Season of Migration to the North (7 page)

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.’

The man was silent for a while and I had a strong desire to
tell him that I knew Mustafa Sa’eed, that circumstances had thrown him in my
path and that he had recounted his life story to me one dark and torrid night;
that he had spent his last days in an obscure village at the bend of the Nile,
that he had been drowned, had perhaps committed suicide, and that he had made
me of all people guardian of his two sons. I said nothing, however, and it was
the retired Mamur who continued:

‘Mustafa Sa’eed covered his period of education in the Sudan
at one bound — as if he were having a race with time. While we remained on at Gordon
College, he was sent on a scholarship to Cairo and later to London. He was the
first Sudanese to be sent on a scholarship abroad. He was the spoilt child of
the English and we all envied him and expected he would achieve great things.
We used to articulate English words as though they were Arabic and were unable
to pronounce two consonants together without putting a vowel in between,
whereas Mustafa Sa’eed would contort his mouth and thrust out his lips and the
words would issue forth as though from the mouth of one whose mother tongue it
was. This would fill us with annoyance and admiration at one and the same time.
With a combination of admiration and spite we nicknamed him “the black Englishman".
In our day the English language was the key to the future: no one had a chance
without it. Gordon College was actually little more than an intermediate school
where they used to give us just enough education for filling junior government
posts. When I left, I worked first as a cashier in the district of Fasher and
after strenuous efforts they allowed me to sit for the Administration
Examination. Thirty years I spent as a sub-Mamur — imagine it. Just a mere two
years before retirement I was promoted to Mamur. The English District
Commissioner was a god who had a free hand over an area larger than the whole
of the British Isles and lived in an enormous palace full of servants and
guarded by troops. They used to behave like gods. They would employ us, the
junior government officials who were natives of the country to bring in the
taxes. The people would grumble and complain to the English Commissioner, and
naturally it was the English Commissioner who was indulgent and showed mercy. And
in this way they sowed hatred in the hearts of the people for us, their
kinsmen, and love for the colonizers, the intruders. Mark these words of mine,
my son. Has not the country become independent? Have we not become free men in
our own country? Be sure, though, that they will direct our affairs from afar.
This is because they have left behind them people who think as they do. They
showed favour to nonentities — and it was such people that occupied the highest
positions in the days of the English. We were certain that Mustafa Sa’eed would
make his mark. His father was from the Ababda, the tribe living between Egypt
and the Sudan. It was they who helped Slatin Pasha escape when he was the
prisoner of the Khalifa El-ta’aishi, after which they worked as guides for Kitchener’s
army when he reconquered the Sudan. It is said that his mother was a slave from
the south, from the tribes of Zandi or Baria — God knows. It was the nobodies
who had the best jobs in the days of the English.’

The retired Mamur was snoring away fast asleep when the train
passed by the Sennar Dam, which the English had built in 1925, heading
westwards to El-Obeid, on the single track stretching out across the desert
like a rope bridge between two savage mountains, with a vast bottomless abyss
between them. Poor Mustafa Sa’eed. He was supposed to make his mark in the
world of Commissioners and Mamurs, yet he hadn’t even found himself a grave to
rest his body in, in this land that stretches across a million square miles. I
remember his saying that before passing sentence on him at the Old Bailey the
judge had said, ‘Mr Sa’eed, despite your academic prowess you are a stupid man.
In your spiritual make-up there is a dark spot, and thus it was that you
squandered the noblest gift that God has bestowed upon people — the gift of
love.’ I remembered too that when I emerged from Mustafa Sa’eed’s house that
night the waning moon had risen to the height of a man on the eastern horizon
and that I had said to myself that the moon had had her talons clipped. I don’t
know why it looked to me as if the moon’s talons had been clipped.