The Wife's Tale

by Aida Edemariam

  And Rahel – stupidly I had forgotten that the only photograph of Nannyé she knew had been taken in the 1930s, under the Italians. I had not tried to explain how the young person now existed in an old one. She took one look, retreated to the far corner of the room, curled up into a ball on the floor and refused to come out. Ney, called my grandmother, gently, neyilign. Come, come to me. Rahel curled in tighter. Want to go home! Eventually she ran outside, into the garden. Nannyé sat silent as I chased out and in, divided between trying to keep the small one safe and wanting to comfort the older one, say hello properly, re-establish my own connection. What time is it now? Nannyé asked. What time is it? What time?

  Over the next few days Rahel practically lived in the garden, and I watched her discover for herself the smells, the sights and textures, that were the warp and weft of my own childhood, watched her revel in them as though on some level she recognised them too. So she picked and sniffed her way through clumps of rue, of rosemary and mint and lemongrass, and balanced, as if on a tightrope, on the breezeblocks that demarcated the vegetable garden. She swung on the bars of the water tower and inspected the fuchsia bush that grew at its base, comparing tight-closed buds with the pale skirts and dark purple underskirts of fullblown blossoms. Even the column of glossy army ants that one morning inspected her in turn, assaying her limbs and scalp, biting her and sending her screaming for me, did not deter her. She said assiduous hellos to the smaller, kinder sugar ants and stared at a lizard as it basked blinking on the high wall before dropping, a quick sinuous wholeness, out of sight. She shucked corn, watched the yellow kernels blacken over coals that glowed and smoked and settled, then attacked them with her teeth. I rolled up her sleeves, tied a teacloth about her neck, and passed her slices of mango so lush and ripe the juice ran down her forearms and her chin shone orange. She stared as coffee beans, stirred on a pan over the fire, turned from green to red-brown to a lustrous black and jumped in surprise when they began to pop and launch their outer husks into the air, where they drifted delicate, see-through, like a beetle’s wings. When the housemaid took advantage of a break in the clouds to wash Nannyé’s clothes she stood close, riveted by the movement of the girl’s wrists above the rim of the shallow metal tray, the slop of the water as she pressed the heels of her hands into the wet muslin, churning the soap suds into thicker, richer froth, slop, slop, slop, and sometimes an extra slop, right over the edge and onto the ground next to Rahel’s delighted feet.

  She began to come inside more often, bearing gifts: three coffee beans, a brace of bruised fuchsia buds, a muddy carrot just dragged out of the ground. At mealtimes she and Nannyé sat at opposite sides of the room, being fed. Nannyé had no appetite, every sip and mouthful was coaxed into her. Rahel, generally a hearty eater, was wary of strange tastes and grains and looking for any kind of deflection. Oh when the saints come marching in, she sang one day, conversationally, across the coffee table. Oh when the saints come marching in. Then, Happy birthday! recently learned and sung with gusto to her grandfather on the phone, to the pictures of Mary and Jesus on the walls, to the father confessor in his black and yellow robes, making his fortnightly visit. Happy birthday dear Nannyer, happy birthday to you. Raheliyé! said Nannyé, who had resisted proper conversation for weeks, replying to her daughters, to me, in groans only, or in lists of aches and pains. Raheliyé, I know your father, you know. He came to Ethiopia and I danced with him. And she had. After our engagement lunch she had stood and walked to the centre of the room, where a knot of us had gathered. And she had straightened her shoulders and put her hands on her hips, had raised her head, and then her chin was moving, sharp, controlled, like a bird’s, forward, left, right, forward, and the drums were loud, and the fiddle and the lyre, and standing opposite my grandmother, hands on my own hips, responding with my best approximation of the (far easier) shoulder-shaking version of the Gondaré dance, I realised I was smiling so hard I thought my face would split. After a couple of songs Nannyé was persuaded to sit, she was ninety-five or so after all. But I could tell she didn’t want to.

