The last sentence brought him to them and they sat him down in his favourite seat—a low wood and cord armchair.
The coffee was still hot and gave off an aroma of canella bark, cardamom, and ginger. Taking hold of the cup he brought it to his mouth, then quickly replaced it. ‘Is the news true?’ he said.
‘Drink up your coffee before it gets cold,’ Abdul Samad said with a laugh to the Headmaster. ‘What they say is quite right.’
Shifting the quid of tobacco from the right side of his mouth to the left, Sheikh Ali said, ‘The story of Zein’s marriage? It’s a hundred per cent true all right.’
The Headmaster took a large gulp from his cup of coffee, placed it on the small table in front of him, and lit himself a cigarette and took a deep pull.
‘My dear fellow, this is a most strange year—or am I wrong?’ The Headmaster did not use the expression ‘chap’ or ‘man’ like the other villagers, but would begin his sentences by using the phrase ‘my dear fellow.’
‘What you say is quite right, Headmaster,’ said Abdul Samad. ‘A really extraordinary year. Women who’d given up hope of ever being pregnant suddenly have children; cows and sheep give birth to two or three—.’ Hajj Ali continued to enumerate the miracles that had taken place that year: ‘The dates from the palm trees were so plentiful we couldn’t find enough sacks to carry them in; also it snowed—can you imagine such a thing? Snow falling from the sky on a desert town like this?’ The Headmaster shook his head and Abdul Samad muttered incoherent words, for the fall of snow that year had been something to amaze them all, and the Headmaster, for all his vast knowledge of geography, could find no explanation for it.
‘But the biggest miracle of all,’ said the Headmaster, ‘is the business of Zein’s betrothal.’ (He had the habit of interspersing his speech with words in the classical language.)
‘One is loath to believe it,’ said Sheikh Ali—who was, like Abdul Samad, infected by the Headmaster’s classical words; and they would both try to vie with him.
‘Haneen’s words were not idle ones,’ said Abdul Samad. ‘He said to him “Tomorrow you’ll be marrying the best girl in the village”.’
‘Yes, by God, that’s so,’ said the Headmaster. ‘The best girl in the whole village. What beauty! What manners! What modesty!’
‘What money!’ said Abdul Samad provocatively. ‘I know you had your eye on her because of her father’s wealth.’
‘I? Have some shame, my dear fellow,’ said the Headmaster, furiously warding off the accusation. ‘She’s no older than my daughters.’
‘What have your daughters’ ages got to do with it, old chap?’ said Sheikh Ali, seeking to placate him. ‘A man’s a man whatever his age, and a girl of fourteen’s ready for marriage to any man, even if he’s in his sixties like your honour.’
‘Have some shame, dear fellow—I’m in my fifties. I’m certainly younger than both you and Abdul Samad.’
Abdul Samad exploded into his famous guffaw that came from deep inside his chest.
‘Well, let’s forget about the question of age,’ he said. ‘What do you think about the story of Zein’s marriage?’
‘That’s a fantastic business,’ said the Headmaster. ‘How is it Hajj Ibrahim accepts it? Zein’s a dervish of a man who shouldn’t be marrying at all.’
‘You should, sir, be careful when talking of Zein,’ said Abdul Samad with profound conviction. ‘He’s a man blessed of God and was a friend of that devout man Haneen, God rest his soul.’
‘May God rest his soul,’ Sheikh Ali added. ‘He brought prosperity to our village.’
‘And it was all because of Zein,’ said Abdul Samad.
‘My dear fellow, we weren’t talking about miracles. Even so, though—’
‘When everything’s said and done,’ Sheikh Ali interrupted, ‘a man’s a man and a woman’s a woman.’
‘And in any case the girl’s his cousin,’ added Abdul Samad.
The Headmaster kept silent, for he could find no answer to their words; at least from the point of view of formalities the fact that a girl was reserved for marriage to her cousin was an irrefutable argument according to the conventions of village folk; it was an ancient tradition with them, as ancient as the instinct for life itself, the instinct of survival and the preservation of the species. Yet in the depths of his being he felt, as had Amna, that a personal affront had been directed against him.
For an instant he experienced a pleasant sense of relief that neither Sheikh Ali nor Abdul Samad knew he had talked to Hajj Ibrahim about Ni’ma, otherwise he would have been unable to escape from their biting sarcasm. Drinking his fifth cup of Sheikh Ali’s coffee, he asked himself why it was he had asked for her hand—a girl as young as his daughters. He did not know exactly. He had seen her one day leaving her house, wearing a white dress, and had met up with her face to face. Captivated by her beauty, he had given his greeting in a trembling voice and she had answered him with quiet composure. ‘You’re Ni’ma, Hajj Ibrahim’s daughter?’ he had said to her.
