Lyrics Alley (35 page)

And that is all she says about how he lost Soraya to his best friend. Neither does Nassir have any further comments, nor does Fatma or Zaki or Batool. As for his new friends – the writers, musicians and poets – they are interested in the final outcomes of Art itself, rather than its ingredients and fuel. He should bunch up his grievances, sculpt them and hone them for
his poems. This is the outlet, this is the path; this is more than a dream.

He wakes up to look into his teacher’s protruding eyes. He dozes and, when he is wide awake, he finds Ustaz Badr leafing through the magazine that Hamza left.

‘Your poem is published here,’ says Badr. ‘It is part of an article about Hamza Al-Naggar and his songs.’

Badr continues to read and Nur feels young again, a student watching his copybook being marked, eager for approval.

‘Is it good?’ he asks.

Badr continues to read.

‘Or are you a purist?’ Nur rushs in. ‘I’d wager you don’t approve of using colloquial words and phrases.’

‘The poem is good but . . .’ Badr closes the magazine.

‘But what?’

‘You can do better,’ says Badr.

Nur laughs. He is fond of this man, his tenacity and desperate goodness, his knowledge and simplicity; the strength which floods him like a miracle. Nur hadn’t laughed for some time.

‘
Travel
is a hit on the radio, your cousin is in prison for robbing my mother’s jewellery, you want my father to lease you a flat in his new building – and you sit there and tell me
I
can do better!’

Badr frowns. ‘I will gain nothing by flattering you. At the end, what will be will be. So I might as well say the truth. And here is what I think. You will be tempted to write more light verses because popularity is now within your reach, but you can also become a serious poet, a poet others will respect. It is your choice.’

‘I will do both,’ Nur says. ‘I will do both, and I want you to come to me regularly like before. I want us to have our weekly meetings and discussions again. I need . . .’ he pauses and swallows. ‘I need to be a student again.’

When Nur closes his eyes, there is her image, and every ache and aggravation is aroused, envy of Tuf Tuf and simmering rage.
But a little while ago, talking to Ustaz Badr, he had felt clear-headed and liberated.

A day passes, followed by a night. The sharpness eases and there are stretches of calmness, of leisure, when he does not think of Soraya’s engagement to Tuf Tuf. His body had absorbed the shock and the news, like a foreign virus, is now seeping through his system, defeating every antibody, becoming a part of him. There was a Nur before the news, and now, a Nur after the news.

He learns that his reaction to Soraya’s engagement is to be kept secret. He will not be allowed to jeopardize her future and so no one will indulge his sadness or publicly acknowledge his loss. The family’s honour is at stake, the Abuzeid name. In the days to come, women from Tuf Tuf’s family visit in droves. They bring their relations, neighbours and friends to take a look at the bride. They probe and sniff for gossip, but they must not find any. Nur and Soraya’s previous betrothal is played down – a formal engagement never really existed, it was just talk, an appealing idea to marry off two sisters to two brothers but nothing came out of it. The bride has no imperfections. Nothing must blemish Soraya’s reputation.

I feed on bitterness and satiety never comes.
Today sadness has renewed itself.
Let me narrate the story of two souls,
Whose love was struck by the evil eye,
In a twist which Fate had hidden.
Luck won’t smile and Time will scorch.
Only the stars know what is wrong with me.
I almost sense them craning to wipe my tears away
.

‘Your new poem,
Eid Crescent
, is bleak,’ says Hamza when Nur perks up and the evening visitors are allowed.

‘So was
Travel is the Cause.’

‘But this one is exaggerated. Such alienation on a day of
celebration is not something the majority of listeners will relate to.’

Nur defends his work. ‘Are you telling me that no one dies in the Eid, no one loses their job or their money?’

Hamza smiles. ‘Look, it’s a very good poem, don’t get me wrong. But it won’t work as a song. Send it to the literary pages of the top newspapers and they will publish it without hesitation.’

‘I’ll do that,’ says Nur. ‘And it will go out in my collection when it comes out.’

To get
Eid Crescent
on paper had been a frustrating endeavour. Zaki was at school all morning and even in the afternoon he had to return for an award ceremony. Batool, who took Nur’s dictation when Zaki was unavailable, was herself busy preparing Soraya to receive more guests. It was Nassir who had written down the poem. Even this simple task, he had botched. His handwriting was sloppy and Nur spotted many mistakes, which made him annoyed.

