She remembered the vows made in the church when she was too young to understand: I will marry this man, and this man only, and if he should die before me, I will renounce the world.
For years she had looked at nuns with something approaching envy, thinking how their yellow skullcaps signified virtue and removal from the world, but also a kind of licence. And after the years of domestic labour, of privacies denied and advances inescapable, of the bearing of children, the suckling and the carrying and the worry, that seemed like light and freedom to her. In the priests’ wives who had remarried she had seen how her life could go: their houses were poor, their tables bare, and those who had become nuns – how beautiful their houses! How calm!
She had her inheritances, the lands and the house and the self-sufficiencies they represented. Marry once, and leave it be.
* * *
—
For days she sat, thinking over all these things, and then she called her confessor to her and together they boarded a bus north, to Debrè Libanos.
By the time they reached the perimeters of Addis they were already climbing through forest. The eucalyptus trunks stood smooth and pale against the dark of the junipers and cast shadows like bars across the narrow road, making the early-morning sun flicker and refract across their vision. The earth was red underneath the trees, rust-red and bare rock, and where years of rainy-season storms had washed the soil away there were small cliffs and crevasses bridged by ladders and lattices or the single gnarled limbs of exposed roots. Deep in the valley, falling away to their left, corrugated-iron roofs winked at the sky. Blue woodsmoke blurred the horizon.
And then they were no longer climbing, but bustling through open fields. There were still high peaks, but they were far away; here the land stretched itself out under a bowl of sky. Shepherd boys moved tiny across it, and wobble-humped zebu; egrets stood thoughtful, implausibly white, in the reeds at river bends. Goats chewed, plotting delinquency. Eucalyptus saplings glowed in the copses, while all around them fields unfurled, golden seas punctuated by domes of gold. The sun glanced off each blade of hay and set the stacks alight.
This, some of the richest land in the empire, was Kassa country, the base from which the old lord went out to fight the Italians, and where Asratè Kassa was born. These farmers they passed, who spent backbreaking weeks guiding heavy oxen and recalcitrant ploughs across the earth, who sowed and harvested and threshed and winnowed, standing by piles of grain higher than themselves and throwing it aloft until they were surrounded by aureoles of dust and chaff? Their taxes went to Addis Ababa now, but for generations up to a third of their yields had gone to Asratè Kassa’s forebears. She watched the farmers’ homesteads go by, low clusters of houses inside acacia fences aggressive with thorns. The thatch shone too, deep and dark as a gelada’s fur.
And then the land ended.
Before them, where there had been track, was only blue air. There was nowhere to go except right or left, and so the bus bore right along a gorge which dropped and dropped until the braided channels of the river at its base seemed delicate as threads pulled from the hem of a new dress. Kites drifted below them, and snatches of cloud. Lungs filled with space, and an involuntary awe. On their right another cliff rose, and so they were travelling, now, along a kind of shelf.
They began to pass other pilgrims. Women carrying umbrellas against the sun. Monks in black soutanes and turmeric-yellow gabis. Nuns, yellow-robed, yellow-capped, chests armoured in concentric rings of heavy amber. A market under a fig tree, neat little piles of incense, limes, raisins, on small squares of cloth laid on the ground. Lepers crawling up the incline on knee-stumps wrapped in dirty rags.
By the time they arrived at the church there were people everywhere, under the trees, among the graves, people praying, chatting, reading, sleeping. And women, many women: becoming a nun at this most holy of monasteries demanded a minimum of three, often seven years of daily service. After she had kissed the church walls she and her confessor left the grounds and turned onto a rocky path that hugged the base of the cliff. Soon it began to rise into a cool green tunnel. Vast old trees leaned overhead, the higher branches laced with vines, the lower, thicker branches silken. White butterflies danced through the sunlight that threaded through the canopy. The air smelled of mint and acacia, and hummed with bees.