‘Yes,’ she said, neither hesitant nor timorous.
Quickly he searched around in his mind for some other question with which to delay her, but found nothing better than ‘Your brother Ahmed, how is he?’ This was her youngest brother who was one of his pupils.
‘Fine,’ she said to him, her bold face right in front of his, and went on her way. After that the Headmaster spent many nights with her image in his mind.
Perhaps she awakened in his heart some hidden feeling he had not recalled for twenty years. Finally, unable to contain himself any longer, he had seized the opportunity provided by a slight indisposition that befell her father to call and enquire about his health. By good fortune he found him on his own. After a mundane conversation about the prices of wheat and the state of the school, the Headmaster came right to the point and quickly asked for Ni’ma’s hand from her father.
At first Hajj Ibrahim understood nothing, or perhaps pretended not to, and sought elucidation from the Headmaster in one or two sentences which cut into his very soul. ‘You want Ni’ma for whom?’ he asked first of all.
‘For whom?’ said the Headmaster with a certain haughtiness. ‘For me, of course.’
It was as though Hajj Ibrahim had plunged in a dagger and then pressed down on its hilt the better to make it fast in his heart when he said to him ‘For you?’ The long and the short of it was that his visit had been a grave mistake. Hajj Ibrahim had endeavoured to lighten the blow by making a long speech about the honour the Headmaster had conferred upon him by his request, that he would have been the best of son-in-laws, and so on, but—and this was the important thing— the difference between his age and the girl’s made it impossible for him to accept. If he had done so he would not have been easy in his conscience; apart from which her brothers would have objected. Finally the Headmaster sought to repair the damage by exacting an oath from Hajj Ibrahim that he would say nothing of what had passed between them to a living soul and would regard the matter as though it had never happened. ‘Let’s dig a hole and bury it there.’
Hajj Ibrahim did not fail him. Nevertheless, the Headmaster, despite the fact that deep down he knew himself to be at fault, was unable to get rid of the bitter taste in his mouth. When he heard that she was to be given in marriage to Zein of all people, he felt the dagger plunging still deeper into his heart. He was slightly alarmed when he heard Abdul Samad say to him: ‘Your honour shouldn’t be in any way annoyed. If you want to marry, the village is full of women who are spinsters or divorced, or whose husbands have died—the most beautiful of women, I swear to you.’
At this the Headmaster really flared up. All his inner resentment was poured out on Abdul Samad. ‘Fellow, are you mad? Don’t you know the difference between being serious and joking? Haven’t you got an atom of brain? What concerns me is the actual problem of the girl—how she can stand life with a dervish of a fellow who doesn’t know black from white? And there you are talking about spinster wome
n! You really are an oaf of a fellow.’
Abdul Samad guffawed with laughter, pleased at having succeeded in rousing the Headmaster. He sought out such opportunities. Perhaps what had pained the Headmaster had been the mention of widows and divorcees.
‘Do you mean to say that his honour the Headmaster, when wanting to marry another wife in addition to the mother of his children, should marry a second-hand woman?’ said Sheikh Ali, fanning the flames. ‘Really, Hajj Abdul Samad, you are a proper oaf.’
Abdul Samad seized hold of the English word ‘second-hand’ which Sheikh Ali had employed and proceeded to tease him about it. ‘What’s that you said, Sheikh Ali? ‘Sakan dehan?’—and he pronounced the words as though they were Arabic. ‘Wonders will never cease—Ali Wad Shayeb using foreign talk!’
The Headmaster laughed exaggeratedly, doing his best to try and deflect the attack from his own person to that of Sheikh Ali. But Sheikh Ali, knowing all about Abdul Samad’s sorties and the Headmaster’s dodges, ignored Abdul Samad’s attack and brought the conversation round again to the subject of Zein’s marriage.
‘The important thing, as we’ve said, is that getting married is no problem. A man’s a man even though he’s drooling, while a woman’s a woman even if she’s as beautiful as Shajar ad-Durr.’
The Headmaster secretly wondered how it was that Sheikh Ali knew the name of Shajar ad-Durr, the former slave girl who ruled Egypt in the thirteenth century. Though ignorant of it, Abdul Samad found the name pleasant-sounding. However, he was embarrassed to enquire lest he show his ignorance. Sheikh Ali set about enumerating to both of them the names of men of no consequence who had nevertheless married women of outstanding intelligence and beauty. He took possession of his adversaries’ attention for no little time and was filled with happiness at seeing the astonishment and admiration that showed upon their faces. He reminded them of the story of Kuthayyir with whom Azza fell in love despite his being short and ugly, also the story of the bedouin woman who, asked why she had married an ugly and uncouth man, said: ‘By God, had you but ….’ The Headmaster and Abdul Samad almost fell on to their backs with laughter when they heard what the bedouin woman had said.
