by A. S. Byatt
‘Not entirely,’ said the djinn. ‘He was an emanation, like this Becker you would not let me give you.’
‘Only the emanation of an absence.’ She paused. ‘When I was younger there was a boy who was real.’
‘Your first lover.’
‘No. No. Not flesh and blood. A golden boy who walked beside me wherever I went. Who sat beside me at table, who lay beside me at night, who sang with me, who walked in my dreams. Who disappeared when I had a headache or was sick, but was always there when I couldn’t move for asthma. His name was Tadzio, I don’t know where I got that from, he came with it, one day, I just looked up and I saw him. He told me stories. In a language only we two spoke. One day I found a poem which said how it was, to live in his company. I did not know anyone else knew, until I read that poem.’
‘I know those beings –’ said the djinn. ‘Zefir had known one. She said he was always a little transparent but moved with his own will, not hers. Tell me your poem.’
When I was but thirteen or so
I went into a golden land,
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
Took me by the hand.
My father died, my brother too,
They passed like fleeting dreams,
I stood where Popocatapetl
In the sunlight gleams.
I dimly heard the Master’s voice,
And boys far-off at play,
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
Had stolen me away.
I walked in a great golden dream
To and fro from school-
Shining Popocatapetl
The dusty streets did rule.
I walked home with a gold dark boy
And never a word I’d say
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
Had taken my speech away:
I gazed entranced upon his face
Fairer than any flower –
O shining Popocatapetl
It was thy magic hour:
The houses, people, traffic seemed
Thin fading dreams by day,
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
They had stolen my soul away.
‘I love that poem,’ said Dr Perholt. ‘It has two things: names and the golden boy. The names are not the names of the boy, they are the romance of language, and he is the romance of language – he is more real than-reality-as the goddess of Ephesus is more real than I am –’
‘And I am here,’ said the djinn.
‘Indeed,’ aid Dr Perholt. ‘Incontrovertible’
There was a silence. The djinn returned to the topic of Dr Perholt’s husband, her children, her house, her parents, all of which she answered without – in her mind or his – investing any of these now truly insignificant people with any life or colour. My husband went to Majorca with Emmeline Porter, she said to the djinn, and decided not to come back, and I was glad. The djinn asked about the complexion of Mr Perholt and the nature of the beauty of Emmeline Porter and received null and unsatisfactory answers. They are wax images, your people, said the djinn indignantly.
‘I do not want to think about them.’
‘That is apparent. Tell me something about yourself – something you have never told anyone – something you have never trusted to any lover in the depth of any night, to any friend, in the warmth of a long evening. Something you have kept for me.’
And the image sprang in her mind, and she rejected it as insignificant.
‘Tell me,’ said the djinn.
‘It is insignificant.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Once, I was a bridesmaid. To a good friend from my college who wanted a white wedding, with veils and flowers and organ music, though she was happily settled with her man already, they slept together, she said she was blissfully happy, and I believe she was. At college, she seemed very poised and formidable – a woman of power, a woman of sexual experience, which was unusual in my day –’
‘Women have always found ways –’
‘Don’t sound like the Arabian Nights. I am telling you something. She was full of bodily grace, and capable of being happy, which most of us were not, it was fashionable to be disturbed and anguished, for young women in those days-probably young men too. We were a generation when there was something shameful about being an unmarried woman, a spinster – though we were all clever, like Zefir, my friends and I, we all had this greed for knowledge – we were scholars –’
‘Zefir would have been happy as a teacher of philosophy, it is true,’ said the djinn. ‘Neither of us could quite think what she could be-in those days –’
‘And my friend – whom I shall call Susannah, it wasn’t her name, but I can’t go on without one-my friend had always seemed to me to come from somewhere rather grand, a beautiful house with beautiful things. But when I arrived for the wedding her house was much like mine, small, like a box, in a row of similar houses, and there was a settee, there was a three-piece suite in moquette –’
‘A three-piece suite in moquette?’ enquired the djinn. ‘What horrid thing is this to make you frown so?’
‘I knew it was no good telling you anything out of my world. It is too big for those rooms, it is too heavy, it weighs everything down, it is chairs and a sofa that sat on a beige carpet with splashy flowers on –’
‘A sofa– ‘ said the djinn, recognising a word. ‘A carpet.’
‘You don’t know what I’m talking about. I should never have started on this. All English stories get bogged down in whether or not the furniture is socially and aesthetically acceptable. This wasn’t. That is, I thought so then. Now I find everything interesting, because I live my own life.’
