Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Sali

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.