  The day we left there was a hailstorm. Rahel watched the white globes, big as grapes, shrink to points in her hands and cried More! More! until she was brought entire cupfuls of translucent spheres. She ran in to Nannyé to show them off. Their two heads leaned in, absorbed, one in a cup, the other in the small face in front of her. The rain of the thirteenth month is holy, it’s Ruphael’s rain, said Nannyé, to the top of Rahel’s head. When I was a child we’d tear off our clothes and dance through it singing. And every leap year, when Pagumé was six days long instead of five, all the children and the youths would rise before dawn and go down to the Qeha to swim. She picked up Rahel’s hands, and kissed them. Oh they’re so cold! Geté! My jewel! My heart, they’re so cold! And to everyone else, What time is it now? What time?

  * * *

  —

  Six months later I flew back to Addis, and then, with other members of her immediate family, to Gondar, descending through cloud and landing on tarmac edged with tall grasses, an acacia, and an old control tower, rusting. When I first came, twenty-five years ago, this was a flat field grazed by cows and sheep which had to be buzzed away before a landing. Now it was a busy modern airport, all dark asphalt, TV screens, gift shops. The watchfully indolent soldiers were a constant, however. Only the uniforms changed. Nannyé had known the regime was in trouble, had seen and wept for the young men who, fleeing a lost war, had washed up in Gondar market, beautiful young men, she said, princes with cracked feet and troubled eyes, angular with hunger. Many young people refused to eat in solidarity, she remembered, sending their meals out to the soldiers instead; others went from house to house, collecting food. She herself took eight in, asking few questions but feeding and feeding them until there was not enough left that day for her own family. But she did not initially connect all this with the voice that came to her in her dreams, ordering her to tell her rosary, to sing the kyrie and weep for three months. What’s coming? she asked, distressed. What’s coming that I have to do this?

  The day before the three months ended a grandchild sent to borrow a mortar and pestle ran back empty-handed, gabbling with news. The guards have gone! They’ve unlocked the prison and gone! Immediately my grandmother began to gather clothes, food, intending to make for the best sanctuary she could think of, Gimja-bet Mariam. Where should I hide? What should I do? she asked a friend who had dropped by. Nothing, he said. They’re already here. There had been days of fighting at Azezo, but none in the city. All through the following days the neighbourhoods heaved with stories of their entrance, led, some said, by a guerrilla riding a donkey; that some brought black cats and others black dogs, instruments of witchcraft; of wild-haired militiamen taking up stations at each corner of the prison, except that one of them – people made excuses to walk by, just to stare – was a woman.

  We step out of the airport into glittering sunshine and a wall of wailing. Everything in me except my feet steps back, and I am weeping before I am aware of it. All of us are, terrible tears, at the same time that part of me notices how manufactured some of it is, particularly in men who, not generally permitted such things, look for the right sound and largely fail. Then we climb into a four-wheel drive and set off to meet my grandmother.

  She is waiting at the crossroads. New-tarred road and a vast sycamore fig and drawn up on the verge, back pointed to Addis Ababa and front toward Gondar, a pickup with a coffin in the back.

  * * *

  —

  What time is it? What time? It’s late, people are waiting, we must go, we must go – And the cortège sets off, crawling toward her home. She’s been away for twenty years, ever since she returned to Addis because of another jailing, of her son Molla on political grounds, but most things have not changed. The long low hangars of the army camps are still there, and Azezo feels as it always did, a bustling way-station to the airport or Lake Tana, to Bahr Dar and Addis Ababa, or west to Metemma and the Sudan border; a long rauc
ous strip of a town, all focused on the main road. Though some of it might have surprised her – the rows of stalls filled with bright Chinese plastic, the lean-to teahouses, clientèle staring as we pass. Dozens of cars cross the Shinta. Dozens of cars cross the Qeha. Past the hospital, past the university, past men piling unfeasible numbers of eucalyptus logs onto garris, their broken horses waiting, scarred heads down, unmoving. Past the Italian post office, down the Piassa. Past the castle walls, jacarandas in full bloom threaded through the turrets above them, young men idling on motorbikes below. Past Gimja-bet Mariam. Down Arada, people and shops encroaching so far into the road there is little room for vehicles. Out into the open space above the Saturday market. Stepping graceless, watched and watching, out of the car and into a mass of people and noise. ‘Enat Alem! Enat Alem!’ Mother of the world, mother of the world. But it isn’t Mary they’re calling on this time, it’s Nannyé, enat alem, enat alem, my mother, my all.