‘Come on, let’s do something new together,’ says Hamza. ‘Let’s write a light-hearted song. Something merry and thrilling.’

‘
She’s easy and pliant
,’ the words spill from his tongue, the most natural response. He can never run out of words to describe her. Her full lips when she smiles, her gentle voice and the way she drawls out certain words. How slowly she walks, how gently she sits and turns to him. And there is more to say, ‘
Have mercy Angel, your radiance has scorched me
.’

‘Perfect!’ Hamza hoists the oud to his lap and starts strumming. ‘I knew you wouldn’t let me down.’

Nur smiles, and instead of another verse, the title of his future collection comes to his mind. A collection Ustaz Badr would approve of, with Nur’s name on the front page underneath the words,
Evening Withdraws
.

Usually, on holidays, Mahmoud slept in late and had the tea tray brought to his bedroom, but today was a special day. He stood on the roof of the saraya and, because it had been a long time since he had come up here, the views captured his attention. The Nile was a pale blue-grey, not yet lit up by the rising sun. On the bank, a few farmers were bending over with hoes. Mahmoud walked to the northern side of the roof, which overlooked Umdurman’s Great Square. This was an excellent vantage point, an ideal place for the Harrisons to breakfast, with an unobstructed view of the celebrations. He called the servants and instructed them on how to arrange the seating. The best armchairs were carried from downstairs, the best coffee tables and the newest tablecloths. Once they completed the heavy work, he would release some of them so that they could take part in the celebrations. It had been a remarkable week since the signing of the Self Government Agreement between Britain, Egypt and Sudan. On the day itself, crowds had thronged the streets of Khartoum and people climbed the trees overlooking the Civil-Secretary’s Office in order to hear the Governor-General announce the news. On the following day, when the government’s Official celebration was held, Mahmoud was invited and had a good front seat, but there were as many as fifty thousand Sudanese standing to hear the speeches, punctuated by parades of the guards of honour and RAF planes flying overhead. Today’s affair would be more indigenous, a huge, all-party gathering in which the ordinary people of Umdurman would take part. The Harrisons, he was sure, would enjoy the spectacle. He knew them well now and understood the mixture
of folklore and personal comfort, exotica and distance that would ensure their highest level of enjoyment.

It was cool this February morning. Once the sun was up, it would become warmer but now he found the breeze unpleasant, even though he was wearing a cardigan. He went downstairs and wandered around the empty house. It was silent and static without Nabilah and the children. They had been gone for months, but he still wasn’t used to their absence. Nabilah had packed up and left as soon as Ferial’s stitches were removed. He had tried to stop her, but she was adamant. So he gave up and thought, let her mother talk some sense into her, but the signs from Cairo were unfavourable. In the summer he travelled there, as was his custom, but Nabilah was not waiting for him in their flat. Instead, she was at her mother’s apartment. When he went to visit, she repeated her ridiculous conditions and did not yield an inch. Most people now thought that they had reverted to their first arrangement of her living permanently in Cairo and he visiting from time to time. Perhaps, in the end, it would come to that.

He went into his room and felt a pang of loneliness; what had Fate given him: three good-for-nothing sons: the eldest undependable, then the wreck, and now the youngest taken away. But Mahmoud was a man of action and not prone to indulging in despair. These moments of introspection were few and far between. Perhaps, he thought now, he should move back to his ‘bachelor’ quarters in the centre of the saraya, close to Nur and Waheeba. However, that room reminded him of his last serious illness, when he had spent several weeks in bed. For this reason he was reluctant to go back there. Nor did he want a closer proximity to Waheeba. The solution for his loneliness would be to bring Nassir, Fatma and their children to live in the saraya. With Soraya married off, Idris would not need Fatma. If it were up to Mahmoud, Idris would come over, too, but he knew his brother was difficult and independent in his ways. It would be enough for Mahmoud to have Nassir and Fatma. After
the wedding he would broach the subject. Already a date had been set, three weeks from today, before the warm weather closed in and made the preparations that much more arduous. He would feel relieved when the girl was finally married off. Perhaps then, Nur would become even more resigned to his fate. It surprised Mahmoud that the boy had reacted so badly to the announcement of Soraya’s engagement. Surely it was inevitable? But young people always have difficulty living beyond the moment. That was the excuse he always had for Nabilah. She is young, she will grow, she will learn in time. And then she threw everything in his face without any hesitation or mercy.

