The Wife's Tale

by Aida Edemariam

  The rebels had written, they said, the ‘first honourable chapter in Ethiopia’s history, which will be remembered forever’, even though it had failed. That if it had succeeded, it would have freed the Ethiopian people from poverty, ignorance, slavery. That the coup leaders ‘did not value their own honour and wealth but were only instigated by seeing our problems and suffering’, and should be avenged. That ‘our fortunate and happy brothers, Mengistu and Germamé’ – Ah, her son’s new friend. It was a piece of the puzzle that slotted into place so easily it was as if it was already there.

  The moment communications reopened she began searching for Edemariam. Oh, the wonder of his voice! I’m fine, mother, please don’t cry, I’m fine. Relief and tears, anger and tears, when she discovered the massacre was an invention meant to turn people against the generals; no one had in fact shot at demonstrators. There had been fierce fighting, however, and bombing from the air, and many civilians had died before the ceasefire was finally announced. And yes, her son had marched against the emperor with all the other students, and after the march had been broken up and they had returned to their dormitories he had been craning out of a window to see what was going on when a bullet whipped past his ear. So her instincts had not been entirely amiss.

  For weeks the country thrummed with stories, patched together from unofficial eyewitness accounts and official statements in attempts to produce a semi-comprehensible whole. She heard of blood flowing through familiar streets, of bodies toppling off Ginfillé Bridge into the brown water below, of days and nights of gunfire. She heard of a bounty placed on the heads of the Neway brothers and of their capture on Mount Zuqwala, the holy volcano just south of Addis Ababa. Some said it was Germamé who shot his brother and killed himself; others that Mengistu shot Germamé. Both stories caused her to raise her hands to the heavens and pray for their souls. That one side of Mengistu’s handsome face was blasted through, but he lived and was taken to hospital. That the emperor ordered Germamé’s body strung up in front of St George’s Cathedral.

  For days the emperor’s level voice scraped through her living room. ‘You all know how much We trusted and how much authority We reposed in those few who have risen against Us. We educated them. We gave them authority. We did this in order that they might improve the education, the health and the standard of living of Our people. We confided to them the implementation of some of the many plans We have formulated for the advancement of Our nation. And now Our trust has been betrayed…The judgement of God is upon them; wherever they go, they will never escape it.’

  Prison camps were built and filled. Students were pardoned (though many signed letters accepting any future punishment for a ‘traitorous act against a parent who has brought us up, who is our father and our mother’). Asratè Kassa, who had organised much of the counter-attack on behalf of the crown, was promoted to president of the Senate, while his nephew became governor-general of Begemdir. Brigadier-General Mekonnen Deneqè became minister of state in charge of security. Newspapers indulged in elaborate puns, reported gleefully by those who could read to those who could not, and underground leaflets were everywhere. ‘What is sinful is to be ruled by despots, not to rise against them!’ proclaimed one. ‘If the branches of the forest trees united they could trap the lion,’ argued another.

  A few months after the attempted coup, Mengistu Neway was brought to trial. He had not intended bloodshed, he said. Leaders were meant, as the emperor himself had claimed, to ‘be servants of the people, not vice versa’, but few remembered that. It was time for a fairer Ethiopia. Throughout the seven-week trial the city was tense, the army restive and demanding higher pay, which, from a shaky-voiced emperor, they got. After seven weeks Mengistu was, to no one’s surprise, convicted, taken to the main market, and hanged.

  * * *

  —

  After the rainy season she travelled to Addis. Abunè Theophilos, now deputy to Ethiopia’s first independent patriarch, had written to the World Council of Churches on her son’s behalf, and it had responded with a scholarship. And Edemariam, who had never forgotten watching his brother die, had chosen to study medicine.

  She knew she should be happy, she was happy, but she was also desolate. She sat and watched as her son prepared himself. She fussed and fidgeted. She could send him off with food, but of course it would not last. What could he possibly eat, in a place called Canada? He would fade away, lonely, among strangers.

