by Tayeb Sali
‘Politics have spoilt you,’ I said to Mahjoub. ‘You’ve come to think only in terms of power. Let’s not talk about ministries and the government — tell me about him as a man. What sort of a person was he?’
Astonishment showed on his face. ‘What do you mean by what sort of a person?’ he said. ‘He was as I’ve described him.’ I could not find the appropriate words for explaining what I meant to Mahjoub. ‘In any case,’ he said, ‘what’s the reason for your interest in Mustafa Sa’eed? You’ve already asked me several times about him.’ Before I could reply Mahjoub continued, ‘You know, I don’t understand why he made you the guardian of his children. Of course, you deserve the honour of the trust and have carried out your responsibilities in admirable fashion. Yet you knew him less than any of us. We were here with him in the village while you saw him only from year to year. I was expecting he’d have made me, or your grandfather, guardian. Your grandfather was a close friend of his and he used to enjoy listening to his conversation. He used to say to me, “You know, Mahjoub, Hajj Ahmed is a unique person.” "Hajj Ahmed’s an old windbag," I would reply and he would get really annoyed. "No, don’t say that,” he’d say to me. "Hajj Ahmed is a part of history."
‘In any case,’ I said to Mahjoub. ‘I’m only a guardian in name. The real guardian is you. The two boys are here with you, and I’m way off in Khartoum.’
‘They’re intelligent and well-mannered boys,’ said Mahjoub. ‘They take after their father. They couldn’t be doing better in their studies.’
‘What will happen to them,’ I said, ‘if this laughable business of marriage Wad Rayyes has in mind goes through?’
‘Take it easy!’ said Mahjoub. ‘Wad Rayyes will certainly become obsessed with some other woman. Let’s suppose, at the very worst, she marries him; I don’t think he’ll live more than a year or two, and she’ll have her share of his many lands and crops.’
Then, like a sudden blow that lands right on the top of one’s head, Mahjoub’s words struck home: ‘Why don’t you marry her?’ My heart beat so violently within me that I almost lost control. It was some time before I found words and, in a trembling voice, said to Mahjoub: ‘You’re joking of course.’
‘Seriously,’ he said, ‘why don’t you marry her? I’m certain she’d accept. You’re the guardian of the two boys, and you might as well round things off by becoming a father.’
I remembered her perfume of the night before and the thoughts about her that had taken root in my head in the darkness.
‘Don’t tell me,’ I heard Mahjoub saying with a laugh, ‘that you’re already a husband and a father. Every day men are taking second wives. You wouldn’t be the first or the last.’
‘You’re completely mad,’ I said to Mahjoub, laughing, having recovered my self-control.
I left him and took myself off having become certain about a fact which was later on to cost me much peace of mind: that in one form or another I was in love with Hosna Bint Mahmoud, the widow of Mustafa Sa’eed, and that I — like him and Wad Rayyes and millions of others — was not immune from the germ of contagion that oozes from the body of the universe.
After we had had the circumcision celebrations for the two boys I returned to Khartoum. Leaving my wife and daughter in the village, I journeyed by the desert road in one of the Project’s lorries. I generally used to travel by steamer to the river port of Karima and from there I would take the train, passing by Abu Hamad and Atbara to Khartoum. But this time I was, for no particular reason, in a hurry so I chose to go the shortest way. The lorry set off first thing in the morning and proceeded eastwards along the Nile for about two hours, then turned southwards at right angles and struck off into the desert. There is no shelter from the sun which rises up into the sky with unhurried steps, its rays spilling out on the ground as though there existed an old blood feud between it and the people of the earth. There is no shelter apart from the hot shade inside the lorry — shade that is not really shade. A monotonous road rises and falls with nothing to entice the eye: scattered bushes in the desert, all thorns and leafless, miserable trees that are neither alive nor dead. The lorry travels for hours without our coming across a single human being or animal. Then it passes by a herd of camels, likewise lean and emaciated. There is not a single cloud heralding hope in this hot sky which is like the lid of Hell·fire. The day here is something without value, a mere torment suffered by living creatures as they await the night. Night is deliverance. In a state close to fever, haphazard thoughts flooded through my head: words taken from sentences, the forms of faces, voices which all sounded as desiccated as light flurries of wind blowing across fallow fields. Why the hurry? ‘Why the hurry?’ she had asked me. ‘Why don’t you stay another week?’ she had said. ‘The black donkey; a bedouin fellow cheated your uncle and sold him the black donkey.’
‘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 wa
s 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 jo
in 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.