Season of Migration to the North (11 page)

‘May God rest her soul,’ said Bakri. ‘She was a fine woman.’
Wad Rayyes gave a deep sigh and said, ‘What a pity — that’s life though. It
gives to those who don’t want to take. I swear to you if I’d been in your place
I’d have done all sorts of things. I’d have married and settled there and
tasted the sweetness of life with the Egyptian girls. What brought you back to
this barren, good-for-nothing place?’

‘The gazelle said, “To me my desert country is as beautiful
as Syria,” Bakri quoted the proverb.

Lighting up another cigarette and drawing strongly on it so
that the air in the room was clouded, Bint Majzoub said to Wad Rayyes, ‘You’re
not deprived of the sweetness of life even in this barren, good-for-nothing
place. Here you are, hail and hearty and growing no older though you’re over
seventy’

‘I swear, a mere seventy only not a day older, though
you’re
a good deal older than Hajj Ahmed.’

‘Have a fear of God, Wad Rayyes!’ my grandfather said to him.
‘Bint Majzoub wasn’t born when I married. She’s two or three years younger than
you.’

‘In any event,’ said Wad Rayyes, ‘as we stand today I’m the
most energetic one of you. And I’ll swear that when I’m between a woman’s
thighs I’m more energetic than even this grandson of yours.’

‘You’re a great one for talking,’ said Bint Majzoub. ‘You
doubtless run after women because what you’ve got to offer is no bigger than a fingerjoint.’ 

‘If only you’d married me, Bint Majzoub,’ said Wad Rayyes,
‘you’d have found something like a British cannon.’

‘The cannon were silenced when Wad Basheer died,’ said Bint Majzoub.
‘Wad Rayyes, you’re a man who talks rubbish. Your whole brain’s in the head of
your penis and the head of your penis is as small as your brain.’

Their voices were all raised in laughter, even that of Bakri
who had previously laughed quietly. My grandfather ceased altogether clicking
his prayer-beads and gave his thin, shrill, mischievous laugh. Bint Majzoub
laughed in her hoarse, manly voice, while Wad Rayyes’s laugh was more of a
snort than a laugh. As they wiped the tears from their eyes, my grandfather
said, ‘l ask forgiveness of Almighty God, I pray pardon of Him.’

‘I ask forgiveness of Almighty God,' said Bint Majzoub. ‘By
God, what a laugh we’ve had. May God bring us together again on some auspicious
occasion.’

‘I ask God’s forgiveness,’ said Bakri. ‘May God do as He wishes
with us all the days of our lives on this earth and in the Hereafter.’

‘l ask forgiveness of God,’ said Wad Rayyes. ‘We spend our
days on the face of the earth and in the Hereafter God does with us as He wills.’

Bint Majzoub sprang to her feet at a bound like a man in his
thirties and stood up perfectly straight, with no curve to her back or bend to
her shoulders. As though bearing some weight, Bakri stood up. Wad Rayyes rose,
leaning slightly on his stick. My grandfather got up from his prayer-rug and
seated himself on the couch with the short legs. I looked at them: three old
men and an old woman laughing a while as they stood at the grave’s edge.
Tomorrow they would be on their way. Tomorrow the grandson would become a
father, the father a grandfather, and the caravan would pass on.

Then they left. ‘Tomorrow, Effendi, you’re lunching with us,’
Wad Rayyes said to me as he was going.

My grandfather stretched himself out on the couch, then
laughed, alone this time, as though to underline his feeling of isolation,
after the departure of the people who had made him laugh and whom he had made
laugh. After a while he said, ‘Do you know why Wad Rayyes invited you to
lunch?’ I told him we were friends and that he had invited me before. ‘He wants
a favour of you,’ said my grandfather.

‘What’s he want?’ I said.

‘He wants to get married,’ he said.

I made a show of laughing and asked my grandfather what Wad Rayyes’s
marrying had to do with me. ‘You’re the bride’s guardian.’

