The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye

by A. S. Byatt

  ‘And when they heard these sayings, they were full of wrath, and cried out, saying, Great is Diana of the Ephesians.

  ‘And the whole city was filled with confusion: and having caught Gaius and Aristarchus, men of Macedonia, Paul’s companions in travel, they rushed with one accord into the theatre.

  ‘And there for two hours they continued to cry Great is Diana of the Ephesians.’

  And because of the uproar, which was calmed by the town clerk, Paul left the city of Ephesus and set off for Macedonia.

  So the bristling apostle was beaten by commerce and the power of the goddess.

  • • •

  ‘You know,’ said Leyla Doruk, ‘that your Virgin Mary came and died here. It is not certain, as it is not certain that Homer was born in Izmir, but it is said to be so, and her house was discovered because of a sick German lady in the nineteenth century who saw it in visions, the house and the hills, and when they came to look it was there, or so they say. We call it Panaya Kapulu, there is a Christian church too. She came with John, they say, and died here.’

  At a nightclub in Istanbul once, Gillian had been shocked, without quite knowing why, to find one of those vacant, sweetly pink and blue church Virgins, life-size, standing as part of the decorations, part hat-stand, part dumb-waitress, as you might find a many-handed Hindu deity or a plaster Venus in an equivalent occidental club. Now suddenly, she saw a real bewildered old woman, a woman with a shrivelled womb and empty eyes, a woman whose son had been cruelly and very slowly slaughtered before her eyes, shuffling through the streets of Ephesus, waiting quietly for death until it came. And then, afterwards, this old woman, this real dead old woman had in part become the mother goddess, the Syria Dea, the crowned Queen. She was suddenly aware of every inch of her own slack and dying skin. She thought of the stone eyes of the goddess, of her dangerous dignity, of her ambiguous plump breasts, dead balls, intact eggs, wreathed round her in triumph, and understood that real-unreal was not the point, that the goddess was still, and always had been, and in the foreseeable future would be, more alive, more energetic, infinitely more powerful than she herself, Gillian Perholt, that she would stand here before her children, and Orhan’s children, and their children’s children and smile, when they themselves were scattered atomies.

  And when she thought this, standing amongst a group of smiling friends in the centre of the theatre at Ephesus, she experienced again the strange stoppage of her own life that had come with the vision of Patient Griselda. She put out a hand to Orhan and could move no more; and it seemed that she was in a huge buzzing dark cloud, sparking with flashes of fire, and she could smell flowers, and her own blood, and she could hear rushing and humming in her veins, but she could not move a nerve or a muscle. And after a moment, a kind of liquid sob rose in her throat, and Orhan saw the state she was in, and put an arm round her shoulder, and steadied her, until she came to herself.

  In the aeroplane on the way back to Istanbul, Orhan said to Gillian:

  ‘Forgive me, are you quite well?’

  ‘Never better,’ said Gillian, which was in many senses true. But she knew she must answer him. ‘I do truly mean, I feel more alive now than ever before. But lately I’ve had a sense of my fate-my death, that is-waiting for me, manifesting itself from time to time, to remind me it’s there. It isn’t a battle. I don’t fight it off. It takes charge for a moment or two, and then lets go again, and steps back. The more alive I am, the more suddenly it comes.’

  ‘Should you see a doctor?’

  ‘When I am so well, Orhan?’

  ‘I am delighted to see you so well,’ said Orhan. The plane came down into Istanbul and the passengers began a decorous and delightful clapping, applause perhaps for the pilot’s skill, applause perhaps for another successful evasion of fate.

