by Tayeb Sali
‘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.’
Thinking over Mustafa Sa’eed’s words as he sat in that very place on just such a night as this, I listened to her sobbing as though it came to me from afar, mingled in my mind with
scattered noises which I had no doubt heard at odd times but which all intertwined together in my brain like a carillon of church bells: the scream of a child somewhere in the neighbourhood, the crowing of cocks, the braying of a donkey and the sounds of a wedding coming from the far side of the river. But now I heard only one sound, that of her anguished weeping. I did nothing. I sat on where I was without moving and left her to weep alone to the night till she stopped. I had to say something, so I said, ‘Clinging to the past does no one any good. You have two children and are still a young woman in the prime of life. Think about the future. Who knows, perhaps you will accept one of the numerous suitors who want to marry you.’
‘After Mustafa Sa’eed,’ she answered immediately with a decisiveness that astonished me, ‘I shall go to no man.’
Though I had not intended to, I said to her, ‘Wad Rayyes wants to marry you. Your father and family don’t object. He asked me to talk to you on his behalf.’
She was silent for so long that, presuming she was not going to say anything, I was on the point of getting up to leave. At last, though, I became aware of her voice in the darkness like the blade of a knife. ‘If they force me to marry, I’ll kill him and kill myself.’
I thought of several things to say; but presently I heard the muezzin calling for the night prayer: ‘God is great. God is great’. So I stood up, and so did she, and I left without saying anything.
While I was drinking my morning coffee Wad Rayyes came to me. I had intended to go to his house but he forestalled me. He said that he had come to remind me of the invitation of the day before, but I knew that, unable to hold himself in wait, he had come to learn of the result of my intervention.
‘It’s no good,’ I told him as he seated himself ‘She doesn’t want to marry at all. If I were you I’d certainly let the whole matter drop.’
I had not imagined that the news would have such an effect on him. However Wad Rayyes, who changed women as he changed donkeys, now sat in front of me with a morose expression on his face, eyelids trembling, savagely biting his lower lip. He began fidgeting in his seat and tapping the ground nervously with his stick. He took off the slipper from his right foot and put it on again several times as though preparing to get up and go, then reseated himself and opened his mouth as though wishing to speak but without doing so. How extraordinary! Was it reasonable to suppose that Wad Rayyes was in love? ‘It’s not as if there’re not plenty of other women to marry’ I said to him.
His intelligent eyes were no longer intelligent but had become two small glass globes fixed in a rigid stare. ‘I shall marry no one but her,’ he said. ‘She’ll accept me whether she likes it or not. Does she imagine she’s some queen or princess? Widows in this village are more common than empty bellies. She should thank God she’s found a husband like me.’
‘If she’s just like every other woman, then why this insistence? I said to him. ‘You know she’s refused many men besides you, some of them younger. If she wants to devote herself to bringing up her children, why not let her do as she pleases?’
Suddenly Wad Rayyes burst out into a crazy fit of rage which I regarded as quite out of character. In a violent state of excitement, he said something that truly astonished me: ‘Ask yourself why Mahmoud’s daughter refused marriage. You’re the reason — there’s certainly something between you and her. Why do you interfere? You’re not her father or her brother or the person responsible for her. She’ll marry me whatever you or she says or does. Her father’s agreed and so have her brothers. This nonsense you learn at school won’t wash with us here. In this village the men are guardians of the women.’
I don’t know what would have happened if my father had not come in at that moment. Immediately I got up and left.
I went to see Mahjoub in his field. Mahjoub and I are of the same age. We had grown up together and had sat at adjoining desks in the elementary school. He was more clever than I. When we finished our elementary education Mahjoub had said, ‘This amount of education will do me — reading, writing and arithmetic. We’re farming folk like our fathers and grandfathers. All the education a farmer wants is to be able to write letters, to read the newspapers and to know the prescribed rules for prayers. Also so that if we’ve got some problem we can make ourselves understood with the powers-that-be.’
I went my own way and Mahjoub turned into a real power in the village, so that today he has become the Chairman of the Agricultural Project Committee and the Co-operative, and a member of the committee of the hospital that is almost finished. He heads every delegation which goes to the provincial centre to take up instances of injustice. With independence Mahjoub became one of the local leaders of the National Democratic Socialist Party. We would occasionally chat about our childhood in the village and he would say to me, ‘But look where you are now and where I am. You’ve become a senior civil servant and I’m a farmer in this god-forsaken village.’
