The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye

by A. S. Byatt

  ‘Entendu,’ said the djinn. ‘You are an intelligent and cautious woman. You may wish when you will and the praeternatural laws require me to remain at your service until all three wishes have been made. Lesser djinns would tempt you into making your wishes rapidly and foolishly, for their own ends, but I am God-fearing and honourable (despite which I have spent much of my long life shut up in bottles), and I will not do that. All the same, I shall attempt to catch one of these travelling butterflies. They are spread along the waves of the atmosphere-not as we are when we travel-in the waves – I should be able to concentrate one – to move the matter as well as the emanation – the pleasure is to use the laws of its appearance here and intensify – I could easily wish him here – but I will, I will have him along his own trajectory – so – and so –’

  A small Boris Becker, sandy-browed, every gold hair on his golden body gleaming sweat, was standing on the chest of drawers, perhaps twice the size of his television image, which was frozen in mid-stroke on the screen. He blinked his sandy lashes over his blue eyes and looked around, obviously unable to see more than a blur around him.

  ‘Scheiss,’ said the tiny Becker. ‘Scheiss und Scheiss. Was ist mit mir?’

  ‘I could manifest us to him,’ said the djinn. ‘He would be afeard.’

  ‘Put him back. He will lose the set.’

  ‘I could expand him. Life-size. We could speak to him.’

  ‘Put him back. It isn’t fair.’

  ‘You don’t want him?’

  ‘Scheiss. Warum kann ich nicht…’

  ‘No. I don’t.’

  The Becker on the screen was frozen into an attitude, his racket raised, his head back, one foot lifting. Henri Leconte advanced towards the net. The commentator announced that Becker had had a seizure, which delighted the djinn, who had indeed seized him. ‘Scheiss, said the forlorn small Becker in the bedroom. ‘Return him,’ said Dr Perholt imperiously, adding quickly, ‘That is not one of my three wishes, you must do what seems to you best, but you must understand that you are disappointing millions of people, all round the world, interrupting this story-I’m sorry, deformation professionelle, I should say, this game –’

  ‘Why are your homunculi not three-dimensional?’ asked the djinn.

  ‘I don’t know. We can’t do that. We may learn. You seem to understand it better than I do, however long you have been in that bottle. Please put him back.’

  ‘To please you,’ said the djinn with grave gallantry. He picked up the mannikin-Becker, twisted him rapidly like a top, murmured something, and the Becker on the screen collapsed on the court in a heap.

  ‘You have hurt him,’ said Gillian accusingly.

  ‘It is to be hoped not,’ said the djinn with an uncertain note. Becker in Monte Carlo got up unsteadily and was escorted off the court, his hands to his head.

  ‘They will not be able to continue,’ said Gillian crossly, and then put her hand to her mouth in amazement, that a woman with a live djinn on her bed should still be interested in the outcome of a tennis match, only part of which she had seen.

  ‘You could wish him well,’ said the djinn, ‘but he will probably be well anyway. More than probably, almost certainly. You must wish for your heart’s desire.’

  ‘I wish,’ said Gillian, ‘for my body to be as it was when I last really liked it, if you can do that.’

  The great green eyes settled on her stout figure in its white robe and turban.

  ‘I can do that,’ he said. ‘I can do that. If you are quite sure that that is what you most desire. I can make your cells as they were, but I cannot delay your Fate.’

  ‘It is courteous of you to tell me that. And yes, it is what I desire. It is what I have desired hopelessly every day these last ten years, whatever else I may have desired.’

  ‘And yet,’ said the djinn, ‘you are well enough as you are, in my opinion. Amplitude, madame, is desirable.’

  ‘Not in my culture. And moreover, there is the question of temporal decay.’

  ‘That I suppose, but do not wholly understand sympathetically. We are made of fire, and do not decay. You are made of dust, and return to it.’

  He raised his hand and pointed at her, one finger lazily extended, a little like Michelangelo’s Adam.

  She felt a fierce contraction in the walls of her belly, in her loose womb.

