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

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СКАЧАТЬ rocking the form to sleep. Sometimes she heard children’s voices beyond the walls, whispering, calling – ‘coo-coo-loo!’ – and swallowed the voice that itched to answer.

      Other times she sat at the window, craning for glimpses of life. Morose donkeys clopped by, or women doubled over beneath wide loads of firewood. Slaves with high packs balanced on their heads, nuns in yellow caps, children running errands. Once she saw a great lord riding in the direction of Ba’ata. His mule clashed and jingled with embellishments and the sun lit the dull barrel of a rifle. Retainers scurried to clear the way.

      How handsome he was. ‘Who’s that?’ she asked the slave girl, who shook her head, and ran to see.

      ‘Ras Gugsa,’ she reported. Ras Gugsa. Their governor! From her father she knew she was distantly related to him, and even here, shut up among the servants, she had heard the rhymes and the gossip. He was pious, as required, a poet and a fair administrator, but somewhat hidebound, too, and a melancholy and determined drinker. He had been married to the empress, who, it was said, still loved him, but they had been forced to separate when she was crowned; it was no secret he blamed his loss of power on the regent. Just over a year later he would be tricked into battle against Ras Tafari and die on the fields of Anchem, his soldiers having scattered in fear of the regent’s most recent toy, the aeroplane. But for now he carried all the sheen of high office.

      When they were first married her husband had hired a blind abba to lead her, singing, through the alphabet, the set texts of early church school, the psalms her mother had hummed to her. She found the abba kind, loving, but soon he was reporting that she was too impressionable, too prone to tears. And too quick to learn, too. ‘If you correct her or do her wrong,’ he said to her husband, ‘she will quote David at you. She will cry to God and God will listen to her. Do not teach her to read.’ So the lessons stopped, and she sat out her hours spinning thread from tight bolls of cotton, twisting coloured yarn around narrow bundles of straw to make serving baskets, or picking crumbs of dark earth out of quintal after quintal of wheat kernels, lentils, teff.

      Sometimes, still, in a sudden access of spirit, she would run to the neighbours’, climb up into their peach tree, fill her skirts with the biggest fruits she could find, and slink back to enjoy them. Once she left the main door open by accident. A sheep had just been slaughtered and a dog crept in and got hold of one of the back legs. Heart thumping so hard it seemed it might deafen her, she managed to startle the animal into dropping it.

      Other times she acted willingly enough in the play that had been written for her. Not that she necessarily knew the words, or her exits and her entrances. So at harvest time, after the peasants had delivered their tithes – two-thirds of the barley and wheat from the Jews who farmed at Gonderoch Mariam, the smaller church her husband administered; chickpeas and chilli peppers, peas and broad beans and teff from Ba’ata’s lands in Dembiya and Bisnit – she handed skiffs of wheat and barley, balls of butter, strips of beef jerky and cobs of corn out to anyone who looked as if they needed it. There was so much she felt it wouldn’t be missed.

      Or guests dropped by. ‘Where’s your father?’ Sometimes she could not help but laugh. ‘Oh, you’re mistress here!’ By the time she turned twelve she was becoming accustomed to being called woizero. Lady. Enjoying it, even.

      As such she was not expected to grind grain or collect water, but she was expected to be able to cook, to provide handsomely for the priests, the merchants, the visiting dignitaries her husband brought to the house almost daily. Sometimes, knowing her instruction had been interrupted, he helped her, tasting, suggesting, demonstrating, assuming she knew this had to be a secret held between them lest it diminish his station. Until one lunchtime he criticised her: the fish in the wat had been overcooked and was breaking up, there was not enough sauce. Child, he said, this is a bit dry. But we made it together! she protested, before she could think.

      The next time she was brought fish, five fresh silvery creatures from the Angereb river, she was extra careful, stripping them, washing them, removing every bone, rubbing the pieces with spice. The resulting wat was succulent, perfect, and when that day’s guests arrived, and took too long at their conversational preliminaries, Tsega was impatient. ‘Never mind, sit down and eat.’ There was no feigning their enjoyment of what had been put before them. After they left he took her small hands and kissed them, over and over, until she thought he might swallow them.

      He took a keen interest in her deportment. It wasn’t enough to wash her hands before and after meals; she had to scrub her arms up to the elbows. When her official mourning for her mother and brother was ended she had begun to grow her hair again and braid it back from her forehead. Other girls put silver rings in the plaits, but he would not allow it. Soon he found even the shining braids too much, and told her to hide them under a scarf.

      She understood her new state meant she was to stay at home, but initially she did not understand how absolutely he meant it. She had always previously been allowed to run over to a neighbour’s to borrow pots, or muslin to strain butter, or a few shallots, and she still did so. One afternoon when she returned, however, he was waiting for her.

      Come here. Her stomach seemed suddenly to have slid to somewhere around her feet. Come here, I said. He raised a stick, and he did not stint. At first she was so shocked she could not cry, but then the sobs arrived, deep and gusty so she could hardly breathe.

      But with him it was as if a tempest had passed. Anxiously he stroked her head and picked at her shawl, straightening it, smoothing it over her shoulders. My heart, don’t cry. Don’t cry. Here. Here’s some money. Pressing silver thalers into limp hands. Get the servants to buy you something nice. Not jewellery, you know I don’t like jewellery, but something nice.

      Sometimes he worried whether she ate enough. Lijé, he’d say. My child. My child is hungry. And at night especially, when there were no strangers about, he would draw her close and feed her from his side of the mesob. The portions were too big, so she would intercept his hand and break them up into smaller pieces, eating what she could, then closing her mouth tight.

      Not infrequently he would arrive home to find her in a corner, weeping. Child, he would say gently, why are you crying? Who has harmed you? And at last the answer would come. My mother. My mother is dead.

      Ayzosh, ayzosh, he would murmur, drawing her to him. He dipped a hand into a wooden vessel that had held butter from Asmara. When he drew it out it glistened with the remains of the butter, and with it he would wipe away her tears and gently soften her taut and salty face. Ayzosh. I will be like a mother to you.

      After one of these moments he seemed to be concentrating on her longer than usual, drawing dark fingers down her neck. They stopped at the centre, traced a spot low on her throat. Are you growing a goitre? he said, almost to himself. She had little idea what a goitre was, so as usual she said nothing, and soon forgot he had asked the question at all.

      But some days later a servant came to her to say, that lady the master asked for, she has come. What lady? But she greeted the woman, and watched as the woman set about heating oil-seeds over a low fire, stirring them until they smoked and burned. Watched as she scraped the soot off the sides of the gas lamps and added that to the black residue. A bit of kohl, too, so the mixture glistered and plopped on the heat.

      The woman set it aside to cool, then walked over and took her by the hand. ‘Now, sit still.’ She took up a narrow stick, dipped it into the cooling mess, and began to draw a line around Yetemegnu’s neck, parallel to her collarbone. As suddenly as she understood she was on her feet. But the servants held her down as the woman drew another line, and then another and another, and at the ends of the longest, just under her ears, risen suns.

      ‘Araqi?’ Alcohol would numb her, but she could not assent to any part of this. She shook her head, a sharp snap of refusal. ‘Don’t СКАЧАТЬ