He then referred to the Ibrahimab tribe who were all descended from the loins of a dervish named Ibrahim Abu Jibba and how he—but Abdul Samad, exasperated by Sheikh Ali’s being so longwinded, interrupted him somewhat brusquely with: ‘Why go so far as Kuthayyir, Azza, and the Ibrahimab tribe when you’ve got Sa’eed the Idiot? Don’t you know the story of his marriage?’
The Headmaster smiled, for he had a special affection for Sa’eed the Idiot—or was it perhaps because he used to exploit Sa’eed in getting him to bring kindling and water to his house? Sa’eed used to sell firewood and to work in people’s houses and would hand over the money he earned to the Headmaster to save for him. When he had wanted to marry he had gone to the Headmaster to ask his advice, after which he used to say proudly that the Headmaster had, despite his lofty position, acted as a witness to his marriage contract. Everyone in the village knows the story of Sa’eed’s marriage and how he lived with his wife for nearly a year without touching her, till the woman, despairing of him, was about to divorce him. When asked about the reason for his dilatoriness, Sa’eed would say: ‘There’s no reason to rush into the business.’ He had, however, in later years, had children, male and female, from her.
Suddenly in the Headmaster’s mind’s eye there appeared the face of Ni’ma, and once again he felt the dagger stirring in his heart. As though he had not heard all the stories Sheikh Ali and Hajj Abdul Samad had told him, he said: ‘But will she marry Zein? That doesn’t make sense, my dear fellow. By God, what extraordinary things do happen!’
The Imam of the mosque was also affected by the extraordinary happenings witnessed by the village that year. He was, in the opinion of the village, an importunate man, a talker and a grumbler, and in their heart of hearts they used to despise him because they reckoned him to be practically the only one among them who had no definite work to do: no field to cultivate and no business to occupy him, but lived off teaching children for a set fee collected from every family— a fee grudgingly paid. In their minds he was connected with things they sometimes liked to forget: death, the after-life, prayers. In their minds there clung to his person something old and gloomy, like the strands of a spider’s web; when his name was mentioned they automatically recalled the death of someone dear to them or were put in mind of the dawn prayer in the depths of winter, the making of ablutions in cold water that brought cracks to one’s feet, the leaving of a warm bed for the blast of the frost and the walk to the mosque in the half-light of dawn.
This was the reaction of those who did in fact go to prayers. If, however, they were like Mahjoub, Abdul Hafeez, Ahmed Isma’il, Taher Rawwasi and Hamad Wad Rayyes—those who made up the band of ‘the sinful’ who didn’t pray—then each morning they would have that same vague feeling of apprehension as when casting a surreptitious glance at their neighbour’s wife. If you were to ask Mahjoub about the Imam of the mosque, he would say to you: ‘A hard man with no give or take to him,’ which was a way of saying that he made no effort to get along with people or become interested in what they had to say, not being concerned as they were with the time for sowing wheat and the ways of irrigating it, fertilizing it, cutting and harvesting it. He wasn’t interested in whether the barley in Abdul Hafeez’s field was a good crop or a bad one, whether the water-melons in Wad Rayyes’s field were large or small, what the market price was for an ardeb of beans, whether the price of onions had fallen, or why the season for pollinating the date palms had been delayed. He had by nature an aversion to such matters, and because of his ignorance of them he was also contemptuous. For his part he was interested in matters that only a few people in the village concerned themselves with. He used to follow the news on the wireless and in the newspapers and liked to argue about whether or not there would be a war, were the Russians stronger than the Americans, what Nehru had said, and what Tito. The people of the village were preoccupied with the particulars of life and were not concerned with its generalities, and so an abyss had grown up between them.
Yet while they did not like him, they recognized their need of him; they recognized for example his scholarship, for he had spent ten years at al-Azhar University. One of them would say, ‘The Imam’s got nothing to do,’ and would then add, ‘But in truth, by God, he has an eloquent tongue and is a great talker.’ He used to chastise them harshly in his sermons as though avenging himself on them with an outburst of words of exhortation about the Judgement Day and punishment, Heaven and Hell-fire, disobedience to God and turning to Him in repentance—words that passed down their throats like poison. Each would leave the mosque after Friday prayers boggle-eyed, feeling all of a sudden that the flow of life had come to a stop. Each, looking at his field with its date palms, its trees and crops, would experience no feeling of joy within himself. Everything, he would feel, was incidental, transitory, the life he was leading, with its joys and sorrows, merely a bridge to another world, and he would stop for a while to ask himself what preparations he had made for that other world. But the trivialities of life would all too soon take possession of his mind, and quickly—quicker than he expected— the picture of that other, far-off world would vanish and things would take on their normal perspective and he would look at his field and once again experience that old joy that gave him the justification for living. Even so, most of them would go back to listen to him and each time they would experience the same mysterious conflict. They would go back to him because his voice was strong and clear when he preached, sweetly melodious when he recited the Koran, terrifyingly awesome when he said prayers over the dead, thoroughly knowledgeable of all aspects of life as he performed contracts of marriage. His eyes held a look of scorn and disdain, the impact of which made itself felt when a man had lost confidence in himself. He was like the large domed tomb in the middle of the cemetery.