I took refuge in silence and my grandfather, thinking I had
not understood, said, ‘Wad Rayyes wants to marry Mustafa Sa’eed’s widow.’

Again I took refuge in silence. ‘Wad Rayyes is sprightly
enough — and he’s got money’ said my grandfather. ‘In any case, the woman needs
someone to protect her. Three years have passed since her husband’s death.
Doesn’t she ever want to remarry?’

I told him I was not responsible for her. There was her
father, her brothers, why didn’t Wad Rayyes ask for her from them?

‘The whole village knows,’ said my grandfather, ‘that Mustafa
Sa’eed made you guardian of his wife and children.’

I told him that while I was guardian of the children the wife
was free to do as she pleased and she was not without relatives. ‘She listens
to what you say,’ said my grandfather. ‘If you were to talk to her she might
agree.’

I felt real anger, which astonished me for such things are
commonly done in the village. ‘She has refused younger men than him,’ I said to
my grandfather. ‘He’s forty years older than her.’ However, my grandfather
insisted that Wad Rayyes was still sprightly that he was comfortably off and
that he was sure her father would not oppose it; however, the woman herself
might refuse and so they had wanted to make a persuasive intermediary out of
me.

Anger checked my tongue and I kept silent. The obscene
pictures sprang simultaneously to my mind, and, to my extreme astonishment, the
two pictures merged: I imagined Hosna Bint Mahmoud, Mustafa Sa’eed’s widow as
being the same woman in both instances: two white, wide-open thighs in London,
and a woman groaning before dawn in an obscure village on a bend of the Nile
under the weight of the aged Wad Rayyes. If that other thing was evil, this too
was evil, and if this was like death and birth, the Nile flood and the wheat harvest,
a part of the system of the universe, so too was that. I pictured Hosna Bint Mahmoud,
Mustafa Sa’eed’s widow; a woman in her thirties, weeping under seventy-year-old
Wad Rayyes. Her weeping would be made the subject of one of Wad Rayyes’s famous
stories about his many women with which he regales the men of the village. The
rage in my breast grew more savage. Unable to remain, I left; behind me I heard
my grandfather calling but I did not turn round.

At home my father inquired of me the reason for my bad humour
so I told him the story ‘Is that something to get angry about?’ he said,
laughing. 

At approximately
four o’clock
in the
afternoon
I went ro Mustafa Sa’eed’s house. I entered by the door of the
large courtyard, glanced momentarily to the left at the rectangular room of red
brick, silent not as the grave but as a ship that has cast anchor in mid-ocean.
However, the time had not yet come. She sat me down in a chair on the stone
stoop outside the diwan — the very same place — and brought me a glass of lemon
juice. The two boys came up and paid their respects to me; the elder was called
Mahmoud, her father’s name, and the younger Sa’eed, his father’s name. They
were ordinary children, one eight and the other seven, who went off each
morning to their school six miles away seated one behind the other on a donkey:
They are my responsibility; and one of the reasons that brings me here each
year is to see how they are getting on. This time we shall be holding their
circumcision ceremony and shall bring along professional singers and religious
chanters to a celebration that will be a landmark in their childhood memories.
He had told me to spare them the pangs of wanderlust. I would do nothing of the
sort; when they grew up, if they wanted to travel, they should be allowed to.
Everyone starts at the beginning of the road, and the world is in an endless
state of childhood.

The two boys left and she remained, standing in front of me:
a slim, tallish figure, firmly built and as lithe as a length of sugar cane;
while she used no henna on her feet or hands, a slight smell of perfume hung
about her. Her lips were naturally dark red and her teeth strong, white and
even. She had a handsome face with wide black eyes in which sadness mingled
with shyness. When I greeted her I felt her hand soft and warm in mine. She was
a woman of noble carriage and of a foreign type of beauty — or am I imagining
something that is not really there? A woman for whom, when I meet her, I feel a
sense of hazard and constraint so that I flee from her as quickly as I can.
This woman is the offering Wad Rayyes wants to sacrifice at the edge of the
grave, with which to bribe death and so gain a respite of a year or two.

