Season of Migration to the North (10 page)

My grandfather used the edge of his gown to wipe away the
tears that had run down his face from laughing so much, and after giving me
time to settle myself in the gathering, said, ‘By God, that’s some story of
yours, Wad Rayyes.’ This was a cue to Wad Rayyes to continue the story my
entrance had interrupted. And afterwards, Hajj Ahmed, I put the girl in front
of me on the donkey squirming and twisting, then I forcibly stripped her of all
her clothes till she was as naked as the day her mother bore her. She was a
young slave girl from down-river who’d just reached puberty — her breasts, Hajj
Ahmed, stuck out like pistols and your arms wouldn’t meet round her buttocks.
She had been rubbed all over with oil so that her skin glistened in the
moonlight and her perfume turned one giddy I took her down to a sandy patch in
the middle of the maize, but when I started on her I heard a movement in the
maize and a voice saying, "Who’s there?” O Hajj Ahmed, there’s no madness
like the madness of youth. Thinking quickly I made out I was an afreet and
began letting out Hendish shrieks, scattering sand around and stamping about,
so the man panicked and fled. The joke was, though, that my uncle Isa had been
following hard on my heels from the moment I snatched the girl from the wedding
house right up to when we arrived at the patch of sand. When he saw I was
pretending to be an afreet, he stood by watching. Early the next day he went
off to my father, may God rest his soul, and told him the whole story “This son
of yours is a real devil," he told him, “and if you don’t fmd him a wife
this very day he’ll corrupt the whole village and bring down on us no end of
scandals," and they in fact married me off that very day to my uncle Rajab’s
daughter. God rest her soul, she died giving birth to her first child. “Since
when," said Bint Majzoub to him, laughing in her manly voice made hoarse
by too much smoking, “you’ve been jumping on and off like a jack donkey"

‘”Is there anyone who knows the sweetness of this thing
better than you, Bint Majzoub?” Wad Rayyes said to her. “You’ve buried eight
husbands and now you’re an old woman you wouldn’t say no if you were offered
it."

"‘We’ve heard,” said my grandfather, “that Bint Majzoub’s
cries of delight had to be heard to be believed."

‘“May I divorce, Hajj Ahmed," said Bint Majzoub,
lighting up a cigarette, “if when my husband was between my thighs I didn’t let
out a scream that used to scare the animals tied up at pasn1re."

‘Bakri, who previously had been laughing without saying
anything, said, “Tell us, Bint Majzoub, which of your husbands was the best?”

‘“Wad Basheer,” said Bint Majzoub promptly "‘Wad Basheer
the dozy dope," said Bakri. “He was so slow a goat could make off with his
supper."

‘“May I divorce," said Bint Majzoub, freeing the ash
from her cigarette on to the ground with a theatrical movement of her fingers,
"if his thing wasn’t like a wedge he’d drive right into me so I could
hardly contain myself He’d lift up my legs after the evening prayer and I’d
remain splayed open till the call to prayers at dawn. When he had his climax
he’d shout like an ox being slaughtered, and always when moving from on top of
me he would say ‘Praise be to God, Bint Majzoub.”

‘“It’s not surprising you killed him off in the bloom of
youth," said my grandfather to her.

"‘The time that fate decreed for him killed him,"
said Bint Majzoub with a laugh. “This business never kills anyone.”

Bint Majzoub was a tall woman of a charcoal complexion like
black velvet who, despite the fact she was approaching seventy still retained
vestiges of beauty. She was famous in the village, and men and women alike were
eager to listen to her conversation which was daring and uninhibited. She used
to smoke, drink and swear on oath of divorce like a man. It was said that her
mother was the daughter of one of the Fur sultans in Darfur. She had been
married to a number of the leading men of the village, all of whom had died and
left her a considerable fortune. She had borne one son and a countless number
of daughters who were famous for their beauty and for being as uninhibited in
their conversation as their mother. It was recounted that one of Bint Majzoub’s
daughters married a man of whom her mother did not approve. He took her off on
a journey with him and on his return about a year later he decided to hold a
banquet to which to invite his wife’s relatives. ‘My mother is quite
uninhibited in the way she talks,’ the wife said to him, ‘and it would be
better to invite her on her own.’ So they slaughtered some animals and invited
her along. After she had eaten and drunk Bint Majzoub said to her daughter, in
her husband’s hearing, Amna, this man has not done badly by you, for your house
is beautiful and so is your clothing, and he has filled your hands and neck
with gold. However it would not appear from the look of him that he is able to
satisfy you in bed. Now if you want to have real satisfaction I can find you a
husband who once he mounts you will not get off till you’re at your last gasp.’
When the husband heard these words he was so angry he divorced his wife
irrevocably on the spot.

