by Tayeb Salih
‘Later I followed the same road on my return, asking myself during the whole journey whether it would have been possible to have avoided any of what happened. The string of the bow is drawn taut and the arrow must needs shoot forth. I look to right and left, at the dark greenness, at the Saxon villages standing on the fringes of hills. The red roofs of houses vaulted like the backs of cows. A transparent veil of mist is spread above the valleys. What a great amount of water there is here, how vast the greenness! And all those colours! The smell of the place is strange, like that of Mrs Robinson’s body. The sounds have a crisp impact on the ear, like the rustle of birds’ wings. This is an ordered world; its houses, fields, and trees are ranged in accordance with a plan. The streams too do not follow a zigzag course but flow between artificial banks. The train stops at a station for a few minutes; hurriedly people get off hurriedly others get on, then the train moves off again. No fuss.
‘I thought of my life in Cairo. Nothing untoward had occurred. My knowledge had increased and several minor incidents had happened to me; a fellow student had fallen in love with me and had then hated me. "You’re not a human being," she had said to me. “You’re a heartless machine." I had loafed around the streets of Cairo, visited the opera, gone to the theatre, and once I had swum across the Nile. Nothing whatsoever had happened except that the waterskin had distended further, the bowstring had become more taut. The arrow will shoot forth towards other unknown horizons.
‘I looked at the smoke from the engine vanishing to where it is dispersed by the wind and merges into the veil of mist spread across the valleys. Falling into a short sleep, I dreamt I was praying alone at the Citadel Mosque. It was illuminated with thousands of chandeliers, and the red marble glowed as I prayed alone. When I woke up there was the smell of incense in my nose and I found that the train was approaching London. Cairo was a city of laughter, just as Mrs Robinson was a woman of laughter. She had wanted me to call her by her first name — Elizabeth — but I always used to call her by her married name. From her I learnt to love Bach’s music, Keats’s poetry; and from her I heard for the first time of Mark Twain. And yet I enjoyed nothing. Mrs Robinson would laugh and say to me, “Can’t you ever forget your intellect?” Would it have been possible to have avoided any of what happened? At that time I was on the way back. I remembered what the priest had said to me when I was on my way to Cairo: “All of us, my son, are in the last resort traveling alone.” He was fingering the cross on his chest and his face lit up in a big smile as he added: "You speak English with astonishing fluency." The language, though, which I now heard for the first time is not like the language I had learnt at school. These are living voices and have another ring. My mind was like a keen knife. But the language is not my language; I had learnt to be eloquent in it through perseverance. And the train carried me to Victoria Station and to the world of Jean Morris.
‘Everything which happened before my meeting her was a premonition; everything I did after I killed her was an apology; not for killing her, but for the lie that was my life. I was twenty-five when I met her at a party in Chelsea. The door, and a long passageway leading to the entrance hall. She opened the door and lingered; she appeared to my gaze under the faint lamplight like a mirage shimmering in a desert. I was drunk, my glass two-thirds empty. With me were two girls; I was saying lewd things to them and they were laughing. She came towards us with wide strides, placing the weight of her body on the right foot so that her buttocks inclined leftwards. She was looking at me as she approached. She stopped opposite me and gave me a look of arrogance, coldness, and something else. I opened my mouth to speak, but she had gone. "Who’s that female?” I said to my two companions.
‘London was emerging from the war and the oppressive atmosphere of the Victorian era. I got to know the pubs of Chelsea, the clubs of Hampstead, and the gatherings of Bloomsbury. I would read poetry talk of religion and philosophy discuss paintings, and say things about the spirituality of the East. I would do everything possible to entice a woman to my bed. Then I would go after some new prey. My soul contained not a drop of sense of fun — just as Mrs Robinson had said. The women I enticed to my bed included girls from the Salvation Army, Quaker societies and Fabian gatherings. When the Liberals, the Conservatives, Labour, or the Communists, held a meeting, I would saddle my camel and go. "You’re ugly” Jean Morris said to me on the second occasion. “I’ve never seen an uglier face than yours." I opened my mouth to speak but she had gone. At that instant, drunk as I was, I swore I would one day make her pay for that. When I woke up, Ann Hammond was beside me in the bed. What was it that attracted Ann Hammond to me? Her father was an officer in the Royal Engineers, her mother from a rich family in Liverpool. She proved an easy prey. When I first met her she was less than twenty and was studying Oriental languages at Oxford. She was lively with a gay intelligent face and eyes that sparkled with curiosity. When she saw me, she saw a dark twilight like a false dawn. Unlike me, she yearned for tropical climes, cruel suns, purple horizons. In her eyes I was a symbol of all her hankerings. I am South that yearns for the North and the ice. Ann Hammond spent her childhood at a convent school. Her aunt was the wife of a Member of Parliament. In my bed I transformed her into a harlot. My bedroom was a graveyard that looked on to a garden; its curtains were pink and had been chosen with care, the carpeting was of a warm greenness, the bed spacious, with swans-down cushions. There were small electric lights, red, blue, and violet, placed in certain corners; on the walls were large mirrors, so that when I slept with a woman it was as if I slept with a whole harem simultaneously. The room was heavy with the smell of burning sandalwood and incense, and in the bathroom were pungent Eastern perfumes, lotions, unguents, powders, and pills. My bedroom was like an operating theatre in a hospital. There is a still pool in the depths of every woman that I knew how to stir. One day they found her dead. She had gassed herself. They also found a small piece of paper with my name on it. It contained nothing but the words: “Mr Sa’eed, may God damn you.” My mind was like a sharp knife. The train carried me to Victoria Station and to the world of Jean Morris.