  In Istanbul Orhan Rifat, a very happily married man, returned to his family, and Gillian Perholt settled in for a few days in the Peri Palas Hotel, which was not the famous Pera Palas, in the old European city across the Golden Horn, but a new hotel, of the kind Gillian liked best, combining large hard beds, elegant mirrored bathrooms, lifts and a swimming pool with local forms and patterns – tiled fountains, Turkish tiles with pinks and cornflowers in the bathrooms, carpets woven with abundant silky flowers in the small sitting rooms and writing rooms. It was constructed around a beehive of inner courtyards, with balconies rising one above the other, and silky translucent white-gold curtains behind functional double-glazed balcony doors. Gillian had developed a late passion for swimming. Flying distorts the human body-the middle-aged female body perhaps particularly-the belly balloons, the ankles become cushions of flesh and air, the knees round into puffballs, toes and fingers are swollen and shiny. Gillian had learned never to look in the mirror on arrival, for what stared out at her was a fleshy monster. She had learned to hurry to the pool, however little she felt inclined to exert herself, for what air pressure inflates, water pressure delicately makes weightless and vanishing. The pool at the Peri Palas was empty on the day of Gillian’s arrival, and very satisfactory, if small. It was underground, a large tank, tiled in a dark emerald green, lit from within by gold-rimmed lamps, and the walls of its cavern were tiled with blue and green tiles covered with chrysanthemums and carnations, edged with gold mosaic, glinting and gleaming in the golden light. Oh the bliss, said Gillian to herself as she extended her sad body along the green rolls of swaying liquid and felt it vanish, felt her blood and nerves become pure energy, moved forward with a ripple like a swimming serpent. Little waves of her own making lapped her chin in this secret cistern; her ears were full of the soft whisper and plash of water, her eyes were wide upon green and green, woven with networks of swaying golden light. She basked, she rolled, she flickered ankles and wrists, she turned on her back and let her hair fan on the glassy curves. The nerves unknotted, the heart and lungs settled and pumped, the body was alive and joyful.

  When Orhan took her to Topkapi her body was still comfortable from the swimming, which her skin remembered as the two of them looked down from the Sultan’s upper window on the great dark tank under cedars where once the women of the harem swam together in the sun. In the harem, too, was the Sultan’s bath, a quite different affair, a central box inside a series of carved boxes and cupboards inside the quarters of the Valide Sultan, his mother, where his nakedness could be guarded by many watchful eyes from assassin’s knives. Here too, as in Ephesus, Gillian Perholt struggled with the passions of real stories. Here in the cages the sons of the sultans had waited for the eunuchs with the silken cords that would end their lives and make the throne safe for the chosen one. Here intriguing or unsatisfactory women had been caught and tied in sacks and drowned; here captives, or unsatisfactory servants, had been beheaded for a whim of an absolute ruler. How did they live with such fear? She said to Orhan:

  ‘It is as you said of Shahriyar and I said of Walter-there must be a wonderful pleasure for some people in being other people’s fates and destinies. Perhaps it gave them the illusion that their own fates too were in their own hands–’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Orhan. ‘Perhaps life mattered less to them, their own or anyone else’s.’

  ‘Do you really think they thought that?’

  ‘No,’ said Orhan, looking round the empty maze of hidden rooms and secret places. ‘No, not really. We like to say that. They believed in a future life. We can’t imagine that.’

  Showing her round Istanbul, nevertheless, Orhan became more Turkish. Before the great gold throne of Murat III studded with emeralds, and cushioned in gold and white silk, he said,

  ‘We were a nomadic people. We came over the steppes from Mongolia, from China. Our thrones are portable treasures, our throne-rooms resemble tents, we put our skill into small things, daggers and bowls and cups.’ She remembered the rhythms of his recitation of the poem of the red horsemen.

  • • •

  In the Haghia Sophia she had her third encounter with Fate, or with something. Haghia Sophia is a confus
ing place, echoing and empty, hugely domed and architecturally uncertain, despite its vast and imposing space: it has been church and mosque and modern museum; it has minarets and patches, ghosts, of ruined gold mosaics of Byzantine emperors and the Christian mother and child. The emperor Justinian built it from eclectic materials, collecting pillars and ornaments from temples in Greece and Egypt, including pillars from the temple of the Goddess in Ephesus. It could feel-Gillian had expected it to feel-like a meeting-place of cultures, of East and West, the Christian Church and Islam, but it did not. It felt like an empty exhausted barn, exhausted by battle and pillage and religious rage. Whatever had been there had gone, had fled long ago, Gillian felt, and Orhan too showed no emotion, but returned to his European academic self, pointing out the meanings of the mosaics and talking of his own new thoughts about the absurdities of the theories of Marcuse which had been all the rage in the sixties, when they began to teach. ‘There is a curious pillar here,’ he said vaguely, ‘somewhere or other, with a hole of some sort, where people wish, you might like to see that, if I can find it. The stone is worn away by people touching it, I forget what it does, but you might like to see it.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Gillian.

