Then at last, come, come, look what I have for you. And she would lead them through to where the food was waiting, buttery porridge and fresh injera and dish after dish from a just-slaughtered sheep, meat in hot sauce and in mild sauce, pan-fried ribs, spiced offal. The room would be full of people, too, relatives who had come from Simano, from Atakilt, from all over Dembiya, bringing their own offerings, some of the farmers so poor that even the girls, young as they were, knew these dignified meek-seeming men could not afford the battered tins of beer, the baskets of muddy eggs nestled in straw they bore so carefully into Gondar.
And she would hover about them, Eat, eat, upon my death, please eat, here, here is the best bit in the whole dish, you are not eating, what is wrong, please eat. Searching their faces, Tell me about Harar. Do they feed you? What do they feed you? Do they care for you? Yes, yes, they are good to us. They tell me there are hyenas, I have been terrified, wiy! I have been terrified that the hyenas will take you. Are there hyenas? Yes, there are hyenas, but they’re kept outside the walls, they don’t often come into the city, Nannyé. In the mornings she brought them breakfast in bed, injera still warm from the griddle, dripping with butter and spice; when they got up she gave them new clothes to wear; in the evenings, after supper, she would gather them around her. Terèt, terèt! And they would reply, delighted, yelam berèt! There once was a jester called Shiguté. One day he went to his master, who was a grand military commander…and they would settle at her feet, stilled with the pleasure of attention. Sometimes they sang, competing to remember the wittiest verse, or the most moving, and sometimes someone would turn the dial on the radio and they would find themselves standing, shoulders shaking, heads dipping forward, back, forward, back, dancing and laughing, surprised by joy.
There is a rare photograph of them all, plus various half-brothers, uncles and cousins, taken about two weeks into the new year, just before the annual dispersal to school, and, for Edemariam, college. In five days it will be Masqal, when the tabots come out of the churches and process around high bonfires lit in celebration of the arrival of a fragment of the True Cross in Ethiopia. But the holiday also coincides with the end of months of heavy rain, when the sun reappears and the fields, wet and lush with barley and masqal flowers, reflect its rays back into the bright, humming air. In fact, the sun is out now: it picks out each blade of grass in the yard and outlines every stone in the walls of the house. It beats, fresh and hot, into faces accustomed to days and weeks of dark and damp indoors, revealing every contour of forehead, cheekbone, nose, mouth, chin, bleaching the cotton of shemmas, of best dresses, a brilliant undifferentiated white. Nearly everyone squints into it, or gazes up from lowered brows, or looks to the ground; one small boy gives up altogether and shuts his eyes. Alemitu, a defiant Nefertiti, faces it directly down.
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They are almost all entirely serious, as was normal in photos then, but two manage slight smiles – a girl cousin, and Edemariam, tall in the back row, arms draped protectively around the shoulders of Tiruworq and of Teklé, who despite being older is not much taller than her. Although Teklé, along with his father, had recovered from the fevers that killed Yohannes during the Italian war, he had never really thrived, eating little, physically careful, retiring and kind and watchful except for the occasional rage. And then he had contracted TB, and scrofula. An abscess appeared on his neck and he became ill again, shaking with chills, losing even more weight. Again she did the rounds of the churches, looking for the holy water that might cure him – Loza-mariam, near Azezo, Seqlè-mariam, two days’ mule journey away. A traditional doctor gave her sulphur, which she hid, taking out tiny amounts to drop onto the abscess and shrink it, but Teklé, impatient, found it and dosed himself with too much. It burned through the abscess but also through great sections of his neck, scarring it and altering his voice. At last she took him to a zar-doctor, who prophesied a long life. The abscess did not recur, but he had missed a great deal of school and would never really catch up. She always said the photograph was a sad occasion because her husband was not there to take his place at the centre, but she is the only one who smiles a full, open smile.