‘What’s come over you?’ Bint Majzoub said to Wad Rayyes. ‘For
two years now you’ve contented yourself with a single wife. Has your prowess
waned?’

Wad Rayyes and my grandfather exchanged glances the meaning
of which I was to understand only later. ‘The face is that of an old man, the
heart that of a young one,’ said Wad Rayyes. ‘Do you know of a widow or
divorced woman who would suit me?’

‘By God, the truth is, Wad Rayyes,’ said Bakri, ‘that you’re
past marrying again. You’re now an old man in your seventies and your
grandchildren have children of their own. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself having
a wedding every year? What you need now is to bear yourself with dignity and
prepare to meet the Almighty God.’

Bint Majzoub and my grandfather both laughed at these words.
‘What do you understand of these matters?’ said Wad Rayyes in feigned anger.
‘Both you and Hajj Ahmed made do with one woman, and when they died and left
you you couldn’t find the courage to marry again. Hajj Ahmed here spends all
day praying and telling his beads as though Paradise had been created just for
him. And you, Bakri, busy yourself in making money till death gives you release
from it. Almighty God sanctioned marriage and He sanctioned divorce. “Take them
with liberality and separate from them with liberality” he said. "Women
and children are the adornment of life on this earth," God said in His
noble Book.’

I said to Wad Rayyes that the Koran did not say ‘Women and
children’ but ‘Wealth and children’.

He answered: ‘In any case, there’s no pleasure like that of
fornication.’

Wad Rayyes carefully stroked his curved moustaches upwards,
their ends like needle-points, then with his left hand began rubbing the thick
white beard that covered his face right up to his temples. Its utter whiteness
contrasted strongly with the brownness of his skin, the colour of tanned
leather, so that his beard looked like something artificial stuck on to his
face. However, the whiteness of his beard blended without difficulty with the
whiteness of his large turban, forming a striking frame that brought out the
main features of his face: the beautifully intelligent eyes and the thin
elegant nose. Wad Rayyes used kohl on his eyes: though he gave as his reason
for so doing the fact that kohl was enjoined in the sunna, I believe it was out
of vanity. It was in its entirety a beautiful face, especially if you compared
it to that of my grandfather, which had nothing characteristic about it, or
with Bakri’s which was like a wrinkled water melon. It was obvious that Wad Rayyes
was aware of this. I heard that in his youth he was a strikingly handsome man
and that the girls, south and north, up-river and down, lost their hearts to
him. He had been much married and much divorced, taking no heed of anything in
a woman except that she was woman, taking them as they came, and if asked about
it replying, ‘A stallion isn’t finicky’ I remember that among his wives was a Dongola
woman from El-Khandak, a Hadandawi woman from El-Gedare£ an Abyssinian he’d
found employed as a servant by his eldest son in Khartoum, and a woman from
Nigeria he’d brought back with him from his fourth pilgrimage. When asked how
he had married her he said he’d met her and her husband on the ship between Port
Sudan and Jeddah and that he’d struck up a friendship with them. The man,
however, had died in Mecca on the Day of Halting at Arafat and had said to him
as he was dying, ‘I ask you to look well after my wife.’ He could think of no
way of looking after her better than by marrying her, and she lived with him
for three years which, for Wad Rayyes, was a long time. He had been delighted
with her, the greater part of his pleasure coming from the fact that she was
barren. Recounting to people the details of his intimacies with her, he would
say ‘No one who hasn’t been married to a Nigerian knows what marriage is.’
During his time with her he married a woman from the Kababeesh he brought back
with him from a visit to Hamrat El-Sheikh, but the two women could not bear
living together so he divorced the Nigerian to please the Kababeeshi woman, who
after a while deserted him and fled to her people in Hamrat El-Sheikh.

Wad Rayyes prodded me in the side with his elbow and said,
‘They say the infidel women are something unbelievable.’

‘I wouldn’t know’ I said to him.

