The Wedding of Zein by Tayeb Salih Read Free Book Online Page A

raised them one would experience a quickening of the heart. Zein was the first to draw the attention of the young men of the village to Azza’s beauty. One day he suddenly raised his voice whilst amid a great gathering of men brought together by the Omda for the cultivation of his field, raised his hoarse, piercing voice as does the cock at the break of dawn: ‘Hear ye, O people of the village, O kinsfolk, Azza the Omda’s daughter has slain herself a man. Zein is slain in the courtyard of the Omda.’ The people were taken aback by such daring and the Omda turned round sharply towards Zein, instinctve anger rising within him. Suddenly, as though everyone had at one and the same instant become conscious of the laughable disparity between Zein’s appearance, standing there as though he were a dried-up goat’s skin, and between Azza the Omda’s daughter, they all burst out laughing at one accord.
    The anger died in the breast of the Omda, who was seated on a chair in the shade of a palm tree, red of eye and dusty of moustache, as he spurred the people on to work. He was a serious, awe-inspiring man who seldom laughed; however, on this occasion he gave a harsh explosive laugh at Zein’s words. ‘Zein,’ he shouted out at him, ‘if you go on working hard till evening we’ll give you Azza in marriage,’ and once again the people laughed, in deference to the Omda. Zein, however, remained silent, his face serious and preoccupied, unconscious of the increasing strength and frequency of the strokes of his hoe in the ground.
    After that a month elapsed with Zein talking of nothing but his love for Azza and her father’s promise that he would marry her. The Omda knew how to exploit Zein’s emotions and gave him any number of arduous tasks which would have defeated the jinn themselves. So Zein the Lover would be seen bearing a yoke with tins of water on his back at high noon when the very stones groaned with the heat, hurrying to and fro as he watered the Omda’s garden; or he would be found wielding an axe larger than himself and cutting down a tree or chopping up wood; or you’d come upon him earnestly engaged in gathering fodder for the Omda’s donkeys, horses, and calves. And when, once a week, Azza smiled at him the whole world could hardly contain him for joy. Not a month passed, though, before it became known in the village that Azza had become engaged to her cousin, who worked as a Medical Assistant at Abu Usher.
    Without fuss, without saying a word, Zein started on a new romance. One day the village awoke to his cries of: ‘I am slain among the people of the Koz.’ His ‘Laila’ this time was a young girl from among the bedouin who lived along the Nile in the north of the Sudan and came down from the lands of the Kababeesh and the Dar Hamar, and from the encampments of the Hawaweer and the Mereisab in Kordofan. At certain seasons water became scarce in their lands and they would journey down the Nile with their camels and sheep in search of watering for them. Sometimes years of drought, when the sky withheld rain, would bring them down and they would arrive in droves at the watering-places in the lands of the Shaigiya and the Bideeriya who lived along the Nile. Most of them remained only until things got better, when they would return whence they had come, though some of them, taking a liking to the settled life in the Nile valley, stayed on. The bedouin of the Koz were one such group. They continued to pitch their tents on the edge of the cultivated land, where they pastured their sheep and sold the milk, collected wood for fuel, and hired themselves out at low rates in the date-harvesting season. They did not intermarry with the local inhabitants, considering themselves to be pure Arabs. The village people, however, regarded them as uncouth bedouin.
    Zein, though, broke down this barrier. Always on the move, spending all day long wandering