‘Do not heat yourself. You did not like the house. The house was small and the three-piece suite in moquette was big, I comprehend. Tell me about the marriage. The story is presumably about the marriage and not about the chairs and sofa.’
‘Not really. The marriage went off beautifully. She had a lovely dress, like a princess out of a story-those were the days of the princess-line in dresses – -I had a princess-line dress too, in shot taffeta, turquoise and silver, with a heart-shaped neck, and she was wearing several net skirts, and over those silk, and over that white lace – and a mass of veiling – and real flowers in her hair-little rosebuds-there wasn’t room for all those billows of wonderful stuff in her tiny bedroom. She had a bedside lamp with Peter Rabbit eating a carrot. And all this shimmering silk and stuff. On the day, she looked so lovely, out of another world. I had a big hat with a brim, it suited me. You can imagine the dresses, I expect, but you can’t imagine the house, the place.’
‘If you say I cannot,’ replied the djinn, obligingly. ‘Why do you tell me this tale? I cannot believe this is what you have not told.’
‘The night before the wedding,’ said Gillian Perholt, ‘we bathed together, in her parents’ little bathroom. It had tiles with fishes with trailing fins and big soulful cartoon eyes –’
‘Cartoon?’
‘Disney. It doesn’t matter. Comic eyes.’
‘Comic tiles?’
‘It doesn’t matter. We didn’t share the bath, but we washed together.’
‘And –’ said the djinn. ‘She made love to you.’
‘No,’ said Dr Perholt. ‘She didn’t. I saw myself. First in the mirror, and then I looked down at myself. And then I looked across at her – she was pearly-white and I was more golden. And she was soft and sweet –’
‘And you were not?’
‘I was perfect. Just at that moment, just at the very end of being a girl, and before I was a woman, really, I was perfect.’
She remembered seeing her own small, beautifully rising breasts, her warm, flat, tight belly, her long slender legs and ankles, her waist – her waist –
‘She said, “Some man is going to go mad with desire for you,” ‘ said Gillian Perholt. ‘And I was all proud inside my skin, as never before or since. All golden.’ She thought. ‘Two girls in a suburban bathroom,’ she said, in an English deprecating voice.
The djinn said, ‘But when I changed you, that was not what you became. You are very nice now, very acceptable, very desirable now, but not perfect.’
‘It was terrifying. I was terrified. It was like –’ she found a completely unexpected phrase – ‘like having a weapon, a sharp sword, I couldn’t handle.’
‘Ah yes,’ said the djinn. ‘Terrible as an army with banners.’
‘But it didn’t belong to me. I was tempted to-to love it – myself. It was lovely. But unreal. I mean, it was there, it was real enough, but I knew in my head it wouldn’t stay – something would happen to it. I owed it– ‘ she went on, searching for feelings she had never interrogated – ‘I owed it – some sort of adequate act. And I wasn’t going to live up to it.’ She caught her breath on a sigh. ‘I am a creature of the mind, not the body, Djinn. I can look after my mind. I took care of that, despite everything.’
‘Is that the end of the story?’ said the djinn after another silence. ‘Your stories are strange, glancing things. They peter out, they have no shape.’
‘It is what my culture likes, or liked. But no, it is not the end. There is a little bit more. In the morning Susannah’s father brought my breakfast in bed. A boiled egg in a woolly cosy, a little silver-plated pot of tea, in a cosy knitted to look like a cottage, toast in a toast-rack, butter in a butter-dish, all on a little tray with unfolding legs, like the trays old ladies have in Homes.’
‘You didn’t like the-the whatever was on the teapot? Your aesthetic sense, which is so violent, was in revolt again?’
‘He suddenly leaned forwards and pulled my nightdress off my shoulders. He put his hands round my perfect breasts,’ said Dr Perholt who was fifty-five and now looked thirty-two, ‘and he put his sad face down between them – he had glasses, they were all steamed up and knocked sideways, he had a little bristly moustache that crept over my flesh like a centipede, he snuffled amongst my breasts, and all he said was “I can’t bear it” and he rubbed his body against my counterpane – I only half-understood, the counterpane was artificial silk, eau-de-nil colour – he snuffled and jerked and twisted my breasts in his hands-and then he unfolded the little legs of the tray and put it over my legs and went away – to give away his daughter, which he did with great dignity and charm. And I felt sick, and felt my body was to blame. As though out of that,’ she said lucidly, ‘was spun snuffling and sweat and three-piece suites and artificial silk and teacosies –’
‘And that is the end of the story?’ said the djinn.
‘That is where a storyteller would end it, in my country.’
‘Odd. And you met me and asked for the body of a thirty-two-year-old woman.’
