She did not know how long she had been sitting on the roadside when a man appeared, walking toward her. In one hand he held a carafe and in the other a pitcher. Please! she called out. Please, I can’t move, I am shaking so much I can’t move.
He crossed the road. ‘Healer of the world, what have we here?’ And he put the vessels down and began to help her along the road, supporting her when her knees gave out, holding her when she could not move at all.
They came to a low house. A woman sat outside it baking bread. A pale woman, stately, unsurprised to see her. ‘Take care of her,’ the man said. ‘I entrust her to you.’ And he went on his way.
The woman smiled and held out a piece of fresh bread. She accepted, cupping both hands and bowing, but she was shaking still, looking about her for the pursuers she was sure would appear, and she could not eat.
* * *
—
Her son’s best friend came to see her, and to read her a letter. I have found my life partner, wrote Edemariam. Frances is a fellow student, a doctor like me. She is Canadian. I know you will have imagined me marrying an Ethiopian girl, but it is a long time since I lived in Ethiopia. I like her, and I hope you can give us your blessing.
He would later hear that at first she had been upset by this, that yes, a mixed marriage had not been quite what she had in mind for her eldest son. And she had worried about the girl, how would she manage, in a country so different to her own? What if it didn’t work, and she went home, taking any children with her? She would never see her grandchildren again. But when finally she dictated her reply it read, ‘I will love whom you love, and I give you my blessing.’ She knew there were few Ethiopian girls who had an education to match his, although the empress had set up a school for girls, who also now went abroad to study. Her own husband had had various ideas about who Edemariam should marry, and it would usually have fallen to her to implement them, or even to supply her own suggestions, but who was she to do that, in this new, modern world?
She travelled to Addis Ababa and the airport to meet them. She kissed the ground in thanks for their safe coming, she kissed her son and she kissed his new wife. She sat in the foyer of a hotel and smiled at her daughter-in-law, and her daughter-in-law smiled back. A pale girl, pale even for a foreigner, with long dark hair piled in a braid on top of her head and thoughtful eyes. She reached over and patted Frances on the thigh, comfortingly, realising as she did so that her inability to speak English was making her behave as though the girl was deaf. So she said, Enaté, ihité. Ayzosh. My mother, my sister. Take heart. ‘Egzieryistiling,’ said Frances. Thank you. Then they looked at each other and smiled again, unable, for the moment, to proceed.
Back in Gondar she haunted the house of a neighbour who had acquired a telephone. When her children called – often, as requested – she would hurry across the road, go down on her knees, and give thanks for the bare fact of the squat machine, praising its inventor and the God who had inspired him. Everyone laughed at her for it – Nannyé, we have had telephones since Menelik’s day! – but she didn’t care. It made her so happy. She felt the same way about cars and about aeroplanes – all things that brought her children close to her – suppressing the fact that they also took them away again. Ritual dispatched, she would take the handset. ’Allo? ’Allo?
And so she tracked their doings, Tiruworq nursing, Zenna teaching. Edemariam and Frances working, almost immediately, at the Hailè Selassie I Hospital opposite Genetè Le’ul, which had, after the attempted coup, been given with much fanfare to the university. She worried when Edemariam was sent to Harar for countryside service, worried about his wife walking through the streets, about the attention that followed foreigners, the shouts of ‘Ferenj! Ferenj!’, worried about her living alone, and enjoined Teklé to look after her until Edemariam returned to establish a teaching unit at the free hospital, St Paul’s. She approved when Edemariam went to see his benefactor Theophilos, now elevated, after the death of Basilios, to patriarch of the Orthodox Church, and laughed, aghast, when she heard her new daughter-in-law had shooed a meddling visitor from a hospital room, only to find the visitor was Princess Tenagnewerq, and not much minded to do as she was told. When Edemariam and Frances were invited to one of the many receptions celebrating the wedding of the crown prince’s daughter she wanted to know every detail – how on the third or fourth evening of this vastly lavish affair they sat at the bottom end of a long table, sipping fortified mead and waiting for a banquet that took so long to arrive at least one foreign diplomat had to be carried out insensible. Or of how, in celebration of the emperor’s eightieth birthday (though a strong rumour circulated that he was in fact about eighty-five) the entire city had been smartened up, with banners, coloured lights, and bright-painted hoardings to hide the slums. How every national institution had been required to hold its own party, and how for weeks his subjects journeyed in from every corner of the country, bringing gifts.
