That first day she fed everyone expensive wheaten bread, because, she said, she had been instructed to do so in a dream. She moved among her guests, enjoining them to eat, delighting in the atmosphere, the festival of it, but always, whoever she was talking to, whatever questions she answered, she kept an eye on her son.
He held himself so carefully. He bowed and greeted people and kissed their cheeks and answered their questions, no one could fault his manners, and yet it was as though something within him was sitting away from the hubbub, staring. And he was not eating, she could see he was not eating. Eventually she took his best friend from school aside. Here. Take this food, and take him somewhere else, somewhere quiet. Make sure he eats. So his friend drew him away, into the street and up to the castles, where it was still among the trees, where bees buzzed in and out of their hives, and ivy pushed blind fingers through tumbled-down walls.
The priests danced, she always claimed, for eight days. They danced until their turbans came unwound and drooped and bobbed along with the drums. Minstrels came, and made everyone clap and laugh. Her cousin bought a sheep, and she bought a sheep, many guests brought something, there was food and beer for everyone.
* * *
—
But he had to leave, eventually, had to go back to Canada to finish his training, and after she had seen him off, she returned to the routines of her widowhood.
She had had her favourite homiliaries copied onto parchment and after communion each morning a deacon came to the house to read them to her, just as her aunt had been read to by the man who would become her husband, all those years ago. Sometimes, placing a stool at a decent distance from him, she would sit to listen; sometimes she went about her work, stirring a popping pan of shirro, chopping onions and garlic fine, while his voice ran the familiar words together, curving and lifting like the lengths of cotton on the weaver’s loom down in the market. When after an hour or so he closed the wooden end-boards and slipped the book back into the battered case that smelled so strongly of incense and hide and decades of handling, she felt a pang of loss. But there was cooking to be done, rent to be received, a store of firewood to be built up for the rainy season, and so she would feed the deacon and send him on his way.
Alemitu had moved out of the main house, to two rooms in the compound that she had made her own. And she had met a man she liked, a trader from Debrè Tabor who bought low and in bulk – teff, niger seed – and waited for the price to go up before selling it on. She found him good company. He was an accomplished cook, an ally whom, importantly, she herself had chosen, and when her mother murmured about unorthodox arrangements she snapped, ‘It’s none of your business! I am grown, and I am not a nun. I must live my own life.’
Yetemegnu’s youngest, Maré, was still at home, too, and when she was not in school or doing homework (about which Yetemegnu would tolerate no dissent) they worked together in the garden or around the house, polishing, spinning, cooking. She hoisted Maré, far too big for this now, onto her back and went out to plant cucumbers, because, she said, to have a child strapped to your back at the time of planting would make the fruits strong and healthy, the absurdity of it making her laugh so hard her daughter felt the shaking deep in her own body. As the rainy season approached, women began to bring in firewood, eucalyptus from the land at Bisnit. The piles rose up the walls of the house until she called Maré and handed some to her, saying, here, take this to our neighbours, so they may have a taste too. She did the same with berberé and with shirro – take a share to all our neighbours, especially those poorer than we are, and then we will be ready for winter.
And as they worked they talked. Advice, of course – respect your elders, no gossiping ever, give generously, in secret if necessary, don’t sit with your legs apart like that, stand up straight, work hard – but confidences too. How much she still missed her own mother. I loved her so much and she died so early. She called me nigisté, have I told you that? My queen. Yes, Nannyé. And before she had her fill of me, before I had my fill of her, she died. Yes, Nannyé. Her daughter listened, and began to understand the gilding need gives to memory, and also that what was being offered was everything her mother had never had, and had not yet had the chance to give.
So when Maré got love letters at school – she was spirited and pretty and scandals and suspicions notwithstanding came from a good family – she trusted her mother enough to bring them back and read them out. And when she fell in love herself she was, unlike her friends, allowed to bring the boy to the house and talk to him there.
There were strict instructions, however. Be careful, Maré, my honey. He is a nice boy and serious and I want you to be happy, your sisters and brothers have been successful in their education and I want this for you, too. She said nothing about Alemitu, although she was beginning to regret, deeply, her earlier refusal of training in Addis. Be careful, Maré. Please.
Then when the sun went down and after they had eaten they would put the radio on, and Maré would get to her feet and dance – dances from Gondar, from Tigré or from Shewa, watching her mother all the while, for the moment when she could take her hand and persuade her, laughing and demurring, to join in. Minstrels often stopped by, knowing they would be welcome, and Alemitu, and for a couple of hours they would be united in movement and music and lamplight.
One day Yetemegnu called to Alemitu and handed her an umbrella. Not the kind of umbrella with a canvas shade that, rare in her childhood, had become ordinary, the kind of thing any lady might carry to ward off sun or rain, but a ceremonial umbrella, shivering with tassels and braided with gold. Take this to Abunè Aregay – a church outside Gondar, possessed of a tabot revered above most other tabots, and a reputation for encouraging fertility. Alemitu did as she requested, and nine months later gave birth to a baby girl. Tigist, or Patience.