  ‘I am glad to see you prefer ripe women to green girls,’ said the djinn. ‘I too am of that opinion. But your ideal is a little meagre. Would you not care to be rounder?’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Gillian, suddenly modest, and retreated into the bathroom, where she opened her robe and saw in the demisted mirror a solid and unexceptionable thirty-five-year-old woman, whose breasts were full but not softened, whose stomach was taut, whose thighs were smooth, whose nipples were round and rosy. Indeed the whole of this serviceable and agreeable body was flushed deep rose, as though she had been through a fire, or a steam bath. Her appendix scar was still there, and the mark on her knee where she had fallen on a broken bottle hiding under the stairs from an air raid in 1944. She studied her face in the mirror; it was not beautiful but it was healthy and lively and unexceptionable; her neck was a clean column and her teeth, she was happy to see and feel, more numerous, more securely planted. She undid the coiled towel and her hair sprang out, damp, floppy, long and unfaded. I can go in the streets, she said to herself, and still be recognisably who I am, in my free and happy life; only I shall feel better, I shall like myself more. That was an intelligent wish, I shall not regret it. She brushed out her hair, and went back to the djinn, who was lolling on the bedspread, watching Boris Becker, who had lost the first set, and was ranging the court like a tiger in the beginning of the second. The djinn had also helped himself to the glossy shopping magazines which lay in the drawer of the bedside table, and to the Gideon Bible which, with the Koran, was also there. From these he appeared to have absorbed the English language by some kind of cerebral osmosis.

  ‘Hmn,’ he said in that language, ‘Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners? This is your language, I can learn its rules quickly, I find. Are you pleased, madame, with the outcome of your wish? We have a little sister and she hath no breasts: what shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for? I see from these images that in this time you prefer your ladies without breasts, like boys. A curious form of asceticism, if that is what is, or perversity possibly, it may be. I am not a djinn who ever needed to lurk in bathhouses to catch young boys from behind. I have consorted with ladies of all kinds, with the Queen of Sheba herself, with the Shulamite whose breasts were like clusters of grapes and ripe pomegranates, whose neck was a tower of ivory and the smell of whose nose was like apples. A boy is a boy and a woman is a woman, my lady. But these images have lovely eyes, they are skilful with the kohl.’

  ‘If you consorted with the Queen of Sheba,’ said the scholar, ‘how did you come to be shut in what I believe is at the earliest a nineteenth-century bottle, çesm-i bülbül, if not Venetian?’

  ‘Certainly çesm-i bülbül,’ said the djinn. ‘Freshly made and much prized by its owner, the beautiful Zefir, wife of Mustafa Emin Bey, in Smyrna. I came into that bottle through a foolish accident and a too-great fondness for the conversation of women. That was my third incarceration: I shall be more careful in the future. I am happy to tell you my history, whilst you decide upon your two remaining wishes, but I am also curious to know your own – are you wife, or widow, and how do you come to be inhabiting this splendid apartment with flowing waters in the Peri Palas as your shining books tell me this place is called? What I know of England is little and unfriendly. I know the tale of the pale slaves from the island in the north of whom a Roman bishop said “Non Angli sed angeli.” And I know about Bisnismen, from the conversation in the caravanserai in Smyrna. You are rumoured to be thick red people who cannot bend or smile, but I have learned never to trust rumours and I find y
ou graceful.’

  ‘My name is Gillian Perholt,’ said Dr Perholt. ‘I am an independent woman, a scholar, I study tale-telling and narratology’ (She thought he could learn this useful word; his green eyes glittered.) ‘I am in Turkey for a conference, and return to my island in a week’s time. I do not think my history will interest you, much.’

  ‘On the contrary. I am temporarily in your power, and it is always wise to understand the history of those who hold power over you. I have lived much of my life in harems, and in harems the study of apparently uneventful personal histories is a matter of extreme personal importance. The only truly independent woman I have known was the Queen of Sheba, my half-cousin, but I see that things have changed since her day. What does an independent woman wish for, Djil-yan Perihan?’

  ‘Not much,’ said Gillian, ‘that I haven’t got. I need to think. I need to be intelligent. Tell me the story of your three incarcerations. If that would not bore you.’