* * *
—
So she was home at last, but returning had not freed her from some of the more onerous routines of her exile. She was still fighting for the land at Bisnit, for instance, where the eucalyptus trees reached higher and higher and the monks, despite their supposed renunciation of worldly values, grew ever more intractable. At court she argued that she had never denied part of the land was theirs, of course they could grow vegetables along the banks of the stream, of course they could have that, however it seemed to her they wanted it all now, land, trees, crops, and that she could not allow. There was another skirmish too, with a family that had taken advantage of her absence to annex some of her rental rooms.
On court mornings she woke jangling with apprehension. Her children would watch her dress – an underdress, a plain dress. Then another dress and another on top of that, because she was so thin, and did not believe she could be taken seriously if she was not more physically substantial. One netela, another. And with every layer, a litany, why this again, why this, look what I have to do, I’m only doing this for others, look what I have to do. So she worried aloud, and prayed, until finally she left the house in the company of whichever male relative was free that day – her half-brother, perhaps, or the boy Alemantè, who came with her when there was no school and soon became adept at writing memoranda replete with lawyerly phrases he did not always quite understand. When she returned she did so cursing the courts and everyone in them, the days and everything encountered during them.
Other times a child, Alemantè or Maré usually, would walk into the main room and find her sitting empty-eyed on the daybed. They knew what generally came next, and they hated it. And sure enough, it would begin – head first, tipping to the side, dropping forward, tipping, dropping back, again, again, wider, and wider, each ellipsis bringing more of her body with it, then a voice whipped into the air like seeds sown onto a stiff breeze, a voice they did not recognise, full of words, some of which they understood, many of which made no sense to them at all.
Weliyé, Weliyé, Weliyé,
Weliyé’s axe has two mouths,
You don’t see him cutting till the tree falls.
At last she would slip into a trance and then into sleep; finally they could creep out into fresh air, and breathe.
But for all the evident and much-performed anguish they knew it was also true that all those years in Addis meant she was now a practised litigant, equipped with ploys and defences honed on a far larger stage than this. So she was not unduly impressed by the dirty-yellow Italian courthouse at the centre of town, whose high arched windows looked unfeeling down at the ranked shacks of scribes writing letters and testaments for the illiterate. Here, on home turf, she knew who to nobble and how, where to stand, which mornings it was worth going and which it wasn’t. She knew how to go through the papers she was given and commit to memory a thumbprint or a smudge, the sweep of a signature or a torn or fading corner, so that even though she could not read she could select with confidence the correct documents when required, wrongfooting men – for the judges were always men – who assumed the rare women who came before them had no such ability.
She learned to do the same to the inevitable suitors, too, choosing circuitous paths home, affecting incomprehension, even, on one occasion, picking up her skirts and bolting. She had accepted a dinner invitation from a nun of her acquaintance and asked Alemantè to come with her through the dark streets. He was sitting in an anteroom dozing over his schoolbooks when she reappeared, whispering and shaking him, Come, come, we have to go, we have to go. He leapt up unquestioning, and then they were both running down the hill, trusting their feet to find safe grips among the cobblestones, running past the castle compound, breath loud in their ears. When they got home she said it had suddenly become clear the dinner was an enabling of a m
ale guest’s interest in her, and that when he had made his move she had simply stood and walked out. Thank you, child, thank you, she said then, and for years afterwards, when increasingly laughter mingled with the telling, thank you for getting to your feet so fast.
And then one morning she arrived at court with her half-brother and a witness, a priest who had agreed to support her suit. Proceedings began as usual, but when the priest began to speak it became clear he had at the last minute decided to switch sides.
Erè, erè! she said before she thought.
‘Quiet,’ said the judge.
‘I am telling the truth,’ insisted the priest. ‘Our Lady knows I am telling the truth.’
Yes, and Our Lady also knows how you pray, she shot back. She has watched you bowing in the light of the lamp. Everyone understood her; he had been having an affair with a woman whose name meant ‘light’. The room rang with delighted laughter, and the priest subsided protesting into silence.
