by Tayeb Sali
‘What’s come over you?’ Bint Majzoub said to Wad Rayyes. ‘For two years now you’ve contented yourself with a single wife. Has your prowess waned?’
Wad Rayyes and my grandfather exchanged glances the meaning of which I was to understand only later. ‘The face is that of an old man, the heart that of a young one,’ said Wad Rayyes. ‘Do you know of a widow or divorced woman who would suit me?’
‘By God, the truth is, Wad Rayyes,’ said Bakri, ‘that you’re past marrying again. You’re now an old man in your seventies and your grandchildren have children of their own. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself having a wedding every year? What you need now is to bear yourself with dignity and prepare to meet the Almighty God.’
Bint Majzoub and my grandfather both laughed at these words. ‘What do you understand of these matters?’ said Wad Rayyes in feigned anger. ‘Both you and Hajj Ahmed made do with one woman, and when they died and left you you couldn’t find the courage to marry again. Hajj Ahmed here spends all day praying and telling his beads as though Paradise had been created just for him. And you, Bakri, busy yourself in making money till death gives you release from it. Almighty God sanctioned marriage and He sanctioned divorce. “Take them with liberality and separate from them with liberality” he said. "Women and children are the adornment of life on this earth," God said in His noble Book.’
I said to Wad Rayyes that the Koran did not say ‘Women and children’ but ‘Wealth and children’.
He answered: ‘In any case, there’s no pleasure like that of fornication.’
Wad Rayyes carefully stroked his curved moustaches upwards, their ends like needle-points, then with his left hand began rubbing the thick white beard that covered his face right up to his temples. Its utter whiteness contrasted strongly with the brownness of his skin, the colour of tanned leather, so that his beard looked like something artificial stuck on to his face. However, the whiteness of his beard blended without difficulty with the whiteness of his large turban, forming a striking frame that brought out the main features of his face: the beautifully intelligent eyes and the thin elegant nose. Wad Rayyes used kohl on his eyes: though he gave as his reason for so doing the fact that kohl was enjoined in the sunna, I believe it was out of vanity. It was in its entirety a beautiful face, especially if you compared it to that of my grandfather, which had nothing characteristic about it, or with Bakri’s which was like a wrinkled water melon. It was obvious that Wad Rayyes was aware of this. I heard that in his youth he was a strikingly handsome man and that the girls, south and north, up-river and down, lost their hearts to him. He had been much married and much divorced, taking no heed of anything in a woman except that she was woman, taking them as they came, and if asked about it replying, ‘A stallion isn’t finicky’ I remember that among his wives was a Dongola woman from El-Khandak, a Hadandawi woman from El-Gedare£ an Abyssinian he’d found employed as a servant by his eldest son in Khartoum, and a woman from Nigeria he’d brought back with him from his fourth pilgrimage. When asked how he had married her he said he’d met her and her husband on the ship between Port Sudan and Jeddah and that he’d struck up a friendship with them. The man, however, had died in Mecca on the Day of Halting at Arafat and had said to him as he was dying, ‘I ask you to look well after my wife.’ He could think of no way of looking after her better than by marrying her, and she lived with him for three years which, for Wad Rayyes, was a long time. He had been delighted with her, the greater part of his pleasure coming from the fact that she was barren. Recounting to people the details of his intimacies with her, he would say ‘No one who hasn’t been married to a Nigerian knows what marriage is.’ During his time with her he married a woman from the Kababeesh he brought back with him from a visit to Hamrat El-Sheikh, but the two women could not bear living together so he divorced the Nigerian to please the Kababeeshi woman, who after a while deserted him and fled to her people in Hamrat El-Sheikh.
Wad Rayyes prodded me in the side with his elbow and said, ‘They say the infidel women are something unbelievable.’
‘I wouldn’t know’ I said to him.
‘What a way to talk!’ he said. A young lad like you in the flower of his youth spending seven years in the land of hanky-panky and you say you don’t know.’
I was silent and Wad Rayyes said, ‘This tribe of yours isn’t any good. You’re one-woman men. The only real man among you is Abdul Karim. Now there’s a man for you.’