  Climbing steps and through the narrow gate into her compound is like walking into memory so old it is indistinguishable from dream. But it has different furniture: two das, one of eucalyptus poles and basketwork just to the right of the entrance, and a larger one, of tenting canvas and metal poles, along the back wall. In the latter stand mourners, mostly women, and a man. Enat alem, enat ale-e-e-e-em, the last syllable bouncing in his throat like a pulse. Then, next to the basketwork das – for it is too small to hold them – a half-circle of deacons, white-turbanned, white-shawled, begin to chant. Sistra clash, and then the drum. Dum, da. Dum, da. Enat alem, enat ale-e-e-e-em. My mead, my rich meat. Dum, da. Dum, da. Dum, da.

  The coffin was taken ahead into the house and now sits draped in cloth of red and gold at the centre of her living room. We form a dark wall down one side, facing priests and deacons in embellished robes and golden skullcaps on the other. On the floor, beneath the head of the coffin on its stand, sits a flat basket containing offerings of wheat, of holy water, of frankincense. A censer swings, and smoke rises into the corners, around photographs of strangers (for the house is rented now, has been for years), through their careful bouquets of plastic flowers and their best crockery, and the words that followed her all her life, had been among the first she learned to read, unspool into this space she loved so much. Thou wast named Beloved Woman, oh blessed among women. Thou art the second chamber – The churchmen, young, sweet-voiced, a bit shambolic, clearly bored, conduct whispered conferences between each section of the service, in which gospel follows covenant follows the Book of the Praise of Mary in straggling close harmony. Few apart from the clergy speak Ge’ez, but even I, who am moved by this meeting of high church ritual and domestic intimacy, recognise some of it. Weletè Amanuel, daughter of Amanuel, return now to the country from whence you came. Our Father, who art in heaven.

  And then they are lifting her up, and out. No family are allowed to touch the bier. This is an honour accorded only to priests and to the wives of priests who have remained true to their vows, but it makes her children and grandchildren, in an instant, peripheral. They don’t go far – they set her down in the yard, and gather round again. This time there is no space next to her for anyone but clergy. Their umbrellas, white and gold robes, processional cross, blink in the sunshine. Her trees tower above us, eucalyptus leaves and the pale beginnings of eucalyptus fruits are scattered across the ground. A purple morning glory has twisted itself about the electrical cables between gate and house, but of her garden nothing else remains. The keening reasserts itself, and the drum.

  Out of her gate, through a hubbub of bodies, and back onto the pickup. But almost as soon as everyone sets off, following the boat of the truck and its umbrella sails into the Saturday market, a horn sounds, five times, an old old sound, and all halt. A few of the umbrellas are unusual in shape, conical on top, with Ba’ata picked out in link-metal on the straight-falling velvet sides. These dibab only ever come out with the Ark of the Covenant on holidays, or when clergy die. Another honour. The deacons range themselves in facing lines, and, against a backdrop of legless, faceless shop mannequins, of garish bolts of cloth and curious children, begin to dance. The drumbeat is regular now. A step, a shallow bend of the knees, and a small move sideways per beat, so the lines of white turbans dip and rise, dip and rise. The dance of David, of reeds in water.

  The horn again. The procession moves on, streaming through the market, halting work, getting in the way of garris and buses, thus announcing her passing. There’s lots of chat. Catching up on gossip, marriages, divorces, deaths, who finally found a job, who has escaped to America. And stop. Some mourners hold up framed photographs of Nannyé in youth, others have draped dresses we brought from Addis, her favourite dresses, over their backs.

  At each stop the churchmen make their enclave, the chief mourners a parallel one. They declaim in scratched voices poems of who she was. Wife, mother – imposed roles, unquestioned and in her time unquestionable; passive, in a way, however fully inhabited and lovingly dispatched. She gave her daughters and granddaughters the chance of something different, and in making that gift separated them from her in fundamental ways. The mourners speak of her kindness, her generosity, her many griefs. (She herself could not begin to cope with funerals like this, so when each adult child died she was told of their burial after the fact.) Of how she never got to Tana Qirqos, but in her late eighties made a pilgrimage to Lalibela in the north, where in the thirteenth century vaulting rock churches were hewn out of the mountainsides to make a new Jerusalem, and even to Jerusalem itself, walking to Golgotha on swollen feet and raging because she was not strong enough to climb down to Mary’s tomb.

