by Tayeb Sali
‘I leave my wife, two sons, and all my worldly goods in your care, knowing that you will act honourably in every respect. My wife knows about all my property and is free to do with it as she pleases. I have confidence in her judgment. However, I would ask you to do this service for a man who did not have the good fortune to get to know you as he would have liked: to give my family your kind attention, and to be a help, a counsellor and an adviser to my two sons and to do your best to spare them the pangs of wanderlust. Spare them the pangs of wanderlust and help them to have a normal upbringing and to take up worthwhile work. I leave you the key of my private room where you will perhaps find what you are looking for. I know you to be suffering from undue curiosity where I am concerned something for which I can find no justification. Whatever my life has been it contains no warning or lesson for anyone. Were it not for my realization that knowledge of my past by the village would have hindered my leading the life I had chosen for myself in their midst there would have been no justification for secrecy. You are released from the pledge you took upon yourself that night and can talk as you please. If you are unable to resist the curiosity in yourself then you will find, in that room that has never before been entered by anyone but myself, some scraps of paper, various fragments of writing and attempts at keeping diaries, and the like. I hope they will in any event help you to while away such hours as you cannot find a better way of spending. I leave it to you to judge the proper time for giving my sons the key of the room and for helping them to understand the truth about me. It is important to me that they should know what sort of person their father was — if that is at all possible. I am not concerned that they should think well of me. To be thought well of is the last thing I’m after; but perhaps it would help them to know the truth about themselves, at a time when such knowledge would not be dangerous. If they grow up imbued with the air of this village, its smells and colours and history; the faces of its inhabitants and the memories of its floods and harvestings and sowings, then my life will acquire its true perspective as something meaningful alongside many other meanings of deeper significance. I don’t know how they will think of me then. They may feel pity for me or they may in their imagination, transform me into a hero. That is not important. The important thing is that my life should not emerge from behind the unknown like an evil spirit and cause them harm. How I would have liked to stay on with them, watching them grow up before my eyes and at least constituting some justification for my existence. I do not know which of the two courses would be the more selfish, to stay on or to depart. In any event I have no choice, and perhaps you will realize what I mean if you cast your mind back to what I said to you that night. It’s futile to deceive oneself. That distant call still rings in my ears. I thought that my life and marriage here would silence it. But perhaps I was created thus, or my fate was thus — whatever may be the meaning of that I don’t know. Rationally I know what is right: my attempt at living in this village with these happy people. But mysterious things in my soul and in my blood impel me towards faraway parts that loom up before me and cannot be ignored. How sad it would be if either or both of my sons grew up with the germ of this infection in them, the wanderlust. I charge you with the trust because I have glimpsed in you a likeness to your grandfather. I don’t know when I shall go, my friend, but I sense that the hour of departure has drawn nigh, so good—bye.’
