Because although there were words everywhere – shouting from newspapers, strung up across streets, blaring from loudspeakers mounted on jeeps, towering two storeys high on government buildings, spilling in six-hour speeches from Mengistu’s mouth or from the radio and the television, where every single broadcast began ‘Mengistu Hailemariam, Chairman of the Provisional Military Administrative Council, Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, General Secretary of the Party, and (eventually) President of the Democratic Republic of Ethiopia’ – they were not generally helpful words; they were not real news. ‘Etyopya tiqdem!’ (again and again and again). ‘Revolutionary Motherland or death!’ ‘Marxism-Leninism is our guide!’ ‘Down with American imperialism!’ ‘Long Live Proletarian Internationalism!’ ‘The oppressed masses shall be victorious!’ They did not explain – or perhaps explained all too clearly – why there was not enough food in the markets and the shops, why gunshots split the night, or why not everyone lying at the side of the road was sleeping.
THOU ART THE TABOT WHICH WAS COVERED ON ALL ITS SIDES WITH GOLD, AND WAS MADE OF THE WOOD THAT NEVER PERISHETH, AND THAT FORESHADOWED FOR US THE WORD OF GOD, WHO BECAME MAN WITHOUT SEPARATION AND CHANGE, THE PURE AND UNDEFILED DEITY, THE EQUAL OF THE FATHER.
The skies were blue, and stayed blue long into the time when they should have given way to rain. Carrion-birds spiralled down from the mountains, vultures, fork-tailed hawks, searching the ground lazily, diving suddenly, secure in their dominance. Brown earth turned yellow then dried into dust. In the Saturday market, under the castle walls, on the steps of the Italian post office, the hungry joined the halt and the limbless. Every day children and servant-girls queued for hours for the bounty of a few small loaves at 10 cents each.
As the tenth anniversary of the revolution approached, the rivers of words became floods, but they did not carry with them any mention of food shortages, of failed rains and stillborn crops. Red stars rose above the streets, and along them murals depicting the proletariat marching bright-faced and triumphant through rich wheatfields, hammers and sickles aloft. (While many of the proletariat in fact lived behind those murals, in slums.) Ethiopia could feed itself five times over, boasted Mengistu. It would be a breadbasket for the region for generations to come. She heard him on the radio and like many others believed him. Red flags flapped from every lamppost, and the pictures of Mengistu, Marx and Engels and Lenin, the shouting banners, proliferated. ‘Workers of the World Unite!’ In Addis, in front of foreign dignitaries fighting to stay awake, Mengistu gave a five-and-a-half-hour speech extolling the glories of his own achievement.
THOU ART THE HOLY GOLDEN POT WHEREIN THE MANNA IS HIDDEN, THE BREAD WHICH CAME DOWN FROM HEAVEN, THE GIVER OF LIFE UNTO ALL THE WORLD.
And then the starving began to arrive. They came into the Saturday market and when, at dusk, the traders packed up, they moved onto the low stone platforms on which the stalls had stood and settled down to sleep. Red and green and yellow lightbulbs, strung up in celebration, cast dim light on inert piles of torn gabis, hollow cheeks. Proud, they tried to work. They sold every scrap of wood they found in their path; the women offered hairdressing, domestic labour. Like many others she invited a few into her compound, asked them to braid her hair, and the children’s hair, to tend the fire, and fed them. All over the city people began to hear of camps and feeding stations, of flies crawling over corpses, of the inescapable smell. Of limited food supplies reaching only the very worst-off. Of cholera racking the living – only no one was allowed to call it cholera. The few who gave the disease its true name (my mother, for instance, who spent her days on underresourced wards filled with the vomiting, dehydrated dying) were accused of political sabotage, as was anyone who said the famine was anything other than a story planted by the CIA. In the newspaper they published pictures of the old famine, under the emperor – the scourge from which Mengistu had supposedly saved his people. She and Alemitu stared at a picture of tiny twins, all bones and vast eyes, trying to suckle at the flat breasts of their dead mother, and could not stop weeping. One of the women who came to her house had three children and asked her to care for the smallest during the days, while the rest of the family collected wood, tearing trees out by the roots to get as much fuel to sell as possible. For two years the tiny, sweet-natured girl played among the pots and pans and followed her to church, until the family judged they had saved enough to go home to Wello, where both the girl and her mother died.