MIYAZIA
THE EIGHTH MONTH
Autumn. Light rains. As the soil softens ploughing begins, especially after Lent. Peasants trade for new iron plough points. Prices of meat, grain, pepper, double in preparation for the end of the fasting. Second big wedding season after Easter.
Outside the mules were waiting, but she refused to be rushed, checking and rechecking she had everything she needed. Good clothes, of course, she had to underline her position in the world, but not too good. A small cloth bag, hung around her neck in easy smelling distance, containing garlic, crushed chalk and rue. Lentils in the saddlebag. Also dried globe thistle, a piece of iron, and a needle. She closed her mouth tight, then pulled her shemma up to her nose, into one nostril of which she had stuffed a small wad of rue, for extra protection. The rest of her face she set stern; she could not risk betraying the slightest glimmer of joy, or of pride – anything that might excite envy. At last she was ready, and they were clattering up the street.
Beneath her the mule’s back moved, narrow and warm. It was not an especially healthy animal – it seemed to her it could not see very well – which she had pointed out to the drovers when they arrived, but not vociferously enough to overcome their insistence that it was fine, a king among beasts, everything was fine. There were no reins, either, so she gripped the pommel as they left the Shinta and began to climb. The mule huffed and shook. She leaned forward to help it, as its forelegs bent nearly double and its hind legs stretched out, dislodging stones that rang against each other or rolled down the hill behind them, making jagged music as they went. Ché! shouted the drovers, slapping its rump. Ché!
The shepherds’ voices carried across the slopes. A calm night? A calm night. It was a long time since she had been to Gonderoch Mariam, and it still held potent memories for her, of flight and of pain – but also of many days after the war, when the whole family had made their way up the slopes to inspect their land, checking on the administration of the church (in the case of her husband) and visiting friends while the children played, kicking footballs across a flat summit that seemed to extend into the sky.
They tethered the mules outside the church,
and she went in to kiss its walls before making her way to a low constellation of huts nearby. Chickens scratched. A couple of children looked up at her. Where are your fathers? A wide-eyed pause, and a scurrying exit.
Their fathers, the farmers who tended this land, had sent their produce down to her house in the city for as long as she could remember. When, on recent trips to Addis, she had noticed the banners the students carried on their now-yearly demonstrations – Choice to the People! Land to the Tiller! – it had not really occurred to her that these attitudes, so foreign to everything she knew and assumed, might have traction in the provinces. But the tithes from Gonderoch Mariam had dwindled, and now some of the farmers were refusing to send anything at all, which was why she was here. Why were they doing this, overturning the natural order of things?
She knew some of the farmers, needing to supplement their income, were blacksmiths too, and their wives were often potters. Hence her elaborate precautions before setting off, her globe thistle and her rue, her garlic, her iron and her needle. For craftsmen in general, but Jewish blacksmiths especially, were believed to possess the evil eye, and the malaise caused by the evil eye was strong, stronger than anything a doctor or even a powerful zar could cure. Blacksmiths, who were said to inherit this sorcery from their fathers, and to depend on it for their ironwork skills, were thought to become hyenas at night, or to ride hyenas across the countryside, looking for victims. In the day they hid in plain sight, as men and women with shining, searching eyes; most did not in themselves mean any harm, but could not curb their power, which searched for those with outstanding qualities: wealth, beauty, gladness. In times of war or epidemic Jews suffered terrible retributions from neighbours who blamed them for their trouble. Already separated by religion and economic opportunity, they were further shunned and called Falasha, which means exile.
She feared them, but she needed them too, and so when the children’s fathers came she was diplomatic and cordial as well as on her guard. ‘I have sent enough of my harvest,’ one said. ‘There will be not a kernel more.’ His beautiful young son, questioned by her, looked expressionless back at her and said not a word. ‘He’s deaf,’ said another. ‘Deaf. He doesn’t hear you.’
When she returned a few weeks later she was told this was not true, that the boy could hear perfectly well. She was there for his funeral, because there had been an accident. The boy’s father, who forged ploughshares, had been working his bellows when a pipe exploded, sending white-hot shards tearing through his son. After the ceremony, after the fragments of bone and flesh had been retrieved and interred, she spoke to the father, expressing sorrow. ‘God has quarrelled with me,’ the man said. Yes, she said, God does many things.
They went back a different way than they had come, shorter but interrupted by a wide ditch running with water. The other route was perfectly serviceable, she said to the drovers, but her mind was elsewhere and again she was overruled. It’s fine, it’s a good mule, they said, it can leap over.
But it could not. Its hooves slipped and she watched as its receding back crashed into the water, throwing her clear. I’m not wet, she thought. What luck. And then the pain arrived.
* * *
—
When they had first wrapped the arm up no one had thought to straighten it. Blood had collected at her elbow and every time she moved her arm she screamed. Eventually they called the local healer, who made a poultice of ground fenugreek he changed every three days. The bones healed slowly, and they healed askew.
