Season of Migration to the North (9 page)

‘I leave my wife, two sons, and all my worldly goods in your
care, knowing that you will act honourably in every respect. My wife knows
about all my property and is free to do with it as she pleases. I have
confidence in her judgment. However, I would ask you to do this service for a
man who did not have the good fortune to get to know you as he would have
liked: to give my family your kind attention, and to be a help, a counsellor
and an adviser to my two sons and to do your best to spare them the pangs of
wanderlust. Spare them the pangs of wanderlust and help them to have a normal
upbringing and to take up worthwhile work. I leave you the key of my private
room where you will perhaps find what you are looking for. I know you to be
suffering from undue curiosity where I am concerned something for which I can
find no justification. Whatever my life has been it contains no warning or
lesson for anyone. Were it not for my realization that knowledge of my past by
the village would have hindered my leading the life I had chosen for myself in
their midst there would have been no justification for secrecy. You are
released from the pledge you took upon yourself that night and can talk as you
please. If you are unable to resist the curiosity in yourself then you will
find, in that room that has never before been entered by anyone but myself,
some scraps of paper, various fragments of writing and attempts at keeping
diaries, and the like. I hope they will in any event help you to while away
such hours as you cannot find a better way of spending. I leave it to you to
judge the proper time for giving my sons the key of the room and for helping
them to understand the truth about me. It is important to me that they should
know what sort of person their father was — if that is at all possible. I am
not concerned that they should think well of me. To be thought well of is the
last thing I’m after; but perhaps it would help them to know the truth about
themselves, at a time when such knowledge would not be dangerous. If they grow
up imbued with the air of this village, its smells and colours and history; the
faces of its inhabitants and the memories of its floods and harvestings and
sowings, then my life will acquire its true perspective as something meaningful
alongside many other meanings of deeper significance. I don’t know how they
will think of me then. They may feel pity for me or they may in their
imagination, transform me into a hero. That is not important. The important
thing is that my life should not emerge from behind the unknown like an evil
spirit and cause them harm. How I would have liked to stay on with them,
watching them grow up before my eyes and at least constituting some
justification for my existence. I do not know which of the two courses would be
the more selfish, to stay on or to depart. In any event I have no choice, and
perhaps you will realize what I mean if you cast your mind back to what I said
to you that night. It’s futile to deceive oneself. That distant call still
rings in my ears. I thought that my life and marriage here would silence it.
But perhaps I was created thus, or my fate was thus — whatever may be the
meaning of that I don’t know. Rationally I know what is right: my attempt at
living in this village with these happy people. But mysterious things in my
soul and in my blood impel me towards faraway parts that loom up before me and
cannot be ignored. How sad it would be if either or both of my sons grew up
with the germ of this infection in them, the wanderlust. I charge you with the
trust because I have glimpsed in you a likeness to your grandfather. I don’t
know when I shall go, my friend, but I sense that the hour of departure has
drawn nigh, so good—bye.’

