by John Barth
You won’t find it in the book, says Carla. But as Doctor Sagamore says, There it is—and wouldn’t you worry? What Scheherazade told May Jump is that your A-rab storytellers don’t bother to say what goes without saying: They give the man in the souk enough action to keep him happy, and the rest they leave for Mister Chip to figure out for himself. As I told you before, this Scheherazade is no crazy-lady. The book calls her the Savior of Her Sex, but she had to stand by and let a thousand virgins go to the chopping block before the time was ripe for her to make her move.
And the time is ripe, ventures Captain Donald, when these two things come together, no? He’s killed his thousand women, and about the same time he’s used up his supply of virgins.
Plus the country’s a wreck, Kath reminds us, as the king must know. If the vizier told him the whole story of his argument with Scheherazade, you can bet he threw in the news that she’s the last item on the shelf. When Shahryar kills her, the jig’s up anyhow. I hadn’t thought of that.
Donald Quicksoat adds that if Shahryar then kills the grand vizier for not bringing him what there isn’t any more of, he’s really scuttling his own ship. He hadn’t thought of that.
Peter Sagamore says he himself hadn’t thought of any of this stuff, and he believed he knew the story backward and forward. Backward and Forward say It’s all news to us; we’re only two hundred sixty-four nights old.
Chip wonders what the quote man in the souk unquote is. Says Peter You’re looking at him, but then defines the term.
And none of this is in the book? His brother-in-law assures him it’s all in the book—between the lines. And he sure wishes he could say hello to this Scheherazade lady.
Now, then, class, says Carla B Silver, who has in this interval lit herself a cigarillo: Was it the thousandth night, or the thousand and first, or what? We don’t know, but we bet it wasn’t some random number like the nine hundred second or the ten seventy-fifth. And was it pure coincidence that the vizier runs out of virgins right about then? Maybe so, for story purposes, but we bet the supply had been short and the quality down for some time, and that all hands knew the clock was running out. Plus there was one more item on the young lady’s checklist, maybe the most important one of all, though you won’t find it mentioned in the official version any more than those others. It’s what this story’s finally all about, and that’s the only clue you get.
Okay? So everybody knows what happens next: Scheherazade gives her kid sister some careful instructions and then presents herself to the king. He whisks her off to bed, and she starts to cry. What’s your problem? the king asks her, and if he expects her to say she’s changed her mind about dying and could she please be excused, he gets a surprise, ‘cause all she says is she can’t bear to be separated from her little sister on this last night of her life. Just let her have Dunyazade to keep her company, and it’s on with the show.
Well, Shahryar’s no prude: He shrugs his shoulders, fetches Dunyazade in to sit at the foot of the bed, and then takes Scheherazade as he’s taken at least a thousand before her. No big deal by this time, right? Pearl or no pearl. When he’s had his fun, he rolls over and maybe even says good night—though that would be a touch much, I guess, wouldn’t it.
Anyhow, sometime after midnight Scheherazade quietly wakes Dunyazade, who’s sound asleep, and Little Sister goes into her act: says she can’t sleep, and would Scheherazade please tell her a story, the way she does back home? Shush, says Scheherazade; you’ll wake up the king. You won’t wake me up, says Shahryar; I can’t seem to get to sleep tonight either. Let’s hear your story.
So why can’t the king get to sleep, friends? Scheherazade told May Jump that she wouldn’t bother to say what goes without saying.
Say, say, urges Peter Sagamore: It never occurred to this particular man in the souk till now what an odd request that is of Dunyazade’s: to ask for a story from a person who’s about to die.
Says Carla They set it up that way to pinch the man’s conscience. As if the kid hadn’t been told, right? And they cross their fingers that the king’s been counting nights instead of counting sheep, and putting two and two together: That Night Number One with the Fairest of Them All happens to be at least Night One Thousand and One of his crazy vow. But whether or not Shahryar’s doing the numbers, Scheherazade knows he knows that the girl he’s just deflowered was not only the most eligible nubile virgin in town, but the last one; and that ordering his prime minister to kill his own daughter might just be the last straw for what’s left of the taxpayers out there. What’s more, this beauty has got to be his first playmate in a thousand and one nights who actually volunteered for the job! Who knows what she’s got up her sleeve? No wonder the poor sucker can’t sleep; he’s humped himself into a corner, pardon my French.