‘What a way to talk!’ he said. A young lad like you in the
flower of his youth spending seven years in the land of hanky-panky and you say
you don’t know.’

I was silent and Wad Rayyes said, ‘This tribe of yours isn’t
any good. You’re one-woman men. The only real man among you is Abdul Karim. Now
there’s a man for you.’

We were in fact known in the village for not divorcing our wives
and for not having more than one. The villagers used to joke about us and say
that we were afraid of our women, except for my uncle Abdul Karim who was both
much divorced and much married — and an adulterer to boot.

‘The infidel women aren’t so knowledgeable about this
business as our village girls,’ said Bint Majzoub. ‘They’re uncircumcized and
treat the whole business like having a drink of water. The village girl gets
herself rubbed all over with oil and perfumed and puts on a silky night-wrap,
and when she lies down on the red mat after the evening prayer and opens her
thighs, a man feels like he’s Abu Zeid El-Hila1i. The man who’s not interested
perks up and gets interested.’

My grandfather laughed and so did Bakri. ‘Enough of you and
your local girls,’ said Wad Rayyes. ‘The women abroad, they’re the ones all right.’

‘Your brain’s abroad,’ said Bint Majzoub.

‘Wad Rayyes likes uncircumcised women,’ said my grand-
father.

‘I swear to you, Hajj Ahmed,’ said Wad Rayyes, ‘that if you’d
had a taste of the women of Abyssinia and Nigeria you’d throw away your string
of prayer-beads and give up praying — the thing between their thighs is like an
upturned dish, all there for good or bad. We here lop it off and leave it like
a piece of land that’s been stripped bare.’

‘Circumcision is one of the conditions of Islam,’ said Bakri.

‘What Islam are you talking about?’ asked Wad Rayyes. ‘It’s
your Islam and Hajj Ahmed’s Islam, because you can’t tell what’s good for you
from what’s bad. The Nigerians, the Egyptians, and the Arabs of Syria, aren’t
they Moslems like us? But they’re people who know what’s what and leave their
women as God created them. As for us, we dock them like you do animals.’

My grandfather laughed so hard that three beads from his
string slipped by together without his realizing. ‘As for Egyptian  women, the
likes of you aren’t up to them,’ he said.

‘And what do you know of Egyptian women?’ Wad Rayyes said to
him. Replying for my grandfather, Bakri said, ‘Have you forgotten that Hajj
Ahmed traveled to Egypt in the year six
*
and stayed there for nine months?’

“I walked there,’ said my grandfather, ‘with nothing but my
string of prayer-beads and my ewer.’

‘And what did you do?’ said Wad Rayyes. ‘Return as you went,
with your string of beads and your ewer? I swear to you that if I’d been in
your place I wouldn’t have come back empty-handed.’

‘I believe you’d have come back with a woman,’ said my
grandfather. ‘That’s all you worry about. I returned with money with which to
buy land, repair the water-wheel, and circumcise my sons.’

‘Good God, Hajj Ahmed, didn’t you taste a bit of the Egyptian
stuff?’ said Wad Rayyes.

The prayer-beads were slipping through my grandfather’s
fingers all this time, up and down like a water-wheel. The movement suddenly
ceased and my grandfather raised his face to the ceiling and opened his mouth,
but Bakri beat him to it and said, ‘Wad Rayyes, you’re mad. You’re old in years
but you’ve got no sense. Women are women whether they’re in Egypt, the Sudan, Iraq
or the land of Mumbo-jumbo. The black, the white, and the red — they’re all one
and the same.’

So great was his astonishment that Wad Rayyes was unable to
say anything. He looked at Bint Majzoub as though appealing to her for help.
‘In God’s truth, I almost got married in Egypt,’ said my grandfather. ‘The
Egyptians are good, God-fearing people, and the Egyptian woman knows how to
respect a man. I got to know a man in Boulak — we used to meet up for dawn
prayers in the Abu ’l-Ala Mosque. I was invited to his house and got to know
his family He was the father of several daughters — six of them and any of them
was beautiful enough to be able to say to the moon "Get down and I’ll sit
in your place". After some time he said to me, “O Sudanese, you are a
religious and God—fearing man, let me give you one of my daughters in
marriage." In God’s truth, Wad Rayyes, I really fancied the eldest, but
shortly after this I got a telegram telling me of my late mother’s death, so I
left then and there.’