If Mustafa Sa’eed had chosen his end, then he had undertaken the most melodramatic act in the story of his life. If the other possibility was the right one, then Nature had bestowed upon him the very end which he would have wanted for himself. Imagine: the height of summer in the month of fateful july; the indifferent river has flooded as never before in thirty years; the darkness has fused all the elements of nature into one single neutral one, older than the river itself and more indifferent. In such manner the end of this hero had to be. But was it really the end he was looking for? Perhaps he wanted it to happen in the north, the far north, on a stormy; icy night, under a starless sky; among a people to whom he did not matter — the end of conquering invaders. But, as he said, they conspired against him, the jurors and the witnesses and the lawyers and the judges, to deprive him of it. ‘The jurors,’ he said, ‘saw before them a man who didn’t want to defend himself, a man who had lost the desire for life. I hesitated that night when Jean sobbed into my ear, "Come with me. Come with me.” My life achieved completion that night and there was no justification for staying on. But I hesitated and at the critical moment I was afraid. I was hoping that the court would grant me what I had been incapable of accomplishing. It was as though, realizing what I was after, they decided that they would not grant me the final request I had of them — even Colonel Hammond who I thought wished me well. He mentioned my visit to them in Liverpool and what a good impression I had made on him. He said that he regarded himself as a liberal person with no prejudices. Yet he was a realistic man and had seen that such a marriage would not work. He said too that his daughter Ann had fallen under the influence of Eastern philosophies at Oxford and that she was hesitating between embracing Buddhism or Islam. He could not say for sure whether her suicide was due to some spiritual crisis or because of finding out that Mr Mustafa Sa’eed had deceived her. Ann was his only daughter, and I had got to know her when she was not yet twenty; I deceived her, seducing her by telling her that we would marry and that our marriage would be a bridge between north and south, and I turned to ashes the firebrand of curiosity in her green eyes. And yet her father stands up in court and says in a calm voice that he can’t be sure. This is justice, the rules of the game, like the laws of combat and neutrality in war. This is cruelty that wears the mask of mercy...’ The long and short of it is they sentence him to imprisonment, a mere seven years, refusing to take the decision which he should have taken of his own free will. On coming out of prison he wanders from place to place, from Paris to Copenhagen to Delhi to Bangkok, as he tries to put off the decision. And after that the end came in an obscure village on the Nile; whether it was by chance or whether the curtain was lowered of his own free will no one can say for certain.
But I have not come here to think about Mustafa Sa’eed, for here, craning their necks in front of us, are the closely-packed village houses, made of mud and green bricks, while our donkeys press forward as their nostrils breathe in the scent of clover, fodder, and water. These houses are on the perimeter of the desert: it is as though some people in the past had wanted to settle here and had then washed their hands of it and quickly journeyed away. Here things begin and things end. A small girdle of cold, fresh breeze, amidst the meridional heat of the desert, comes from the direction of the river like a halftruth amidst a world filled with lies. The voices of people, birds and animals expire weakly on the ear like whispers, and the regular puttering of the water pump heightens the sensation of the impossible. And the river, the river but for which there would have been no beginning and no end, flows northwards, pays heed to nothing; a mountain may stand in its way so it turns eastwards; it may happen upon a deep depression so it turns westwards, but sooner or later it settles down in its irrevocable journey towards the sea in the north.
I stood at the door of my grandfather’s house in the morning, a vast and ancient door made of harraz, a door that had doubtless been fashioned from the wood of a whole tree. Wad Baseer had made it; Wad Baseer, the village engineer who, though he had not even learnt carpentry at school, had yet made the wheels and rings of the waterwheels, had set bones, had cauterized people and bled with cupping glasses. He was also so knowledgeable about judging donkeys that seldom did anyone from the village buy one without consulting him. Though Wad Baseer is still alive today; he no longer makes such doors as that of my grandfather’s house, later generations of villagers having found out about zan wood doors and iron doors which they bring in from Omdurman. The market for water-wheels, too, dried up with the coming of pumps. I heard them guffawing with laughter and made out the thin, mischievous laugh of my grandfather when in a
good humour; Wad Rayyes’s laugh that issues forth from an ever-full stomach; Bakri’s that takes its hue and flavour from the company in which he happens to be; and the strong, mannish laugh of Bint Majzoub. In my mind’s eye I see my grandfather sitting on his prayer-mat with his string of sandalwood prayerbeads in his hand revolving in ever- constant movement like the buckets of a water-wheel; Bint Majzoub, Wad Rayyes and Bakri, all old friends of his, will be sitting on those low couches which are a mere two hand-spans off the floor. According to my grandfather, a couch raised high off the floor indicates vanity; a low one humility. Bint Majzoub will be leaning on one elbow; while in her other hand she holds a cigarette. Wad Rayyes will be giving the impression of producing stories from the tips of his moustaches. Bakri will merely be sitting. This large house is built neither of stone nor yet of red brick but of the very mud in which the wheat is grown, and it stands right at the edge of the field so that it is an extension of it. This is evident from the acacia and sunt bushes that are growing in the courtyard and from the plants that sprout from the very walls where the water has seeped through from the cultivated land. It is a chaotic house, built without method, and has acquired its present form over many years: many differently-sized rooms, some built up against one another at different times, either because they were needed or because my grandfather found himself with some spare money for which he had no other use. Some of the rooms lead off one another, others have doors so low that you have to double up to enter, yet others are doorless; some have many windows, some none. The walls are smooth and plastered with a mixture of rough sand, black mud and animal dung, likewise the roofs, while the ceilings are of acacia wood and palm-tree trunks and stalks. A maze of a house, cool in summer, warm in winter; if one looks objectively at it from outside one feels it to be a frail structure, incapable of survival, but somehow as if by a miracle, it has surmounted time.