Says Captain Donald, shaking his head, L’homme du souk, c’est moi.
And I’m another, says Katherine Sherritt. And we’re at least two more, say Oui et Non.
P.S. declares he’s going to turn in his union card and go back to Writers’ Kindergarten; he has read this story a thousand and one times, and now he sees he hasn’t read it at all. He’d thought himself a pretty clever fellow for noting that the first story Scheherazade tells is just close enough to her own story to make its point without exactly writing its moral on the king’s eyeglasses. . . .
The Tale of the Merchant and the Genie, Kath remembers, and explains for Andrew’s benefit that it’s about a merchant who, in imminent peril of being killed by an imperious genie, stalls for time like Scheherazade by telling his would-be executioner a story.
Three stories, actually, if Peter Sagamore’s memory serves: stories told by the characters in the merchant’s story, to give the guy more time, and each one very pointedly applauded by the other characters as being even more marvelous than the one before.
But on this critical first night, Carla B Silver reminds us, all she tells is the front end of the Merchant-and-Genie story and two-thirds of the first of those three stories in it—a story that also happens to be about an innocent man on the verge of execution. Then, just before she gets to its punch line—you can imagine how many times she’s been over this with Dunyazade, to get her timing down perfect—smack in the middle of a sentence she says Uh-oh: I hear the roosters crowing, or the muezzin in the minaret, or something; my time’s up, I guess. And before the king can even react, Dunyazade says that that’s about the best story she ever heard in her life—two of the best, in fact, and she can’t stand not knowing how they end. To which of course Miss Scheherazade says Pish tush, child: You call that a good story, before I’ve even got its chestnuts out of the fire? That story can’t fetch tea for the ones I’d tell you tomorrow night, if I were here to tell them.
And there she stops and holds her breath, my friends, ‘cause numbers or no numbers, last straw or no last straw, her life is on the line, and the hombre she’s in bed with is not Donkey Ho-Tay dee la Mancha, but a meshuga A-rab sultan who for all she knows might be perfectly ready to commit national suicide over her dead body.
And that’s where we should end this story, no?
NO FAIR!
cries Andrew Christopher “Chip” Sherritt.
Show of hands, says Carla B Silver, and gets a unanimous mandate to proceed. Nevertheless, she declares she’s done with it: not the story of Scheherazade’s first second menstruation, but the story of Scheherazade’s stories, which any crew member can go read off the shelf, just as she herself means to do one of these years. Needless to say, the king thinks carefully for all of two seconds about the pros and cons of Scheherazade’s indirect pleas for a stay of execution—mostly pros, inasmuch as the only con he can imagine is losing his image as a capital-B Badass where women are concerned. Happily, there occurs to him a way to have it both ways: how to save face with his grand vizier after swearing he’d make no exception of Scheherazade, and how to save his political hind-end as well, which is as much on the line as his new friend’s neck.
So declared Scheherazade herself to May Jump in Kitty Hawk, N.C., declares Carla B Silver, reminding us that nowhere in our printed version of The 1001 Nights do we hear the king decide to mend his ways before the sky falls on his head; much less that the coolest way to go about that might be to declare a tacit moratorium on further executions before he goes public with his change of heart. Now, Mister Chip: Just how long a moratorium do you think he’ll tacitly declare?
Says Peter Sagamore You’ve just answered a question I asked on Day Zero. Why should The Thousand and One Nights be a thousand and one instead of some other number? Somebody has been talking to the horse’s mouth!
(Not us, swear Chick ‘n’ Little.)
Kath admits she’d thought the number meant simply plenty and then some, if she’d thought about it at all: a taleteller’s number.
And that it is, says Carla; but that’s not all it is. Nor is it just a playback of his vow, you know: the time of his sex-murders played back as the time of his penance. It’s both of those things plus another big one—and the person who has it from the horse’s mouth is your friend May Jump.
Hold tight now while we skip to the end, which is what May did when she told me this story, ‘cause that’s where Scheherazade began it: a thousand nights after the morning when the king made another vow to Allah, that he’d put off killing the vizier’s daughter till he’d heard the end of her story. That first morning, you understand, he didn’t say Boo to her; when the sun came up, he just climbed out of bed and went to work. The prime minister showed up with a shroud under his arm to fetch his daughter off to the guillotine, and the king didn’t say Boo to him, either; he just went on with business as usual, leaving the poor guy to wonder what’s going on. Then back to bed for another shot of sex with his new roommate, who you can bet has been turning cartwheels and polishing her act all day. She knows she’s not out of the woods yet; so on Night Two, when the time comes, she gives him the rest of her first story-within-the-story, plus the whole second and third one, plus all but the very end of the one that frames those other ones: the Merchant-and-Genie story, which she breaks off right before the punch line with her crack-of-dawn routine.
Et cetera, okay? Because a routine is just what it gets to be over the next nine hundred and ninety-nine nights: First comes the sex; then all hands grab a nap; then Dunyazade says On with the story, et cetera. Now and then Scheherazade gives him a clutch of quickies all in the same night; another time she spends a hundred nights spinning out the same story, just to see if she can get away with it.
By that time, needless to say, she’s pretty sure where she stands. But in Magic Carpet Land, tacit means tacit: Her stories run from G to triple-X, but no matter how explicit they are, the things that go without saying never get mentioned. One of those things, I don’t have to tell you, is that it would not have been very smart of young Scheherazade to do Night One with Shahryar at a time when she happened to be menstruating, no? Even if we leave aside the old Muslim suspicion that sex during menstruation is what causes leprosy, it would’ve been suicide for her not to wait till the coast was clear. Right?
Well (we agree), we’d never thought of that; but yes. For sure.
For that matter, says Carla B Silver, if you were Scheherazade and you’d managed to survive Night One, you’d really feel like a dummy if you got your period on Night Two, wouldn’t you? Or Three or Four or Five, when your position was still pret-ty delicate. Seems to me that along with the body count you’d’ve been keeping tabs on the moon and your menstrual calendar before you made your big move, and that once you’d cleared the first hurdle by surviving Night One, you’d want as much time as possible to firm up your position before the night comes when you have to make it on art without sex. Don’t you think?
I think, I think, murmurs Peter Sagamore; but I never thought of it before. Where’ve I been?
You’ve been reading the lines, Carla assures him, like the rest of us. Scheherazade told May Jump that good readers read the lines and better readers read the spaces. Why should she have the scribes draw a picture of what any shtook can figure out for himself? No offense intended.
So when we shtooks put our heads together, Captain Donald Quicksoat sums up, it turns out that Night One is Night One for three or four different reasons, of which the only one mentioned in the book is that the vizier can’t find any more young women for Shahryar to play with. By happy Arabian coincidence, a thousand sacrificial virgins just about uses up the supply, maybe give or take a weeksworth of C-minus specimens—
Andrew Sherritt remarks surprisingly A couple weeksworth, I bet. Carla B Silver taps her cigar ash over the side and beams.
A couple weeksworth, Capn Don shrugs: to give her time to clear the monthly decks before she goes into action. I guess she’d choose the first night after she was finished, if she could, to allow herself a solid three weeks before she’s off limits again.
Unless! Katherine says suddenly. Don’t I remember that she has three children by the end of the story?
Carla smiles. Does she or doesn’t she, Professor Sagamore?
She does, remembers Peter. On the thousand-and-first night they go through exactly the same routine as on all the other nights, and then on the thousand-and-first morning-after, Scheherazade finishes her last story. Instead of starting another one, she asks for a favor in return for her thousand-and-one nightsworth of entertainment. The King tells her she can have anything she wants, and then she calls for her children—the first time they’re mentioned in the book. The nursemaids bring them in: three sons. . . .
Rhyme and Reason gasp as one.
Triplets? Carla wants to know.
No; different ages, I believe. Yes: One’s walking, one’s crawling, and the nurses are carrying the third one.
Wet-nurses or dry-nurses? Carla demands further.
Capn Don declares he’ll bite: What difference does it make to the story whether Scheherazade breast-feeds her children or farms them out?
What story? asks Carla B Silver, palms up. The story’s over. Scheherazade parades the kids in and asks their father to spare her life—not because of her storytelling, but so the boys shouldn’t grow up motherless. The king says sure, even though a few hours ago he was still doing his old routine: By Allah, I won’t kill her till I’ve heard the end of her story, et cetera. We get the idea he changed his mind a long time ago and that she and Dunyazade probably knew it, but it’s been a matter of saving the old face again not to make it official till now. So Shahryar sends for his brother to come over from Samarkand, where all this time he’s been doing the virgin-a-night thing—Samarkand must have a lot more virgins than the Islands of India and China—and he tells Shah Zaman all about what a prize this Scheherazade is: how she’s fixed his head with her stories and her good looks and her character and general smarts. Then he orders the scribes to write down all her stories in thirty volumes, plus the story of his craziness and how Scheherazade cured him better than any shrink and saved his kingdom at the same time.
Peter Sagamore, professional writer, can’t help saying If she borrowed all those stories from her thousand volumes, I hate to think of the paperwork involved to get permission rights for the new anthology.
Katherine Sherritt, professional librarian, says Think of her having to tell her stories all over again, to the scribes! But maybe she and Dunyazade wrote them down each morning, after the king went off to work.
Anyhow, says Carla B Silver, little Dunyazade has reached legal age herself by this time, and with her and Shah Zaman it’s love at first sight—despite the blood of how many virgins on his hands, Mister Chip?
Two thousand and two minimum, Chip says at once. Not allowing for travel time between Samarkand and the Islands. But excuse me now: I’m counting something else.
Says Carla I bet you are, and while you’re working your way to the bottom line, I’ll just ask your classmates here Where do you suppose the king gets the idea to do the next thing he d
oes, which is to marry Scheherazade in a double wedding with Shah Zaman and Dunyazade? I mean aside from the general situation.
None of us remembers, until now reminded at third hand by Scheherazade herself: that just as her first story pointedly dealt with a person very much in her position (and the first story within that story with a person very much in that person’s position, lest Shahryar miss the point as we did), so her last story—no doubt by this time to their mutual though tacit amusement—deals with a cobbler whose shrewish and unfaithful wife meets the fate she deserves, and who subsequently becomes king of the country and marries . . . that’s right: his grand vizier’s excellent young daughter.
So okay, says Carla B Silver. So now we ask this Muslim story a Jewish question, the Passover question: How is this night different from all other nights? You say ‘Cause it’s the thousand and first, and I say What else is new?
Peter Sagamore declares that whatever else is new, it had not till this evening occurred to this particular shtook-in-the-souk that there are a thousand and one nights of love and life-engendering narrative because there’d been the same number of murderous defloration, following Shahryar’s reckless vow. Each morning that he hasn’t killed Scheherazade is a kind of penance for his having killed one of her predecessors; the morning that that penance is finished is as fit a time for her to make her plea as was Night One for her to make her play. Hats off to Arab formalism! says Peter Sagamore. I don’t deserve Frank Talbott’s boina; where’s my dunce cap?
Carla B Silver asks for a refill—we’re all ready for a refill, though some of us have been too engrossed to remember to drink—and remarks portentously that Franklin Key Talbott’s unsinkable boina (it’s in Peter’s sea-bag, but she doesn’t know that), will no doubt soon float by. But dum-de-dum-dum, she says, drumming her fingertips on Donald Quicksoat’s knee: We are making what I believe you chaps call stern way. One walking, one crawling, one suckling, mates, and How is this night different from all other thousand-and-first nights?