  I had a dream, she told him. I saw a mark on your forehead. It means that in the first country you go to there will be someone to meet you. Someone who will help you, like your mother or your father. He smiled at her, but they both had to know this was a reach, a brave flailing for comfort. Not long after he arrived in Montreal he sent her a photograph of himself standing at a stove, stirring something in a pot, as reassurance; she composed a poem saying that at last she could sleep. In fact, he never did learn to cook.

  The emperor no longer had an audience with each student who went abroad – there were too many of them, and since the failed coup he had removed himself somewhat from day-to-day involvement in education. But he had been at her son’s graduation, handing out diplomas, and his message, as always, was clear: go, study well, then return to serve your country. The irony in this was now lost on nobody: it was those he had sent abroad who brought back ideas of governance that ran so counter to his own; or, as the emperor himself put it, ‘Trees that are planted do not always bear the desired fruit.’

  The Jesuits who ran the university had given Edemariam long grey trousers and a blue blazer, the emperor had provided a knee-length coat, and one day just before he left he donned his finery and they all went to Trinity Cathedral. The sun, testing its rays after months of rain, warmed the dark stone and burned through their clothes so after the service Edemariam took off his coat and laid it carefully over a fence while he talked to his mother, his sisters, his brother. He noticed a boy loitering, but there were always boys loitering, and he thought nothing of it. When he turned back for his coat, however, it was gone. At once he was running – and so was she, dignified widow though she was meant to be, picking up her skirts and chasing round the fence, up the steps, into the church, collaring the gibbering child whose attempt at innocence collapsed at the first slap. ‘It’s in the crypt! It’s in the crypt!’ Edemariam retrieved it from under a pile of dirty blankets, laughing and shaking with relief at a bad omen averted.

  They said goodbye to the archbishop, and to the brigadier-general, who beckoned her son over and handed him more cash than he had ever handled in his life. She organised a small party, her children, a few relatives, neighbours. It was meant to be a joyful send-off, but her grief was catching. Guest after guest turned away to hide eyes glittering with tears. Everyone tried to bolster her, saying how brave she was, how lucky; the archbishop told her off: ‘He’s going to study. Do you know how many people have not had his or your good fortune? You must stop!’ but she knew now how this kind of bravery and this kind of luck actually felt and she could not be persuaded. The day before he left she sang to her son a verse she would sing often over the coming years:

  Parting is death

  For those who love,

  Parting is death

  For those who love

  To be buried standing.

  She was startled when he joined in. He was not a singer – it was the first time she had heard him sing anything apart from childhood ditties and scraps of liturgy, and it would be the last. She hugged him as if she would strangle him, while he tried to comfort her. Ayzosh, Nannyé. Ayzosh. When she went to see him off at the airport, she felt she might dissolve with sorrow. What if she never saw him again?

  * * *

  —

  Every Friday she washed, standing in a wide metal tub while a servant girl or granddaughter poured jugs of water over her then rubbed her down, scrubbing her back, her arms, her thighs, until every curve and plane of skin offered itself up tingling to the air. She lifted clean white clothes over her
head, embroidered white muslin, a matching netela, a headscarf. She drank coffee, as on every other day, except that on Fridays she took more time over the ceremony – cut grass laid down, her best carpet, the best incense, making sure every step, from roasting to pounding to the three cycles of pouring and drinking, was properly, unhurriedly honoured. Then, not every Friday, but often, and especially on certain feasts of the archangel Mikael, she would go to the chest in her bedroom and lift out strings of coloured beads, red, green, yellow, blue; long necklaces of black silk wound in gold and ending in a wide gold ring; bracelets to climb her wrists and traceries of silver and gold to rest on her ankles; she threaded rings onto her fingers, then, spraying it on the insides of her wrists first, brought to her neck, to the front of her dress, touches of Sudanese perfume.