‘Aleqa Tsega’s gifts haven’t died,’ people began to say, giving her her backhanded due. ‘They’ve simply been passed on to his wife.’ But when she entered the chambers each morning, she did so to respect that was hers alone.
The issue of the houses was soon decided in her favour. The case for Bisnit, however, would take another decade.
MONDAY
She still celebrated Ba’ata each year, though not on the same scale as before. She brewed beer, but only five gans rather than thirty or forty. There were a few stews, and a pile of injera, for priests and for family who had walked in from Dembiya and Infiraz and Gonderoch Mariam to be with her. For the students and lowerrank church people who would go anywhere for free food she roasted a quintal of dried peas.
The students were all very well, she often liked them, and she imagined that their mothers, far away in other provinces, would be pleased to know they were being fed, but the priests and the priestlings – she smiled and greeted them, asked after their families, played the kindest host, while behind her eyes the commentary circled and jabbed and threatened to break through. Where were you when he needed you? Did you contribute to his trouble? And will you now go back to your dark huts and gossip about how Aleqa Tsega’s family has fallen?
And behind the familiar, curdled litany, other, more complex feelings. Fewer guests meant less work, surely she should be grateful. So why this itchy, achy, private sense of loss? Mother, said neighbours who noticed her abstraction, this is so good, greater than how it was before. The beer hits its mark. It wasn’t about the death of her husband, exactly, though that was the cause of it. What she missed was the camaraderie and the gossip, the flamboyant complaint and the laughter, the shared purpose of dozens of working women pulling together. To her specifications, of course; a grown-up echo of the games of her childhood, when the other children pelted through the fields and thorn-hedges but always came back to her sitting collected on her mound of rocks. As a landowning widow and mother, well-born, she was now granted more authority and autonomy than most women would ever possess. She knew the value of it. But at times like this she found it was not quite enough. Where were the rases, the dejaz-matches, the bishops? Where was the sense of being at the centre of things? She said none of this, of course, just greeted her guests warmly, smiling, bowing, bowing.
TUESDAY
The next day the crowd was thinner, composed more of relatives than of churchmen and nuns. Moving among them, persuading them to eat more, and more – upon your father’s death, upon my death, but you must! No, not that poor scrap, don’t be silly. Here, here’s an especially tasty bit, let me feed you, no, no, open your mouth – she felt more at ease, more able to give herself up to chat, to the play of anecdote and memory, to her glee in wit so sharp the victim took a moment to notice a mortal wounding.
WEDNESDAY
After the first and the second and the third rounds of coffee, after the frankincense had melted into the coals and filled the room with banking clouds of sweet smoke, after her benediction, said in a monotone, hands before her, palms to the heavens – May He bring justice to the wronged, and to the poor and the oppressed. May He clothe the naked and liberate the crucified. May He protect us from sudden death, and bless this house with longevity and with plenty. May He who brought you safe from all your lands return you there in safety – her guests replied, Amen, Amen, Amen and collected up their shawls and walking sticks and loaded their animals and kissed her on each cheek, one, two, three, four, five times and bowed through the gate and away. When they had gone she turned back into the house, loneliness and worry momentarily at bay, and asked the servant girl to sweep up the grass and attend to lunch.
Back in the main room she reached for the radio and switched it on.
…Just as the bee whose hive has been disturbed becomes violent so also have some opponents abandoned all restraint. But despite that they have been unable to hold back a growing awareness among the Ethiopian people.
The individual words made sense, in and of themselves, but…
The few selfish persons who fight merely for their own interests and for personal power, who are obstacles to progress and who, like a cancer, impede the nation’s development, are now replaced. And I have, as of today, agreed to serve you and Ethiopia as a salaried official under the Constitution.
I? Who is this?
Know that all decisions and appointments declared by the new Ethiopian government formed by me, and supported by the armed forces, the police, the younger educated Ethiopians and by the whole Ethiopian people, are effective from this moment on.
