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

at night I resumed the war with bow and sword and spear
and arrows. I saw the troops returning, filled with terror, from the war of
trenches, of lice and epidemics. I saw them sowing the seeds of the next war in
the Treaty of Versailles, and I saw Lloyd George lay the foundations of a
public welfare state. The city was transformed into an extraordinary woman,
with her symbols and her mysterious calls, towards whom I drove my camels till
their entrails ached and I myself almost died of yearning for her. My bedroom
was a spring-well of sorrow, the germ of a fatal disease. The infection had
stricken these women a thousand years ago, but I had stirred up the latent
depths of the disease until it had got out of control and had killed. The
theatres of Leicester Square echoed with songs of love and gaiety, but my heart
did not beat in time with them. Who would have thought that Sheila Greenwood
would have the courage to commit suicide? A waitress in a Soho restaurant, a
simple girl with a sweet smile and a sweet way of speaking. Her people were
village folk from the suburbs of Hull. I seduced her with gifts and honeyed
words, and an unfaltering way of seeing things as they really are. It was my
world, so novel to her, that attracted her. The smell of burning sandalwood and
incense made her dizzy; she stood for a long time laughing at her image in the
mirror as she fondled the ivory necklace I had placed like a noose round her
beautiful neck. She entered my bedroom a chaste virgin and when she left it she
was carrying the germs of self-destruction within her. She died without a
single word passing her lips — my storehouse of hackneyed phrases is
inexhaustible. For every occasion I possess the appropriate garb.
    ‘“Is it not true, by way of example, that in the period
between October 1922 and February 1923, that in this period alone you were
living with five women simultaneously?”
    ‘“Yes."
    "And that you gave each one the impression you’d marry
her?"
    "‘Yes."
    ‘“And that you adopted a different name with each one?"
    "‘Yes."
    "‘That you were Hassan and Charles and Amin and Mustafa
and Richard?"
    ‘“Yes.”
    "And yet you were writing and lecturing on a system of
economics based on love not figures? Isn’t it true you made your name by your
appeal for humanity in economics?"
    "‘Yes.”
     
    ‘Thirty
years. The willow trees turned from white to green to yellow in the parks; the
cuckoo sang to the spring each year. For thirty years the Albert Hall was
crammed each night with lovers of Beethoven and Bach, and the presses brought
out thousands of books on aft and thought. The plays of Bernard Shaw were put
on at The Royal Court and The Haymarket. Edith Sitwell was giving wings to
poetry and The Prince of Wales’s Theatre pulsated with youth and bright lights.
The sea continued to ebb and flow at Bournemouth and Brighton, and the Lake
District flowered year after year. The island was like a sweet tune, happy and
sad, changing like a mirage with the changing of the seasons. For thirty years
I was a part of all this, living in it but insensitive to its real beauty
unconcerned with everything about it except the filling of my bed each night.
    ‘Yes. It was summer — they said that they had not known a
summer like it for a hundred years. I left my house on a Saturday sniffing the
air, feeling I was about to start upon a great hunt. I reached Speakers’ Corner
in Hyde Park. It was packed with people. I stood listening from afar to a
speaker from the West Indies talking about the colour problem. Suddenly my eyes
came to rest on a woman who was craning her neck to catch a glimpse of the
speaker so that her dress was lifted above her knees exposing two shapely
bronzed legs. Yes, this was my prey. I walked up to her, like a boat heading
towards the rapids. I stood beside her and pressed up close against her till I
felt her warmth pervading me. I breathed in the odour of her body, that odour
with which Mrs Robinson had