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 the
mselves 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.
While the whole village was in a turmoil from that affliction called Seif ad-Din, all of a sudden, following the Haneen incident, he changed as though born anew. To begin with people couldn’t believe their eyes, but every day Seif ad-Din did something new. First they heard that he had gone early one morning to his mother, had kissed her head and wept lengthily before her. Hardly had they got over this than they heard he had brought together all his uncles, and had repented and asked forgiveness in front of them, and that as an assurance of his repentance he had taken all that remained of his father’s fortune from his own charge and had made his senior paternal uncle a trustee over it, until he should become wholly fit for carrying out his responsibilities. No sooner had the inhabitants of the village accustomed their ears to that than to their amazement they saw Seif ad-Din repairing to the mosque for the Friday prayers. He had shaved off his beard, and had his moustache neatly trimmed, and was dressed in clean clothes. Those who attended the prayers said that when he heard the Imam’s sermon, the subject of which was the honouring of one’s parents, he burst into such lengthy weeping that he went into a swoon and the people flocked round to comfort him. On leaving the mosque he had immediately gone to Mousa the Lame and, telling him that he had acted wrongly towards him, had asked his forgiveness and informed him that he would treat him as his father used to do. For a month or so the village never stopped gasping as every day it heard of some new act performed by Seif ad-Din: his abstaining from wine, his withdrawal from the company of his disreputable friends, his devoting himself to his prayers, his applying himself to reviving his father’s business which he had undermined, his engagement to his cousin, and finally his resolution to perform the pilgrimage that year. Whenever Abdul Hafeez, who was one of those who believed most firmly in Haneen’s miracles as evidenced in Seif ad-Din, heard some fresh piece of news, he would hurry off to Mahjoub, who was known for his distaste for religious people and in particular ascetics. ‘A miracle, my friend—not a doubt about it.’ Mahjoub would keep silent—in his belly a sensation of vague uneasiness assails him in such circumstances. ‘Seif ad-Din has decided to go on the pilgrimage. By God, do you credit it, friend? Do you or don’t you believe it? A miracle, friend, without the shadow of a doubt.’ At first Mahjoub used to say to Abdul Hafeez that Seif ad-Din had had enough of fooling about or, as he put it, ‘His fooling about had reached the giddy limit,’ and that he was bound to make a change one day. But as he went on hearing something new and astounding each day, he no longer felt capable of disputing the matter and took refuge in silence.
The miraculous change in Seif ad-Din saw the beginning of a number of strange things that came to pass in the village that year. There was not the slightest doubt in anyone’s mind, even Mahjoub’s, as they saw miracle after miracle occurring, that it was all attributable to Haneen’s having said to those eight men in front of Sa’eed’s shop that night, ‘God bless you all. May God bring you His blessing.’ The time was a little before the evening prayer, a time especially propitious for prayers—especially when made by such saints of God as Haneen. The village was still and silent, except for a slight fresh breeze that played with the fronds of the palm trees. The eight men who were witnesses, and the rest of the people in their houses and fields, they all remember that night as clearly as though it were yesterday. The thick velvety darkness lay over every corner of the village, except for the faint beams of light leaking out from the windows of the houses and the bright light from the large lamp in Sa’eed’s shop. The time was that of the seasonal change over from summer to autumn. Sa’eed the shopkeeper remembers that the night had not been scorchingly hot like its predecessor and that his face was not moist with sweat as he weighed out sugar for Seif ad-Din, and that when ‘the hullabaloo occurred,’ as he put it, and he left his scales and went out of his shop to intervene between Zein and Seif ad-Din, he remembers a cold breeze blowing on his face. The people who did not have the good fortune to be present at the incident, because they were preparing for evening prayers in the mosque, mention that as he led them in prayer that night the Imam recited a section of the Chapter of Mary. Hajj Ibrahim, Zein’s uncle and Ni’ma’s father, a man renowned for his truthfulness, states quite definitely that the Imam read the verse: ‘And shake towards thee the trunk of the palm tree, it will drop upon thee fresh dates fit to gather’ from the Chapter of Mary, a verse which is a particularly auspicious and blessed one. Hamad Wad Rayyis, who is well-known in the village for the range of his imagination and a propensity for exaggeration, adds that on the night in question a comet appeared on the western horizon over the burial grounds. However, no one except him mentions a comet. In any event there is no doubt about Haneen, that righteous man, saying within the hearing of eight men on that auspicious night between summer and autumn, just a little before the evening prayer, ‘God bless you all. May God bring you His blessing,’ and it was as though supernatural powers in the heavens had answered in one voice ‘Amen’.