  In her last ill months she began to beg to be taken, please, Lord, is it not time? whilst also being greatly afraid. She worried she had not fasted enough, had not prayed enough, would be found wanting. She asked not to be taken in the rainy season, so she did not have to be interred in mud and storms. That prayer has been abundantly granted. The sky is a radiant cloud-scudded blue, and the hills and fields bake in the sun.

  We arrive at a sharp bend in the cobbles. The land has opened out. In front of us, beyond dusty figs, rubbish-filled ditches and struggling olive trees, it plunges down to the Qeha, then rises again into mountains and Gonderoch Mariam. These are her streets, her landscape, her home. Even though she has been away for so many years, the white-veiled stream of people flows as far as I can see.

  The pickup chugs and tips up a small rise, stops under an unfinished arch. Old old trees, the glory of churches, sough over walls painted so they shine like plastic. I’ve been told that when, a few years ago, they knocked down my grandfather’s church in order to build this one the sanctuary was so well made, the stones so tightly fitted together, it took them ages. Good, I thought, indignant on my grandmother’s behalf, thinking of all the work and pain that did for mortar. Good. I’m glad it gave them trouble. This structure, recently consecrated a cathedral, is bombastic, ugly. Bigger was better, as big as possible, overshadowing all others – then again, when was that ever not the case, where Ba’ata was concerned?

  * * *

  —

  A long blast on the horn. Another, and another. The truck rocks in, up, past the main church, and Nannyé is unloaded onto a patch of bare earth between the bell tower and the humble building in which she was married. Again the clergy in their vivid plumage close in around her. This is the last of the seven stops; here they recite the seventh of the seven chapters of the Book of the Praise of Mary. They swing a censer into air alive with birdsong. The mourners, plain in comparison, like female birds, make their own circle around an empty space and sing their secular plainchant. Enanney enanney enanney. Enat alem enat alem enat alem. I drag my black scarf up over my head.

  Then the churchmen carry her up the steep new steps and into the sanctuary so she can say goodbye to it. In the yard there is a distinct slackening. A child cries on its mother’s back. Someone answers a mobile phone. There are vultures in the trees, dark weights on branches that look too fra
il to hold them.

  When they come out again they are ringing a bell, a continuous ringing that jangles already jangled nerves. They have lit long wax tapers, so flames accompany her circuit, once around the balcony, maregn Christos, maregn Christos, Christ have mercy, Christ have mercy, Christ have mercy, forty-one times, and down, into a crescendo of bells, of keening, of plain, heart-scouring weeping. And the drum. It’s the end, cry the mourners. It’s the end. She is escaping us.

  After all this preparation the final step goes unceremoniously fast. She is already interred, and the men are huddled around the family tomb, holding everyone else at a distance.

  Finally, a last long blast of the horn. Come, say your goodbyes. The entrance is narrow, those going in have to flatten themselves against the wall to make space for those going out. She has been placed in the space next to her husband, but they haven’t quite been able to close the door, so a tall white wreath is propped up against it, keeping things decent. There is pushing and shoving and wailing; all I can think is, no quiet, no quiet, give us quiet, give me quiet, give her quiet.

  * * *

  —

  A couple of days later, early in the morning, I returned alone. I watched as a man climbed to the top of the bell tower and settled down to read. Above him a kite ascended, trusting itself to the air. Crows cawed demands, and the doves answered. Figures in white sat against tree trunks mouthing verses from fat little books. Women walked bowing up to a workmanlike priest who sat under the balcony handing out holy water and blessing them with his cross, briskly tapping head, back, belly, anywhere the concern was greatest. They kissed the threshold, removed their shoes, covered their hair, and entered the church, as my grandmother had done, morning after morning, for decades. I went down into the tomb. Torn spiderwebs hung from the roof and a weak light crept through the windows. She had been moved and now lay in a larger space, next to Molla and just above Teklé and Alemitu. Here she fitted, exactly. From inside the church a voice rose, and a drum began to beat, quiet and slow. A cockerel crowed. And I took my leave.