Season of Migration to the North (15 page)

‘Just like everyone else,’ I said, ‘I want to know what
happened. Why should I be the only one who mustn't be allowed to know?’

She drew on the cigarette I gave her. ‘Some time after the
evening prayer,’ she continued, ‘I awoke to the screaming of Hosna Bint Mahmoud
in Wad Rayyes’s house. The whole village was silent, you couldn’t hear a sound.
To tell you God’s truth, I thought that Wad Rayyes had at last achieved what he
wanted — the poor man was on the verge of madness: two weeks with the woman
without her speaking to him or allowing him to come near her. I gave ear for a
time as she screamed and wailed. May God forgive me, I laughed as I heard her
screaming, telling myself that Wad Rayyes still had something left in him. The
screaming grew louder and I heard a movement in Bakri’s house alongside Wad Rayyes’s.
I heard Bakri shouting, “You, should be ashamed of yourself man, making such a
scandal and hullabaloo.” Then I heard the voice of Sa’eeda, Bakri’s wife,
saying, “Bint Mahmoud, look to your honour. What scandals are these? A virgin
bride doesn’t behave like this — as though you’d had no experience of
men." Bint Mahmoud’s screams grew louder. Then I heard Wad Rayyes
screaming at the top of his voice, “Bakri! Hajj Ahmed! Bint Majzoub! Help! Bint
Mahmoud has killed me.” I leapt up from bed and rushed out in a state of
undress. I rapped on Bakri’s door and on Mahjoub’s, then ran to Wad Rayyes’s,
which I found closed. I cried out at the top of my voice, at which Mahjoub came
along, then Bakri. Many people then gathered round us. As we were breaking down
the courtyard door we heard a scream — a mountain—shattering scream from Wad Rayyes,
then a similar scream from Bint Mahmoud. We entered, Mahjoub, Bakri and I.
"Stop the people from entering the house," I said to Mahjoub. “Don’t
let any woman enter the house." Mahjoub went out and shouted at the
people; when he returned your uncle Abdul Karim was with him, also Sa’eed, Tahir
Rawwasi, and even your poor grandfather came from his house.’

The sweat began pouring down Bint Majzoub’s face. Her throat
was dry and she pointed to the water. When I had brought it to her she drank,
wiped the sweat from her face, and said, ‘I ask pardon and repentance of
Almighty God. We found the two of them in Wad Rayyes’s low-ceilinged room
looking on to the street. The lamp was alight. Wad Rayyes was as naked as the
day he was born; Bint Mahmoud too was naked apart from her torn underclothes.
The red straw mat was swimming in blood. I raised the lamp and saw that every
inch of Bint Mahmoud’s body was covered in bites and scratches — her stomach,
thighs and neck. The nipple of one breast had been bitten through and blood
poured down from her lower lip. There is no strength and no power save in God.
Wad Rayyes had been stabbed more than ten times — in his stomach, chest, face,
and between his thighs.’

Bint Majzoub was unable to continue. She swallowed with
difficulty and her throat quivered nervously. Then she said: ‘O Lord, there is
no opposition to Thy will. We found her lying on her back with the knife
plunged into her heart. Her mouth was open and her eyes were staring as though
she were alive. Wad Rayyes had his tongue lolling out from between his jaws and
his arms were raised in the air.’

Bint Majzoub covered her face with her hand and the sweat
trickled down between her fingers; her breathing was fast and laboured. ‘I ask
forgiveness of Almighty God,’ she said with difficulty ‘They had both died
minutes beforehand. The blood was still warm and dripped from Bint Mahmoud’s
heart and from between Wad Rayyes’s thighs. Blood covered the mat and the bed
and flowed in rivulets across the floor of the room. Mahjoub, God lengthen his
life, was a tower of strength. When he heard Mahmoud’s voice he hurried outside
and told your father not to let him in. Then Mahjoub and the men bore off Wad Rayyes’s
body, while Bakri’s wife and I, with some of the older women, took care of Bint
Mahmoud. We put them in their shrouds that very night and they took them away
before sunrise and buried them — she beside her mother and he beside his first
wife, Bint Rajab. Some of the women started to hold a funeral ceremony but Mahjoub,
God bless him, shut them up and said he’d break the neck of anyone who opened
her mouth. What sort of funeral ceremony, my child, can be held in such
circumstances? This is a great catastrophe that has befallen the village. All
our lives we have enjoyed God’s protection and now finally something like this happens
to us! I ask forgiveness and repentance of Thee, O Lord.’