What new Ethiopian government? Where is the emperor? What is going on?
People of Ethiopia! Let your unity be stronger than iron bonds! Today is the beginning of a new era for Ethiopia in the eyes of the world.
She sent a servant chasing to a neighbour’s to place a phone call, but the lines were silent. There was no way to reach Addis.
There was only the radio. She sat in front of it, willing it to explain. ‘I’, it transpired, was the crown prince. The emperor was abroad. But the younger educated Ethiopians, the younger educated Ethiopians – what was her son doing now? Where was he? The radio had no answer to that question. When finally she peeled herself away from it to go to bed she prayed and prayed and could not sleep.
THURSDAY
It was not yet light when she dragged herself aching out of her bed and into the cold back yard for her ablutions. Eucalyptus leaves rattled faintly, silver-green sabres. A cock crowed, harsh in the stillness.
Coffee, and the radio again. The aims of the new government, ‘peacefully established in the Empire under the direction and leadership of the crown prince’, with Ras Imru as prime minister. Ras Imru? How interesting. She had known he was critical, progressive even. Young people currently shut out of education would, it was promised, be welcomed back in. There would be new factories, and much help given to farmers.
A group of bandits under the influence of two traitors – former generals Merid Mengesha and Kebedè Gebré – opened fire on peaceful civilians demonstrating for the new Representative People’s Government. Several of the civilians were killed in this inhuman massacre and many were wounded –
He’s dead! He’s dead! My son is dead! Howling, undone. He’s dead! He’s dead!
Neighbours, brought running, ‘Ayzosh, you don’t know for sure’ – He’s dead! He’s dead!
‘Hush,’ said one of her neighbours. ‘HUSH!’
Urgent announcement. Urgent announcement. All people must evacuate themselves as soon as possible from the area near the railway station, near Mitchell Cotts commercial offices, Menelik Square, Mesfin Harer District and the airport.
They brought her a sash, and helped her fumbling hands tie it tight about her waist, to hold the pieces of her together.
On the radio one voice claimed imminent ceasefire, another claimed increasing support for the new government. Troops were stationed across Addis. A curfew was declared throughout the empire.
She
curled up on the floor, hugging herself, rocking. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead.
FRIDAY
The anniversary of her husband’s death. Seven years. Each year she cooked – or had cooked, if she was in Addis – split-pea sauce in a large pot, exactly forty-two fresh injera, and a gan of tella, and had all of it carried up the rise to the church, where priests from Ba’ata and often from other Gondar churches stood at her husband’s grave and prayed for his soul. After communion they gathered near the eastern entrance to the church, the so-called gateway of peace, and there they ate the food she provided in required payment for their pains. There was so much that often they kept some, and ate it for a second day.
The anniversary both compounded and mocked her present grief. She sat unresponsive among household and neighbours, and the radio, to which they all now felt umbilically attached, talked on and on, one voice replacing another, until, finally, an announcement that the revolt had failed and the emperor was home. The army were on their way to free royals held captive in Genetè Le’ul.
The memory of the emperor’s palace came to her so clearly she could almost feel it: the tall narrow windows, the columned portico, the palms, the steps climbing into nowhere – They were reading a list. Le’ul-Ras Seyoum Mengesha, grandson of Emperor Yohannes IV, and governor of Tigré, dead. Ras Abebè Aregai, chairman of the Council of Ministers and minister of defence, dead. Mekonnen Habtè-Wold, minister of commerce and industry, brother of the deputy prime minister, dead…on it went, fifteen dead, many of high rank, shot at close quarters in a locked room, blood sprayed across carpets and wooden floorboards, high leather-backed chairs, pale pillars. Brigadier-General Mekonnen Deneqè, hit by many bullets, alive, but badly wounded. She imagined the huge body, felled and suffering, and could not understand when the tears were going to stop.
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