The Wife’s Tale: A Personal History. Aida Edemariam

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СКАЧАТЬ twisted through her and she cried to the midwife, Madam, have I laboured and laboured in vain?

      ‘Quiet,’ answered the midwife, sharply. Then, more kindly, ‘Ayzosh. He’s probably just tired.’

      A big bowl was filled with water, and soap brought, and clean clothes to receive the child, and the room stretched taut with watching. As soon as he touched the water he heaved a great sigh and began to suck his fingers. And it was as if her spirit flowed back into her body, as if she had suddenly come back to life herself.

      ‘AND IT CAME TO PASS THAT, WHEN THE SEA RETURNED TO ITS OWN PLACE, AND THE WATERS THEREOF BECAME QUIET, AND THE WAVES WENT DOWN, THE WOMAN WENT FORTH FROM IT CARRYING HER CHILD IN HER ARMS. AND WHEN THE PEOPLE SAW HER MANY OF THEM MARVELLED AND BECAME SPEECHLESS BY REASON OF THIS GREAT AND MIRACULOUS THING.’

      For three days after her son’s birth she slept on the floor, on a thin pallet surrounded by strewn grass and tracked-in rainy season mud, welcoming the cold wind that gusted under the door in the darkest hour before dawn, offering her body and her comfort to Mary, who had heard her in her greatest distress.

      When forty days had passed and he was taken to be baptised she would name her first son Edemariam, or hand of Mary, but in the meantime she reached for him and held him close. Looking down at the flattened curls of wet dark hair, the breathing, fragile skull, she knew suddenly that this too was a kind of salvation; that these small forms that emerged from her buffeted body might be an answer to her loneliness, the depth of which she was only now beginning to comprehend.

      The sun was just beginning to touch the tops of the furthest mountains when they set out, but the city was still in shade, the air clear and chill. She tightened her arms around the baby, and shifted her weight. Breastfeeding had further stripped her already slight figure, and the bright cloth decorating her mule did nothing to soften the saddle. The sound of their mules’ hooves – hers, Alemitu’s, his – echoed against the walls of the houses, but their servants’ bare feet, trotting alongside, made no sound at all. Above them the curved swords of eucalyptus leaves soughed in the breeze, bowed, crossed each other, bowed again.

      She leaned forward and grasped the pommel as they began to climb, and watched as the sun slid down the slopes to meet them. It lit the tops of the trees and picked out the straw and pebbles in the mud walls of the houses, which glinted it back. Along the roadside the grass had dried to feathery fringes of pale gold, cool in the dapple of early morning. Woodsmoke rose tentative into the air, and crows argued themselves hoarse over rubbish heaps. Women stood in doorways, beating basketwork clean with branches. Hens scratched at their feet, and cockerels. Her mule’s ears twitched, pointed forward again.

      Houses with doorways open onto the street began to give way to homesteads encircled by fences of lashed-together eucalyptus and euphorbia. Flowering bushes crowded in on them, wild roses, creamy yellow crotons. They began to pass women in white shawls returning from church, stepping easy, quiet among the rocks, their long shadows mingling and moving together. When the women saw her husband they came close to ask for his blessing, touching forehead and chin to the cross he disentangled from the folds of the gabi he had wrapped around his shoulders for warmth. May God bless you and keep you. Amen.

      At the sides of the path thistle flowers, white and purple starbursts nestled in green-pointed ruffs, drew level with the tops of the eucalyptus trees on the hillside below. Lammergeyers wheeled, then sloped down out of sight. The far ridges of the mountains were grey-blue steps ascending into a sky undisturbed by any clouds at all. The mules’ hooves crunched against the rubble on the path and the sound seemed suddenly smaller, bare, but also hard and bright, as though it could travel forever through the clear air above the valley. As they rounded a bend she turned slightly, and saw Gondar spread out below them.

      Ever since the beginning of the dry season, as the ground hardened, the green meadows began to yellow, as the rivers shrank and became passable, she had felt the city change around her. Her husband did not think to tell her much about the wider world, but she saw and heard enough. She knew that in the market there were more people, more strangers, sensed a darker, harsher mood. The servants came in and out with water and wood and shreds of news. Thousands of men and women, their mules, their children, their slaves, were walking in daily from the mountains. They carried muskets, spears, shields, lion’s mane headdresses; grinding stones bent the women’s backs, and great hide-covered food baskets chafed the donkeys’ flanks. At night the mead-houses rang with war chants, with boasting and with burnished memory. The emperor’s cousin Ras Kassa, appointed governor of Begemdir and Semien after Ras Gugsa Wulé’s death, was calling his armies in.

      Kassa was as pious as Ras Gugsa had been, and known for his mastery of theology, but though he had fought in the battle of Adwa as a teenager and been victorious against Negus Mikael of Wollo since, he was not necessarily known for his mastery of war. He was steady and loyal, and a trusted adviser to the emperor – even though he had a better claim to the throne. When he became governor he had preferred to stay at the court in Addis Ababa and delegated the administration of Gondar to the eldest of his four sons. She would hear, decades later, that on one of her husband’s trips to Addis he had been charged with a message for the new emperor: Gondar and the provinces of which it was capital were too important to be treated in this way. He had been seriously heard, apparently, but for years felt resented by Ras Kassa’s sons.

      They were travelling between scrubby fields now, scattered with yellow stones, the occasional bush a dark jewel set in dry gold land. Now the path was runnelled and gullied, scoured and scored by the daily deluges of the rainy season, and the mules slowed, picking their way along tracks that narrowed sometimes to a single hoof’s width, a steep drop on one side, rough drystone wall or the long unforgiving thorns of an acacia on the other. Or they cast, wary, around the occasional darker section of ground, where the earth was still soggy and pockmarked by previous traffic. Step there and the likelihood was a broken leg, and the mules knew that as well as their riders. Often the animals paused, thinking for a second or two, scanning the ground ahead before stepping on. They sighed, huge, gusty sighs. Their mouths dripped, and their haunches were glossed with sweat that soaked through her dress and warmed her calves and thighs.

      Gondar dropped out of sight.

      The town had emptied of people as abruptly as it had filled, and for a few weeks had felt quiet but stretched out of shape, waiting, but uncertain what it was waiting for.

      And then one day an answer: six specks in the sky, specks moving faster and straighter than any bird, growing bigger and bigger, until she could hear them roar.

      Oh mother of God, what is this? Snatching up her daughter, the baby, looking frantic about for somewhere to hide. Oh daughter of David, save us.

      Closer and closer the specks came. They looked like crosses now, stubby dark crosses, trailing smoke. The streets ran with women, children, clergy, the infirm – anyone able-bodied had marched away with Ras Kassa or quietly disappeared. As the thundering drew near they threw themselves into ditches, huddled against walls, behind trees. Oh Queen of Heaven, save us.

      Around again. She didn’t see but was soon told how on the second pass, over the castles, a dark rain fell from them, a hail of metal that exploded with a terrible noise as it hit the ground. How many huts caught fire, and the women and children inside them.

      That was when the order came from the emperor, who when the Italians invaded, marching over the border and finally taking Adwa, had headquartered at Dessié: evacuate Gondar during daylight hours, every day.

      So here they were, travelling away from Gondar, as they had travelled yesterday, as they would travel tomorrow, and the day after that. They had crested a long rise and were looking down toward the Shinta river. Vegetable plots had been planted along its banks, and neat rows of silver-green kale rose up the slopes. They picked their way СКАЧАТЬ