She remained standing despite my insistence and only seated herself
when I said to her, ‘if you don’t sit down I’ll go.’ Conversation began slowly
and with difficulty and thus it continued while the sun sank down towards its
place of setting and little by little the air grew cooler and little by little
our tongues loosened. I said something that made her laugh and my heart
throbbed at the sweetness of her laughter. The blood of the setting sun
suddenly spilled out on the western horizon like that of millions of people who
have died in some violent war that has broken out between Earth and Heaven.
Suddenly the war ended in defeat and a complete and all-embracing darkness
descended and pervaded all four corners of the globe, wiping out the sadness
and shyness that was in her eyes. Nothing remained but the voice warmed by
affection, and the faint perfume which was like a spring that might dry up at
any moment.

‘Did you love Mustafa Sa’eed?’ I suddenly asked her.

She did not answer. Though I waited a while she still did not
answer. Then I realized that the darkness and the perfume were all but causing
me to lose control and that mine was not a question to be asked at such a time
and place.

However, it was not long before her voice breached a gap in
the darkness and broke through to my ear. ‘He was the father of my children.’
If I am right in my belief the voice was not sad, in fact it contained a
caressing tenderness. I let the silence whisper to her, hoping she would say
something further. Yes, here it was: ‘He was a generous husband and a generous
father. He never let us want for anything in his whole life.’

‘Did you know where he was from?’ I said as I leaned towards
her in the darkness.

‘From Khartoum,’ she said.

‘And what had he been doing in Khartoum? I said.

‘He’d been in business,’ she said.

‘And what brought him here?’ I said.

‘God knows,’ she said.

I almost despaired. Then a brisk breeze blew in my direction,
carrying a charge of perfume greater than I had hoped for. As I breathed it in
I felt my despair becoming keener.

Suddenly a large opening occurred in the darkness through
which penetrated a voice, this time a sad one with a sadness deeper than the
bottom of the river. ‘I think he was hiding something,’ she said.

‘Why?’ I pursued her with the question.

‘He used to spend a lot of time at night in that room,’ she said.

‘What’s in that room?’ I asked, intensifying my pursuit.

‘I don’t know’ she said. ‘I’ve never been in it. You have the
keys. Why don’t you investigate for yourself?’

Yes, supposing we were to get up, she and I, this instant,
light the lamp, and enter, would we find him strung up by the neck from the
ceiling, or would we find him sitting squat-legged on the floor?

‘Why do you think he was hiding something?’ I asked her
again.

Her voice was not sad now and contained no caressing
tenderness; it was saw-edged like a maize leaf. ‘Sometimes at night when he was
asleep he’d say things in — in gibberish.’

‘What gibberish?’ I followed up.

‘I don’t know;’ she said. ‘It was like European talk.’

I remained leaning forward towards her in the darkness,
watching, waiting.

‘He kept repeating words in his sleep, like Jeena Jeeny — I
don’t know.’

In this very place, at just such a time, in just such
darkness as this, his voice, like dead fishes floating on the surface of the
sea, used to float out. ‘I went on pursuing her for three years. Every day the
bow string became more taut. My caravans were parched with thirst and the
mirage glimmered in front of me in the desert of longing. On that night when Jean
whispered in my ear, “Come with me. Come with me,” my life had reached
completion and there was no reason to stay on —’ The shriek of a child reached
me from some place in the quarter.

‘It was as though he felt his end drawing near,’ said Hosna. ‘A
week before the day — the day before his death — he arranged his affairs. He
tidied up odds and ends and paid his debts. The day before he died he called me
to him and told me what he owned and gave me numerous directions about the
boys. He also gave me the letter sealed with wax and said to me, "Give it
to him if anything happens." He told me that if anything happened you were
to be the boys’ guardian. "Consult him in everything you do," he said
to me. I cried and said to him, "God willing, nothing bad will
happen." “It’s just in case,” he said, "for one never knows in this
world." That day I implored him not to go down to the field because of all
the flooding. I was afraid, but he told me not to be, and that he was a good
swimmer. I was apprehensive all day long and my fears increased when he didn’t
come back at his usual time. We waited and then it happened.’