‘Cut off her allowance,’ Idris had advised him. ‘She’ll come scurrying back to you.’ But Mahmoud, though acknowledging the tactical logic of this move, was unable to bring himself to execute it. He was generous by nature and loathed the prospect of Nabilah scrimping and deprived. What bewildered him was how unreasonable her demands were. She continued to ask for the same things, no matter who he sent to intercede with her. She wanted him to divorce Waheeba and leave Umdurman altogether. If she ever returned to Sudan, she said, she would only return to a villa in Khartoum, which would be hers alone. Women were indeed complicated and capricious. There was Nabilah, ready to hand over to Waheeba the whole of the saraya in exchange for a villa in Khartoum, half or even a quarter of its size. How, in God’s name, did this make sense?

She was a little girl; that was how he was tending to view her, a daughter with an unhealthy attachment to her mother, a youngster who was refusing to grow up and become a woman. His mouth twisted and he made a face. Everywhere he looked he could see evidence of the comfortable life he had lavished on her, and she had spurned it and gone. He lay down on his bed, fully clothed. Impressions he had overlooked now came to haunt him.

‘Let’s never go back to Umdurman,’ she had said gaily, in their room in the Ritz.

He was lying in bed, watching her sitting at the dressing table brushing her hair. She was in her nightdress and he could see her smooth armpit, the cleave of her breasts, while her hand moved up and down with the hairbrush. When their eyes met in the mirror, she smiled and said, ‘Ya Bey, you are a man of the world, too sophisticated for Umdurman!’

Another memory was of him walking in, with tremendous good news, to find her absorbed in some alterations she was making on a dress. There were pins in her mouth and her eyes were focused on the material in her hand. He was happy because Nur, after many dark days, was eating and talking again. He was reading and chatting to his friends, listening to the radio and smoking cigarettes. But Nabilah received the news with a dry smile and a conventional, polite remark. To Mahmoud, an obvious fact was underlined. Nur was his son, not hers, and she was keeping her distance – as if she was holding back so that she would not be contaminated by his bad luck.

In her last letter she had written, ‘If you won’t fulfil my wishes, then our marriage cannot continue.’

But he had no intention of divorcing her. Why should he give up something he possessed and cherished? She would eventually have her fill of Cairo and return to her senses. Let her indulge herself in her mother’s company; let her pique and petulance play itself out. He would be waiting. Certain women in Khartoum were already making advances at him. If he wanted a wife or a mistress, all he had to do was point his finger. But he was waiting for Nabilah. He would forgive her everything if she came back: that she had thrown the necklace in his face, that she had deprived him of his children and that she had spoken to him in the bitterest and most callous of ways. Only one thing stuck in his throat, only one thing would be hard to overlook. She had shared his life and not understood him. Not understood that he could not leave Umdurman, not understood that Waheeba, for all her faults, was Nur’s mother and always would be. Umdurman was where Mahmoud belonged. Here on this
bed was where he would one day die, and down these alleys his funeral procession would proceed. And every shop owner in the souq, every tradesman pulling his cart, the beggars and the neighbours would know who Mahmoud Abuzeid was, where he came from and what he had done or not done.

Even if Nabilah came back, he brooded, her dismissiveness might continue to rankle, her desire to wrap his Sudanese identity and limit it with spatial classification. From early on she had mistaken his spirited love of modernity for a wholehearted conversion, and she had not taken account of the vicissitudes of Fate. But perhaps he expected too much from her. She was young, after all, and no one should be expected to predict the future. Indirectly, with cunning, Nur’s accident had dealt a blow to his second marriage. The ingredients of his life, which he had kept in balance, irrevocably altered. The modern-to-traditional ratio shifted; Nabilah’s dining table versus Waheeba’s hoash, Cairo’s avenues versus the alleys of Umdurman. He had prided himself in harnessing both, in gliding gracefully between both worlds, but now he was faltering; now he was unsure.