Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Sali

Author:Tayeb Sali
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-01-06T23:02:15+00:00

At approximately four o’clock in the afternoon I went ro Mustafa Sa’eed’s house. I entered by the door of the large courtyard, glanced momentarily to the left at the rectangular room of red brick, silent not as the grave but as a ship that has cast anchor in mid-ocean. However, the time had not yet come. She sat me down in a chair on the stone stoop outside the diwan — the very same place — and brought me a glass of lemon juice. The two boys came up and paid their respects to me; the elder was called Mahmoud, her father’s name, and the younger Sa’eed, his father’s name. They were ordinary children, one eight and the other seven, who went off each morning to their school six miles away seated one behind the other on a donkey: They are my responsibility; and one of the reasons that brings me here each year is to see how they are getting on. This time we shall be holding their circumcision ceremony and shall bring along professional singers and religious chanters to a celebration that will be a landmark in their childhood memories. He had told me to spare them the pangs of wanderlust. I would do nothing of the sort; when they grew up, if they wanted to travel, they should be allowed to. Everyone starts at the beginning of the road, and the world is in an endless state of childhood.

The two boys left and she remained, standing in front of me: a slim, tallish figure, firmly built and as lithe as a length of sugar cane; while she used no henna on her feet or hands, a slight smell of perfume hung about her. Her lips were naturally dark red and her teeth strong, white and even. She had a handsome face with wide black eyes in which sadness mingled with shyness. When I greeted her I felt her hand soft and warm in mine. She was a woman of noble carriage and of a foreign type of beauty — or am I imagining something that is not really there? A woman for whom, when I meet her, I feel a sense of hazard and constraint so that I flee from her as quickly as I can. This woman is the offering Wad Rayyes wants to sacrifice at the edge of the grave, with which to bribe death and so gain a respite of a year or two.

She remained standing despite my insistence and only seated herself when I said to her, ‘if you don’t sit down I’ll go.’ Conversation began slowly and with difficulty and thus it continued while the sun sank down towards its place of setting and little by little the air grew cooler and little by little our tongues loosened. I said something that made her laugh and my heart throbbed at the sweetness of her laughter. The blood of the setting sun suddenly spilled out on the western horizon like that of millions of people who have died in some violent war that has broken out between Earth and Heaven.

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