‘It's you who’ve succeeded, not I,’ I would say to him with genuine admiration, ‘because you influence actual life in the country. We civil servants, though, are of no consequence. People like you are the legal heirs of authority; you are the sinews of life, you’re the salt of the earth.’
‘If we’re the salt of the earth,’ Mahjoub would say with a laugh, ‘then the earth is without fIavour.’
He laughed too on hearing of my encounter with Wad Rayyes. ‘Wad Rayyes is an old windbag. He doesn’t mean what he says.’
‘You know that my relationship with her is dictated by duty neither more nor less,’ I said to him.
‘Don’t pay any attention to Wad Rayyes’s drivel,’ said Mahjoub. ‘Your reputation in the village is without blemish. The people all speak well of you because you’re doing your duty by the children of Mustafa Sa’eed, God rest his soul. He was, after all, a stranger who was in no way related to you.’ After a short silence he said, ‘Anyway if the woman’s father and brothers are agreeable no one can do anything about it.’
‘But if she doesn’t want to marry?’ I said to him.
‘You know how life is run here,’ he interrupted me. ‘Women belong to men, and a man’s a man even if he’s decrepit.’
‘But the world’s changed,’ I said to him. ‘These are things that no longer fit in with our life in this age.’
‘The world hasn’t changed as much as you think,’ said Mahjoub. ‘Some things have changed — pumps instead of water-wheels, iron ploughs instead of wooden ones, sending our daughters to school, radios, cars, learning to drink whisky and beer instead of arak and millet wine — yet even so everything’s as it was.’ Mahjoub laughed as he said, ‘The world will really have changed when the likes of me become ministers in the government. And naturally that,’ he added still laughing, ‘is an out-and-out impossibility.’
‘Do you think Wad Rayyes has fallen in love with Hosna Bint Mahmoud? I said to Mahjoub, who had cheered me up.
‘It’s not out of the question,’ said Mahjoub. ‘Wad Rayyes is a man who hankers after things. For two years now he’s been singing her praises. He asked for her in marriage before and her father accepted but she refused. They waited, hoping that in time she’d accept.’
‘But why this sudden passion?’ I said to Mahjoub.
‘Wad Rayyes has known Hosna Bint Mahmoud since she was a child. Do you remember her as a wild young girl climbing trees and fighting with boys? As a child she used to swim naked with us in the river. What’s happened to change that now?’
‘Wad Rayyes,’ said Mahjoub, ‘is like one of those people who are crazy about owning donkeys — he only admires a donkey when he sees some other man riding it. Only then does he find it beautiful and strives hard to buy it, even if he has to pay more than it’s worth.’ After thinking for a while in silence, he said, ‘It’s true, though, that Mahmoud’s daughter changed after her marriage to Mustafa Sa’eed. All women change after marriage, but she in particular underwent an indescribable change. It was as though she were another person. Even we who were her contemp
oraries and used to play with her in the village look at her today and see her as something new — like a city woman, if you know what I mean.’
I asked Mahjoub about Mustafa Sa’eed. ‘God rest his soul,’ he said. ‘We had a mutual respect for each other. At first the relationship between us was not a strong one, but our work together on the Project Committee brought us closer. His death was an irreparable loss. You know he gave us invaluable help in organizing the Project. He used to look after the accounts and his business experience was of great use to us. It was he who pointed out that we should invest the profits from the Project in setting up a flour mill. We were saved a lot of expense and today people come to us from all over the place. It was he too who pointed out that we should open a co-operative shop. Our prices now are no higher than those in Khartoum. In the old days, as you know supplies used to arrive by steamer once or twice a month. The traders would hoard them till the market had run out, then they would sell them for many times their cost. Today the Project owns ten lorries that bring us supplies every other day direct from Khartoum and Omdurman. I asked him more than once to take over the Chairmanship, but he always used to refuse, saying I was better suited. The Omda and the merchants absolutely loathed him because he opened the villagers’ eyes and spoiled things for them. After his death there were rumours that they had planned to kill him — mere talk. He died from drowning — tens of men were drowned that year. He was a man of great mental capacity Now, there was a man — if there is any justice in the world — who deserved to be a minister in the government.’