She heard the first holy spring before she saw it, dribbling into the back of a crevasse tucked under the base of the cliff. It was far quieter here, the only sounds the water, dripping onto basalt crazed into diamonds, pentagons, elongated octagons, and the precise tick of dry leaves landing on rock. After she had been blessed they moved on, picking their way across the tumbled boulders of a pool, empty now, but in the rainy season churned by a high waterfall, and impassable. The cliff was riddled with crevices and caves. Hermits lived in some. Others were piled with the bones of generations of pilgrims who had come to be buried here, and, more recently, the bones of monks the Italians had asserted were accomplices to their viceroy’s would-be assassins. All of Debrè Libanos’s 297 monks were shot dead and the church razed; two thousand people were slaughtered and a further thousand sent to concentration camps.
The second holy spring had been directed into a pipe that led into a small concrete enclosure and bifurcated, a tap for men and a tap for women. Across the path was a low tree-sheltered area, where Emperor Hailè Selassie, like Menelik II before him, came to take the waters. It was modest – even the most ostentatious of kings knew this was not a place in which to parade his wealth – but there was nothing modest about the view. After many wanderings, said the monks, the archangel Mikael had brought St Teklè-Haimanot here and said, look down. Birds darted, glided, hovered below him. Count them. But he could not count them. These are your spiritual children – they are innumerable. A cloud descended and filled the valley. And this is the Holy Spirit, said the archangel. It covers everything.
The saint was said to have stayed for the rest of his ninety-nine years, founding the monastery and taking up residence in a cave that reached deep under the mountain and echoed with water. For twenty-two years he stood praying on both feet; for the next seven he prayed on one, until the other leg withered and dropped off. Here, in the forecourt, next to the cave, was the holiest of holy water, coveted by believers for over six hundred years. Reverently she joined the other pilgrims in their milling nakedness, waiting her turn.
The piped water hit her back with the force of a blow. She moved further in, welcoming it. Another blow.
‘Wiy! Wiy! Wiy! Ay Saytan! Ay Saytan! The devil! The devil has come!’
Fear scraped through her. What was it? A snake?
No, blood, tendrils of it, mingling with the water flowing across the rock. Had someone hurt themselves? That didn’t explain the horror. Menstrual blood. It must be menstrual blood. Absolutely no one was allowed in these holy places if they were bleeding.
‘Come, enaté,’ said her confessor. ‘Come, mother, come out of there.’
Why would I do that? I want to be blessed.
‘Just come out, my dear.’
Reluctant and annoyed, she moved away from the others. And felt it, moving down her leg.
How could this be? She had waited for two weeks after her last flow, had washed carefully, purified herself as well as she knew how – she could not understand it, how could it be? How could it be? And the desecration of it –
‘Come with me,’ said the priest, moved by her misery. ‘Come with me.’
When she was clothed he led her down, back into the valley, and introduced her to an old monk. ‘He carries St Teklè-Haimanot’s gold cross. He might be able to help you.’
Father, she begged. Father, bless me, please.
The monk held the cross toward her. She kissed it, again and again.
Father, I came here to be a nun, and I thought I was pure, but I bled. I thought I was clean.
‘Ayi,’ he said, sorrowful. ‘Ayi. Never mind. It is the devil’s fault, not yours. Take courage.’
But I am also sick, she added, I am sick with the zar and it will not leave me. How can I be rid of it? Will it prevent me from receiving God?
‘There is nothing we can do about the zar. You must placate it. And no – it will not stop you from receiving God.’
He turned to her confessor and handed him a small pot. ‘If she came all this way she should not stop. Keep her away from the spring, but bring the holy water to her in this.’
When, eight days later, the course was finished, they returned to the monk.
Father, I am pure now, and I look forward to becoming a nun.
‘You receive His body and His blood, don’t you?’ he replied.
Yes. Yes, I do.
‘Good. So why are you so concerned about a bit of cloth on your head? Come to mass this Sunday. There will be a vigil beforehand; join that too.’
And after that?
‘Be a good Christian. Keep yourself separate and holy, and continue to take communion. And go home in peace.’
