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 move!’ She closed her eyes.
When the needle punctured her skin, she exploded, biting and scratching and writhing. But they held her tight, across her body, by her head, so nothing could stir – only her tears, streaming down her face. And her mouth, screaming. What had she done to God to deserve this?
After the scabs had hardened and fallen off, after she had spent two months delirious and burning with infection, she looked and saw she was imprinted with the tracks of her own tears.
In her first pregnancy she slept all the time. They fed her and she accepted it, and they fed her more. And when finally they wrapped her up tight and sent her on slow mule-back to her father’s home in the countryside she felt only relief, to be away from the big house, even though her husband had already left some months before, taking the road south to Addis Ababa as soon as he had heard word the empress was dead.
One morning she felt a trickle down her thighs.
The women gathered, aunts, grandmother, neighbours. None seemed especially concerned, though they did become quite busy. Some raised a dividing curtain across the main room, others began to roast and pound and boil coffee. Charcoal was brought in on a small stand and blown into redness. Incense curled into the rafters. Watchful laughter, and chat.
Yetemegnu, now fourteen, had been told birth would feel something like it did when she went to the grove behind the house at dawn and squatted to relieve herself, so she had thought of it as that painless and that quick. All she could think, as the contractions tightened and tightened their grip, was no, this didn’t feel like that at all. She gasped, and the women’s voices rose to meet her, to share her pain, to distribute it between them.
Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam, dirèshilin.
O Lady Lady Lady Lady Lady, come to our aid.
Outside the sun shone on fields vivid with young crops, yellow oil-seed, blue flax, the nodding, dewy greens of new barley, broad beans, wheat. The air, washed bright after months of storms, picked out every tree on the hill that rose behind the house, every silver leaf in the eucalyptus brakes.
But inside it was dark with people and smoke and low talk. In the doorway, behind the curtain, a deacon read from the homilies of Ruphael. Listen, the women said. Listen, because Ruphael opens our wombs.
She sat at the centre, on a low stool. One woman stood behind her, strong arms clasped across her narrow chest. Another sat at her feet. They told stories, asked her questions, tried to divert her, but she sank further and further into herself, dreading the next visitation.
Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam, dirèshilin.
O Lady Lady Lady Lady Lady, come to our aid.
They told her she was not meant to cry out, but she couldn’t help it. Oh Mary, mother of God, relieve me! Ayzosh, they said. Ayzosh.
She made wild and breathless promises, about the prayers, the fasting she would undergo if only this could stop. One of the women laughed. Oh, you’ll forget. And you’ll be having another soon enough.
The deacon read on, a baseline whose timbre changed only when he shifted in his seat, or coughed.
Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam Mariam, dirèshilin.
O Lady Lady Lady Lady Lady, come to our aid.
An endless night, and another day. The women had put down a mattress so she could curl up on her side, but she was now back on the stool. They took turns holding her and drank cup after cup of coffee, but no one ate.
The deacon read on.
Another