The Wedding of Zein (9 page)

Seif ad-Din's eyes were wet with tears. ‘I have wronged you,' he said to Zein. ‘Forgive me.' He got up and kissed Zein's head, then seized Haneen's hand and kissed it. All the men came along: Mahjoub, Abdul Hafeez, Hamad Wad Rayyis, Taher Rawwasi, Ahmed Isma'il, and Sa'eed the merchant. Each silently took hold of Haneen's hand and kissed it.

‘God bless you. God bring down His blessings upon you,' said Haneen in his soft, unassuming voice, and he rose and took up his pitcher.

‘You must dine with us tonight,' Mahjoub quickly invited him.

Haneen, though, gently refused. Clasping Zein's shoulder with the other hand, he said, ‘Dinner's to be in the house of the blessed one,' and the two of them made off into the darkness. For an instant a shaft of light from the lamp hanging in Sa'eed's shop flickered above their heads, then slipped off them as a white silk gown slips from a man's shoulder. Mahjoub looked at Abdul Hafeez, Sa'eed looked at Seif ad-Din, and they all exchanged looks and nodded their heads.

Long years after this incident, when Mahjoub had become a grandfather many times over, as had Abdul Hafeez, Taher Rawwasi and the rest, when Ahmed Isma'il had become a father and his daughters had become of marriageable age, the inhabitants of the village used to look back on that year and on the incident with Zein, Haneen, and Seif ad-Din that had taken place in front of Sa'eed's shop. Those who had taken part in the incident remember it with solemn awe—including Mahjoub who had never previously bothered about anything. The lives of each one of those eight men, the participants in the incident, were affected in one way or another. In the days that were ahead of them these eight men were to go over the details of the incident among themselves thousands of times, and each time the events made a more magical impression. They would remember in amazement how Haneen had appeared to them from out of the blue at the moment, the very instant, when Zein's grip had tightened on Seif ad-Din and he had all but throttled him. In fact some of them insist that Seif ad-Din had actually died, had breathed his last, and had fallen to the ground a lifeless corpse. Seif ad-Din himself affirms this version and says that he did actually die; he says that the moment Zein's grip on his throat had tightened he completely departed this world. He saw a vast crocodile the size of a large ox with its mouth agape; the crocodile's jaws closed upon him, then came a wave so large it seemed like a mountain, which bore off the crocodile with Seif ad-Din between its jaws into the valley that was the trough of the wave, and the crocodile plunged down into a vast bottomless pit. It was then, Seif ad-Din says, that he saw Death face to face, and Abdul Hafeez, the person closest to Seif ad-Din when he recovered consciousness, is adamant that the first words he uttered on breath coming anew to his lungs, the first thing he said on opening his eyes, was: ‘I bear witness that there is no god but God, and I bear witness that Mohammed is the Messenger of God.' At any event, there is no doubt that from that moment Seif ad-Din's life underwent a change undreamt of by anyone.

Seif ad-Din was the only son of Badawi the Jeweller—so named because he had followed this trade at the beginning of his life, and when he had grown rich and was no longer a jeweller, the name had inevitably stuck to him. Badawi was well-off, possibly the richest man in the village. Some of his wealth he had collected by the sweat of his brow from his trade as a goldsmith, from commerce and travelling about; some had come to him from his wife. He was, as the village folk expressed it, a man ‘with a green arm,' who touched nothing without it turning to money. In less than twenty years he had built up a fortune from scratch, partly in lands and estates, partly in goods distributed along the length of the Nile from Kareema to Karma, partly in the form of boats loaded with dates and merchandise plying up and down the river; partly in the shape of the great mass of gold worn by his wife and daughters in the way of jewellery covering their necks and arms. Seif ad-Din was brought up an only son among five daughters, pampered by his mother, pampered by his father, and pampered by his five sisters. He could not but be spoilt, or, as the village folk put it, he could not but become soft and flabby like the tree that grows in the shade of a bigger tree, being exposed to no winds and not seeing the light of the sun.