The village was
made up of clearly divided camps in relation to the Imam (they never called him by his name, for in their minds it was as though he were not a person but a institution). One of the camps, composed mostly of sensible-minded grown-up men headed by Hajj Ibrahim, Ni’ma’s father, treated the Imam with reserved affection. They used to attend all the prayers in the mosque and they made at least a show of understanding what he said. Taking it in turns, they would invite him to lunch every Friday after prayers. At the end of Ramadan they would pay him the appropriate alms and give him the skins of the animals they had slaughtered at the Greater Bairam feast. If one of their sons or daughters got married, they would give him a fee in cash, together with a cloak or piece of cloth. An exception to this group was a man in his seventies, Ibrahim Wad Taha by name, who did not pray, fast, or give alms, and who did not acknowledge the Imam’s existence.
The second group was made up largely of young men under twenty who were openly antagonistic to the Imam. Some of them were students, others had travelled abroad and returned, while yet others, feeling the flame of life scorching hot in their blood, paid no heed to a man whose business it was to remind people of death. This was the group of adventurers—among whom were those who drank wine in private and gathered secretly at ‘the Oasis’ on the edge of the desert; it was the group, too, of the educated who had read about or heard of dialectical materialism, the mutinous, and the lazy who found it difficult to perform their ablutions at dawn in the depths of winter. Strange to say, the leader of this group was Ibrahim Wad Taha, a man in his seventies; but he was a poet.
The third group, the camp carrying the greatest influence, comprised Mahjoub, Abdul Hafeez, Taher Rawwasi, Hamad Wad Rayyis, Ahmed Isma’il and Sa’eed. They were all much of an age, between thirty-five and forty-five, except for Ahmed Isma’il who, though in his twenties, was one of them by virtue of his sense of responsibility and way of thinking. These were the men who wielded real power in the village. Each of them had a field to cultivate, generally larger than those of the rest of the people, and a business in which he was engaged. Each one of them had a wife and children. They were the men you came across in every matter of moment that arose in the village. Every wedding was seen to by them; every funeral was organized and got ready by them; between them they would wash the dead man and take turns when bearing him off to the cemetery. It was they who would dig the grave, bring along the water, lower the dead man into his tomb, and pile the earth on top of him, after which you would find them receiving in the dead person’s house those who came to offer their condolences, passing round cups of unsugared coffee. When the Nile was in spate or there was a torrential downpour, it was they who dug channels, set up barricades, and patrolled the village by night carrying lanterns, finding out how people were faring and making estimates of the damage. If someone said that a woman or girl had glanced provocatively at a man, it was they who would reprimand, and sometimes even strike, her—it didn’t matter to them whose daughter she was. If they learned that there was some stranger hanging round the village at sundown, it was they who would send him packing; when the Omda came to collect the taxes, it was they who would stand up to him and say that such-and-such taxes were too much for so-and-so, that this amount was reasonable, that unreasonable. If some government representative descended on the village— and they came but seldom—it was they who received him and put him up, killing a sheep or lamb for him, and argued matters out with him in the morning before he met any of the villagers. With schools being set up in the village, also a hospital and an agricultural project, it was they who were the contractors and overseers; they who made up the committees responsible for everything. Though the Imam didn’t like them, he knew he was at their mercy, for it was they who paid him his salary at the end of every month, having collected it from the inhabitants of the village. Every government officer who turned up at the village, and anyone with any business to put through, soon ran this group of men to earth, for no task could be carried out successfully, no work accomplished, unless he came to an understanding with them. But like everyone possessed of power and influence, they did not reveal their personal inclinations (other than at their private gatherings in front of Sa’eed’s shop). The Imam, for instance, they regarded as a necessary evil and they harnessed their tongues as best they could to avoid criticizing him and would render him ‘the requisite courtesies’, as Mahjoub would say. Though they did not pray, at least one of them would attend prayers once a month, generally at noon or evening, for they were incapable of getting up in time for the dawn prayer. The object of the visit was not to listen to the Imam’s sermon, but rather to give him his monthly salary and examine the structure of the mosque to see if it was in need of repair.