  When dusk began to gather the houses in, huddling them under a sky brighter and somehow higher in these moments just after the sun had left; when the shadowed hills were crowned with gold and kites owned the heavens; when the streets filled with a sense of focused hurry, of errands to finish before the light was switched off altogether; when the air thickened with cooking smoke and a day’s worth of kicked-up dust, she walked out of the compound and, accompanied by a daughter or a granddaughter or by Alemantè, turned right toward the market, then left toward the mosque and the Muslim quarter. From a low thatched house on a narrow lane came the sound of voices, and the intermittent, exploratory thump of a drum. She knocked and was admitted. The children were welcome, and the girls would often stay for a while, but Alemantè always declined.

  The room was thick with incense, the light from a few small lamps struggling against the haze, the gloom full of people, mostly women, sitting on the floor. They smelled of perfume too, the scents competed with each other; around their necks and arms and ankles hung beads and chains like her own. She handed the offering she had brought to an attendant – a pitcher of beer, or some food, or money, and bent to take off her shoes. Then in bare feet she walked over to the far end of the room, where a curtain was drawn across a raised-earth dais. She kneeled, and kissed the ground before it.

  Greetings.

  ‘Welcome, Yetemegnu,’ came a voice from behind the curtain. ‘Are you well?’

  I am worried, madam, worried about my son, I have not had a letter for months. Or, my younger son is ill again. Will he ever be well? Or, my daughter is unhappy, I do not know how to help her. Or, I have been ill myself, madam. My heart aches. I am afraid, always, I worry and I cannot sleep.

  Sometimes the reply came in voices and languages not alien exactly, but moved a step or two sideways, away from their daylight sound and meaning. So salt became the king of stones, and water mead of the desert; a dress was a veil, and sleep the bringer of sadness. The voices spoke of the future, or redrew the past. They spoke to unseen personages – now, you know you must not torment Yetemegnu in this way. I have told you and told you not to, and you must listen. They promised comfort, or delivered warnings.

  Other times the woman behind the curtain would reply in her own voice. Ayzosh Yetemegnu, take heart. These things happen, and they pass. Or, are you sure you have not offended your zar? Have you prepared your offerings in exactly the manner I told you? A black chicken, remember, throat cut and left outside –

  Yes, madam. Of course. I will do that tomorrow. And she would back away and take her place on the floor among the women, who welcomed her in. Looking about her, listening as others confessed their hopes and their troubles to the voice behind the curtain, breathing the close air, she began to ease.

  Eve had thirty children, everyone here believed, and when God came calling she feared for them and hid fifteen of the most lovely away. But God knew she had hidden them, and decreed that henceforth they would remain in darkness. Zars, beautiful creatures with no toes and holes in the centres of their palms, were their descendants, who haunted the woods and glades of the northern plateaus. Like humans, the fallible children of light, they lived in families, they ate and drank, they quarrelled and they loved, but they used tree stumps as tables, gazelles and antelope were their cattle, elephants and lions their steeds. And when they wished to come into the light they chose a human as their horse, and rode him or her – though most often her – into submission.

  Some could be malevolent, but most could be persuaded into kindness – and, importantly, protection – with gifts of perfume, with jewellery, with sacrifice. Over the years she had discovered that she had more than one zar: Gumay Lelé, a zar from Tigré; Ateté, an Oromo female; a Muslim zar who caused her to speak in something approaching Arabic, and to puff, awkward, at cigarettes; Shanqit, female servant of Rahelo, greatest of the female zars; and above all, Seyfu Chengeré, commander of the right guard of the zars. His gift was to understand medicine, his totem was a lemon tree, and his ally and adviser the Christian saint Gebrè-Menfes Qiddus, who travelled the world with sixty lions and sixty leopards and once obtained forgiveness for the people of Arabia by hanging from a cliff for thirty years, allowing his body to be pecked by birds. Gebrè-Menfes Qiddus lived on Mount Zuqwala and secured God’s mercy for Ethiopia by placing on one side of a scale straw and weeds, for her sins, and on the other honey, milk and wheat, for her penances. Each zar required offerings – particular shades of sheep or hens or goats, intuited by reading coffee dregs, or the fat marbling through meat, or arrangements of thrown-down pebbles. Zars were always hungry, and especially hungry simply to be remembered – hence the daily coffee ceremony. Sometimes there was so much meat in the house and so many strictures about who could and could not eat it that her daughter, discomfited, felt she could not invite school friends round.