She too wept as my grandfather had done. She wept long and
bitterly; then, smiling through her tears, she said, ‘The strange thing about
it is that his eldest wife Mabrouka didn’t wake up at all, despite all the
shouting that brought people right from the far end of the village. When I went
to her and shook her, she raised her head and said, "Bint Majzoub, what’s
brought you at this hour?" "Get up," I said to her. "'There’s
been a murder in your house." "Whose murder?" she said. “Bint Mahmoud
has killed Wad Rayyes and then killed herself" I said to her. "Good
riddance!" she said and went back to sleep, and we could hear her snoring
while we were busy preparing Bint Mahmoud for burial. When the people returned
from the burial, we found Mabrouka sitting drinking her morning coffee. When
some of the women wanted to commiserate with her she yelled, “Women, let
everyone of you go about her business. Wad Rayyes dug his grave with his own
hands, and Bint Mahmoud, God’s blessings be upon her, paid him out in full.”
Then she gave trilling cries of joy. Yes, by God, my child, she gave trilling
cries of joy and said to the women, “It’s too bad, but if anyone doesn’t like
it she can go drink river water." I ask forgiveness of Almighty God. Her
father, Mahmoud, almost killed himself with weeping that night — he was
bellowing like an ox. Your grandfather was cursing and swearing, laying about
him with his stick, yelling and weeping. For no reason your uncle Abdul Karim quarrelled
with Bakri. “A murder happens next door to you,” he said to him, “and you sleep
right through it?" It was the same thing with the whole village that night
— it was as though they’d been visited by devils. Mahjoub alone was calm and
collected and saw to everything: he brought shrouds from we don’t know where,
and he quietened down Wad Rayyes’s boys who were making a terrible noise. May
God spare you such a sight, my child — it was something to break one’s heart
and bring white hair to a baby’s head. And it was all without rhyme or reason.
She accepted the stranger — why didn’t she accept Wad Rayyes?’

The
fields are all fire and smoke. It is the time for preparing to sow the wheat.
They clean the ground and collect up the sticks of maize and small stems,
mementos of the season that has ended, and make them into burning heaps. The
earth is black and level, ready for the coming event. The men’s bodies are bent
over their hoes; some are walking behind the ploughs. The tops of the palm
trees shudder in the gentle breeze and grow still. Under the sun’s violence at midday hot steam rises from the fields of watered clover. Every breath of wind diffuses
the scent of lemon, orange and tangerine. The lowing of an ox, the braying of a
donkey or the sound of an axe on wood. Yet the world has changed.

I found Mahjoub mud—bespattered, his body naked except for
the rag round his middle, moist with sweat, trying to separate a shoot from the
mother date palm. I did not greet him and he did not turn to me but went on
digging round the shoot. I remained standing, watching him. Then I lit a
cigarette and held out the packet to him, but he refused with a shake of his
head. I took my cares off to the trunk of a nearby date palm against which I
rested my head. There is no room for me here. Why don’t I pack up and go?
Nothing astonishes these people. They take everything in their stride. They
neither rejoice at a birth nor are saddened at a death. When they laugh they
say ‘I ask forgiveness of God’ and when they weep they say ‘I ask forgiveness
of God.’ Just that. And I, what have I learnt? They have learnt silence and
patience from the river and from the trees. And I, what have I learnt? I
noticed that Mahjoub was biting his lower lip as was his habit when engaged on
some job of work. I used to beat him in wrestling and running, but he would
outstrip me in swimming the river to the other bank and in climbing palm trees.
No palm tree was too difficult for him. There was between us the sort of
affection that exists between blood brothers. Mahjoub swore at the small palm
tree when he eventually succeeded in separating it from the trunk of its mother
without breaking its roots. He heaped earth on to the large wound that was left
in the trunk, lopped the stalks from the small plant and removed the earth,
then threw it down to dry out in the sun. I told myself that he would now be
more prepared to talk. He came into the shade where I was, sat down and
stretched out his legs. He remained silent for a while, then sighed and said,
‘I ask forgiveness of God.’ He stretched out his hand and I gave him a
cigarette — he only smoked when I was at the village and would say ‘we’re
burning the government’s money.’

He threw away the cigarette before finishing it. ‘You look
ill,’ he said. ‘The journey must have tired you out. Your presence wasn’t
necessary. When I sent you the telegram I didn’t expect you’d come.’

‘She killed him and killed herself I said as though talking
to myself. ‘She stabbed him more than ten times and — how ghastly!’

‘Who told you?’ he said, turning to me in astonishment.