  She was later to wonder how she could be so matter-of-fact about the presence of the gracefully lounging Oriental daimon in a hotel room. At the time, she un-questioningly accepted his reality and his remarks as she would have done if she had met him in a dreamthat is to say, with a certain difference, a certain knowledge that the reality in which she was was not everyday, was not the reality in which Dr Johnson refuted Bishop Berkeley’s solipsism with a robust kick at a trundling stone. She was accustomed also to say, in lectures, that it was possible that the human need to tell tales about things that were unreal originated in dreams, and that memory had certain things also in common with dreams; it re-arranged, it made clear, simple narratives, certainly it invented as well as recalling. Hobbes, she told her students, had described imagination as decayed memory. She had at no point the idea that she might ‘wake up’ from the presence of the djinn and find him gone as though he had never been; but she did feel she might move suddenly-or he might-into some world where they no longer shared a mutual existence. But he persisted, his finger-nails and toe-nails solid and glistening, his flesh with its slightly simmering quality, his huge considering eyes, his cloak of wings, his scent, with its perfumes and smokiness, its pheromones, if djinns have pheromones, a question she was not ready to put to him. She suggested ordering a meal from Room Service, and together they chose charred vegetable salad, smoked turkey, melons and passion fruit sorbet; the djinn made himself scarce whilst this repast was wheeled in, and added to it, upon his reappearance, a bowl of fresh figs and pomegranates and some intensely rose-perfumed loukoum. Gillian said that she need not have ordered anything if he could do that, and he said that she did not allow for the effects of curiosity on one who had been cramped in a bottle since 1850 (your reckoning, he said in French)-he desired greatly to see the people and way of life of this late time.

  ‘Your slaves,’ he said, ‘are healthy and smiling. That is good.’

  ‘There are no slaves, we no longer have slaves – at least not in the West and not in Turkey-we are all free,’ said Gillian, regretting this simplification as soon as it was uttered.

  ‘No slaves,’ said the djinn thoughtfully. ‘No sultans, maybe, either?’

  ‘No sultans. A republic. Here. In my country we have a Queen. She has no power. She is-a representative figure.’

  ‘The Queen of Sheba had power,’ said the djinn, folding his brow in thought, and adding dates, sherbet, quails, marrons glacés and two slices of tarte aux pommes to the feast spread before them. ‘She would say to me, as her spies brought her news of his triumphal progress across the desert, the great Suleiman, blessed be his memory, she would say, “How can I, a great Queen, submit to the prison house of marriage, to the invisible chains which bind me to the bed of a man?” I advised her against it. I told her her wisdom was hers and she was free as an eagle floating on the waves of the air and seeing the cities and palaces and mountains below her with an even eye. I told her her body was rich and lovely but her mind was richer and lovelier and more durable-for although she was partly of our kind, she was a mortal being, like you-djinns and mortals cannot produce an immortal scion, you know, as donkeys and horses can only produce a seedless mule. And she said she knew I was in the right: she sat amongst the cushions in her inner room, where no one came, and twisted her dark hair in her hand, and knit her brow in thought, and I looked at the great globes of her breasts and the narrowness of her waist and her huge soft fundament like two great heaps of silky sand, and was sick with desire for her, though I said nothing of that, for she liked to play with me a little, she had known me since she was born, I had come invisibly in and out of her sleeping-chamber and kissed her soft mouth and stroked her back as she grew, and I knew as well as any of her female slaves the little touches that made her shiver with bliss, but all was in play only, and she liked to consult me on serious matters, on the intentions of the kings of Persia and Bessarabia, on the structure of a ghazal, on medicines for choler and despair, on the disposition of the stars. And she said she knew I was right, and that her freedom was her true good, not to be surrendered, and that only I – an immortal djinn-and a few women, advised her so, but that most of her court, men and women, and her human family were in favour of marriage with this Suleiman (blessed be his memory), who advanced across the desert day by day, growing in her mind as I could grow and shrink before her eyes. And when he came, I saw that I was lost, for she desired him. It is true to say that he was desirable, his loins and his buttocks in his silk trousers were of a perfect beauty, and his fingers were long and wonderfuly quick-he could play on a woman as well as he could play on a lute or a flute-but at first she did not know that she desired him, and I, like a fool, went on telling her to think of her proud autonomy, of her power to go in and out as she pleased. And she agreed with all I said, she nodded gravely and once dropped a hot tear, which I licked up-never have I desired any creature so, woman or djinn or peri or boy like a fresh-peeled chestnut. And then she began to set him tasks which seemed impossible – to find a particular thread of red silk in the whole palace, to guess the secret Name of the djinn her mother, to tell her what women most desire – and I knew even more surely that I was lost, for he could speak to the beasts of the earth and the birds of the air, and djinns from the kingdom of fire, and he found ants to discover the thread, and an Ifrit from the kingdom of fire to tell him the Name, and he looked into her eyes and told her what women most desire, and she lowered her eyes and said he was right, and granted him what he desired, which was to wed her and take her to his bed, with her lovely curtain of flesh still unparted and her breath coming in little pants of desire that I had never heard, never, and never should again. And when I saw him tear her maidenhead and the ribbon of red blood flow on to the silk sheets, I gave a kind of groan, and he became aware of my presence. He was a great magician, blessed be his name, and could see me well enough, though I was invisible. And he lay there, bathed in her sweat and his, and took account of certain little love-bites-most artistically placed, and unfortunately not invisible – in the soft hollows of her collarbone, and-elsewhere, you may imagine. And he could see the virgin blood well enough, or I imagine my fate might have been worse, but he imprisoned me with a word of power in a great metal flask there was in the room, and sealed me in with his own seal, and she said nothing, she made no plea for me-though I am a believer, and not a follower of Iblis-only lay back and sighed, and I saw her tongue caress her pearly teeth, and her soft hand reach out to touch those parts of him which had given her such pleasure, and I was nothing to her, a breath in a bottle. And so I was cast into the Red Sea, with many others of my kind, and languished there for two and a half thousand years until a fisherman drew me up in his net and sold the bottle to a travelling pedlar, who took me to the bazaar in Istanbul where I was bought by a handmaid of Princess Mihrimah, daughter of Suleiman the Magnificent, and taken to the Abode of Bliss, the Eski Saray, the harem in the palace.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Gillian Perholt, interrupting his story, ‘what do women most desire?’
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  ‘Do you not know?’ said the djinn. ‘If you do not know already, I cannot tell you.’