THOU ART THE GOLDEN CANDLESTICK AND DOST HOLD THE BRILLIANT LIGHT AT ALL TIMES, THE LIGHT WHICH IS THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD.
Odd things began to appear in the market and on the otherwise mostly empty shelves of the shops in the Piassa. Small metal tins decorated in bright red and blue and white that yielded, once a hole had been punched in the top, thick oversweet milk. Rough sacks of rice with foreign writing stamped across them. No one really knew how to cook the fat white grains, and once they were cooked the results were so sticky no one particularly wanted to eat them. Teff became so expensive and hard to get that even those with a little income, like herself, began to consider mixing it with foreign wheat. The government, unable to deny the famine any longer, announced that anyone earning over 50 birr a month – not a large sum – had to give up a month’s salary for the relief effort. Ration books were issued and the preparation of food, already a chore that occupied most of all days, took up even more time, as a member of the household was dispatched to wait in a long listless queue for the month’s ration of sugar, tea, coffee, matches. People grumbled and groused, eyeing the guards with their sticks and Kalashnikovs, exhausted in the sun, but most also knew this method meant everyone, regardless of their station, would get the same minimum amount to eat.
Daily life was navigated through thickets of edicts. Only local produce could be used, local soap, local salt (quite grey), local sugar. All government employees must henceforth wear suits of local cloth, sewn by government-assigned tailors and available in only three colours: a livid, shiny blue, light blue, or khaki (the fact that the dye itself was imported was conveniently ignored). Wednesday afternoons were for political re-education. No one could leave their homes during the curfew, from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. Car owners were allowed just enough petrol to drive to work and back. On Sundays there could be no driving at all, except for half the taxis (odd licence numbers one week, even the next).
The world, already small, shrank further, turned inward.
[THOU ART] THE GARDEN OF DELIGHT, THE GARDEN OF JOY, WHICH IS PLANTED WITH THE TREES OF LEBANON, AND WAS PREPARED FOR THE SAINTS BEFORE THE WORLD WAS CREATED.
At last, after nearly ten months, the rains returned, sluicing down out of the heavens with the force of an answered prayer, drumming holes into the dry earth, each raindrop seeming to bounce back up, remaining whole for an unfeasible instant before breaking and releasing its bounty into the ground. And the earth drank it in, thirsty, and released a smell so fresh, so intense and intoxicating and welcome few could resist the urge to go out, to lift faces, chests, palms up to it, to dance, even, in gratefulness. The sound was everywhere too, racketing in the gutters, dripping from dulled trees, swirling around the stones in the path down to the market, seeking out holes in the roof.
Her garden bloomed. Every morning when she returned from church, before she went in for coffee, she walked out into it, welcoming the dog that bounded up to her, inspecting the exploring tendrils, the shy orange hides of her precious pumpkins. Then she would stand among the wide leaves and look about her. She and Teklé had planted as much as they could – potatoes, with their star-shaped yellow-centred flowers; tomatoes, all dusty red skins and sharp-smelling hairy stems; tender lettuce; tough, dark-green kale; coriander, sacred basil, maize, broad beans, rue.
THOU ART THE LADDER WHICH JACOB SAW REACHING FROM EARTH TO HEAVEN, WITH THE ANGELS OF GOD ASCENDING AND DESCENDING UPON IT.
They had planted flowers, white rian, black rian, red roses in which she would bury her nose,
breathing in lungfuls of perfume. When they were at their height she picked and then dried them, hanging them upside down by a scarf tied about their waists. The roses lived, then, in her clothes chest, among the dresses and the shawls, releasing their subtle scent every time she lifted the lid.
She had planted henna and winter cherry; purgative vernonia and elders for curing sores; borages, which were good for colds, as of course were the eucalyptus leaves from the trees that now towered over all these things. They had been growing ever since she and her husband had planted them, over thirty years before, and now they were mature, their high grey-green trunks, their shivering leaves, fencing in and bordering the quiet with the sound of a river flowing through the sky.