If Mustafa Sa’eed had chosen his end, then he had undertaken
the most melodramatic act in the story of his life. If the other possibility
was the right one, then Nature had bestowed upon him the very end which he
would have wanted for himself. Imagine: the height of summer in the month of
fateful july; the indifferent river has flooded as never before in thirty
years; the darkness has fused all the elements of nature into one single
neutral one, older than the river itself and more indifferent. In such manner
the end of this hero had to be. But was it really the end he was looking for?
Perhaps he wanted it to happen in the north, the far north, on a stormy; icy
night, under a starless sky; among a people to whom he did not matter — the end
of conquering invaders. But, as he said, they conspired against him, the jurors
and the witnesses and the lawyers and the judges, to deprive him of it. ‘The
jurors,’ he said, ‘saw before them a man who didn’t want to defend himself, a
man who had lost the desire for life. I hesitated that night when Jean sobbed
into my ear, "Come with me. Come with me.” My life achieved completion
that night and there was no justification for staying on. But I hesitated and
at the critical moment I was afraid. I was hoping that the court would grant me
what I had been incapable of accomplishing. It was as though, realizing what I
was after, they decided that they would not grant me the final request I had of
them — even Colonel Hammond who I thought wished me well. He mentioned my visit
to them in Liverpool and what a good impression I had made on him. He said that
he regarded himself as a liberal person with no prejudices. Yet he was a
realistic man and had seen that such a marriage would not work. He said too
that his daughter Ann had fallen under the influence of Eastern philosophies at
Oxford and that she was hesitating between embracing Buddhism or Islam. He
could not say for sure whether her suicide was due to some spiritual crisis or
because of finding out that Mr Mustafa Sa’eed had deceived her. Ann was his
only daughter, and I had got to know her when she was not yet twenty; I
deceived her, seducing her by telling her that we would marry and that our
marriage would be a bridge between north and south, and I turned to ashes the
firebrand of curiosity in her green eyes. And yet her father stands up in court
and says in a calm voice that he can’t be sure. This is justice, the rules of
the game, like the laws of combat and neutrality in war. This is cruelty that
wears the mask of mercy...’ The long and short of it is they sentence him to
imprisonment, a mere seven years, refusing to take the decision which he should
have taken of his own free will. On coming out of prison he wanders from place
to place, from Paris to Copenhagen to Delhi to Bangkok, as he tries to put off
the decision. And after that the end came in an obscure village on the Nile;
whether it was by chance or whether the curtain was lowered of his own free
will no one can say for certain.

But I have not come here to think about Mustafa Sa’eed, for
here, craning their necks in front of us, are the closely-packed village
houses, made of mud and green bricks, while our donkeys press forward as their
nostrils breathe in the scent of clover, fodder, and water. These houses are on
the perimeter of the desert: it is as though some people in the past had wanted
to settle here and had then washed their hands of it and quickly journeyed away.
Here things begin and things end. A small girdle of cold, fresh breeze, amidst
the meridional heat of the desert, comes from the direction of the river like a
halftruth amidst a world filled with lies. The voices of people, birds and
animals expire weakly on the ear like whispers, and the regular puttering of
the water pump heightens the sensation of the impossible. And the river, the
river but for which there would have been no beginning and no end, flows
northwards, pays heed to nothing; a mountain may stand in its way so it turns
eastwards; it may happen upon a deep depression so it turns westwards, but
sooner or later it settles down in its irrevocable journey towards the sea in
the north.

I
stood at the door of my grandfather’s house
in the morning, a vast and
ancient door made of harraz, a door that had doubtless been fashioned from the
wood of a whole tree. Wad Baseer had made it; Wad Baseer, the village engineer who,
though he had not even learnt carpentry at school, had yet made the wheels and
rings of the waterwheels, had set bones, had cauterized people and bled with
cupping glasses. He was also so knowledgeable about judging donkeys that seldom
did anyone from the village buy one without consulting him. Though Wad Baseer
is still alive today; he no longer makes such doors as that of my grandfather’s
house, later generations of villagers having found out about zan wood doors and
iron doors which they bring in from Omdurman. The market for water-wheels, too,
dried up with the coming of pumps. I heard them guffawing with laughter and
made out the thin, mischievous laugh of my grandfather when in a good humour;
Wad Rayyes’s laugh that issues forth from an ever-full stomach; Bakri’s that
takes its hue and flavour from the company in which he happens to be; and the
strong, mannish laugh of Bint Majzoub. In my mind’s eye I see my grandfather
sitting on his prayer-mat with his string of sandalwood prayerbeads in his hand
revolving in ever- constant movement like the buckets of a water-wheel; Bint Majzoub,
Wad Rayyes and Bakri, all old friends of his, will be sitting on those low
couches which are a mere two hand-spans off the floor. According to my
grandfather, a couch raised high off the floor indicates vanity; a low one
humility. Bint Majzoub will be leaning on one elbow; while in her other hand
she holds a cigarette. Wad Rayyes will be giving the impression of producing
stories from the tips of his moustaches. Bakri will merely be sitting. This
large house is built neither of stone nor yet of red brick but of the very mud
in which the wheat is grown, and it stands right at the edge of the field so
that it is an extension of it. This is evident from the acacia and sunt bushes
that are growing in the courtyard and from the plants that sprout from the very
walls where the water has seeped through from the cultivated land. It is a
chaotic house, built without method, and has acquired its present form over
many years: many differently-sized rooms, some built up against one another at
different times, either because they were needed or because my grandfather
found himself with some spare money for which he had no other use. Some of the
rooms lead off one another, others have doors so low that you have to double up
to enter, yet others are doorless; some have many windows, some none. The walls
are smooth and plastered with a mixture of rough sand, black mud and animal
dung, likewise the roofs, while the ceilings are of acacia wood and palm-tree
trunks and stalks. A maze of a house, cool in summer, warm in winter; if one
looks objectively at it from outside one feels it to be a frail structure,
incapable of survival, but somehow as if by a miracle, it has surmounted time.

