by Tayeb Salih
‘“The Nile.”
‘“Yes, the Nile.”
‘“'Then you live on the banks of the Nile?"
‘“Yes. Our house is right on the bank of the Nile, so that when I’m lying on my bed at night I put my hand out of the window and idly play with the Nile waters till sleep overtakes me.”
‘Mr Mustafa, the bird has fallen into the snare. The Nile, that snake god, has gained a new victim. The city has changed into a woman. It would be but a day or a week before I would pitch tent, driving my tent peg into the mountain summit. You, my lady, may not known; but you — like Carnarvon when he entered Tutan-Khamen’s tomb — have been infected with a deadly disease which has come from you know not where and which will bring about your destruction, be it sooner or later. My store of hackneyed phrases is inexhaustible. I felt the flow of conversation firmly in my hands, like the reins of an obedient mare: I pull at them and she stops, I shake them and she advances; I move them and she moves subject to my will, to left or to right.
‘“Two hours have passed without my being aware of them,” I said to her. “I’ve not felt such happiness for a long time. And there’s so much left for me to say to you and you to me. What would you say to having dinner together and continuing the conversation?"
‘For a while she remained silent. I was not alarmed for I felt that satanic warmth under my diaphragm, and when I feel it I know that I am in full command of the situation. No, she would not say no.
“This is an extraordinary meeting,” she said. ‘A man I don’t know invites me out. It’s not right, but —" She was silent. "Yes, why not?” she then said. "There’s nothing to tell from your face you’re a cannibal."
"‘You’ll find I’m an aged crocodile who’s lost its teeth," I said to her, a wave of joy stirring in the roots of my heart. “I wouldn’t have the strength to eat you even if I wanted to." I reckoned I was at least fifteen years her junior, for she was a woman in the region of forty whose body — whatever the experiences she had undergone — time had treated kindly. The fine wrinkles on her forehead and at the comers of her mouth told one not that she had grown old, but that she had ripened.
‘Only then did I ask her name.
‘“Isabella Seymour," she said.
‘I repeated it twice, rolling it round my tongue as though eating a pear. "And what’s your name?"
‘“I’m — Amin. Amin Hassan."
"‘I shall call you Hassan."
‘With the grills and wine her features relaxed and there gushed forth — upon me — a love she felt for the whole world. I wasn’t so much concerned with her love for the world, or for the cloud of sadness that crossed her face from time to time, as I was with the redness of her tongue when she laughed, the fullness of her lips and the secrets lurking in the abyss of her mouth. I pictured her obscenely naked as she said: “Life is full of pain, yet we must be optimistic and face life with courage."
‘Yes, I now know that in the rough wisdom that issues from the mouths of simple people lies our whole hope of salvation. A tree grows simply and your grandfather has lived and will die simply. That is the secret. You are right, my lady: courage and optimism. But until the meek inherit the earth, until the armies are disbanded, the lamb grazes in peace beside the wolf and the child plays water-polo in the river with the crocodile, until that time of happiness and love comes along, I for one shall continue to express myself in this twisted manner. And when, puffing, I reach the mountain peak and implant the banner, collect my breath and rest — that, my lady is an ecstasy greater to me than love, than happiness. Thus I mean you no harm, except to the extent that the sea is harmful when ships are wrecked against its rocks, and to the extent that the lightning is harmful when it rends a tree in two. This last idea converged in my mind on the tiny hairs on her right arm near to the wrist, and I noticed that the hair on her arms was thicker than with most women, and this led my thoughts to other hair. It would certainly be as soft and abundant as cypress-grass on the banks of a stream. As though the thought had radiated from my mind to hers she sat up straight.
“Why do you look so sad?” she said.
‘“Do I look sad? On the contrary I’m very happy"
‘The tender look came back into her eyes as she stretched out her hand and took hold of mine.
“Do you know that my mother’s Spanish?” she said.
