The Wedding of Zein Read Online Free Page B

government.
    â€˜And who has changed it?’ we asked them, but received no answer. As for us, ever since we refused to allow the stopping-place to be set up at the doum tree no one has disturbed our tranquil existence. Two years passed without our knowing what form the government had taken, black or white. Its emissaries passed through our village without staying in it, while we thanked God that He had saved us the trouble of putting them up. So things went on till, four years ago, a new government came into power. As though this new authority wished to make us conscious of its presence, we awoke one day to find an official with an enormous hat and small head, in the company of two soldiers, measuring up and doing calculations at the doum tree. We asked them what it was about, to which they replied that the government wished to build a stopping-place for the steamer under the doum tree.
    â€˜But we have already given you our answer about that,’ we told them. ‘What makes you think we’ll accept it now?’
    â€˜The government which gave in to you was a weak one,’ they said, ‘but the position has now changed.’
    To cut a long story short, we took them by the scruffs of their necks, hurled them into the water, and went off to our work. It wasn’t more than a week later when a group of soldiers came along commanded by the small-headed official with the large hat, shouting, ‘Arrest that man, and that one, and that one,’ until they’d taken off twenty of us, I among them. We spent a month in prison. Then one day the very soldiers who had put us there opened the prison gates. We asked them what it was all about but no one said anything. Outside the prison we found a great gathering of people; no sooner had we been spotted than there were shouts and cheering and we were embraced by some cleanly-dressed people, heavily scented and with gold watches gleaming on their wrists. They carried us off in a great procession, back to our own people. There we found an unbelievably immense gathering of people, carts, horses, and camels. We said to each other, ‘The din and flurry of the capital has caught up with us.’ They made us twenty men stand in a row and the people passed along it shaking us by the hand: the Prime Minister — the President of the Parliament — the President of the Senate — the member for such and such constituency — the member for such and such other constituency.
    We looked at each other without understanding a thing of what was going on around us except that our arms were aching with all the handshakes we had been receiving from those Presidents and Members of Parliament.
    Then they took us off in a great mass to the place where the doum tree and the tomb stand. The Prime Minister laid the foundation stone for the monument you’ve seen, and for the dome you’ve seen, and for the railing you’ve seen. Like a tornado blowing up for a while and then passing over, so that mighty host disappeared as suddenly as it had come without spending a night in the village — no doubt because of the horseflies which, that particular year, were as large and fat and buzzed and whirred as much as during the year the preacher came to us.
    One of those strangers who were occasionally cast upon us in the village later told us the story of all this fuss and bother.
    â€˜The people,’ he said, ‘hadn’t been happy about this government since it had come to power, for they knew that it had got there by bribing a number of the Members of Parliament. They therefore bided their time and waited for the right opportunities to present themselves, while the opposition looked around for something to spark things off. When the doum tree incident occurred and they marched you all off and slung you into prison, the newspapers took this up and the leader of the government which had resigned made a fiery speech in Parliament in which he