But she also had an instinct for the things they did not tell her. Her children grew used to fielding expensive long-distance calls. I have had a dream. This son – or that daughter, or the other – is not well, is hurting, or is unhappy. Something is wrong. No, Nannyé, nothing’s wrong, don’t worry. Yes. There is something wrong. Tell me!
Sometimes she was placated, other times she stood her ground. Once she was staying with Zenna in Debrè Zeit, a bustling, jacaranda-lined town an hour’s car journey south of Addis, when she dreamed of a woman so old and so tiny she looked like a child. She even spoke like a child, or perhaps an adult’s sense of a child, a high-pitched, indistinct lisp. The little zar looked at her, then raised her arm and rang a bell. Follow me. So she followed until they came to a big house surrounded by a verandah. Through a doorway she could see Edemariam’s wife lying on her stomach on a long bed. She was facing east and reading a book. Edemariam leaned against the verandah railings. His face was dark, ashy, and down his left side, from head to toe, hovered clouds of grey and white, like cotton wool with the seeds picked out. The little zar pitter-pattered up to him. Then she grasped the upper edges of the cloud and pulled it down until it lay like an unhooked curtain, moving in folds about his feet.
Zenna? she called. Zenna? I had a dream about Edemariam. He was very ill, and now he is better.
What a good dream, said her daughter.
When she next saw her son he admitted that yes, he had been ill, hospitalised with tuberculosis contracted on the wards at St Paul’s.
The zar healed you.
No, Nannyé. You really shouldn’t believe in them. It’s backward, embarrassing. I had injections. I had medication.
* * *
—
More births, then.
After five years of not always patient waiting she persuaded her eldest to shoulder another ornate umbrella and return to the monastery. Nine months later another baby duly appeared. Nine ililta: a girl, Elsabet, on Christmas Day.
Then one rainy season she boarded a bus to Addis Ababa. On the roof and about her feet and on her lap pots and packages, baskets and cases. For weeks she and the household had been preparing everything necessary for a woman after a birth: thick porridge swimming in butter and chilli, cracked wheat, honey and oatmeal gruel.
My mother smiled and thanked her, and refused all her largesse. But you must! Upon my death you must. How will you regain your strength? My mother stayed firm. There were further shocks. She put me to sleep on my belly rather than on my back. But she will stop breathing! She will die! It had not been an easy birth, might, in fact, have resulted in at least one death if it had not occurred in hospital, but within days my mother was standing and walking about. Sit! Sit! Go back to bed! You must heal, you must take it more slowly!
Within two weeks my mother had left the house to visit a friend. Everyone was appalled by that. Forty days! Forty days are yours, in which to rest, to be cared for and waited on, and for forty days you must remain at home. And yet here she was – my mother took me outdoors, into the sunlight. But
in the sun, wailed my grandmother, a baby is open to pestilence, to relapsing fever, pneumonia, the evil eye. Oh it’s not good, it’s not good, Mary, mother of God protect her, it’s not good. Ayzosh, said my mother, who was learning Amharic, and especially important words like this; ayzosh. She will be fine. And she kept on taking me out of doors.
When I was eighty days old they all woke before dawn and carried me round the corner to Abunè Theophilos’s church, St Mary’s, where in a basement room I was stripped of my white dress and plunged howling into a font of cold water. My grandmother chose my baptismal name, Iqibtè-Mariam.