‘In the courtroom in London I sat for weeks listening to the lawyers talking about me — as though they were talking about some person who was no concern of mine. The Public Prosecutor, Sir Arthur Higgins, had a brilliant mind. I knew him well, for he had taught me Criminal Law at Oxford and I had seen him before, at this court, in this very same room, tightening his grip on the accused as they stood in the dock. Rarely did anyone escape him. I saw men weeping and fainting after he had finished his cross examination; but this time he was wrestling with a corpse.
‘“Were you the cause of Ann Hammond’s suicide?”
‘“I don’t know”
‘“And Sheila Greenwood?"
‘“I don’t know"
‘“And Isabella Seymour?"
“‘I don’t know”
‘“Did you kill Jean Morris?”
‘“Yes.”
‘“Did you kill her intentionally?”
"‘Yes.”
‘It was as though his voice came to me from another world. The man continued skillfully to draw a terrible picture of a werewolf who had been the reason for two girls committing suicide, had wrecked the life of a married woman and killed his own wife — an egoist whose whole life had been directed to the quest of pleasure. Once it occurred to me in my stupor, as I sat there listening to my former teacher, Professor Maxwell Foster- Keen, trying to save me from the gallows, that I should stand up and shout at the court: "This Mustafa Sa’eed does not exist. He’s an illusion, a lie. I ask of you to rule that the lie be killed." But I remained as lifeless as a heap of ashes. Professor Maxwell Foster- Keen continued to draw a distinctive picture of the mind of a genius whom circumstances had driven to killing in a moment of mad passion. He related to them how I had been appointed a lecturer in economics at London University at the age of twenty-four. He told them that Ann Hammond and Sheila Greenwood were girls who were seeking death
by every means and that they would have committed suicide whether they had met Mustafa Sa’eed or not. “Mustafa Sa’eed, gentlemen of the jury; is a noble person whose mind was able to absorb Western civilization but it broke his heart. These girls were not killed by Mustafa Sa’eed but by the germ of a deadly disease that assailed them a thousand years ago.” It occurred to me that I should stand up and say to them: “This is untrue, a fabrication. It was I who killed them. I am the desert of thirst. I am no Othello. I am a lie. Why don’t you sentence me to be hanged and so kill the lie?” But Professor Foster-Keen turned the trial into a conflict between two worlds, a struggle of which I was one of the victims. The train carried me to Victoria Station and to the world of Jean Morris.
‘I pursued her for three years. Every day the string of the bow became more taut. It was with air that my waterskins were distended; my caravans were thirsty; and the mirage shimmered before me in the wilderness of longing; the arrow’s target had been fixed and it was inevitable the tragedy would take place. “You’re a savage bull that does not weary of the chase,” she said to me one day “I am tired of your pursuing me and of my running before you. Marry me.” So I married her. My bedroom became a theatre of war; my bed a patch of hell. When I grasped her it was like grasping at clouds, like bedding a shooting-star, like mounting the back of a Prussian military march. That bitter smile was continually on her mouth. I would stay awake all night warring with bow and sword and spear and arrows, and in the morning I would see the smile unchanged and would know that once again I had lost the combat. It was as though I were a slave Shahrayar you buy in the market for a dinar encountering a Scheherazade begging amidst the rubble of a city destroyed by plague. By day I lived with the theories of Keynes and Tawney and at night I resumed the war with bow and sword and spear and arrows. I saw the troops returning, filled with terror, from the war of trenches, of lice and epidemics. I saw them sowing the seeds of the next war in the Treaty of Versailles, and I saw Lloyd George lay the foundations of a public welfare state. The city was transformed into an extraordinary woman, with her symbols and her mysterious calls, towards whom I drove my camels till their entrails ached and I myself almost died of yearning for her. My bedroom was a spring-well of sorrow, the germ of a fatal disease. The infection had stricken these women a thousand years ago, but I had stirred up the latent depths of the disease until it had got out of control and had killed. The theatres of Leicester Square echoed with songs of love and gaiety, but my heart did not beat in time with them. Who would have thought that Sheila Greenwood would have the courage to commit suicide? A waitress in a Soho restaurant, a simple girl with a sweet smile and a sweet way of speaking. Her people were village folk from the suburbs of Hull. I seduced her with gifts and honeyed words, and an unfaltering way of seeing things as they really are. It was my world, so novel to her, that attracted her. The smell of burning sandalwood and incense made her dizzy; she stood for a long time laughing at her image in the mirror as she fondled the ivory necklace I had placed like a noose round her beautiful neck. She entered my bedroom a chaste virgin and when she left it she was carrying the germs of self-destruction within her. She died without a single word passing her lips — my storehouse of hackneyed phrases is inexhaustible. For every occasion I possess the appropriate garb.