Badawi died with a bitter lump of disappointment in his throat because of his son. He had spent a lot of money on his education, but the boy had done no good. He had set him up in the village in a business, which had failed within a month. After this he had put him into a workshop to learn a trade, but he had run away. In the end, by bringing influence to bear, he had succeeded in having him appointed as a junior government employee, hoping that he would learn to stand on his own feet. But no more than a few months later a succession of reports came, both from the mouths of enemies and friends, from those who enjoyed such misfortunes and those who were well-wishers, that his son was spending all his nights in a wine-shop and was seen at office only once or twice a week, and that his superiors had warned him time and time again, threatening him with dismissal. The father had therefore set off for the city, to return herding along his son like a captive, having sworn he would keep him imprisoned in the fields his whole life long, like a man in bondage. Those were his words.

And so Seif ad-Din had spent a year collecting fodder for the cows, pasturing the cattle on the fringes of the fields all day long, sowing and harvesting, chopping wood and grumbling. Even so, he did not lack amusement of an evening, for he knew of places where liquor was made and would frequent the girls who used to make it—‘the sluts' as the villagers called them. These girls were slaves who had been given their freedom, some of them having migrated from the village and married far away from the locality of their bondage; others had married freed slaves in the village and led a respectable life, a continuing affection existing between them and their former masters. Some of them, however, not finding a settled life easy, had stayed on the perimeter of life in the village, a place of call for those bent on pleasure and sensual enjoyment. The fact was that this rendezvous of ex-slave-girls was something alien that contained the spirit of adventure and rebellion; it represented a departure from the familiar. There, on the edge of the desert far from the village, squatted their houses made of straw, and at night, when people had gone to bed, beams of lamp-light flickered from their doorways and windows, and drunken laughter could be heard. In their displeasure the inhabitants of the village burned them down, but they returned to life like the alfa plant that will not die. Though the villagers drove away those who inhabited these houses, tormenting them in a variety of ways, they soon got together again, like flies alighting upon a dead cow. How many an adolescent young man's heart had throbbed in the darkness as the night brought him the sounds of female laughter and the shouts of intoxicated men. In that ‘oasis' on the edge of the desert there was something frightening, something delightful yet intimidating that tempted one to reconnoitre.

It was not difficult for Seif ad-Din to find his way to it. There he would spend his nights, for he had taken one of the women as his mistress. All this his father bore patiently. When reports came to him about his son, he would sometimes pretend to take no notice, at others he would fly into a rage. But his patience came to an end when, one night as he sat on his prayer-mat after performing the evening prayer, Seif ad-Din came to him reeking of liquor. In a voice made hoarse from the effects of drink and lack of sleep Seif ad-Din announced that he was in love with and wanted to marry Sarra, one of the ex-slave-girls. The father saw red and lost all control: his only son, a dissolute drunkard, informing him, as he sat on his prayer-mat, that he was ‘in love'—a phrase that conjured up in the minds of fathers in the village all the concepts of idleness, indolence, and lack of manliness; and that he wanted to marry some brazen, immoral slave-girl. The father rose and set about giving his son a thorough good beating. Along came the mother wailing loudly, at which people gathered and finally extricated the son from the father's hands more dead than alive. The father swore that the dissolute boy—as he expressed it—was not to spend another single night under his roof, and that he disowned him as a son. Seif ad-Din spent the night at his uncle's house, vanishing the next morning.

Jeweller Badawi passed the rest of his life like a man stricken with some infirmity. Pain bit into his heart and his face became as thin and emaciated as a consumptive's. He used to say that his son had died; when sometimes, by a slip of the tongue, he mentioned his son he did so as though he had in actual fact died. Dreadful reports about Seif ad-Din were continually being received: of how he had been sent to prison in Khartoum on a charge of larceny; of how he had once been accused in Port Sudan of killing a man and would have been hanged had the real murderer not eventually been found; and of how he lived like an out-and-out dissolute wastrel with the prostitutes of every town in which he stayed. Once he was reported to be working as a labourer carrying bales of cotton on his back in the port; another time that he was a lorry driver between Fasher and Obeid; on yet other occasions he was said to be cultivating cotton at Toker.