* * *
—
During the rains, when the heavy clouds lift for a moment and from underneath them sunlight reaches long fingers across mountain slopes and down into the valleys, it catches on trees: sycamore fig, juniper, wild olive and rosewood, fern pine, cedar and eucalyptus. And the fresh, rounded leaves of young eucalyptus catch the sun and reflect it back, each leaf a jubilant, quivering mirror. As they age these leaves lengthen into blue-green points that slide and dance, drawing traceries across the sky. If the women have not been through for a while, gathering fuel for cooking fires, the ground is littered with them: fresh leaves, tough but malleable, that bend and bruise and sharpen the air with their aroma. In the dry season they brown and harden, then craze and shatter, scattering brown confetti across red earth. And everywhere lies the fruit – rough conical hats with ridged seams, scored underneath with four-point, five-point, six-point stars.
The first eucalyptus trees to take root in Ethiopia were planted around St George’s Cathedral during the reign of Menelik II. They grew quickly, their trunks slim and strong, and people saw, first with surprise and then with an acute sense of utility, that after they were cut down for firewood – fast-burning, fantastically hot – new trunks rose from the roots. Within a few years eucalyptuses were everywhere, their muted silhouettes radically softening and saving a capital that had long ago burned through its native trees and faced abandonment.
By the 1970s the country felt as though it was built on them: eucalyptus supported the houses and shaded the churchyards; it held up the electric cables and spread like webs across rapidly rising buildings. Long eucalyptus branches, wrapped into heavy bundles, were strapped to women’s backs and bent them double in the dawn, men fashioned walking canes and used them to drive oxen or to sling across their shoulders as they swaggered down the roads. Eucalyptus smoke flavoured the food, the beer, the very air; a copse of mature eucalyptus meant a child’s books, a coat for school, a dowry or funeral dues; it was insurance, and it was wealth.
When she was awarded the land at Bisnit she had been awarded all the trees as well – those that stood on her land, and those she had planted on the land that now belonged to the monks. Now she cut them down and sold them, and hosted a wedding party for a relative’s daughter she had taken in to raise, in the same way she had taken Alemantè. For years she boasted about what a brilliant wedding it was. We had a huge bull slaughtered, and a cow, the sauces came out right, the beer was so good, hundreds of people were fed.
SENÉ
THE TENTH MONTH
Heavy rain, fog, storms. Fishing season. Children taught to swim before rivers turn dangerous. Intensive ploughing, seeding by broadcasting of barley, teff, wheat. Garden crops seeded and fenced.
Later she would say that was when the loneliness came – when the wedding was over and her youngest had boarded a bus for Addis and school. It had been there always, waiting, glimpsed out of the corner of her eye as she stirred split peas or picked through cracked wheat, watching from the ceiling as she lay in bed, her daughter breathing beside her, whispering through the trees when she went out into the garden to tend her pumpkins. Now the loneliness flowed into the open, dimming the sky, an ache that kept her awake into the small hours, refusing to be kept at bay.
This was to some extent a matter of perception, however, for it was also true that Alemitu was still at home, and now there were Alemitu’s two daughters. There were house servants and neighbours and the usual trickle of relations from the countryside, dropping by to sip beer, be fed, exchange, after long silent intervals, titbits of family news, and then go on their way. There was church, and there was the zar-house, and then there was, after so many years, more building work. When her son returned from Canada he had decided she could not keep living in a house with earthen floors and no modern plumbing; in gratefulness for all she had done for him he would, before he bought a home for himself, build one for her. They had discussed it off and on for months, but when I was born, and my mother’s parents arrived from Ontario to help her, my Canadian grandfather, a skilled carpenter, drew plans for it and suddenly the house her husband built was being knocked down around her, the irregular stones, held together with mud and grass and, some insisted, raw egg, were being prised apart and carted away and replaced with breeze-block and cement, cast-iron piping, a toilet, a sink, a bath.