“'That, then, explains everything. It explains our meeting by chance, our spontaneous mutual understanding as though we had got to know each other centuries ago. Doubtless one of my forefathers was a soldier in Tarik ibn Ziyad’s army. Doubtless he met one of your ancestors as she gathered in the grapes from an orchard in Seville. Doubtless he fell in love with her at first sight and she with him. He lived with her for a time, then left her and went off to Africa. There he married again and I was one of his progeny in Africa, and you have come from his progeny in Spain." ‘These words, also the low lights and the wine, made her happy. She gave out throaty gurgling laughs.
"‘What a devil you are!" she said.
‘For a moment I imagined to myself the Arab soldiers’ first meeting with Spain: like me at this instant sitting opposite Isabella Seymour, a southern thirst being dissipated in the mountain passes of history in the north. However, I seek not glory for the likes of me do not seek glory. After a month of feverish desire I turned the key in the door with her at my side, a fertile Andalusia; after that I led her across the short passageway to the bedroom where the smell of burning sandalwood and incense assailed her, filling her lungs with a perfume she little knew was deadly. In those days, when the summit lay a mere arm’s length away from me, I would be enveloped in a tragic calm. All the fever and throbbing of the heart, the strain of nerves, would be transformed into the calm of a surgeon as he opens up the patient’s stomach. I knew that the short road along which we walked together to the bedroom was, for her, a road of light redolent with the aroma of magnanimity and devotion, but which to me was the last step before attaining the peak of selfishness. I waited by the edge of the bed, as though condensing that moment in my mind, and cast a cold eye at the pink curtains and large mirrors, the lights lurking in the corners of the room, then at the shapely bronze statue before me. When we were at the climax of the tragedy she cried out weakly; “No. No." This will be of no help to you now. The critical moment when it was in your power to refrain from taking the first step has been lost. I caught you unawares; at that time it was in your power to say "No". As for now the flood of events has swept you along, as it does every person, and you are no longer capable of doing anything. Were every person to know when to refrain from taking the first step many things would have been changed. Is the sun wicked when it turns the hearts of millions of human beings into sand-strewn deserts in which the throat of the nightingale is parched with thirst? Lingeringly I passed the palm of my hand over her neck and kissed her in the fountainheads of her sensitivity. With every touch, with every kiss, I felt a muscle in her body relax; her face glowed and her eyes sparkled with a sudden brightness. She gazed hard and long at me as though seeing me as a symbol rather than reality I heard her saying to me in an imploring voice of surrender “I love you,” and there answered her voice a weak cry from the depths of my consciousness calling on me to desist. But the summit was only a step away after which I would recover my breath and rest. At the climax of our pain there passed through my head clouds of old, far-off memories, like a vapour rising up from a salt lake in the middle of the desert. She burst into agonized, consuming tears, while I gave myself up to a feverishly tense sleep.’
It was a steamingly hot ]uly night, the Nile that year having experienced one of those floodings that occur once every twenty or thirty years and become legendary — something for fathers to talk to their sons about. Water covered most of the land lying between the river bank and the edge of the desert where the houses stood, and the fields became like islands amidst the water. The men moved between the houses and the fields in small boats or covered the distance swimming
. Mustafa Sa’eed was, as far as I knew an excellent swimmer. My father told me — for I was in Khartoum at the time — that they heard women screaming in the quarter after the evening prayers and, on hurrying to the source of the sound, had found that the screaming was coming from Mustafa Sa’eed’s house. Though he was in the habit of returning from the fields at sunset, his wife had waited for him in vain. On asking about him here and there she was told he had been seen in his field, though some thought he had returned home with the rest of the men. The whole village, carrying lamps, combed the river bank, while some put out in boats, but though they searched the whole night through it was without avail. Telephone messages were sent to the police stations right along the Nile as far as Karma, but Mustafa Sa’eed’s body was not among those washed up on the river bank that week. In the end they presumed he must have been drowned and that his body had come to rest in the bellies of the crocodiles infesting the waters.