Awash with fury and dismay she bowed and kissed his cross, and did as she was told.
* * *
—
In the mid-1880s King Menelik, named after the progenitor of the Solomonic empire and determined to expand that empire as far as his diplomatic abilities and the might of his armies would permit, had recently remarried (his second union, and her fifth) when the royal household picked their way down the slopes of Entoto and pitched their tents on the plateau below. The land was lush with grasses and flowering trees, but most important to a king who suffered from rheumatism were the hot springs that bubbled out of the ground and seeped, sulphurous, into the red earth.
His wife Taitu stood at the door of their tent and looked out. She was formidable, a woman who beyond her already rare accomplishments – the ability to read and write Amharic, to play chess and the lyre, to compose poetry – was decisive and forthright, physically brave, and gifted in the oblique arts of acquiring and keeping power. ‘May I build a house here?’ she asked. Menelik had no objection; remembered, in fact, a prophecy his grandfather had made, that one day there would be a city in this spot. The next year, while Menelik was in the south, overthrowing the emirate at Harar (and acquiring, thereby, a remarkably useful economic base), Taitu made the prophecy reality, moving down the mountain. Remembering the cascades of lemon-yellow mimosa blossom that had surrounded their tent she named the new city Addis Ababa, or New Flower.
Three years later Yohannes IV fell in battle against the Mahdists at Metemma and Menelik became emperor of all Ethiopia. He insisted the coronation be held in the church his queen had established at the top of the mountain, but it was a last hurrah. A palace already existed on the plateau below, with neighbourhoods emerging around it according to the configuration of a camped army. It burned down three years later but Menelik II simply built another, on a brow of land overlooking the steaming springs: a three-storey living complex ringed with balconies and topped at one end by a dome; kitchens, stables, embroidery rooms, smithies, arsenals, a mint, anteroom after anteroom, and a vast reception hall each of whose three gables boasted a row of fifty ostrich eggs. Indoors, under electric lights and stained-glass windows, soldiers, peasants and priests could feast on raw beef and beer at a rate of nearly seven thousand guests per sitting.
Four years later a hundred thousand fighting men – and a roughly equal number of camp followers – marched north with Menelik II and his empress, who personally led five thousand infantry into battle. She also organised over ten thousand women, ensuring they carried drinking water to the troops, and directed, with her husband, the building of a defence perimeter. Their decisive victory over the Italians at Adwa sealed the importance of Addis Ababa as the first fixed capital of an independent Ethiopian state since the collapse of the Gondarine kingdom over a century earlier.
Menelik II enjoyed their achievements for only a decade: he suffered strokes and declined into paralysis and senility, while his wife, feared and eventually outmanoeuvred, was confined to his sickroom and then, when he died, sent back up the cold mountain to live out her days in a modest house in the grounds of Entoto Mariam church. Menelik’s heir, Iyasu, spent little time in his grandfather’s palace and in any case was deposed within three years by nobles and clerics appalled, they said, by his favouring of (or, attempts to bring equality to) the Muslims of his empire. He was replaced by Ethiopia’s first empress, the far more biddable Zewditu.
Zewditu’s modernising successor Hailè Selassie I built his own home as soon as he decently could: within four years of his coronation work began on a new palace, up the hill from the old one. It was finished only seven months later, in time for a visit from the crown prince of Sweden. The old ghibbi bustled still, lions paced their cages or sprawled across the entrance to the throne room, where visitors who could bring themselves to step past them could inspect gold pillars, Persian carpets, and Menelik II’s throne, hung with silk. But in many ways the centre of power had moved, to a cool European-influenced two-storey building surrounded by gardens. Hailè Selassie I called it Genetè Le’ul, Paradise of the Prince.
