waters of Lake Tana and prayed without sustenance for eight years before rising onto the island of Gwangut, where she founded a convent and was vouchsafed many miracles and visions.
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