  Yetemegnu understood how challenging all this was for her children, but she also knew this space, and these rituals, were necessary to her, that they were generous, and supportive. Calming. And so she kept going to the zar-house down the road. There food was served, roast grain, or bread, or small morsels of spiced tripe and liver, blessed by the zar-doctor. Sometimes a bottle of araqi was passed around. Coffee was poured and drunk with reverence, for in this room each tray, with its round-bottomed coffee pot, its delicate china finjals, and its incense burner, raised, occasionally, or, if it contained certain aromatic roots, passed under the women’s skirts, was dedicated to an individual zar. Sometimes a tincture of healing leaves was handed round too.

  The drum slipped into a regular rhythm, slow and deep, an exaggerated heartbeat. The sounds from behind the curtain began to change, the grunts and pants becoming cries, faster and faster, the drum climbing with them. A scream. And silence. Finally the curtain was drawn aside to reveal a very old woman, so tiny and thin it seemed impossible such great sounds could have come from her.

  After a pause the drum began again. One of the women rose, and began to dance. Another joined her, and another. Some led with their shoulders, others with their hips. Some jumped and skipped, others bit and snarled. Some danced vertical dances of atonement, others dances of mercy and acquittal. Occasionally they beat themselves, as a rider might a too-slow horse. Sometimes women chewed on crushed glass, others walked through embers. Her half-sister, from whom she had received her first zar, in that dark hut long ago, used to claim that when possessed she could put a glowing coal into her mouth and cause no injury. All of them, echoing the behaviour expected of brides on their wedding night, attempting to hold in balance a struggle for freedom and inevitable capitulation, of joy and pain; all ending by moving faster and faster, until they collapsed, exhausted, and those who were watching them clapped and clapped.

  The room was murky with smoke. She watched until she felt her conscious self melt away and her body take over, felt her limbs begin to move and her head begin to thrust, and then she knew nothing, nothing at all, until she heard the clapping, and slowly, slowly, opened her eyes to look about her. Her eyes met other eyes, encouraging, eyes holding her close, holding her safe.

  Some of the lamps had guttered out. A couple of women bowed and left. Her body ached, but her mi
nd was still.

  MEGABIT

  THE SEVENTH MONTH

  Dry. Burning of bush to keep locusts away, and to clear new fields. Peaches and other cultivated fruits ripen, and garden crops are harvested. Caravans hurry to complete tours before the rains. Cattle pastured far into the bush.

  When the spot appeared in the sky, she watched it as though it was she herself who was bringing it in to land, noting every tip of its wings, feeling every drop in altitude as though it was occurring somewhere in her stomach. She watched impatient as men scattered the sheep, sticks flashing about their narrow muddy rumps. Watched as the aeroplane bumped to a stop on the grass, the propellers slowed from blur to blades, and the stairs were folded out.

  Ililililil!

  The airport was full of people, relatives, schoolmates, friends, all come to welcome her son.

  There he was! Dark and thin and looking for her.

  Ililililil! Ililililil!

  She bowed to the ground in thanks, and then she was holding his head tight to hers, burying her face in his neck, breathing him in, kissing him as though she would swallow him whole from love and missing him.

  He smelled different. Of sharp air and a sweet clean fruit she could not name. Of new materials – plastic and cloth, cold metal and milled wood.

  Ililililil!

  They climbed into a taxi. A line of cars followed, and then more people followed the cars, walking and singing along the long road from the airport, past the army barracks and the hospital, the careful rows of Italian-built farmhouses, over the bridges and the rocky riverbeds, answering onlookers who asked who is this, why the dancing? ‘It’s Aleqa Tsega’s son, become a doctor, he’s back for a holiday, from five years in Canada.’