Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih Read Free Book Online

God damn you.” My mind was
like a sharp knife. The train carried me to Victoria Station and to the world
of Jean Morris.
     
    ‘In
the courtroom in London I sat for weeks listening to the lawyers talking about
me — as though they were talking about some person who was no concern of mine.
The Public Prosecutor, Sir Arthur Higgins, had a brilliant mind. I knew him
well, for he had taught me Criminal Law at Oxford and I had seen him before, at
this court, in this very same room, tightening his grip on the accused as they
stood in the dock. Rarely did anyone escape him. I saw men weeping and fainting
after he had finished his cross examination; but this time he was wrestling
with a corpse.
    ‘“Were you the cause of Ann Hammond’s suicide?”
    ‘“I don’t know”
    ‘“And Sheila Greenwood?"
    ‘“I don’t know"
    ‘“And Isabella Seymour?"
    “‘I don’t know”
    ‘“Did you kill Jean Morris?”
    ‘“Yes.”
    ‘“Did you kill her intentionally?”
    "‘Yes.”
    ‘It was as though his voice came to me from another world.
The man continued skillfully to draw a terrible picture of a werewolf who had
been the reason for two girls committing suicide, had wrecked the life of a
married woman and killed his own wife — an egoist whose whole life had been
directed to the quest of pleasure. Once it occurred to me in my stupor, as I
sat there listening to my former teacher, Professor Maxwell Foster- Keen,
trying to save me from the gallows, that I should stand up and shout at the
court: "This Mustafa Sa’eed does not exist. He’s an illusion, a lie. I ask
of you to rule that the lie be killed." But I remained as lifeless as a
heap of ashes. Professor Maxwell Foster- Keen continued to draw a distinctive
picture of the mind of a genius whom circumstances had driven to killing in a
moment of mad passion. He related to them how I had been appointed a lecturer
in economics at London University at the age of twenty-four. He told them that
Ann Hammond and Sheila Greenwood were girls who were seeking death by every
means and that they would have committed suicide whether they had met Mustafa Sa’eed
or not. “Mustafa Sa’eed, gentlemen of the jury; is a noble person whose mind
was able to absorb Western civilization but it broke his heart. These girls
were not killed by Mustafa Sa’eed but by the germ of a deadly disease that
assailed them a thousand years ago.” It occurred to me that I should stand up
and say to them: “This is untrue, a fabrication. It was I who killed them. I am
the desert of thirst. I am no Othello. I am a lie. Why don’t you sentence me to
be hanged and so kill the lie?” But Professor Foster-Keen turned the trial into
a conflict between two worlds, a struggle of which I was one of the victims.
The train carried me to Victoria Station and to the world of Jean Morris.
     
    ‘I
pursued her for three years. Every day the string of the bow became more taut.
It was with air that my waterskins were distended; my caravans were thirsty;
and the mirage shimmered before me in the wilderness of longing; the arrow’s
target had been fixed and it was inevitable the tragedy would take place.
“You’re a savage bull that does not weary of the chase,” she said to me one day
“I am tired of your pursuing me and of my running before you. Marry me.” So I
married her. My bedroom became a theatre of war; my bed a patch of hell. When I
grasped her it was like grasping at clouds, like bedding a shooting-star, like
mounting the back of a Prussian military march. That bitter smile was continually
on her mouth. I would stay awake all night warring with bow and sword and spear
and arrows, and in the morning I would see the smile unchanged and would know
that once again I had lost the combat. It was as though I were a slave Shahrayar
you buy in the market for a dinar encountering a Scheherazade begging amidst
the rubble of a city destroyed by plague. By day I lived with the theories of
Keynes and Tawney and