THOU ART THE BUSH WHICH MOSES SAW BLAZING WITH FIRE, AND THE WOOD THEREOF WAS NOT CONSUMED.
She didn’t keep many chickens – she maintained they ruined a back yard with their scratching – but she had a couple, naming them Pumpkin and Shashé, feeding them, splinting broken leg bones and watching, helpless with sympathy, as they struggled to lay eggs. Despite herself and her best intentions she always fell in love with her milk-cows, loved their long-lashed eyes, their patience, remembered previous milk-cows she had raised from calves, feeding them injera, burning incense for them, naming them too (Welansa, and then Enquay, Welansa’s child), treating them as an extended part of the family and weeping for them when they died. She raised puppies, making nests for them of old dresses and spoon-feeding them milk, running distraught into the streets to avoid the exterminators who came round after outbreaks of rabies, having asked, first, for a grave to be dug to receive their handiwork.
But she did not weep for the sheep, who on high days and holidays joined her menagerie for a few days, baa-ing and butting, pulling against the ropes that held them, until prayers were said over their heads, their throats cut, and they were strung up by their hind legs to be gutted.
And so she would stand and look around her, and then her eyes and her heart would return to the pumpkins again, imagining the rich orange flesh, the sweetness of the stew she would make from it, thinking this was fine, this was beautiful, that whatever was raging outside her gates, here at least was a private Eden. And then she would turn and go indoors.
THROUGH EVE WAS THE DOOR OF THE GARDEN SHUT FAST, AND BECAUSE OF MARY THE VIRGIN IT HATH BEEN OPENED TO US AGAIN.
Her youngest daughters had long gone, to Addis first, and Debrè Zeit, and then they had scattered, one to Canada like her eldest son, another to Bulgaria, yet another to Czechoslovakia, where they learned languages she had never heard of and in them studied nursing, economics, agriculture. She fed on their infrequent letters and even more infrequent visits home, and turned her energies on her granddaughters. She had started quite early to take the girls overnight, arguing that Alemitu, asleep, would not hear them cry; now they often chose her company over their mother’s, heedless as children are of the raw hurt they thus caused. The eldest ate every meal with her and settled in her living room to study – or to war about studying, and about seeing friends in the evenings. Education came first, there could be no dissent. Get away from here! she would command, when her granddaughter stayed out late. Get out! I’ll feed you to the hyenas, you impossible child! But then she would relent, and open the door, and draw her granddaughter into a hug, and put out her favourite food. Come, come to me, it’s all right. Just don’t do it again, do you hear?
AND A VOICE CAME TO THE HOLY WOMAN, SAYING, ‘O MARY.’ AND SHE ANSWERED AND SAID, ‘HERE AM I.’ AND AGAIN, THE VOICE SAID, ‘REJOICE AND BE GLAD, AND LET THY SOUL BE GLAD BECAUSE THOU HAST FOUND GREAT GRACE WITH ME…’ AND STRAIGHTWAY THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD SAW A GREAT LIGHT WHICH MAN CANNOT DESCRIBE, AND THEN THAT VOICE SAID UNTO HER, ‘HENCEFORTH THY BODY SHALL REST IN THE GARDEN AND THY HOLY SOUL IN THE KINGDOM OF THE HEAVENS.’
In the evenings, in these the darkest months of the year, in the days preceding the feast of the Assumption, she drew her family even closer about her. After supper – no meat or butter or eggs, because the feast was preceded by fifteen days of fasting – they would wash their hands, their wrists, their feet, and then they would sing, meditative, joyous songs in praise of Mary, songs she had known since she herself was a small child. Songs so familiar, so comforting, that they unspooled like memory.
AND THEN OUR LORD ANSWERED AND SAID UNTO PETER, ‘SPEAK UNTO ALL THE BEINGS OF HEAVEN AND COMMAND THEM TO SING HYMNS AND PLAY INSTRUMENTS OF MUSIC WITH JOY AND GLADNESS’; AND AT THAT MOMENT THE SOUL OF THE HOLY WOMAN MARY WENT FORTH, AND HE TOOK IT AWAY INTO THE TREASURIES OF THE FATHER. THEN JOHN STRETCHED FORTH HIS HAND AND STRAIGHTENED HER, AND CLOSED HER EYES; AND PETER AND PAUL STRAIGHTENED HER HANDS, AND FEET.
