Season of Migration to the North (13 page)

‘Is that something to get angry about?’ said my father. Man’s
mind is not kept in a refrigerator. It is this sun which is unbearable. It
melts the brain. It paralyses thought. And Mustafa Sa’eed’s face springs
clearly to my mind, just as I saw it the first day, and is then lost in the
roar of the lorry’s engine and the sound of the tyres against the desert
stones, and I strive to bring it back and am unable to.

The day the boys’ circumcision was celebrated, Hosna bared
her head and danced as a mother does on the day her sons are circumcised. What
a woman she is! Why don’t you marry her? In what manner used Isabella Seymour
to whisper caressingly to him? ‘Ravish me, you African demon. Burn me in the
fire of your temple, you black god. Let me twist and turn in your wild and
impassioned rites.’ Right here is the source of the fire; here the temple. Nothing.
The sun, the desert, desiccated plants and emaciated animals. The frame of the
lorry shudders as it descends into a small wadi. We pass by the bones of a
camel that has perished from thirst in this wilderness. Mustafa Sa’eed’s face
returns to my mind’s eye in the form of his elder son’s face — the one who most
resembles him. On the day of the circumcision Mahjoub and I drank more than we
should. Owing to the monotony of their lives the people in our village make of
every happy event however small an excuse for holding a sort of wedding party.
At night I pulled him by the hand, while the singers sang and the men were
clapping deep inside the house. We stood in front of the door of that room. I
said to him, ‘I alone have the key.’ An iron door.

Mahjoub said to me in his inebriated voice: ‘Do you know
what’s inside?’

‘Yes,’ I said to him.

‘What?’ he said.

‘Nothing,’ I said, laughing under the influence of the drink.
‘Absolutely nothing. This room is a big joke — like life. You imagine it
contains a secret and there’s nothing there. Absolutely nothing.’

‘You’re drunk,’ said Mahjoub. ‘This room is filled from floor
to ceiling with treasures: gold, jewels, pearls. Do you know who Mustafa Sa’eed
is?’

I told him that Mustafa Sa’eed was a lie. ‘Do you want to know
the truth about Mustafa Sa’eed?’ I said to him with another drunken laugh.

‘You’re not only drunk but mad,’ said Mahjoub.

‘Mustafa Sa’eed is in fact the Prophet El-Kidr, suddenly
making his appearance and as suddenly vanishing. The treasures that lie in this
room are like those of King Solomon, brought here by genies, and you have the
key to that treasure. Open, Sesame, and let’s distribute the gold and jewels to
the people.’ Mahjoub was about to shout out and gather the people together had
I not put my hand over his mouth. The next morning each of us woke up in his
own house not knowing how he’d got there.

The road is endless, without limit, the sun indefatigable. No
wonder Mustafa Sa’eed fled to the bitter cold of the North. Isabella Seymour
said to him: ‘The Christians say their God was crucified that he might bear the
burden of their sins. He died, then, in vain, for what they call sin is nothing
but the sigh of contentment in embracing you, O pagan god of mine. You are my
god and there is no god but you.’ No doubt that was the reason for her suicide,
and not that she was ill with cancer. She was a believer when she met him. She
denied her religion and worshipped a god like the calf of the Children of Israel.
How strange! How ironic! Just because a man has been created on the Equator
some mad people regard him as a slave, others as a god. Where lies the mean?
Where the middle way? And my grandfather, with his thin voice and that
mischievous laugh of his when in a good humour, where is
his
place in
the scheme of things? Is he really as I assert and as he appears to be? Is he
above this chaos? I don’t know. In any case he has survived despite epidemics,
the corruption of those in power, and the cruelty of nature. I am certain that
when death appears to him he will smile in death’s face. Isn’t this enough? Is
more than this demanded of a son of Adam?’

From behind a hill there came into view a bedouin, who
hurried towards us, crossing the car’s path. We drew up. His body and clothes
were the colour of the earth. The driver asked him what he wanted.

He said, ‘Give me a cigarette or some tobacco for the sake of
Allah — for two days I haven’t tasted tobacco.’ As we had no tobacco I gave him
a cigarette. We thought we might as well stop a while and give ourselves a rest
from sitting.