Entering by the door of the spacious courtyard, I looked to right and to left. Over there were dates spread out on straw matting to dry; over there onions and chillies; over there sacks of wheat and beans, some with mouths stitched up, others open. In a corner a goat eats barley and suckles her young. The fate of this house is bound up with that of the field: if the field waxes green so does it, if drought sweeps over the field it also sweeps over the house. I breathe in that smell peculiar to my grandfather’s house, a discordant mixture of onions and chillies and dates and wheat and horse-beans and fenugreek, in addition to the aroma of the incense which is always floating up from the large earthenware censer. The aroma of incense puts me in mind of my grandfather’s ascetic manner of life and the luxury of his accessories for prayers: the rug on which he prays, made up of three leopard skins stitched together, and which he would use as a coverlet when it turned excessively cold; the brass ewer with its decorations and inscriptions, which he used for his ablutions, and the matching brass basin. He was especially proud of his sandalwood prayer-beads, which he would run through his fingers and rub against his face, breathing in their aroma; when he got angry with one of his grandchildren he would strike him across the head with them, saying that this would chase away the devil that had got into him. All these things, like the rooms of his house and the date palms in his field, had their own histories which my grandfather had recounted to me time and time again, on each occasion omitting or adding something.
I lingered by the door as I savoured that agreeable sensation which precedes the moment of meeting my grandfather whenever I return from a journey: a sensation of pure astonishment that that ancient being is still in actual existence upon the earth’s surface. When I embrace him I breathe in his unique smell which is a combination of the smell of the large mausoleum in the cemetery and the smell of an infant child. And that thin tranquil voice sets up a bridge between me and the anxious moment that has not yet been formed, and between the moments the events of which have been assimilated and have passed on, have become bricks in an edifice with perspectives and dimensions. By the standards of the European industrial world we are poor peasants, but when I embrace my grandfather I experience a sense of richness as though I am a note in the heartbeats of the very universe. He is no towering oak tree with luxuriant branches growing in a land on which Nature has bestowed water and fertility; rather is he like the sayal bushes in the deserts of the Sudan, thick of bark and sharp of thorn, defeating death because they ask so little of life. That was the cause for wonder: that he was actually alive, despite plague and famines, wars and the corruption of rulers. And now here he is nearing his hundredth year. All his teeth are still intact; though you would think his small lustreless eyes were sightless, yet he can see with them in the pitch darkness of night; his body small and shrunken in upon itself is all bones, veins, skin and muscle, with not a single scrap of fat. None the less he can spring nimbly on to his donkey and walks from his house to the mosque in the twilight of dawn.