But however tempted she might have been to stay at home, to cradle her weakened arm and run gentle fingers over its new contours, the courts had their own rhythm, and very soon she had to slip back into her layers of dresses and walk not to the courthouse, but to Bisnit, the land just up from Ba’ata that her family had ploughed for decades, and that the monks had claimed.
She stood in the cool groves and watched as the men she had brought with her cast about for landmarks. The sun, hot and strong out in the open, here only dappled the ground. They could hear the cool trickle of the stream as it worked its way between the rocks, and birds, singing among themselves. The court recorder stood slightly apart, writing in a notebook, face giving nothing away.
Alemantè was there too, though he was now no longer a boy. When the court in Addis Ababa had ordered her to find as many witnesses as she could, people who might remember where the boundaries of her land lay, he had come back to Gondar to help her. The two of them had waited in the marketplace while these strange men had assembled about them. Alemantè, having just finished a law degree – a choice prompted by the endless childhood trips to the courts with Yetemegnu – had wanted to know exactly what qualified them and had quizzed each in turn. I came here as a child, with my father, came the invariable answer. He was conducting business and wanted me to learn how it worked, so I followed him everywhere. He gave me roasted wheat or chickpeas as a reward. Now the children were men, and wandered among the eucalyptus trees, remembering.
Here, they said. Here from this creek that goes through the electricity generator, then runs into the Qeha, to there.
Or, See this spur of land? Here.
When the court recorder had finished writing they all dispersed, and a few days later she and Alemantè took a lumbering bus to Addis Ababa.
She stayed with him this time, in a small flat he had rented – as did, at various points, and for various holidays, three of his brothers, two of her daughters (Tiruworq between nursing school and compulsory countryside service, Zenna before starting as a teacher), Teklé, a serving girl and her baby. Being at home most days, waiting for court appointments, she took charge of feeding whoever was there; making sure that even if there wasn’t quite enough at least Alemantè, who had just won a job at the recently constituted ministry of land reform, was always well fed.
They piled into the small rooms, kind, polite, loving – eat, upon my death eat, no, not that, this; don’t go out there! The sun will make you ill, you’ll catch your death of cold! They agreed their mother needed protecting, and held to their policy of not telling her anything about which she might worry. But they hid things from each other too. Molla, for instance, had at one point lived with Alemantè for months, but apart from frequent late nights and, one tense evening, the appearance of a poster of Lenin on their wall, gave little clue to what he was thinking. Years of watching his mother had made him instinctively anti-monarchist even before he became caught up in student politics and the demonstrations that were occurring, with increasing confidence, each year: for civil liberties, educational reform, or the people of Vietnam; against concentration camps or the government of Rhodesia, and always, always (even if the students had never been to the countryside and did not know a single farmer) for Land to the Tiller. He took a teaching job and during the day preached equality along with geography and biology; at night he learned Russian, and read a translation of Das Kapital. And then he too won a scholarship. He travelled to Gondar to say goodbye to his mother and then, via the Sudan (to camouflage his final destination from the authorities) to Moscow, to study medicine.
It wasn’t too long, this time, before she received her court summons. There were three judges sitting that day, and in front of each of them arguments written by her nephew. Not for him the grandstanding, the physical flamboyance, the circumlocutions and resonant phrase-making of the traditional lawyers: his arguments were self-consciously, proudly modern – numbered, clear, and brief.
And not for the judges either, as it turned out. She had braced herself for months of appeals and counter-appeals, but they never came. In under three months – an unheard-of speed – the judges called them back to announce their decision. They had found nothing to disagree with. The land was hers.
GINBOT
THE NINTH MONTH
Light rains, spots of fresh green grass. Storks fly north. Women prepare fuel for the rainy season: deadwood, and sundried cow dung coated with mud. Caravans hurry home from Sudan.
Fis
hing in rivers. Children sing of the country’s wellbeing to storks, men and women picnic outside, celebrating the birthday of Mary.
She dreamt the emperor came to her on a small black mule, glossy and groomed. Back straight, eyes calm, hands quiet over the animal’s neck. His cape fell in heavy folds onto a European saddle.
Follow me, he said. Take your mule and follow me. So she picked up her mule’s reins and followed him.
They travelled until they came to a high building. The emperor dismounted and, unsaddling his mule, pointed it westwards. It ambled toward the horizon and dropped out of sight.
Follow me, he said again. And so she followed him, up into the tower. The walls were of marble, and they dazzled her. The stairs were without end. At last they came to a door. Low, oddly placed, it reminded her of the entrance to the undercroft at Ba’ata. The emperor opened it and walked in, and then it was as though the ground sank beneath his feet, engulfing him.
She looked about her at the smooth floors and featureless walls and realised she was alone. Panic overtook her. What if someone came? They would think she was a thief. They would arrest her. They would kill her. She began to run, up steps, down steps, up, down, till her breath roared in her ears and the floor billowed at her, mocking.
Eventually a window appeared and she rushed toward it and looked out. It was high above the ground, but craning she could see underneath it a pile of manure, such as was sometimes left outside her own walls at the end of market day. Carefully, waiting after each move until her trembling had subsided a little, she climbed out and, praying, slid down.
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