  ‘Maybe they do not all desire the same thing.’

  ‘Maybe you do not. Your own desires, Djil-yan Perihan, are not clear to me. I cannot read your thoughts, and that intrigues me. Will you not tell me your life?’

  ‘It is of no interest. Tell me what happened when you were bought by Princess Mihrimah.’

  ‘This lady was the daughter of the Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, and his concubine Roxelana, la Rossa, the woman out of Galicia, daughter of a Ukrainian priest and known in Turkish as Hurrem, the laughing one. She was terrible as an army with the banners, Roxelana. She defeated the Sultan’s early love, Gülbahar, the Rose of Spring, whom he adored, and when she bore him a son, she laughed him fiercely into marrying her, which no concubine, no Christian, had ever achieved. And when the kitchens burned – in your year 1540 it must be-she marched her household into the Seraglio-a hundred ladies-in-waiting and the eunuchs, all quaking in their shoes for fear of being disembowelled on the spot – but they were more afraid of her laughter-and so she settled in the palace itself. And Mihrimah’s husband, Rüstem Pasha, was the grand vizir after Ibrahim was strangled. I remember Suleiman the Magnificent-his face was round with blue eyes, the nose of a ram, the body of a lion, a full beard, a long neck-he was a big man, a king of men, a man without fear or compromise, a glorious man…. Those who came after were fools and boys. That was her fault, Roxelana’s fault. She intrigued against his son Mustafa, Gülbahar’s son, who was like his father and would have been a wise ruler-she persuaded Suleiman he was treacherous, and so when he came boldly into his father’s presence they were waiting for him, the mutes with the silk strangling cords, and he tried to cry to the janissaries who loved him, but the stranglers beat him down and stopped his breath. I saw it all, for I had been sent to see it by my new young mistress, a slave girl who belonged to Mihrimah and opened my bottle, believing it contained perfume for her mistress’s bath. She was a Christian and a Circassian, Gülten, pale for my tastes, and tremulous and given to weeping and wringing her hands. And when I appeared to her in that secret bathroom she could only faint and I had great trouble in rousing her and explaining to her that she had three wishes, because she had released me, and that I meant her no harm and could do her no harm, for I was the slave of the bottle until the wishes were performed. And the poor silly thing was distractedly in love with Prince Mustafa and wished immediately that she could find favour in his eyes. Which came about – he sent for her-I spoke to him – I escorted her to his bedchamber, I told her how to please him-he was very much like his father and loved poems, and singing, and good manners. And then the silly girl wished she could become pregnant –’