His uncles on both sides of the family tried to persuade his father to write a will leaving all his fortune to his wife and daughters. All sensible men in the village also held that this was the right thing to do, but the father continually shirked it, explaining that he would do so when he felt his end drawing near and that he was still in good health and was in no need of writing a will. These men used to shake their heads in distress and say that Badawi was still hoping his son would return to his senses; something incomprehensible to the inhabitants of the village stopped the man from taking the decisive step of cutting his son off from his inheritance.

Then, one night in the month of Ramadan, Badawi died seated on his prayer-mat after having performed the special late night prayers for this month. He was a good man, and he died the death of all good men, in the month of Ramadan, in the final third of it—the most blessed part—on his prayer-mat after having performed the special Ramadan prayers. The people of the village shook their heads and said: ‘God have mercy on Badawi. He was a good man. He deserved a better son than that dissolute one of his.'

One day when the people were still in mourning and had just finished giving the prescribed alms, Seif ad-Din made his appearance. He carried a thick stick of the sort used in the east of the Sudan and had no luggage whatsoever. His hair was ruffled as a
sayal
acacia tree, his beard thick and dirty, and his face that of a man who has come back from Hell-fire. He gave greeting to no one and all eyes avoided him. However, his eldest uncle on his father's side walked up to him and spat in his face, and when the news of his arrival reached his mother in the other side of the house where she was leading the women of the household in their mourning of the deceased, she broke into renewed wailing as though her husband had just died. Seif ad-Din's sisters broke into wailing, as did all his aunts, and the women's wing of the house fairly rocked with the din, until the eldest uncle went and rebuked them, at which they fell silent.

All this did not prevent Seif ad-Din from getting his hands on his father's wealth. All the uncles managed to do was to rescue his mother's and sisters' portions, leaving the greater part of the fortune in Seif ad-Din's hands. Here, too, began the life of torture for Mousa, Zein's friend—Mousa the Lame as the village folk called him. Seif ad-Din turned him out on the pretext that as he was no longer a slave he was not responsible for him. From then on Seif ad-Din led an unrestrained life, made worse by the abundance of money he now possessed. He was continually away travelling, sometimes eastwards, sometimes westwards, spending a month in Khartoum, a month in Cairo, a month in Asmara, only coming to the village to sell some land or dispose of a crop. He was a type of person the inhabitants of the village had never in their lives known and they shunned him as they would a leper; even those closest to him on both sides of his family did not feel safe having him in their homes and would shut the door in his face lest he corrupt their sons or seduce their daughters.

On one of his intermittent visits to the village he found his sister's marriage in progress—his family kept him away from their weddings and he by natural disposition did not attend funerals. Because of him that marriage was all but transformed into a tragedy. First of all, there was the incident of Zein. Along came Zein as usual with his gaiety and raillery, with no one paying him any heed. Seif ad-Din, however, taking exception to this, struck him on the head with an axe. The matter would have ended in prison had it not been for the intervention of the wise men of the village who said that Seif ad-Din was not worth the time they would spend on him in the courts. Secondly, the bridegroom almost changed his mind at the last moment because he quarrelled with Seif ad-Din, the bride's brother, and once again the wise men of the village, amongst them the bridegroom's father, gathered together and said that Seif ad-Din was not one of them and that his attendance at the wedding was an unavoidable evil. Thirdly, in the last week of the marriage celebrations, tens of strangers whom no one had ever seen before descended upon the house: brazen women, and men with lascivious glances, vagabonds and insolent boors, who came from who knows where—friends of Seif ad-Din's, invited by him to his sister's wedding celebrations. At this point the inhabitants of the village found themselves bound to do something; thus, before these guests had settled in their seats, there entered a file of men from the village headed by Ahmed Isma'il and then Mahjoub, followed by Abdul Hafeez, Taher Rawwasi and Hamad Wad Rayyes, then all Seif ad-Din's uncles—about thirty men with stout sticks and hoes in their hands. Locking the doors behind them, they gave a good beating to all the intruders and the best hiding of all they gave to Seif ad-Din. Then they threw them out into the street.