After that, supernatural events came in quick succession, miracle following miracle in a fascinating manner. During its existence the village had never experienced such an auspicious and fruitful year as ‘Haneen’s year,’ as they had begun to call it. It was certainly true that the prices of cotton had had an unprecedented rise that year and that the government, for the first time in history, had permitted them to cultivate it, whereas previously it had been restricted to specified districts of the country. (Mahjoub alone, and on his own admission, made more than a thousand pounds from his cotton.) It is true, too, that for no particular reason—or for some obscure one they didn’t know about—a large army camp was set up in the desert two miles from the village. Soldiers eat and drink, and so the village benefitted from supplying vegetables, meat, fruit, and milk to the army. Even the prices of dates had an unprecedented rise that year. Also true is the fact that the government, that creature which in their anecdotes they likened to a refractory donkey, decided all at once—again for no apparent reason—to build in their village, to the exclusion of the rest of the villages of the northern sector of the country, a large hospital for five hundred patients, a secondary school, and an agricultural school—all this despite the fact that they were people without power or influence and with no spokesman to talk on their behalf in the assemblies of the powers-that-be. Here again the village benefitted through supplying the labour, the building materials, and the food, to say nothing of the fact that the sick among them were assured of treatment and that their sons would obtain proper education. If all these indications do not suffice, how do you explain that the government, that ‘refractory donkey’ as they believed, also decided that very same year, no more than two months having passed on Haneen’s death, to organise their lands into a large agricultural project which the government itself, with all its power and authority, would supervise? Suddenly they found their village alive with land surveyors, engineers, and inspectors. When the government has made up its mind to something, it has the power to carry it out, and it was merely a question of day following upon day and month succeeding month before there rose up on the bank of the Nile by their village a lofty, temple-like building of red brick which cast its shadow upon the river. A little later, amidst the din of labourers and the grating of iron, the wheels of the giant began to turn and its pumps began sucking up such quantities of waters from the Nile as ten water-wheels during tens of days would not have managed—all in a flash, like a man sucking up his tea. And so the vast tract of land from the bank of the Nile to the edge of the desert was inundated with water. Some of it
was land that had not seen water from early times, and there it was, after a while, swelling with life. How could this be explained? Abdul Hafeez, though, knows the secret. Scanning the expanse of field which is his, as the wind plays with the wheat so that its ranks bend down like graceful houris drying their hair in the breeze, he says to Mahjoub, ‘A miracle, my friend—without the slightest doubt.’
Tureifi sat down furtively in his chair after having told the Headmaster of the news of Zein’s marriage. He seated himself on the edge of his behind as though preparing himself for flight at any instant—there was something of the hyena about both his manner and his nature. Looking around him with cunning eyes, he whispered in the ear of his right-hand neighbour, ‘We’ve got out of tonight’s geography. I bet you the Headmaster won’t finish the lesson.’
As predicted by Tureifi, the Headmaster announced in a listless, offhand voice that he was going out on an urgent matter. ‘Revise the lesson on the wheat-growing area of Canada,’ and he went out with constrained steps as, watched by Tureifi, he attempted not to hurry until he got to the door of the school courtyard. Tureifi gave a mischievous laugh when he saw the Headmaster grasp the end of his aba and rush forward through the sand as hard as he could go.
The Headmaster reached Sheikh Ali’s shop in the market, panting for breath and dry of throat, the school not being all that near to the market and the two being separated by a tract of sand into which one’s feet sank; besides, the headmaster was in his fifties. Sheikh Ali’s shop in the market was his favourite haunt. He was also delighted to see Abdul Samad with whom he had a bitter-sweet relationship and without whose presence he could never really enjoy any gathering or game of back-gammon. Though still ten yards away from the shop, he couldn’t help starting to speak: ‘Sheikh Ali, Hajj Abdul Samad— this year’s a year of miracles. What a thing to happen!’