The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  Affirmed the three older women of us Hear hear, Hear hear, Hear hear. Strum strum went May Jump’s Gibson. Will Scheherazade go on with the story? We may certainly hope so. Given who she is, we may even bet she will. Has Doctor Jack stopped delivering babies? Has Miz Irma turned her back on Saint Deniston’s School for Girls, and Mister Hank taken up thumb-twiddling? Not yet. But—

  But after that first second menstruation, put in Peter Sagamore, not even Chip Sherritt is allowed to count on it. Amen, May Jump, and good show.

  AMEN. AMEN. AMEN. AMEN. AMEN. AMEN. AMEN. AMEN. AMEN. AMEN.

  Amen, said Marian Silver last, then stood with her hands in her green-and-silver hair and guessed she’d go make sure Sy hadn’t sleepwalked back overboard. You do that, hon, strummed smiling May. And you, said Marian (of whom we saw no more till morning) . . . you tell along.

  May did. That had been Scheherazade’s first story to her, she declared, on the first night May’d really come to know her. And it was the last one she’d told the king for twenty-one years—which we remember was her approximate age when she told it. The main stages of Scher’s career, like those of many another woman’s, had been marked by changes in her plumbing. The day she’d reached puberty, just a tad late, happened to be the day Shahryar had skewered his fickle first wife. A thousand and one nights later, on her eighteenth birthday, she had volunteered herself, had put her apprenticeship behind her with her maidenhead, and for the next almost-three years had done her number, as set forth by Andrew Sherritt. At circa twenty-one, that first second menstruation aforenarrated had prompted her pitch for marriage, which the king granted. Did we expect she’d go on as before, telling stories and giving birth? So did she—but she did not. The next two decades after that thousand-and-second night she devoted to being queen of the Islands of India and China and her husband’s closest advisor, especially after the death of her father, the grand vizier; also to raising her three sons (that hoped-for daughter, May was sorry to say, never came along); and to transcribing, editing, and publishing in thirty volumes the tales she’d told, plus the story of her telling them to Shahryar.

  Those twenty-plus years passed more swiftly, it seemed to her, than had the thousand and one nights of her storytelling. At the end of them, her boys were men (one a father himself already, one a bridegroom, one a fiancé); her husband was at the end of middle age and all but impotent; and Scheherazade herself was forty-three or -four and ready, though she scarcely realized it, for her next great change of life.

  Don’t we remember, said the chorus of Irma Sherritt, Joan Bass, and Carla B Silver. Thought Katherine Dear God: I’m almost that age now, and look at me.

  Her menopause, said May, came on that same year: even earlier than her menarche had been late. She and Shahryar were still friends, but their mariage had gone blanc, pardon my French. Old before his time, the king had abdicated the throne to his eldest son and spent his days reading the thirty volumes of Grandma’s tales to his infant grandson, who couldn’t understand a word.

  Those volumes had appeared at the rate of one every nine months, and they’d established their teller and editor as the absolute boss of Islamic storytelling. Her readers called for more, more, more. But when she put the final period on Volume Thirty—the story of her marriage to Shahryar and her sister Dunyazade’s to Shah Zaman of Samarkand—and closed the final period of her menstrual life, she found herself as weary of writing stories as she’d become of telling them. Weary as well of advising and administering; weary of wifing; weary of mothering. Her number-one daughter-in-law, already pregnant again, said Come live with us and make up stories for your grandchildren. No doubt she would, Scheherazade replied, with love and pleasure, one of these days. But pas encore. Stories? She had hundreds more, for stories breed stories the way money breeds money.

  However, she was tired of all that, at least for the present. Pure vacation was what she craved: a thousand-night leave from responsibility, after which she would take stock and perhaps settle down to grandmotherhood and the rest. Well, said Shahryar and their three sons and two daughters-in-law: If that’s what you really want. . . . That’s what I really want, said Scheherazade. Do you remember my stories about Sindbad the Sailor? His seven several voyages?

  Do we ever! They gathered around and shushed the baby, eager to hear those famous stories told again. All Scheherazade said, however, was that she wished she could voyage like Sindbad to parts unknown. But Sindbad’s motive, more than mere restlessness, was to make his fortune, or increase it; hers was simply to hazard forth. And Sindbad, though he was resourceful in the matter of surviving one peril after another, was essentially the pawn of chance. Every one of his seven adventures began with his accidental separation from a ship on which, even if he owned it, he was merely a passenger; his aim thereafter was nothing more than to save his skin, recoup his losses if possible, and get home to Bassorah. If she were to attempt such a voyage herself, she’d want to be captain of her fate, and she would seek no further treasure than the tale itself of her adventures.

