Free Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih

will continue thereafter to whisper in men’s ears. To say what?
I don’t know. We were in the house of a young Sudanese who was lecturing at the
University and had been studying in England at the same time as I, and among
those present was an Englishman who worked in the Ministry of Finance. We got
on to the subject of mixed marriages and the conversation changed from being
general to discussing particular instances. Who were those who had married
European women? Who had married English women? Who was the first Sudanese to
marry an English woman? So-and-so? No. So-and-so? No. Suddenly — Mustafa Sa’eed.
The person who mentioned his name was the young lecturer at the University and
on his face was that very same expression of joy I had glimpsed on the retired Mamur’s
face. Under Khartoum’s star-studded sky in early winter the young man went on
to say ‘Mustafa Sa’eed was the first Sudanese to marry an Englishwoman, in fact
he was the first to marry a European of any kind. I don’t think you will have
heard of him, for he took himself off abroad long ago. He married in England
and took British nationality. Funny that no one remembers him, in spite of the
fact that he played such an important role in the plottings of the English in
the Sudan during the late thirties. He was one of their most faithful
supporters. The Foreign Office employed him on dubious missions to the Middle
East and he was one of the secretaries of the conference held in London in
1936. He’s now a millionaire living like a lord in the English countryside.’
    Without realizing it I found myself saying out loud, ‘On his
death Mustafa Sa’eed left six acres, three cows, an ox, two donkeys, ten goats,
five sheep, thirty date palms, twenty-three acacia, sayal and harraz trees,
twenty-five lemons, and a like number of orange, trees, nine ardebs of wheat
and nine of maize, and a house made up of five rooms and a diwan, also a
further room of red brick, rectangular in shape, with green windows, and a roof
that was not flat as those of the rest of the rooms but triangular like the
back of an ox, and nine hundred and thirty—seven pounds, three piastres and
five milliemes in cash.’
    In the instant it takes for a flash of lightning to come and
go I saw in the eyes of the young man sitting opposite me a patently live and
tangible feeling of terror. I saw it in the fixed look of his eyes, the tremor
of the eyelid, and the slackening of the lower jaw. If he had not been
frightened, why should he have asked me this question: Are you his son?’
    He asked me this question though he too was unaware of why he
had uttered these words, knowing as he does full well who I am. Though not
fellow students, we had none the less been in England at the same time and had
met up on a number of occasions, more than once drinking beer together in the
pubs of Knightsbridge. So, in an instant outside the boundaries of time and
place, things appear to him too as unreal. Everything seems probable. He too
could be Mustafa Sa’eed’s son, his brother, or his cousin. The world in that
instant, as brief as the blinking of an eyelid, is made up of countless
probabilities, as though Adam and Eve had just fallen from Paradise.
    All these probabilities settled down into a single state of
actuality when I laughed, and the world reverted to what it had been — persons
with known faces and known names and known jobs, under the star-studded sky of Khartoum
in early winter. He too laughed and said, ‘How crazy of me! Of course you’re
not Mustafa Sa’eed’s son or even a relative of his - perhaps you’d never even
heard of him in your life before. I forgot that you poets have your flights of
fancy’
    Somewhat bitterly I thought that, whether I liked it or not,
I was assumed by people to be a poet because I had spent three years delving
into the life of an obscure English poet and had returned to teach pre-Islamic
literature in secondary schools before being promoted to an