I was conscious of her crying silently then her weeping grew
louder and was transformed into a fierce sobbing that shook the darkness lying
between her and me. Her perfume and the silence were lost and nothing existed
in the whole world except the lamentation of a woman for a husband she did not
know, for a man who, spreading his sails, had voyaged off on the ocean in
pursuit of a foreign mirage. And the old man Wad Rayyes dreams in his house of
nights of dalliance under the silken night-wrap. And I, what shall I do now
amidst this chaos? Shall I go up to her, clasp her to my breast, dry her tears
with my handkerchief and restore serenity to her heart with my words? I half
raised myself; leaning on my arm, but I sensed danger as I remembered
something, and remained as I was for a time in a state between action and
restraint. Suddenly a feeling of heavy weariness assailed me and I sank down on
to the chair. The darkness was thick, deep and basic — not a condition in which
light was merely absent; the darkness was now constant, as though light had
never existed and the stars in the sky were nothing but rents in an old and
tattered garment. The perfume was a jumble of dreams, an unheard sound like
that of ants’ feet in a mound of sand. From the belly of the darkness there
issued forth a voice that was not hers, a voice that was neither angry nor sad,
nor frightened, nothing more than a voice saying: ‘The lawyers were fighting
over my body. It was not I who was important but the case. Professor Maxwell
Foster-Keen — one of the founders of the Moral Rearmament movement in Oxford, a
Mason, and a member of the Supreme Committee for the Protestant Missionary
Societies in Africa — did not conceal his dislike of me. In the days when I was
a student of his at Oxford he would say to me with undisguised irritation:
“You, Mr Sa’eed, are the best example of the fact that our civilizing mission
in Africa is of no avail. After all the efforts we’ve made to educate you, it’s
as if you’d come out of the jungle for the first time.” And here he was,
notwithstanding, employing all his skill to save me from the gallows. Then
there was Sir Arthur Higgins, twice married and twice divorced, whose love
affairs were notorious and who was famous for his connections with the left and
Bohemian circles. I had spent the Christmas of 1925 at his house in Saffron
Walden. He used to say to me, “You’re a scoundrel, but I don’t dislike
scoundrels because I’m one myself.” Yet in court he employed all his skill to
place the hangman’s noose around my neck. The jurors, too, were a varied bunch
of people and included a labourer, a doctor, a farmer, a teacher, a
businessman, and an undertaker, with nothing in common between them and me; had
I asked one of them to rent me a room in his house he would as likely as not
have refused, and were his daughter to tell him she was going to marry this
African, he’d have felt that the world was collapsing under his feet. Yet each
one of them in that court would rise above himself for the first time in his
life, while I had a sort of feeling of superiority towards them, for the ritual
was being held primarily because of me; and I, over and above everything else,
am a colonizer, I am the intruder whose fate must be decided. When Mahmoud Wad
Ahmed was brought in shackles to Kitchener after his defeat at the Battle of Atbara,
Kitchener said to him, "Why have you come to my country to lay waste and
plunder?" It was the intruder who said this to the person whose land it
was, and the owner of the land bowed his head and said nothing. So let it be
with me. In that court I hear the rattle of swords in Carthage and the clatter
of the hooves of Allenby’s horses desecrating the ground of Jerusalem. The
ships at first sailed down the Nile carrying guns not bread, and the railways
were originally set up to transport troops; the schools were started so as to
teach us how to say “Yes" in their language. They imported to us the germ
of the greatest European violence, as seen on the Somme and at Verdun, the like
of which the world has never previously known, the germ of a deadly disease
that struck them more than a thousand years ago. Yes, my dear sirs, I came as
an invader into your very homes: a drop of the poison which you have injected
into the veins of history ‘I am no Othello. Othello was a lie.’