Never in my life have I seen a man smoke a cigarette with
such gusto. Squatting down on his backside, the bedouin began gulping in the
smoke with indescribable avidity.  After a couple of minutes he put out his
hand and I gave him another cigarette, which he devoured as he had done the
first. Then he began writhing on the ground as though in an epileptic fit,
after which he stretched himself out, encircled his head with his hands, and
went stiff and lifeless as though dead. All the time we were there, around
twenty minutes, he stayed like this, until the engine started up, when he
jumped to his feet — a man brought back to life — and began thanking me and
asking Allah to grant me long life, so I threw him the packet with the rest of
the cigarettes. Dust rose up behind us, and I watched the bedouin running
towards some tattered tents by some bushes southwards of us, where there were
diminutive sheep and naked children. Where, O God, is the shade? Such land
brings forth nothing but prophets. This drought can be cured only by the sky.

The road is unending and the sun merciless. Now the car lets
out a wailing sound as it passes over a stony surface, flat as a table. ‘We are
a doomed people, so regale us with amusing stories.’ Who said this? Then: ‘Like
someone marooned in the desert who has covered no distance yet spared no mount.’
The driver is not talking; he is merely an extension of the machine in his
charge, sometimes cursing and swearing at it, while the country around us is a
circle sunk in the mirage. ‘One mirage kept raising us up, another casting us
down, and from deserts we were spewed out into yet more deserts.’ Mohamed Sa’eed
El-Abbasi, what a poet he was! And Abu Nuwas: ‘We drank as deeply as a people
athirst since the age of Aad.’ This is the land of despair and poetry but there
is nobody to sing.

We came across a government car that had broken down, with
five soldiers and a sergeant, all armed with rifles, surrounding it. We drew up
and they drank from the water we had and ate some of our provisions, and we let
them have some petrol. They said that a woman from the tribe of El-Mirisab had
killed her husband and the government was in the process of arresting her. What
was her name? What his? Why had she killed him? They do not know — only that
she is from the El-Mirisab tribe and that she had killed a man who was her
husband. But they would know it: the tribes of El-Mirisab, El-Hawaweer and El-Kababeesh;
the judges, resident and itinerant; the Commissioner of North Kordofan, the Commissioner
of the Southern North Province, the Commissioner of East Khartoum; the
shepherds at the watering places; the Sheikhs and the Nazirs; the bedouin in
hair tents at the intersections of the valleys. All of them would know her
name, for it is not every day that a woman kills a man, let alone her husband,
in this land in which the sun has left no more killing to be done. An idea
occurred to me; turning it over in my mind, I decided to express it and see
what happened. I said to them that she had not killed him but that he had died
from sunstroke — just as Isabella Seymour had died, and Sheila Greenwood, Ann
Hammond, and Jean Morris. Nothing happened.

‘We had a horrible Commandant of Police called Major Cook,’
said the sergeant. No use. No sense of wonder. They went on their way and we
went on ours.

The sun is the enemy. Now it is exactly in the liver of the
sky as the Arabs say. What a fiery liver! And thus it will remain for hours
without moving — or so it will seem to living creatures when even the stones
groan, the trees weep, and iron cries out for help. The weeping of a woman
under a man at dawn and two wide-open white thighs. They are now like the dry
bones of camels scattered in the desert. No taste. No smell. Nothing of good. Nothing
of evil. The wheels of the car strike spitefully against the stones. ‘His
twisted road all too soon leads to disaster, and generally the disaster lies
clearly before him, as clear as the sun, so that we are amazed how such an
intelligent man can in fact be so stupid. Granted a generous measure of
intelligence, he has been denied wisdom. He is an intelligent fool.’ That’s
what the judge said at the Old Bailey before passing sentence.