Entering by the door of the spacious courtyard, I looked to
right and to left. Over there were dates spread out on straw matting to dry;
over there onions and chillies; over there sacks of wheat and beans, some with
mouths stitched up, others open. In a corner a goat eats barley and suckles her
young. The fate of this house is bound up with that of the field: if the field
waxes green so does it, if drought sweeps over the field it also sweeps over
the house. I breathe in that smell peculiar to my grandfather’s house, a
discordant mixture of onions and chillies and dates and wheat and horse-beans
and fenugreek, in addition to the aroma of the incense which is always floating
up from the large earthenware censer. The aroma of incense puts me in mind of
my grandfather’s ascetic manner of life and the luxury of his accessories for
prayers: the rug on which he prays, made up of three leopard skins stitched
together, and which he would use as a coverlet when it turned excessively cold;
the brass ewer with its decorations and inscriptions, which he used for his
ablutions, and the matching brass basin. He was especially proud of his
sandalwood prayer-beads, which he would run through his fingers and rub against
his face, breathing in their aroma; when he got angry with one of his
grandchildren he would strike him across the head with them, saying that this
would chase away the devil that had got into him. All these things, like the
rooms of his house and the date palms in his field, had their own histories
which my grandfather had recounted to me time and time again, on each occasion
omitting or adding something.

I lingered by the door as I savoured that agreeable sensation
which precedes the moment of meeting my grandfather whenever I return from a
journey: a sensation of pure astonishment that that ancient being is still in
actual existence upon the earth’s surface. When I embrace him I breathe in his
unique smell which is a combination of the smell of the large mausoleum in the
cemetery and the smell of an infant child. And that thin tranquil voice sets up
a bridge between me and the anxious moment that has not yet been formed, and
between the moments the events of which have been assimilated and have passed
on, have become bricks in an edifice with perspectives and dimensions. By the
standards of the European industrial world we are poor peasants, but when I
embrace my grandfather I experience a sense of richness as though I am a note
in the heartbeats of the very universe. He is no towering oak tree with
luxuriant branches growing in a land on which Nature has bestowed water and
fertility; rather is he like the sayal bushes in the deserts of the Sudan,
thick of bark and sharp of thorn, defeating death because they ask so little of
life. That was the cause for wonder: that he was actually alive, despite plague
and famines, wars and the corruption of rulers. And now here he is nearing his
hundredth year. All his teeth are still intact; though you would think his
small lustreless eyes were sightless, yet he can see with them in the pitch
darkness of night; his body small and shrunken in upon itself is all bones,
veins, skin and muscle, with not a single scrap of fat. None the less he can
spring nimbly on to his donkey and walks from his house to the mosque in the
twilight of dawn.