Along with the new house came, for the first time, her own telephone. She never tired of the sound of it ringing, of picking up or being handed the handset, which reminded her of a loom, and speaking into it. ’Allo? ’Allo? How are you? All well? Everyone well? The children? The house? Work? All well? Now tell me. Tell me all your news. She had the radio moved into pride of place in the new living room. Ish! she admonished everyone, three times a day. Ish! And sat down to listen.
Two days after Christmas the price of petrol went up by 50 per cent. Not many ordinary people had cars or trucks, but that was not the point: those who did tended to be nobility, government employees – and merchants, who hauled grain and spices, bolts of cloth and teetering piles of kitchen implements into the cities and now promptly put up their prices. The Saturday market filled with disgruntled traders and disgruntled shoppers and all the talk was of prices, of prices and of unrest. In Addis the taxi drivers went on strike, making of the main avenues loud static rivers of white and blue.
She took to the phone. Are you safe? Are you well?
I’m well, Nannyé, we’re all well, everything’s well. Ayzosh.
The government raised salaries and lowered the price of petrol, but still the cities chafed. Buses were stoned in the capital by running groups of boys, and by taxi drivers outraged the bus drivers had not joined in their protest. She could see those buses, smell them almost – listing, puffing, overfilled and underserviced, the lion leaping across their sides (the emperor owned a stake in the company) both an easy target and a mockery of their actual rate of progress.
Are you safe? Are you well?
I’m well, Nannyé, we’re all well, everything’s well. Ayzosh.
There was trouble in Eritrea. Gondar being a garrison town, the soldiers from Azezo drank in the bars and lounged in the Piassa, and darker news began to filter through, of mutinies at outposts in the south, of a famine in the north that had been ignored.
The prime minister and his cabinet resigned, but it seemed to make no difference: the strikes spread through Addis, then through the major towns and cities. There was a two-day general strike, which paralysed everything. The new prime minister called out the Fourth Division. Initially they did as they were told. Then they joined in. Postal workers and transport workers went on strike. Schools were closed. The prostitutes demonstrated, and lay priests. Thousands of women marched, and tens of thousands of Muslims. What do they want? Equality. Laughter, at the very idea of it, but also the feeling that something was shifting, splitting open.
Are you safe? Are you well?
I’m well, Nannyé, we’re all well, everything’s well. Ayzosh.
During Holy Week her daughter-in-law’s parents came to visit. My grandmother had been concerned for days about how she would cope, but her daughter-in-law’s mother was gentle and kind, a former nurse, and her father was a United Church minister, interested in ecclesiastical architecture and the long Easter services, which made her feel more at home with these people with whom she did not share a language, and with wh
om she had to communicate in bows and smiles and gestures to eat more, eat, eat, please eat, why will you not eat?
Ten days after they left the army arrested the former cabinet. In a broadcast the following morning the army claimed they had done so on orders from the emperor. They threatened retribution for strikes and against ‘trouble-makers in the civilian population’. But weeks of intermittent losses of power, water, telephone and radio contact made clear the warnings had not been entirely successful.
Are you safe? Are you well?
I’m well, Nannyé, we’re all well, everything’s well. Ayzosh.
The military took charge of all radio and TV stations. ‘We, the armed forces, police and militia, would like to notify the public that we are ready to take the necessary action against the detained cabinet members, and at the same time would like to express our loyalty to the emperor and the Ethiopian people at large.’ Five days later ‘we’ had become the Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces, Police and Territorial Army. Two days after that they declared their guiding slogan: Etyopya tiqdem. Ethiopia First.
Nearly every day now it rained. Rain drummed on the corrugated-iron roofs, drowning out the radio, drowning out speech. It roared through the alleyways and tumbled down the streets in brown torrents. The market traders covered their wares with heavy sheets of plastic and huddled, sodden, in the corners of their stalls. Children sent on errands shivered from stone to treacherous shining stone. Hailstorms swept in over the mountains, ripping through the pumpkin leaves and depositing bulwarks of white against the walls. Lightning scrawled across the sky and thunder arrived so suddenly, so loudly, that she hid under her gabi. They laughed at her. Do you think you’ll escape it like that?
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