‘He bit off her nipple,’ I continued, giving no heed to his
questions, ‘and bit and scratched every inch of her body. How ghastly!’

‘It must have been Bint Majzoub who told you,’ he shouted angrily
‘God curse her, she can’t hold her tongue. These are things that shou1dn’t be
spoken about.’

‘Whether they’re spoken about or not,’ I said to him, ‘they’ve
happened. They happened in front of your very eyes and you did nothing. You,
you’re a leader in the village and you did nothing.’

‘What should we do?’ said Mahjoub. ‘Why didn’t you do
something? Why didn’t you marry her? You’re only any good when it comes to
talking. It was the woman herself who had the impudence to speak her mind.
We’ve lived in an age when we’ve seen women wooing men.’

‘And what did she say?’ I said to him.

‘It’s over and done with,’ he said. ‘What’s the use of
talking? Give thanks to God that you didn’t marry her. The thing she did wasn’t
the act of a human being — it was the act of a devil.’

‘What did she say?’ I said to him, grinding my teeth.

‘When her father went and swore at her,’ he said, looking at
me without sympathy ‘she came to my home at sunrise. She said she wanted you to
save her from Wad Rayyes and the attention of suitors. All she wanted was to
become formally married to you, nothing more. She said, “He’ll leave me with my
children and I want nothing whatsoever from him.” I told her we shouldn’t
involve you in the matter, and I advised her to accept the situation. Her
father had charge of her and was free to act as he thought fit. I told her Wad Rayyes
wouldn’t live for ever. A mad man and a mad woman — how can we be to blame?
What could we do about it? Her poor father has been confined to bed ever since
that ill-fated day; he never goes out, never meets anyone. What can I or anyone
else do if the world’s gone crazy. Bint Mahmoud’s madness was of a kind never
seen before.’ I had to make a great effort not to break into tears.

‘Hosna wasn’t mad,’ I said. ‘She was the sanest woman in the
village — it’s you who’re mad. She was the sanest woman in the village — and
the most beautiful. Hosna wasn’t mad.’ 

Mahjoub laughed, guffawed with laughter. ‘How extraordinary!’
I heard him say amidst laughter. ‘Take a pull at yourself man! Wake up! Fancy
you falling in love at your age! You’ve become as mad as Wad Rayyes. Schooling
and education have made you soft. You’re crying like a woman. Good God, wonders
never cease —  love, illness and tears, and she wasn’t worth a millieme. If it
wasn’t for the sake of decency she wouldn’t have been worth burying — we’d have
thrown her into the river or left her body out for the hawks.’

I’m not altogether clear as to what happened next. However, I
do remember my hands closing over Mahjoub’s throat; I remember the way his eyes
bulged; I remember, too, a violent blow in the stomach and Mahjoub crouching on
my chest. I remember Mahjoub prostrate on the ground and me kicking him, and I
remember his voice screaming out ‘Mad! You’re mad!’ I remember a clamour and a
shouting as I pressed down on Mahjoub’s throat and heard a gurgling sound; then
I felt a powerful hand pulling me by the neck and the impact of a heavy stick
on my head.

The
world has turned suddenly upside down
. Love? Love does not do this. This is
hatred. I feel hatred and seek revenge; my adversary is within and I needs must
confront him. Even so, there is still in my mind a modicum of sense that is
aware of the irony of the situation. I begin from where Mustafa Sa’eed had left
off. Yet he at least made a choice, while I have chosen nothing. For a while
the disk of the sun remained motionless just above the western horizon, then
hurriedly disappeared. The armies of darkness, ever encamped near by, bounded
in and occupied the world in an instant. If only I had told her the truth
perhaps she would not have acted as she did. I had lost the war because I did
not know and did not choose. For a long time I stood in front of the iron door.
Now I am on my own: there is no escape, no place of refuge, no safeguard.
Outside, my world was a wide one; now it had contracted, had withdrawn upon
itself until I myself had become the world, no world existing outside of me.
Where, then, were the roots that struck down into times past? Where the
memories of death and life? What had happened to the caravan and to the tribe?
Where had gone the trilling cries of the women at tens of weddings, where the Nile
floodings, and the blowing of the wind summer and winter from north and south? Love?
Love does not do this. This is hatred. Here I am, standing in Mustafa Sa’eed’s
house in front of the iron door, the door of the rectangular room with the
triangular roof and the green windows, the key in my pocket and my adversary
inside with, doubtless, a fiendish look of happiness on his face. I am the
guardian, the lover, and the adversary.