  ‘They put a brass casing round the magic stone to preserve it,’ said Orhan. ‘But the pilgrims have worn it away, they have eaten into the pillar just with touching, through the brass and the stone. Now where is it, I should be able to find it. It is like wearing away with waterdrops, wearing away with faith, I find that quite interesting, I wish I could remember what it does,’

  When they came to it, there was a family already clustered round it, a Pakistani father and his wife and two daughters, richly beautiful in saris, one pink and gold, one peacock and flame, one blue and silver. They had found the pillar with the hole and its brass casing, and the three women were clustered round it, stroking, putting their hands in and out, chattering like subdued birds. The father, dignified in his black coat, approached Orhan, and asked if he spoke English. Orhan said yes, and was asked to help translate an account of the pillar from a French-Turkish guidebook.

  Whilst he did this, the three women, in their fluttering silk, turned laughing to Gillian Perholt, and stretched out three soft hands with gold bangles on their wrists, pulling her by her sleeve, by her hand, towards the pillar, laughing softly. They patted Dr Perholt’s shoulders, they put arms around her and pushed and pulled, smiling and laughing, they took her hand in theirs with strong, wiry grips and inserted it into the hole, showing her in mime what she must do, turn her hand in the hole, touching the inside rim, round, round, round, three times. She pulled back instinctively, out of an English hygienic horror of something so much touched by so many, and out of a more primitive fear, of something clammy, and moist, and nasty in the dark inside. But the women insisted; they were surprisingly forceful. There was liquid of some kind in there, some pool of something in the stem of the pillar. Dr Perholt’s skin crawled and the women laughed, and Orhan recited the story of the pillar in English to the other man. Apparently, he said, it had been touched by Saint Gregory Thaumaturge, the Miracle-Worker, he had put his power into it. The water inside the pillar was efficacious for diseases of vision and for fertility. The women laughed more loudly, clustering round Dr Perholt. The father told Orhan how he had made pilgrimage to all the holy shrines of Islam; he had travelled far and seen much. He supposed Orhan, too, had made pilgrimages. Orhan nodded, grave and non-committal; he was interested. The West was evil, said the respectable black-coated pilgrim. Evil, decadent, and sliding into darkness. But power was arising. There would be a jihad. True religion would bring the cleansing sword and destroy the filth and greed and corruption of the dying West, and a religious world would be established in its ashes; these things were not only possible, they were already happening. The seeds were sown, the sparks were set, the field of spears would spring up, the fire would consume. This was what he said, this paterfamilias, standing in Haghia Sophia, whose stones had run with blood, whose cavernous spaces had been piled high with corpses, whose spirit had died, Gillian Perholt felt, but maybe felt because she could not feel the new spirit, which spoke to this family, and in them filled her with fear. Orhan, she saw, was in some way enjoying himself. He prolonged the conversation, nodding gravely, inserting mild questions – ‘you have seen signs, mn?’-making no move to change his interlocutor’s impression that he was a good Muslim, in a mosque.

  His family came everywhere with him, said the pilgrim. They like to see new places. And she, does she speak English?

  It was clear that Gillian had been taken for a quiet Muslim wife. She had been standing two paces behind Orhan as he cast about for the magic pillar. Orhan replied gravely:

  ‘She is English. She is a visiting professor. An eminent visiting professor.’