And then sometimes, when the feast of the Assumption was over, the songs were replaced by others, from the radio, or from a flat tape-recorder, or from a minstrel who might happen by, looking for work. They would listen, and clap, watching each other, smiling – who would move first? The children, generally, snapping shoulders forward, then back, forward, back, catching her eye, moving faster, and faster. And then she might take a small shot of araqi, or of tej, and wipe her lips, and stand, and they would smile wider, or laugh, and move back to make a space for her. And she would step into the circle, put her hands on her hips, then, keeping the rest of her body still, still, address her chin forward, so. And a sweep to the side, so. And a sweep to the other side, so. And forward again. Body controlled, eyes serious, while inside her heart filled and filled. And then she might begin to move her shoulders too, and they all shook their shoulders, faster and faster, hair flapping, breath gasping, necklaces rapping on breastbones, faces opening into laughter so wide they ceased to be aware of it, only that they were dancing.
AND THERE APPEARED A GREAT WONDER IN HEAVEN; A WOMAN CLOTHED WITH THE SUN, AND THE MOON UNDER HER FEET, AND UPON HER HEAD A CROWN OF TWELVE STARS.
The next morning she would go to church again, to stand in her favourite spot by the south door, and to bow until her forehead touched the ground and the dust of the floor caught in the back of her throat and the chanting of the priests filled her head with light and silence.
BLESSED AM I BECAUSE OF MY BELIEVING AND NOT BECAUSE OF MY RIGHTEOUSNESS AND PURITY. BLESSED AM I BECAUSE I PUT MY CONFIDENCE IN GOD AND PRAY THE PRAYER OF HIS MOTHER.
* * *
—
A few weeks after the royal women were released from prison she and her eldest son, his wife and a family friend bought a bottle of Black Label and went to visit them.
The shaded gardens were quiet and the big house still. Gone, long gone, were the queues of petitioners, the bustling retainers, the gravitational pull of unquestioned power. She looked about her and shivered.
They had been asked to come, but when Princess Tenagnewerq spoke it seemed to her she had not been recognised.
But Your Highness, I am Yetemegnu, Aleqa Tsega’s wife! I am your daughter. Don’t you remember me?
‘Oh,’ said the princess. ‘Yes. But you are older and darker now.’
Yes, Your Highness, we are all much older.
Fourteen years for the royal women; the emperor’s grandsons, imprisoned as children, not yet released. (The crown prince, abroad when his father was deposed, wisely declined to return.)
The next thing she knew Tenagnewerq was bowing down to her, low, almost to her knees.
Oh don’t, please don’t! Unsure whether to touch her, how to lift her back up. What is it, my mother? What is it?
‘I heard you foretold my father’s death. That you said I longed for a father as if I did not have one, and that you said it before he died. I heard that when you pray God answers your prayers. Pray for me, please. Pray that I may see my brother again.’
Of course, Your Highness. Please rise. Of course, of course, of course.
PAGUMÉ
THE THIRTEENTH MONTH
The week after my daughter turned two, I took her to see her great-grandmother. It was the middle of the rainy season, when every day brought to
wering black clouds and thunder rolling around the horizon. Rahel had practised how to say hello in Amharic, how to say ayzosh. She told everyone we passed in the sodden streets who she was going to see. Nannyé had made a huge effort, and sat on her sofa in a full white dress, fresh headscarf, and perfectly draped shawl. I had last seen her three years before, and had spoken to her on the phone many times since. Of course I knew she was failing – who would not be, at nudging ninety-eight? That was partly why we had come – but the spirit had always been there, the presence and the engagement. This was different. I saw at once the cruelty of extreme old age, how it strips away the basic faculties, of movement, of sight (her eyes began to fail barely a decade after she learned to read), but, worst of all, how it strips away people: the fifth of her nine children had died the previous summer, and it was as though that, finally, was the last thing she could bear. Her whole body spoke of exhaustion, of darkness and sadness.
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