‘I didn’t. I asked for it to be as it was when I last liked it. I didn’t like it then. I half-worshipped it, but it scared me – This is my body, I find it pleasant, I don’t mind looking at it –’
‘Like the potter who puts a deliberate flaw in the perfect pot.’
‘Maybe. If having lived a little is a flaw. Which it is. That girl’s ignorance was a burden to her.’
‘Do you know now what other things you will wish for?’
‘Ah, you are anxious to be free.’
‘On the contrary, I am comfortable, I am curious, I have all the time in the world.’
‘And I have everything I wish for, at present. I have been thinking about the story of the Queen of Sheba and what the answer might be to the question of what all women desire. I shall tell you the story of the Ethiopian woman whom I saw on the television box.’
‘I am all ears,’ said the djinn, extending himself on the bedspread and shrinking himself a little, in order to be able to accommodate himself at full length. ‘Tell me, this box, you can turn it to spy anywhere you desire in the world, you can see Manaus or Khartoum as you please?’
‘Not exactly, though partly. For instance the tennis was coming live – we call it “live” when we see it simultaneously with its happening-from Monte Carlo. But also we can make images – stories – which we can replay to ourselves. The Ethiopian woman was part of a story – a film – made for the Save the Children Fund-which is a charitable body-which had given some food to a village in Ethiopia where there had been drought and famine, food specifically to give to the children, to keep them alive through the winter. And when they brought the food, they filmed the people of the village, the head men and the elders, the children playing, and then they came back, the research workers came back, half a year later, to see the children and weigh them, to see how the food they had given had helped them.’
‘Ethiopia is a fierce country of fierce people,’ said the djinn. ‘Beautiful and terrible. What did you see in your box?’
‘The aid workers were very angry-distressed and angry. The head man had promised to give the food only to the families with the small children the project was helping and studying – “project” is –’
‘I know. I have known projectors in my time.’
‘But the head man had not done as he was asked. It was against his beliefs to feed some families and not others, and it was against everyone’s beliefs to feed small children and not grown men, who could work in the fields, if anything could be grown there. So the food had been shared out too sparsely-and everyone was thinner-and some of the children were dead-many, I think – and others were very ill because the food had not been given to them.
‘And the workers – the relief workers-the charitable people from America and Europe – were angry and upset – and the cameramen (the people who make the films) went out into the fields with the men who had had the food, and had sowed their crops in hope of rain-and had even had a little rain – and the men lifted the seedlings and showed the cameramen and the officials that the roots had been eaten away by a plague of sawfly, and there would be no harvest. And those men, standing in those fields, holding those dying, stunted seedlings, were in complete despair. They had no hope and no idea what to do. We had seen the starving in great gatherings on our boxes, you must understand – we knew where they were heading, and had sent the food because we were moved because of what we had seen.
‘And then, the cameras went into a little hut, and there in the dark were four generations of women, the grandmother, the mother and the young girl with her baby. The mother was stirring something in a pot over a fire – it looked like a watery soup – with a wooden stick – and the grandmother was sitting on a kind of bed against the wall, where the hut roof-which seemed conical-met it. They were terribly thin, but they weren’t dying-they hadn’t given up yet, they hadn’t got those eyes looking out at nothing, or those slack muscles just waiting. They were beautiful people still, people with long faces and extraordinary cheekbones, and a kind of dignity in their movement-or what westerners like me read as dignity, they are upright, they carry their heads up –
‘And they interviewed the old woman. I remember it partly because of her beauty, and partly because of the skill of the cameraman-or woman-she was angular but not awkward, and she had one long arm at an angle over her head, and her legs extended on this bench – and the photographer had made them squared, as it were framed in her own limbs-she spoke out of an enclosure made by her own body, and her eyes were dark holes and her face was long, long. She made the edges of the box out of her body. They wrote in English letters across the screen a translation of what she was saying. She said there was no food, no food any more and the little girl would starve, and there would be no milk, there would be no more food. And then she said, “It is because I am a woman, I cannot get out of here, I must sit here and wait for my fate, if only I were not a woman I could go out and do something-” all in a monotone. With the men stomping about in the furrows outside kicking up dry dust and stunted seedlings in perfect despair.
‘I don’t know why I tell you this. I will tell you something else. I was told to wish on a pillar in Haghia Sophia-and before I could stop myself – it was-not a good pillar-I wished what I used to wish as a child.’
‘You w
ished you were not a woman.’
‘There were three veiled women laughing at me, pushing my hand into that hole.
‘I thought, perhaps, that was what the Queen of Sheba told Solomon that all women desired.’
The genie smiled.
