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

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СКАЧАТЬ always been, sweet water available from her well, the market outside healthy and bustling and equal to her needs. Even the talk of deliberate division – whites here, locals there, a school and a hospital and a courthouse each, no locals allowed in cinemas at all – made little impression on her. Gondar had always been a divided city, between Muslim, Christian and Jewish quarters, between aristocracy, gentry, artisans and peasants, and who wanted anything to do with these foreigners anyway? It was they who often insisted on crossing over, chasing women, living with them, defying orders from their superiors.

      Other orders were more efficiently upheld. The death penalty for men caught possessing arms, for instance, a quixotic aim in a land where bearing arms was a necessary adjunct to any claim to be taken seriously, where manliness and honour were synonymous with physical courage and the willingness to go to war. Summary executions, then, often on testimony of nothing more than a rival with a grudge; imprisonment and flogging of families which refused to give up weapons or state the whereabouts of those who carried them. Terrified whispers of a portable gallows, dragged from village to village. Of decapitated heads held high. The death penalty for anyone suspected of supporting the absent emperor.

      Her husband shut his face, and with a gift of a thousand Maria Theresa thalers he had received from Emperor Hailè Selassie before the war, with the income from Ba’ata’s holy water, the tithes from Bisnit and Dembiya, the income from church arbitration, market dues, the sale of the gold-filigreed capes and robes Empress Zewditu had given him on his first promotion, set about building his church as if the end against which it was spiritual insurance could arrive any day.

      The inner circle, the holy of holies, was held together with mud, trampled by labourers’ feet over and over for three or four days, but the meqdes, the priests’ domain, was to be constructed of stone only, cut so carefully no mortar would be needed. All day new-quarried pink tufa arrived from Qusquam, a quiet hilltop north-west of the city, carried between pairs of former slaves, or on the backs of donkeys. All day, in between prayers and sermons and confessions, between the endless questions and supplications visited upon an administrator of forty-four churches, he wove among the labourers, correcting a cut of rock here, a misunderstanding about size there, cajoling, ordering, threatening, driving the work as fast as he knew how.

      For he saw, moving about the city, how in the Italians the need to prove superiority over those they had vanquished, and increasingly over their fear of those they had vanquished, had resulted in an overreaching brutality. Fear of the nobles and village elders, whom they relieved of their positions, replacing them with Italian or Eritrean mercenaries, and not infrequently sending them ‘to Rome’ – bundling them into cars and aeroplanes and from thence to either prison or death. And beyond all this a kind of ancient dream-fear, too, of the Orthodox Church’s ancillaries: its deacons and monks, its soothsayers and its wild-haired travelling hermits, who looked on the surface to have little power but transmitted information faster, it sometimes seemed, than any telephone.

      They feared the priests too. Or, at least, were deeply suspicious of them – though in that they were not unusual. Even amongst their own colleagues and parishioners priests often had a venal reputation, of being concerned more with status and possessions than with matters holy; of being inveterate, individualist schemers. For in the way that the emperor had total power over every aspect of his subjects’ lives, priests had power over their spiritual weather. They received confessions, they punished and they forgave, they controlled access to the written word and thus to the Bible and all its interpretations. To this was added, through tithes, the possibility of worldly riches, and even more temptation. The Italians saw this power and its possible uses (openness to influence, a source of spies) – they also saw that priests were either unreliable, or an active, potent threat. Both sides had only to think of the days after the fall of Addis Ababa, when it quickly became clear that by shooting Abunè Petros, bishop of eastern Ethiopia, the Italians had created a martyr.

      Exactly a year after the Italians first bombed Gondar, they hunted down and shot Ras Kassa’s eldest son. Two of his younger brothers were lured into submission ten days later. They had been promised safety but were promptly executed.

      And in Gondar her husband was again ordered to bring his priests to the main square.

      Not far from the huge sycamore fig stood two clerics, facing Italian guns. The leader of the church of Gana Yohannes stood still, the priest beside him babbled and shook. We grew up together, we were children together, will we die together? But the aleqa of Gana Yohannes said nothing, and then the friend of his childhood said nothing either.

      When he returned to her she thought, this is how the dead must look. His face was like soot. He did not seem to see her. For two full weeks he could not be persuaded to eat.

      She had been at it for a while, chopping the ginger and garlic, mixing it with cardamom and basil and rue, stirring it through simmering butter. The sun was warm on her head and on the baby sleeping in the shawl on her back. She glanced over at her eldest daughter, sitting in the doorway of the house. Her worries about how her children would look had not applied to this child, at least. Alemitu, six years old now, already had a nice long nose and wide brow, a graceful neck.

      Are you hungry?

      She took a spoonful of the freshly spiced butter and, mixing it with some berberé, poured it over a piece of injera, soaking it and tearing it into rich bite-size pieces. Here. It will make you grow.

      The afternoon wore on. The sun seemed, if anything, hotter. Sounds receded. The corners of her daughter’s mouth glistened. She kept working.

      The next time she looked over she was at her daughter’s side almost in the same motion. Hands like startled butterflies, loosening the neck of the child’s dress, feeling her face, which burned, a small dark sun. Cradling her, calling her name. Feeling it in every sliver of herself when Alemitu’s body snapped rigid as a hide left out to dry. Her chin flung back. White eyes stared at the sky. Oh Mary mother of God, what is it? What is it?

      Bring her clothes! A shawl! But her husband had just returned from a trip to Addis Ababa, and everything was down at the river with the menservants, being beaten clean. There was only a thin muslin veil with which to cover her daughter and lift her into the cool of the house.

      Go get her father.

      When he came, he had a friend with him, and the two men exchanged fierce whispers over the child’s inert body. She must take holy water, said her husband. ‘Holy water won’t work.’ Only the devil could do something like this to her, look at her body, how stiff and contorted it is. She must be taken to holy water immediately. ‘It won’t work.’ Yes, it will.

      Her husband prevailed.

      A neighbour offered to help, and every morning, for two times seven days, the small group set off into the dawn, heading for the little old church of Teklè-Haimanot. For two times seven days they sat amongst all the other supplicants, waiting their turn. So much sadness in the world, she thought, looking at the array of bodies before her. So much care. The stripped flanks of farmers accustomed to sparing food and abundant labour. The much-suckled breasts hanging flat and soft. The warped and twisted young limbs. The torsos shining with wellbeing, their specific curses invisible. The underdresses sticking to bodies dripping, bodies drying, bodies inward-looking under the sun. And above them all the perfunctory deacons crouching, pouring the blessed water, and then, as midday approached, intoning – one eye on the takings and another on lunch – the acts of the saints and the Miracles of Mary.

      On one of these days her neighbour invited her to stay overnight, so they could go to the church together in the morning. She was a member of an association that met once a month and it was her turn as host; Yetemegnu could sit and chat for a while if she wished, before she went to bed. She accepted, and made sure to prepare all the food her husband would need the next СКАЧАТЬ