We were in fact known in the village for not divorcing our wives and for not having more than one. The villagers used to joke about us and say that we were afraid of our women, except for my uncle Abdul Karim who was both much divorced and much married — and an adulterer to boot.
‘The infidel women aren’t so knowledgeable about this business as our village girls,’ said Bint Majzoub. ‘They’re uncircumcized and treat the whole business like having a drink of water. The village girl gets herself rubbed all over with oil and perfumed and puts on a silky night-wrap, and when she lies down on the red mat after the evening prayer and opens her thighs, a man feels like he’s Abu Zeid El-Hila1i. The man who’s not interested perks up and gets interested.’
My grandfather laughed and so did Bakri. ‘Enough of you and your local girls,’ said Wad Rayyes. ‘The women abroad, they’re the ones all right.’
‘Your brain’s abroad,’ said Bint Majzoub.
‘Wad Rayyes likes uncircumcised women,’ said my grand- father.
‘I swear to you, Hajj Ahmed,’ said Wad Rayyes, ‘that if you’d had a taste of the women of Abyssinia and Nigeria you’d throw away your string of prayer-beads and give up praying — the thing between their thighs is like an upturned dish, all there for good or bad. We here lop it off and leave it like a piece of land that’s been stripped bare.’
‘Circumcision is one of the conditions of Islam,’ said Bakri.
‘What Islam are you talking about?’ asked Wad Rayyes. ‘It’s your Islam and Hajj Ahmed’s Islam, because you can’t tell what’s good for you from what’s bad. The Nigerians, the Egyptians, and the Arabs of Syria, aren’t they Moslems like us? But they’re people who know what’s what and leave their women as God created them. As for us, we dock them like you do animals.’
My grandfather laughed so hard that three beads from his string slipped by together without his realizing. ‘As for Egyptian women, the likes of you aren’t up to them,’ he said.
‘And what do you know of Egyptian women?’ Wad Rayyes said to him. Replying for my grandfather, Bakri said, ‘Have you forgotten that Hajj Ahmed traveled to Egypt in the year six* and stayed there for nine months?’
“I walked there,’ said my grandfather, ‘with nothing but my string of prayer-beads and my ewer.’
‘And what did you do?’ said Wad Rayyes. ‘Return as you went, with your string of beads and your ewer? I swear to you that if I’d been in your place I wouldn’t have come back empty-handed.’
‘I believe you’d have come back with a woman,’ said my grandfather. ‘That’s all you worry about. I returned with money with which to buy land, repair the water-wheel, and circumcise my sons.’
‘Good God, Hajj Ahmed, didn’t you taste a bit of the Egyptian stuff?’ said Wad Rayyes.
The prayer-beads were slipping through my grandfather’s fingers all this time, up and down like a water-wheel. The movement suddenly ceased and my grandfather raised his face to the ceiling and opened his mouth, but Bakri beat him to it and said, ‘Wad Rayyes, you’re mad. You’re old in years but you’ve got no sense. Women are women whether they’re in Egypt, the Sudan, Iraq or the land of Mumbo-jumbo. The black, the white, and the red — they’re all one and the same.’
So great was his astonishment that Wad Rayyes was unable to say anything. He looked at Bint Majzoub as though appealing to her for help. ‘In God’s truth, I almost got married in Egypt,’ said my grandfather. ‘The Egyptians are good, God-fearing people, and the Egyptian woman knows how to respect a man. I got to know a man in Boulak — we us
ed to meet up for dawn prayers in the Abu ’l-Ala Mosque. I was invited to his house and got to know his family He was the father of several daughters — six of them and any of them was beautiful enough to be able to say to the moon "Get down and I’ll sit in your place". After some time he said to me, “O Sudanese, you are a religious and God—fearing man, let me give you one of my daughters in marriage." In God’s truth, Wad Rayyes, I really fancied the eldest, but shortly after this I got a telegram telling me of my late mother’s death, so I left then and there.’
‘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.