  Orhan, a child of Atatürk’s new world, was enjoying himself. Atatürk had emancipated women. Leyla Serin and Leyla Doruk were also his children, powerful people, thinking teachers. Orhan liked drama, and he had made a nice little revelatory clash. The Pakistani gentleman was not happy. He and Gillian looked at each other, both, she thought, remembering things he had said a moment ago about London being a sewer of decay and the Commonwealth a dead body, putrefying and shrivelling away to nothing. She could not meet the Pakistani’s eye; she was English and embarrassed for him. He could not meet her eye. She was a woman, and should not have been there, with a man who was not her husband, in a museum that was also a mosque. He gathered his flock – who still smiled at Gillian, fluttering their elegant fingers in farewell. ‘Hrmph,’ said Orhan. ‘Istanbul is a meeting-place for many cultures. You didn’t like the pillar, Gillian? Your face was very funny, very ladylike.’

  ‘I don’t like Haghia Sophia,’ said Gillian. ‘I expected to. I like the idea of Sophia, of Wisdom, I like it that she is wise and female, I expected to feel – something – in her church. And there is a wet hole for fertility wishes. In a pillar that might have come from the Temple of Artemis.’

  ‘Not that pillar, I think,’ said Orhan.

  ‘If I was a postmodernist punster,’ said Gillian, ‘I would make something of Haghia Sophia. She has got old, she has turned into a Hag. But I can’t, because I respect etymologies, it means holy. “Hag” is my word, a northern word, nothing to do with here.’

  ‘You have said it now,’ said Orhan. ‘Even if you repudiate it. Lots of American students here do think Hag is Hag. They get excited about Crones.’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Gillian.

  ‘No,’ said Orhan, not revealing what he himself thought about hags and crones. ‘We shall go to the Bazaar. Shopping is good for the souls of western women. And eastern. And men like it too.’

  It was true that the Grand Bazaar was livelier and brighter than the vast cavern of Haghia Sophia. Here was a warren of arcades, of Aladdin’s caves full of lamps and magical carpets, of silver and brass and gold and pottery and tiles. Here and there behind a shop-front, seated in an armchair at a bench surrounded by dangling lamps and water-shakers from the baths, or sitting cross-legged on a bale of carpets amongst a tent of carpets, Orhan had ex-students who brought cups of Turkish coffee, tulip-shaped glasses of rose tea to Gillian, and displayed their wares. The carpet-seller had written a Ph.D. on Tristram Shandy, and now travelled into Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, bringing back carpets on journeys made by camel, by jeep, into the mountains. He showed Gillian pallid kilims in that year’s timid Habitat colours, pale 1930s eau-de-nil and bois-de-rose with a sad null grey. No, said Gillian, no, she wanted richness, the dark bright blues, the crimsons and scarlets, the golds and rusts of the old carpets with their creamy blossoms, their trees full of strange birds and flowers. The West is fickle, said Bulent the carpet-seller, they say they want these insipid colours this year, and the women in India and Iran buy the wool and the silk, and the next year, when the carpets are made, they want something else, black and purple and orange, and the women are ruined, their profit is lost, heaps of carpets lie
round and rot. I think you will like this carpet, said Bulent, pouring coffee; it is a wedding carpet, a dowry carpet, to hang on the wall of a nomad’s tent. Here is the tree of life, crimson and black on midnight blue. This you like. Oh yes, said Gillian, seeing the dark woven tree against the yellows and whites of her Primrose Hill room, now hers alone. The woman, whoever she was, had made it strong and complex, flaunting and subtle. I can’t haggle, said Gillian to Orhan, I’m English. You would be surprised, said Orhan, at some English people’s skill in that art. But Bulent is my student, and he will give you a fair price, for love of Tristram Shandy. And suddenly Gillian felt well again, full of life and singing with joy, away from the puddle in the pillar and the brooding Hag, hidden away in an Aladdin’s cave made of magic carpets with small delightful human artefacts, an unknown woman’s wedding carpet, sentimental Sterne’s monumental fantasia on life before birth, black-brown coffee poured from a bright copper pan, tasting rich and almost, but not quite, unbearably strong and sweet.