At dawn each morning Hailè Selassie I rose from his small bed with its crowned canopy and embossed coverlet of silver-blue and went to his desk, to read, to write, to think about the day ahead, although sometimes there would have been so many petitions, so much work to get through, he would not have been to bed at all. By 7 a.m. he was at prayer, and then at exercises – any grandchild who burst in at this hour received a good scolding – before breakfast at 8.30 and the beginning of his public day. If he looked up he could see the tops of the mature trees that now shaded his gardens. And he could see the spiral staircase not far from his front door. It had no use as a staircase, was not attached to any building, it simply climbed into the sky. The Italians had built it, one stone step for every year of Fascist rule, beginning with the March on Rome in 1922: when Hailè Selassie returned he had claimed the structure for himself by placing on the highest step a stone lion. He looked down again, and continued to work.
* * *
—
Down at the bottom of the hill, roughly halfway between the old palace and the new, Yetemegnu woke too, bullied toward consciousness by the hard earth beneath her hips. When her husband died she had felt she had to follow all the traditions of deep mourning, shaving her head, eschewing the comfort of a bed. Much later she would wonder what it was all for. No amount of self-abnegation – and she had slept on the ground for a full three years – was ever going to bring back the dead. Carefully she rose, wrapped herself in warm shawls, and let herself out into the dawn.
At this hour the streets were mercifully clear. The occasional stray dog, perhaps, nosing through a rubbish heap. Nightwatchmen. Country women bent under wide loads of firewood. Were they widows too? How many children did they have to feed? The cathedral grounds were quiet, but not unpopulated: lone women approached its walls, kissed its thresholds in private supplication. Lone men read under the trees.
When she returned the sun had crested the mountains and the air was warm. Her daughters were awake, and the compound smelled of roasting coffee. She sipped three small cups, saying little, eating nothing, waiting to give the prayers of benediction, which she said quickly, intent and musical, hands held palms-up to heaven, before standing to leave the house again. ‘Be careful!’ called her Eritrean neighbour. Sometimes, when this neighbour felt worried about the children, left to fend for themselves, she brought them fresh bread, hugged them. ‘You’re always crying,’ she said to their mother. ‘I’m surprised you can see. Watch out for the cars!’
Up the hill, past the square with its curving bank and facing post office. Past the leafy grounds of the archbishop’s residence. St Mary’s, his church. The Supreme Court. Into a smaller square, where the victims of the Graziani massacre writhed in bronze bas-relief across a needle of white marble. Through the vast stone gates, after some negotiation with the guards, a now-practised listing of names and connections, or
a surreptitious exchange of coins. Up the wide avenue, flanked by lawns and flowers and trees. She was part of a flow now, all tending toward the same point: ministers and sub-ministers and sub-sub-ministers who knew that basic self-preservation required them to bow to the emperor, and for the emperor to see them bow, and for their colleagues to see the emperor see them bow, each morning before work. Petitioners like herself, who also came nearly every morning, sometimes for years. She looked up, searching above the heads for the lion on his airy steps, and made her way toward him. She found a patch of shade, and then she settled down to wait.
* * *
—
Sometimes, when she knew the emperor was not at home, when she had seen his sleek car glide away through crowds that bowed as it passed like grass bending away from a big cat hunting, she turned and made her way down the hill again, and presented herself at another great gate.
She was almost grateful for the familiarity of this particular wait. It wasn’t long before she had managed to deputise a kindly-looking soul to go inside and wait for her, in case her name was called: the court anterooms were so crowded they made her fear she might faint, or lash out. In fact she already had, once or twice, done exactly that – hemmed in under the obligatory portrait of an impassive emperor, pushed forward by impertinent, impatient men, she had turned and slapped their hands away. Stop! Stop now! What kind of woman do you think I am? Outside there were nearly as many people, but at least there was air and light and sky.
Sitting in the shade, fanning herself occasionally, she tuned in to the chat around her. Who was hopeful, who had had their case knocked back. Whose relatives were proving difficult – they are impossible, may Hailè Selassie die if I lie! – how exasperating it was that no one could get any justice at all these days without money changing hands. There was much shaking of heads and sucking of teeth. ‘May the almighty come to your aid. May He guide you, and keep you.’
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