As for me, I am sometimes seized by the feeling which came over me that night when, suddenly and without my being at all prepared for it, I had heard him quoting English poetry a drink in his hand, his body buried deep in his chair, his legs outstretched, the light reflected on his face, his eyes, it seemed to me, abstractedly wandering towards the horizon deep within himself and with darkness all around us outside as though satanic forces were combining to strangle the lamplight. Occasionally the disturbing thought occurs to me that Mustafa Sa’eed never happened, that he was in fact a lie, a phantom, a dream or a nightmare that had come to the people of that village one suffocatingly dark night, and when they opened their eyes to the sunlight he was nowhere to be seen.
Only the lesser part of the night still remained when I had left Mustafa Sa’eed’s house. I left with a feeling of tiredness — perhaps due to having sat for so long. Yet having no desire to sleep, I wandered off into the narrow winding lanes of the village, my face touched by the cold night breezes that blow in heavy with dew from the north, heavy too with the scent of acacia blossom and animal dung, the scent of earth that has just been irrigated after the thirst of days, and the scent of half-ripe corn cobs and the aroma of lemon trees. The village was as usual silent at that hour of the night except for the puttering of the water pump on the bank, the occasional barking of a dog, and the crowing of a lone cock who prematurely sensed the arrival of the dawn and the answering crow of another. Then silence reigned. Passing by Wad Rayyes’s low-lying house at the bend in the lane, I saw a dim light coming from the small window; and heard his wife give a cry of pleasure. I felt ashamed at having been privy to something I shouldn’t have been: it wasn’t right of me to stay awake wandering round the streets while everyone else was asleep in bed. I know this village street by street, house by house; I know too the ten domed shrines that stand in the middle of the cemetery on the edge of the desert high at the top of the village; the graves too I know one by one, having visited them with my father and mother and with my grandfather. I know those who inhabit these graves, both those who died before my father was born and those who have died since my birth. I have walked in more than a hundred funeral processions, have helped with the digging of the grave and have stood alongside it in the crush of people as the dead man was cushioned around with stones and the earth heaped in over him. I have done this in the early mornings, in the intensity of the noonday heat in the summer months, and at night with lamps in our hands. I have known the fields too ever since the days when there were water-wheels, and the times of drought when the men forsook the fields and when the fertile land stretching from the edge of the desert, where the houses stood, to the bank of the Nile was turned into a barren windswept wilderness. Then came the water pumps, followed by the cooperative societies, and those men who had migrated came back; the land returned to its former state, producing maize in summer and wheat in winter. All this I had been a witness to ever since I opened my eyes on life, yet I had never seen the village at such a late hour of the night. No doubt that large, brilliantly blue star was the Morning Star. At such an hour, just before dawn, the sky seemed nearer to the earth, and the village was enveloped in a hazy light that gave it the look of being suspended between earth and sky. As I crossed the patch of sand that separates the house of Wad Rayyes from that of my grandfather, I remembered the picture that Mustafa Sa’eed had depicted, remembered it with the same feeling of embarrassment as came to me when I overheard the love play of Wad Rayyes with his wife: two thighs, opened wide and white. I reached the door of my grandfather’s house and heard him reading his collects in preparation for the morning prayers. Doesn’t he ever sleep? My grandfathers voice praying was the last sound I heard before I went to sleep and the first I heard on waking. He had been like this for I don’t know how many years, as though he were something immutable in a dynamic world. Suddenly I felt my spirits being reinvigorated as sometimes happens after a long period of depression: my brain cleared and the black thoughts stirred up by the story of Mustafa Sa’eed were dispersed. Now the village was not suspended between sky and earth but was stable: the houses were houses, the trees trees, and the sky was clear and faraway. Was it likely that what had happened to Mustafa Sa’eed could have happened to me? He had said that he was a lie, so was I also a lie? I am from here — is not this reality enough? I too had lived with them. But I had lived with them superficially neither loving nor hating them. I used to treasure within me the image of this little village, seeing it wherever I went with the eye of my imagination.