My grandfather used the edge of his gown to wipe away the tears that had run down his face from laughing so much, and after giving me time to settle myself in the gathering, said, ‘By God, that’s some story of yours, Wad Rayyes.’ This was a cue to Wad Rayyes to continue the story my entrance had interrupted. And afterwards, Hajj Ahmed, I put the girl in front of me on the donkey squirming and twisting, then I forcibly stripped her of all her clothes till she was as naked as the day her mother bore her. She was a young slave girl from down-river who’d just reached puberty — her breasts, Hajj Ahmed, stuck out like pistols and your arms wouldn’t meet round her buttocks. She had been rubbed all over with oil so that her skin glistened in the moonlight and her perfume turned one giddy I took her down to a sandy patch in the middle of the maize, but when I started on her I heard a movement in the maize and a voice saying, "Who’s there?” O Hajj Ahmed, there’s no madness like the madness of youth. Thinking quickly I made out I was an afreet and began letting out Hendish shrieks, scattering sand around and stamping about, so the man panicked and fled. The joke was, though, that my uncle Isa had been following hard on my heels from the moment I snatched the girl from the wedding house right up to when we arrived at the patch of sand. When he saw I was pretending to be an afreet, he stood by watching. Early the next day he went off to my father, may God rest his soul, and told him the whole story “This son of yours is a real devil," he told him, “and if you don’t fmd him a wife this very day he’ll corrupt the whole village and bring down on us no end of scandals," and they in fact married me off that very day to my uncle Rajab’s daughter. God rest her soul, she died giving birth to her first child. “Since when," said Bint Majzoub to him, laughing in her manly voice made hoarse by too much smoking, “you’ve been jumping on and off like a jack donkey"
‘”Is there anyone who knows the sweetness of this thing better than you, Bint Majzoub?” Wad Rayyes said to her. “You’ve buried eight husbands and now you’re an old woman you wouldn’t say no if you were offered it."
"‘We’ve heard,” said my grandfather, “that Bint Majzoub’s cries of delight had to be heard to be believed."
‘“May I divorce, Hajj Ahmed," said Bint Majzoub, lighting up a cigarette, “if when my husband was between my thighs I didn’t let out a scream that used to scare the animals tied up at pasn1re."
‘Bakri, who previously had been laughing without saying anything, said, “Tell us, Bint Majzoub, which of your husbands was the best?”
‘“Wad Basheer,” said Bint Majzoub promptly "‘Wad Basheer the dozy dope," said Bakri. “He was so slow a goat could make off with his supper."
‘“May I divorce," said Bint Majzoub, freeing the ash from her cigarette on to the ground with a theatrical movement of her fingers, "if his thing wasn’t like a wedge he’d drive right into me so I could hardly contain myself He’d lift up my legs after the evening prayer and I’d remain splayed open till the call to prayers at dawn. When he had his climax he’d shout like an ox being slaughtered, and always when moving from on top of me he would say ‘Praise be to God, Bint Majzoub.”
‘“I
t’s not surprising you killed him off in the bloom of youth," said my grandfather to her.
"‘The time that fate decreed for him killed him," said Bint Majzoub with a laugh. “This business never kills anyone.”
Bint Majzoub was a tall woman of a charcoal complexion like black velvet who, despite the fact she was approaching seventy still retained vestiges of beauty. She was famous in the village, and men and women alike were eager to listen to her conversation which was daring and uninhibited. She used to smoke, drink and swear on oath of divorce like a man. It was said that her mother was the daughter of one of the Fur sultans in Darfur. She had been married to a number of the leading men of the village, all of whom had died and left her a considerable fortune. She had borne one son and a countless number of daughters who were famous for their beauty and for being as uninhibited in their conversation as their mother. It was recounted that one of Bint Majzoub’s daughters married a man of whom her mother did not approve. He took her off on a journey with him and on his return about a year later he decided to hold a banquet to which to invite his wife’s relatives. ‘My mother is quite uninhibited in the way she talks,’ the wife said to him, ‘and it would be better to invite her on her own.’ So they slaughtered some animals and invited her along. After she had eaten and drunk Bint Majzoub said to her daughter, in her husband’s hearing, Amna, this man has not done badly by you, for your house is beautiful and so is your clothing, and he has filled your hands and neck with gold. However it would not appear from the look of him that he is able to satisfy you in bed. Now if you want to have real satisfaction I can find you a husband who once he mounts you will not get off till you’re at your last gasp.’ When the husband heard these words he was so angry he divorced his wife irrevocably on the spot.