The road is endless and the sun as bright as it proverbially
is. I shall write to Mrs Robinson. She lives in Shanklin on the Isle of Wight.
Her address has stuck in my memory ever since Mustafa Sa’eed’s conversation
that night. Her husband died of typhoid and was buried in Cairo in the cemetery
of the Imam Shafi’i. Yes, he embraced Islam. Mustafa Sa’eed said she attended
the trial from beginning to end. He was composed the whole time. After sentence
was given he wept on her breast. She stroked his head, kissed him on the
forehead, and said, ‘Don’t cry dear child.’ She had not liked Jean Morris and
had warned him against marrying her. I shall write to her; perhaps she can
throw some light on things, perhaps she remembers things he forgot or did not
mention. And suddenly the war ended in victory. The glow of sundown is not
blood but henna on a woman’s foot, and the breeze that pursues us from the Nile
Valley carries a perfume whose smell will not fade from my mind as long as I
live. And just as a caravan of camels makes a halt, so did we. The greater part
of the journey was behind us. We ate and drank. Some of us performed the night
prayer, while the driver and his assistants took some bottles of drink from the
lorry. I threw myself down on the sand, lighted a cigarette and lost myself in
the splendour of the sky. The lorry too was nourished with water, petrol and
oil, and now there it is, silent and content like a mare in her stable. The war
ended in victory for us all: the stones, the trees, the animals, and the iron,
while I, lying under this beautiful, compassionate sky feel that we are all
brothers; he who drinks and he who prays and he who steals and he who commits
adultery and he who fights and he who kills. The source is the same. No one
knows what goes on in the mind of the Divine. Perhaps He doesn’t care. Perhaps
He is not angry. On a night such as this you feel you are able to rise up to
the sky on a rope ladder: This is the land of poetry and the possible — and my
daughter is named Hope. We shall pull down and we shall build, and we shall
humble the sun itself to our will; and somehow we shall defeat poverty. The
driver, who had kept silent the whole day has now raised his voice in song: a
sweet, rippling voice that you can’t imagine is his. He is singing to his car
just as the poets of old sang to their camels:

How shapely is your steering-wheel astride its metal stem.

No sleep or rest tonight we’ll have till Sitt Nafour is
come
.

Another
voice is raised in answer:

From the lands of Kawal and Kambu on a journey we are
bent.

His head he tossed with noble pride, resigned to our
intent.

The sweat pours down his mighty neck and soaks his massive
sides

And sparks around his feet do fly as to the sands he
strides.

Then
a third voice rose up in answer to the other two:

Woe to me, what pain does grip my breast

As does the quarry tire my dog in chase.

The man of God his very faith you’d wrest

And turn aside at Jeddah the pilgrim to
Hejaz
.

And
so we continued on, while every vehicle, coming or going, would stop and join
us until we became a huge caravanserai of more than a hundred men who ate and
drank and prayed and got drunk.

We formed ourselves into a large circle into which some of
the younger men entered and danced in the manner of girls. We clapped, stamped
on the ground, and hummed in unison, making a festival to nothingness in the
heart of the desert. Then someone produced a transistor radio which we placed
in the centre of the circle and we clapped and danced to its music. Someone
else got the idea of having the drivers line up their cars in a circle and
train their headlights on to the ring of dancers so that there was a blaze of
light the like of which I do not believe that place had ever seen before. The
men imitated the loud trilling cries women utter at festivities and the horns
of the cars all rang out together. The light and the clamour attracted the bedouin
from the neighbouring wadi ravines and foothills, both men and women, people
whom you would not see by day when it was just as if they melted away under the
light of the sun. A vast concourse of people gathered.

Actual women entered the circle; had you seen them by day you
would not have given them a second glance, but at that time and place they were
beautiful. A bedouin man brought a sheep which he tied up and slaughtered and
then roasted over a fire. One of the travelers produced two crates of beer
which he distributed around as he called out, ‘To the good health of the Sudan.
To the good health of the Sudan.’ Packets of cigarettes and boxes of sweets
were passed round, and the bedouin women sang and danced, the night and the
desert resounding with the echoes of a great feast, as though we were some
tribe of genies. A feast without a meaning, a mere desperate act that had
sprung up impromptu like the small whirlwinds that rise up in the desert and
then die. At dawn we parted. The bedouin made their way back to the wadi
ravines. The people exchanged shouts of ‘Good—bye, good—bye’, and everyone ran
off to his car. The engines revved up and the headlights veered away from the
place which moments before had been an intimate stage and which now returned to
its former state — a tract of desert. Some of the headlights pointed southwards
in the direction of the Nile, some northwards also in the direction of the Nile.
The dust swirled up and disappeared. We caught up the sun on the peaks of the
mountains of Kerari overlooking Omdurman.