Sometimes during the summer months in London, after a downpour of rain, I would breathe in the smell of it, and at odd fleeting moments before sunset I would see it. At the latter end of the night the foreign voices would reach my ears as though they were those of my people out here. I must be one of those birds that exist only in one region of the world. True I studied poetry; but that means nothing. I could equally well have studied engineering, agriculture, or medicine; they are all means to earning a living. I would imagine the faces over there as being brown or black so that they would look like the faces of people I knew. Over there is like here, neither better nor worse. But I am from here, just as the date palm standing in the courtyard of our house has grown in our house and not in anyone else’s. The fact that they came to our land, I know not why does that mean that we should poison our present and our future? Sooner or later they will leave our country just as many people throughout history left many countries. The railways, ships, hospitals, factories and schools will be ours and we’ll speak their language without either a sense of guilt or a sense of gratitude. Once again we shall be as we were — ordinary people — and if we are lies we shall be lies of our own making.
Such thoughts accompanied me to my bed and thereafter to Khartoum, where I took up my work in the Department of Education. Mustafa Sa’eed died two years ago, but I still continue to meet up with him from time to time. I lived for twenty-five years without having heard of him or seen him; then, all of a sudden, I find him in a place where the likes of him are not usually encountered. Thus Mustafa Sa’eed has, against my will, become a part of my world, a thought in my brain, a phantom that does not want to take itself off. And thus too I experience a remote feeling of fear, fear that it is just conceivable that simplicity is not everything. Mustafa Sa’eed said that my grandfather knows the secret. A tree grows simply and your grandfather has lived and will die simply' just like that. But suppose he was making fun of my simplicity? On a train journey between Khartoum and El-Obeid I traveled in the same compartment with a retired civil servant. When the train moved out of Kosti the conversation had brought us up to his school days. I learnt from him that a number of my chiefs at the Ministry of Education were contemporaries of his at school, some having been in the same form with him. The man mentioned that so-and-so at the Ministry of Agriculture was a schoolmate of his, that such-and-such an engineer was in the form above him, that so-and-so, the merchant who’d grown rich during the war years, had been the stupidest creature in the form, and that the famous surgeon so-and-so was
the best right-wing in the whole school at that time. Suddenly I saw the man’s face light up, his eyes sparkle, as he said in an excited, animated voice: ‘How strange! Can you imagine? I quite forgot the most brilliant student in our form and before now he’s never come to my mind since he left school. Only now do I remember him. Yes — Mustafa Sa’eed.’
Once again there was that feeling that the ordinary things before one’s very eyes were becoming unordinary I saw the carriage window and the door emerge and it seemed to me that the light reflected from the man’s glasses — in an instant that was no longer than the twinkling of an eye — gave off a dazzling flash, bright as the sun at its height. Certainly the world at that moment appeared different also in relation to the retired Mamur in that a complete experience, outside his consciousness, had suddenly come within his reach. When I first saw his face I reckoned him to be in his middle sixties. Looking at him now as he continued to recount his faraway memories, I see a man who is not a day over forty.
‘Yes, Mustafa Sa’eed was the most brilliant student of our day. We were in the same form together and he used to sit directly in front of our row; on the left. How strange! How had he not come to my mind before, seeing that at that time he was a real prodigy? He was the most well-known student at Gordon College, better known than the members of the first eleven, the prefects of the boarding houses, those who spoke at literary evenings, those who wrote in the wall newspapers, and the leading actors in the dramatic groups. He took part in none of these sorts of activities. Isolated and arrogant, he spent his time alone, either reading or going for long walks. We were all boarders in those days at Gordon College, even those of us who were from the three towns of Khartoum, Khartoum North and Omdurman. He was brilliant at everything, nothing being too difficult for his amazing brain. The tone in which the masters addressed him was different from that in which they talked to us, especially the English language teachers; it was as though they were giving the lesson to him alone and excluding the rest of the students.’
