The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [47]
They drove under the cold stars of dawn, north from Wadi Halfa to the now empty villages of Debeira and Ashkeit.
– In Nubia, said Daub, any dispute that arises is settled by the entire family, including women and children. Violent crimes are extremely rare, but in such a case, an exception would be made and only the men would meet to decide what was to be done. The guilty one would be shunned so completely that he would be forced, for his own survival, to leave the community. Cases are never brought to the police. In this way, Nubia has always protected itself, always kept its independence.
The economy depends on the division of ownership. This is a very satisfactory arrangement of real estate, capital, and labour. But often the distribution of the harvest is a complicated affair – because only the oldest women in the village can remember the tangled terms of the original transaction. These arrangements keep alive the history of each family. They ensure that even the labour exile will maintain his place in the village.
Here is a typical story of Nubia, continued Daub. Two men who shared an eskalay were quarrelling over the division of water. In order to irrigate the land of each man equally, the water had to be channelled from one ditch to the other. They were arguing over who was benefiting from the larger share when their uncle overheard. He arranged for a large stone to be brought and placed in the middle of the canal, separating the water into two streams, thus ending the argument. In 1956, when the hostilities erupted between Egypt and England over the Suez, the Nubians followed the events closely; they hurried back and forth from the field to the village, back and forth to gather around a single shortwave radio. An old man observed this rushing to and fro all morning and at last asked one of the young men what it was all about. ‘Grandfather, the Englishmen are fighting Egypt for the Suez Canal.’ The old man shook his head. ‘Won't anyone put a stone in the middle?’
I will tell you another story, said Daub. My father was hired by the British army to train and serve as a translator. He was very young and very clever. One British officer saw how quick he was and helped him to come to England and to find a job. My father eventually married an Englishwoman. And so I was born and raised in Manchester. I worked very hard, studying for engineering. Then I decided to come to Egypt. My father was unhappy at this but also secretly pleased. He would say, ‘Here in England you have everything, and there …’ he would trail off. There, I knew he was thinking, enviously, was the river and the hills and the desert. And secretly pleased too, because part of every father longs for his own boyhood to be understood by his son.
From a distance Avery and Jean saw that, like other Nubian villages, Ashkeit had been built at the foot of rocky hills and a thick date palm forest grew down to the river.
And from a distance they saw that, like other Nubian houses, the houses of Ashkeit were luminous cubes – both sunlight and moonlight had soaked into the whitewashed walls of sand and mud plaster, smooth and magical as ice that never melts. Just below the roof, small windows were cut in the walls for ventilation – large enough to let in a breeze but small and high enough to keep out the heat and the sand. Each house possessed the wooden door of a fortress, and a one-metre long wooden bolt, which would have held, before the evacuation, a giant wooden key. Behind the impressive entrance, Jean and Avery knew, would be the customary large central courtyard, with rooms leading from it.
Daub stopped