‘“Is it not true, by way of example, that in the period between October 1922 and February 1923, that in this period alone you were living with five women simultaneously?”
‘“Yes."
"And that you gave each one the impression you’d marry her?"
"‘Yes."
‘“And that you adopted a different name with each one?"
"‘Yes."
"‘That you were Hassan and Charles and Amin and Mustafa and Richard?"
‘“Yes.”
"And yet you were writing and lecturing on a system of economics based on love not figures? Isn’t it true you made your name by your appeal for humanity in economics?"
"‘Yes.”
‘Thirty years. The willow trees turned from white to green to yellow in the parks; the cuckoo sang to the spring each year. For thirty years the Albert Hall was crammed each night with lovers of Beethoven and Bach, and the presses brought out thousands of books on aft and thought. The plays of Bernard Shaw were put on at The Royal Court and The Haymarket. Edith Sitwell was giving wings to poetry and The Prince of Wales’s Theatre pulsated with youth and bright lights. The sea continued to ebb and flow at Bournemouth and Brighton, and the Lake District flowered year after year. The island was like a sweet tune, happy and sad, changing like a mirage with the changing of the seasons. For thirty years I was a part of all this, living in it but insensitive to its real beauty unconcerned with everything about it except the filling of my bed each night.
‘Yes. It was summer — they said that they had not known a summer like it for a hundred years. I left my house on a Saturday sniffing the air, feeling I was about to start upon a great hunt. I reached Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. It was packed with people. I stood listening from afar to a speaker from the West Indies talking about the colour problem. Suddenly my eyes came to rest on a woman who was craning her neck to catch a glimpse of the speaker so that her dress was lifted above her knees exposing two shapely bronzed legs. Yes, this was my prey. I walked up to her, like a boat heading towards the rapids. I stood beside her and pressed up close against her till I felt her warmth pervading me. I breathed in the odour of her body, that odour with which Mrs Robinson had met me on the platform of Cairo’s railway station. I was so close to her that, becoming aware of me, she turned to me suddenly. I smiled into her face — a smile the outcome of which I knew not, except that I was determined that it should not go to waste. I also laughed lest the surprise in her face should turn to animosity. Then she smiled. I stood beside her for about a quarter of an hour, laughing when the speaker’s words made her laugh — loudly so that she might be affected by the contagion of it. Then came the moment when I felt that she and I had become like a mare and foal running in harmony side by side. A sound, as though it were not my voice, issued from my throat: “What about a drink, away from this crowd and heat?" She turned her head in astonishment. This time I smiled — a broad innocent smile so that I might change astonishment into, at least, curiosity Meanwhile I closely examined her face: each one of her features increased my conviction that this was my prey. With the instinct of a gambler I knew that this was a decisive moment. At this moment everything was possible. My smile changed to a gladness. I could scarcely keep in rein as she said: “Yes, why not?" We walked along together; she beside me, a glittering figure of bronze under the july sun, a city of secrets and rapture. I was pleased she laughed so freely. Such a woman — there are many of her type in Europe — knows no fear; they accept life with gaiety and curiosity. And I am a thirsty desert, a wilderness of southern desires. As we drank tea, she asked me about my home. I related to her fabricated stories about deserts of golden sands and jungles where non-existent animals called out to one another. I told her that the streets of my country teemed with elephants and lions and that during siesta time crocodiles crawled through it. Half-credulous, half-disbelieving, she listened to me, laughing and closing her eyes, her cheeks reddening. Sometimes she would hear me out in silence, a Christian sympathy in her eyes. There came a moment when I felt I had been transformed in her eyes into a naked, primitive creature, a spear in one hand and arrows in the other, hunting elephants and lions in the jungles. This was fine. Curiosity had changed to gaiety and gaiety to sympathy and when I stir the still pool in its depths the sympathy will be transformed into a desire upon whose taut strings I shall play as I wish. "What race are you?” she asked me. ‘Are you African or Asian?”
"‘I’m like Othello — Arab—African," I said to her.
"‘Yes,” she said, looking into my face. “Your nose is like the noses of Arabs in pictures, but your hair isn’t soft and jet black like that of Arabs.”
‘“Yes, that’s me. My face is Ara
b like the desert of the Empty Quarter, while my head is African and teems with a mischievous childishness.”
‘“You put things in such a funny way,” she said laughing.
‘The conversation led us to my family and I told her — without lying this time — that I had grown up without a father. Then, returning to my lies, I gave her such terrifying descriptions of how I had lost my parents that I saw the tears well up in her eyes. I told her I was six years old at the time when my parents were drowned with thirty other people in a boat taking them from one bank of the Nile to the other. Here something occurred which was better than expressions of pity; pity in such instances is an emotion with uncertain consequences. Her eyes brightened and she cried out ecstatically:
