by Tayeb Salih
She too wept as my grandfather had done. She wept long and bitterly; then, smiling through her tears, she said, ‘The strange thing about it is that his eldest wife Mabrouka didn’t wake up at all, despite all the shouting that brought people right from the far end of the village. When I went to her and shook her, she raised her head and said, "Bint Majzoub, what’s brought you at this hour?" "Get up," I said to her. "'There’s been a murder in your house." "Whose murder?" she said. “Bint Mahmoud has killed Wad Rayyes and then killed herself" I said to her. "Good riddance!" she said and went back to sleep, and we could hear her snoring while we were busy preparing Bint Mahmoud for burial. When the people returned from the burial, we found Mabrouka sitting drinking her morning coffee. When some of the women wanted to commiserate with her she yelled, “Women, let everyone of you go about her business. Wad Rayyes dug his grave with his own hands, and Bint Mahmoud, God’s blessings be upon her, paid him out in full.” Then she gave trilling cries of joy. Yes, by God, my child, she gave trilling cries of joy and said to the women, “It’s too bad, but if anyone doesn’t like it she can go drink river water." I ask forgiveness of Almighty God. Her father, Mahmoud, almost killed himself with weeping that night — he was bellowing like an ox. Your grandfather was cursing and swearing, laying about him with his stick, yelling and weeping. For no reason your uncle Abdul Karim quarrelled with Bakri. “A murder happens next door to you,” he said to him, “and you sleep right through it?" It was the same thing with the whole village that night — it was as though they’d been visited by devils. Mahjoub alone was calm and collected and saw to everything: he brought shrouds from we don’t know where, and he quietened down Wad Rayyes’s boys who were making a terrible noise. May God spare you such a sight, my child — it was something to break one’s heart and bring white hair to a baby’s head. And it was all without rhyme or reason. She accepted the stranger — why didn’t she accept Wad Rayyes?’
The fields are all fire and smoke. It is the time for preparing to sow the wheat. They clean the ground and collect up the sticks of maize and small stems, mementos of the season that has ended, and make them into burning heaps. The earth is black and level, ready for the coming event. The men’s bodies are bent over their hoes; some are walking behind the ploughs. The tops of the palm trees shudder in the gentle breeze and grow still. Under the sun’s violence at midday hot steam rises from the fields of watered clover. Every breath of wind diffuses the scent of lemon, orange and tangerine. The lowing of an ox, the braying of a donkey or the sound of an axe on wood. Yet the world has changed.
I found Mahjoub mud—bespattered, his body naked except for the rag round his middle, moist with sweat, trying to separate a shoot from the mother date palm. I did not greet him and he did not turn to me but went on digging round the shoot. I remained standing, watching him. Then I lit a cigarette and held out the packet to him, but he refused with a shake of his head. I took my cares off to the trunk of a nearby date palm against which I rested my head. There is no room for me here. Why don’t I pack up and go? Nothing astonishes these people. They take everything in their stride. They neither rejoice at a birth nor are saddened at a death. When they laugh they say ‘I ask forgiveness of God’ and when they weep they say ‘I ask forgiveness of God.’ Just that. And I, what have I learnt? They have learnt silence and patience from the river and from the trees. And I, what have I learnt? I noticed that Mahjoub was biting his lower lip as was his habit when engaged on some job of work. I used to beat him in wrestling and running, but he would outstrip me in swimming the river to the other bank and in climbing palm trees. No palm tree was too difficult for him. There was between us the sort of affection that exists between blood brothers. Mahjoub swore at the small palm tree when he eventually succeeded in separating it from the trunk of its mother without breaking its roots. He heaped earth on to the large wound that was left in the trunk, lopped the stalks from the small plant and removed the earth, then threw it down to dry out in the sun. I told myself that he would now be more prepared to talk. He came into the shade where I was, sat down and stretched out his legs. He remained silent for a while, then sighed and said, ‘I ask forgiveness of God.’ He stretched out his hand and I gave him a cigarette — he only smoked when I was at the village and would say ‘we’re burning the government’s money.’
He threw away the cigarette before finishing it. ‘You look ill,’ he said. ‘The journey must have tired you out. Your presence wasn’t necessary. When I sent you the telegram I didn’t expect you’d come.’
‘She killed him and killed herself I said as though talking to myself. ‘She stabbed him more than ten times and — how ghastly!’
‘Who told you?’ he said, turning to me in astonishment.
‘He bit off her nipple,’ I continued, giving no heed to his questions, ‘and bit and scratched every inch of her body. How ghastly!’
‘It must have been Bint Majzoub who told you,’ he shouted angrily ‘God curse her, she can’t hold her tongue. These are things that shou1dn’t be spoken about.’
‘Whether they’re spoken about or not,’ I said to him, ‘they’ve happened. They happened in front of your very eyes and you did nothing. You, you’re a leader in the village and you did nothing.’
‘What should we do?’ said Mahjoub. ‘Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you marry her? You’re only any good when it comes to talking. It was the woman herself who had the impudence to speak her mind. We’ve lived in an age when we’ve seen women wooing men.’
‘And what did she say?’ I said to him.
‘It’s over and done with,’ he said. ‘What’s the use of talking? Give thanks to God that you didn’t marry her. The thing she did wasn’t the act of a human being — it was the act of a devil.’
‘What did she say?’ I said to him, grinding my teeth.
‘When her father went and swore at her,’ he said, looking at me without sympathy ‘she came to my home at sunrise. She said she wanted you to save her from Wad Rayyes and the attention of suitors. All she wanted was to become formally married to you, nothing more. She said, “He’ll leave me with my children and I want nothing whatsoever from him.” I told her we shouldn’t involve you in the matter, and I advised her to accept the situation. Her father had charge of her and was free to act as he thought fit. I told her Wad Rayyes wouldn’t live for ever. A mad man and a mad woman — how can we be to blame? What could we do about it? Her poor father has been confined to bed ever since that ill-fated day; he never goes out, never meets anyone. What can I or anyone else do if the world’s gone crazy. Bint Mahmoud’s madness was of a kind never seen before.’ I had to make a great effort not to break into tears.
‘Hosna wasn’t mad,’ I said. ‘She was the sanest woman in the village — it’s you who’re mad. She was the sanest woman in the village — and the most beautiful. Hosna wasn’t mad.’
Mahjoub laughed, guffawed with laughter. ‘How extraordinary!’ I heard him say amidst laughter. ‘Take a pull at yourself man! Wake up! Fancy you falling in love at your age! You’ve become as mad as Wad Rayyes. Schooling and education have made you soft. You’re crying like a woman. Good God, wonders never cease — love, illness and tears, and she wasn’t worth a millieme. If it wasn’t for the sake of decency she wouldn’t have been worth burying — we’d have thrown her into the river or left her body out for the hawks.’
I’m not altogether clear as to what happened next. However, I do remember my hands closing over Mahjoub’s throat; I remember the way his eyes bulged; I remember, too, a violent blow in the stomach and Mahjoub crouching on my chest. I remember Mahjoub prostrate on the ground and me kicking him, and I remember his voice screaming out ‘Mad! You’re mad!’ I remember a clamour and a shouting as I pressed down on Mahjoub’s throat and heard a gurgling sound; then I felt a powerful hand pulling me by the neck and the impact of a heavy stick on my head.
The world has turned suddenly upside down. Love? Love does not do this. This is hatred. I feel ha
tred and seek revenge; my adversary is within and I needs must confront him. Even so, there is still in my mind a modicum of sense that is aware of the irony of the situation. I begin from where Mustafa Sa’eed had left off. Yet he at least made a choice, while I have chosen nothing. For a while the disk of the sun remained motionless just above the western horizon, then hurriedly disappeared. The armies of darkness, ever encamped near by, bounded in and occupied the world in an instant. If only I had told her the truth perhaps she would not have acted as she did. I had lost the war because I did not know and did not choose. For a long time I stood in front of the iron door. Now I am on my own: there is no escape, no place of refuge, no safeguard. Outside, my world was a wide one; now it had contracted, had withdrawn upon itself until I myself had become the world, no world existing outside of me. Where, then, were the roots that struck down into times past? Where the memories of death and life? What had happened to the caravan and to the tribe? Where had gone the trilling cries of the women at tens of weddings, where the Nile floodings, and the blowing of the wind summer and winter from north and south? Love? Love does not do this. This is hatred. Here I am, standing in Mustafa Sa’eed’s house in front of the iron door, the door of the rectangular room with the triangular roof and the green windows, the key in my pocket and my adversary inside with, doubtless, a fiendish look of happiness on his face. I am the guardian, the lover, and the adversary.
I turned the key in the door, which opened without difficulty. I was met by dampness and an odour like that of an old memory. I know this smell: the smell of sandalwood and incense. I felt my way with my finger-tips along the walls and came up against a window pane. I threw open the window and the wooden shutters. I opened a second window and a third, but all that came in from outside was more darkness. I struck a match. The light exploded on my eyes and out of the darkness there emerged a frowning face with pursed lips that I knew but could not place. I moved towards it with hate in my heart. It was my adversary Mustafa Sa’eed. The face grew a neck, the neck two shoulders and a chest, then a trunk and two legs, and I found myself standing face to face with myself This is not Mustafa Sa’eed — it’s a picture of me frowning at my face from a mirror. Suddenly the picture disappeared and I sat in the darkness for I know not how long listening intently and hearing nothing. I lit another match and a woman gave a bitter smile. Standing in an oasis of light, I looked around me and saw there was an old lamp on the table my hand was almost touching. I shook it and found there was oil in it. How extraordinary! I lit the lamp and the shadows and the walls moved away and the ceiling rose up. I lit the lamp and closed the windows. The smell must remain imprisoned here: the smell of bricks and wood and burning incense and sandalwood — and books. Good God, the four walls from floor to ceiling were filled, shelf upon shelf with books and more books and yet more books. I lit a cigarette and filled my lungs with the strange smell. What a fool he was! Was this the action of a man who wanted to turn over a new leaf? I shall bring the whole place down upon his head; I shall set it on fire. I set light to the fine rug beneath my feet and for a while watched it devour a Persian king, mounted on a steed, aiming his lance at a fleeing gazelle. I raised the lamp and found that the whole floor of the room was covered with Persian rugs. I saw that the wall opposite the door ended in an empty space. Lamp in hand, I went up to it. How ridiculous! A fireplace — imagine it! A real English fireplace with all the bits and pieces, above it a brass cowl and in front of it a quadrangular area tiled in green marble, with the mantelpiece of blue marble; on either side of the fireplace were two Victorian chairs covered in a figured silk material, while between them stood a round table with books and notebooks on it. I saw the face of the woman who had smiled at me moments before — a large oil portrait in a gilt frame over the mantelpiece; it was signed in the right-hand corner ‘M. Sa’eed’. I observed that the fire in the middle of the room was spreading. I took eighteen strides towards it (I counted them as I walked) and trod it out. Though I sought revenge, yet I could not resist my curiosity. First of all I shall see and hear, then I shall burn it down as though it had never been. The books — I could see in the light of the lamp that they were arranged in categories. Books on economics, history and literature. Zoology. Geology. Mathematics. Astronomy. The Encyclopaedia Britannica. Gibbon. Macaulay Toynbee. The complete works of Bernard Shaw Keynes. Tawney Smith. Robinson. The Economics of Imperfect Competition. Hobson Imperialism. Robinson An Essay on Marxian Economics. Sociology. Anthropology. Psychology. Thomas Hardy. Thomas Mann. E. G. Moore. Thomas Moore. Virginia Woolf. Wittgenstein. Einstein. Brierly. Namier. Books I had heard of and others I had not. Volumes of poetry by poets of whom I did not know the existence. The journals of Gordon. Gulliver’s Travels. Kipling. Housman. The History of the French Revolution Thomas Carlyle. Lectures on the French Revolution Lord Acton. Books bound in leather. Books in paper covers. Old tattered books. Books that looked as if they’d just come straight from the printers. Huge volumes the size of tombstones. Small books with gilt edges the size of packs of playing cards. Signatures. Words of dedication. Books in boxes. Books on the chairs. Books on the floor. What play-acting is this? What does he mean? Owen. Ford Madox Ford. Stefan Zweig. E. G. Browne. Laski. Hazlitt. Alice in Wonderland. Richards. The Koran in English. The Bible in English. Gilbert Murray. Plato. The Economics of Colonialism Mustafa Sa’eed. Colonialism and Monopoly Mustafa Sa’eed. The Cross and Gunpowder Mustafa Sa’eed. The Rape of Africa Mustafa Sa’eed. Prospero and Caliban. Totem and Taboo. Doughty. Not a single Arabic book. A graveyard. A mausoleum. An insane idea. A prison. A huge joke. A treasure chamber. ‘Open, Sesame, and let’s divide up the jewels among the people.’ The ceiling was of oak and in the middle was an archway, supported by two marble columns of a yellowish red colour, dividing the room in two; the archway was covered by a faience with decorated edges. I was standing at the head of a long dining-table; I don’t know what wood it was made of but its surface was dark and glistening and along two sides were five leather-upholstered chairs. On the right was a settee covered in blue velvet, with cushions of — I touched them: of swansdown. On both sides of the fireplace I saw various objects I had not noticed before: on the right was a long table on which was a silver candelabrum holding ten virgin candles; on the left was another. I lit them candle by candle, and the first thing they cast their light upon was the oil painting above the mantelpiece: the elongated face of a woman with wide eyes and brows that joined above them. The nose was a shade too large and the mouth tended to be too wide. I realized that the glass-fronted bookshelves on the wall opposite the door did not reach to the ground and ended at the two sides of the fireplace with white-painted cupboards that projected two or three feet from the bookshelves. It was the same along the left-hand side. I went up to the photographs ranged on the shelf: Mustafa Sa’eed laughing; Mustafa Sa’eed writing; Mustafa Sa’eed swimming; Mustafa Sa’eed somewhere in the country; Mustafa Sa’eed in gown and mortar-board; Mustafa Sa’eed rowing on the Serpentine; Mustafa Sa’eed in a Nativity play a crown on his head, as one of the Three Kings who brought perfumes and myrrh to Christ; Mustafa Sa’eed standing between a man and a woman. Mustafa Sa’eed had not let a moment pass without recording it for posterity. I took up the picture of a woman and scrutinized it, reading the dedication written in a flowery hand. ‘From Sheila with all my love.’ Sheila Greenwood no doubt. A country girl from the outskirts of Hull. He had seduced her with presents, honeyed words, and an unfaltering way of seeing things as they really are. The smell of burning sandalwood and incense made her dizzy. She really did have a pretty face. Smiling in the picture, she was wearing a necklace, no doubt an ivory one; her arms were bare and her bosom well-developed. She used to work as a waitress by day and pursue her studies in the evening at the Polytechnic. She was intelligent and believed that the future lay with the working class, that a day would come when class differences would be non-existent and all people would be brothers. ‘My mother,’ she used to tell him, ‘would go mad and my father wou
ld kill me if they knew I was in love with a black man, but I don’t care.’ ‘She used to sing me the songs of Marie Lloyd as we lay naked,’ he said. ‘I would spend Thursday evenings with her in her room in Camden Town and sometimes she would spend the night with me in my flat. She would lick my face with her tongue and say “Your tongue’s as crimson as a tropic sunset.” I never had enough of her nor she of me. Each time she would gaze at me as though discovering something new "How marvelous your black colour is!” she would say to me — “the colour of magic and mystery and obscenities.”’ She committed suicide. Why did Sheila Greenwood commit suicide, Mr Mustafa Sa’eed? I know that you are hiding away somewhere in this Pharaonic tomb which I shall burn over your head. Why did Hosna Bint Mahmoud kill the old man Wad Rayyes and then kill herself in this village in which no one ever kills anyone?
I picked up another photograph and read the dedication which was in a bold, forward-slanting hand: ‘To you until death, Isabella.’ Poor Isabella Seymour. I feel a special sympathy for Isabella Seymour. Round of face and inclined to plumpness, she wore a dress which was too short for the fashions of those days. She was not, as he had described her, exactly a bronze statue, but there was manifest good nature in her face and an optimistic outlook on life. She smiles. She too is smiling. He said she was the wife of a successful surgeon, the mother of two daughters and a son. She had had eleven years of happy married life, regularly going to church every Sunday morning and participating in charitable organizations. Then she met him and discovered deep within herself dark areas that had previously been closed. Despite everything she left him a letter in which she said, ‘If there is a God in Heaven I am sure He will look with sympathetic eye upon the rashness of a poor woman who could not prevent happiness from entering her heart, even if it meant a violation of convention and the wounding of a husband’s pride. May God forgive me and may He grant you as much happiness as you have granted me.’ I heard his voice on that night, darkly rising and falling, holding neither sadness nor regret; if the voice contained any emotion, then it was a ring of joy. ‘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 midst of the desert. When her husband took the stand as a witness in the court, all eyes were on him. He was a man of noble features and gait; his grey head had dignity while his whole bearing commanded respect. He was a man who, placed against me in the scales, would outweigh me many times over. He was a witness for the defense, not the prosecution. “Fairness demands,” he said to the court, over which reigned utter silence, “that I say that my wife Isabella knew she had cancer. In the final period before her death she used to suffer from severe attacks of depression. Several days before her death she confessed to me her relationship with the accused. She said she had fallen in love with him and that there was nothing she could do about it. All through her life with me she had been the model of a true and faithful wife. In spite of everything I feel no bitterness within myself; neither against her nor against the accused. I merely feel a deep sadness at losing her.”