  But she knew better than to imagine that a Muslim woman—who happened also to be queen of the Islands of India and China—could sail off at the helm of her own vessel like some anonymous merchant mariner or simple fisherman, especially as she understood nothing of the arts of seamanship and navigation. Even if she could and did, her fame had so spread that she would quickly be recognized in every port, for better and worse: Pirates would be on particular lookout for her; she’d have to go surrounded by armed security guards, as she must every time she left the palace. Moreover, her craft’s chief cargo would be the very responsibility she craved vacation from: Wherever she sailed, she would carry a freight of guilt for leaving husband, children, and grandchildren behind.

  In short, she concluded, what I want, not even Your Excellency the King can give me; yet nothing else will do. I just thought I’d tell you. Now I’m going off to Samarkand, faute de mieux, to visit my sister. Like a good girl, I’ll go by first-class caravan, heavily escorted, and at every stop along the way I’ll discharge my obligations to our subjects and to my audience as queen and famous storyteller, as well as carrying the obligatory gifts to Dunyazade and my other hosts en route and writing faithful letters home and shopping for souvenirs to bring back to you all, because I really do love you very much indeed, and I’ll miss you enormously. Okay? But don’t think for a minute that this is the vacation trip I had in mind when I said what I said before.

  They promised not to.

  WYDIWYD CONTINUED: TKTTTITT,

  OR,

  A MONTH OF MONDAYS

  Dunyazade’s marriage to Shah Zaman had not gone well.

  In their separate kingdoms, back before Scheherazade entered Shahryar’s story, the cuckolded royal brothers had each deflowered and decapitated a thousand and one virgins in revenge for the infidelity of their wives. Through the thousand and one nights thereafter, unaware of Shahryar’s narrative beguilement and moratorium, Shah Zaman had carried on—2002 deflorations and executions before the news reached him of his brother’s change of heart—and not one of those victims had charmed him enough to be granted a second night in his bed, much less commutation of her sentence. Shahryar had set aside his policy because his murderous vow had in fact been carried out; also because his kingdom was in revolt and his supply of victims all but exhausted; and finally because Scheherazade, both in and out of bed, happened to be the most appealing woman he’d ever known. Shah Zaman had made no vow, only followed his elder brother’s lead. His supply of sacrificial virgins lasted longer because he kept his practice a state secret, giving out the fiction that maiden refugees from his brother’s kingdom were welcome in his, on condition they agree to be resettled far to the west in a newly established colony of women called Amazonia. And he abandoned his practice not because he was repentant but because he was bored (the last few hundred virgins he had actually sent west as promised, after defloration; the last few dozen he had packed off unmolested) an
d ready once again to follow Shahryar’s lead.

  Dunyazade (when Shah Zaman came at his brother’s bidding to meet and marry her) he had found attractive and by no means untalented in her own right: Those thousand nights at the foot of her sister’s bed had been an extensive, though vicarious, sex education, and Scheherazade’s stories had made Dunyazade similarly wise, though similarly unpracticed, in the ways of the world. She had never concentrated her energies upon any one thing, as had Scheherazade upon storytelling, and had therefore become adept at several. In the arts of singing, dancing, needlework, yoga, and calligraphy, to name only a few, she was her sister’s clear superior.

  After the double wedding ceremony, the kingdom of Samarkand was bestowed upon Shahryar’s grand vizier, father of the brides, in reward for his long-suffering patience. The royal bridegrooms retired each with his bride, and while all went satisfactorily in Shahryar’s chamber (where Scheherazade, out of action, entertained her old bedpartner with the story of her first second menstruation), the other couple’s troubles began. After quite satisfactory foreplay and defloration, followed by a postcoital nap, Shah Zaman had said Story time, and Dunyazade had sung him a little song instead. Bravo! her bridegroom applauded. Now let’s have the story. Dunyazade obliged him with an extraordinary yoga position called Bandha Padmasana, from which contortion she recited a risqué limerick concerning two lesbians in a tub. First-rate contortion and risqué limerick, cheered Shah Zaman: The last line especially, of the latter, tested the very limits of the genre. Now: a story. His bride sighed, untangled her limbs, fetched out her manuscript copy of Volume One of Scheherazade’s transcription of The Thousand Nights and a Night, and launched into Tale One: “The Merchant and the Genie.” Shah Zaman interrupted her: Don’t read it, hon; tell it.

  Well, she tried. It turned out, however, that she had no knack at all for telling stories, nor any particular wish to acquire that knack. Much as she admired her older sister, she was altogether satisfied to be herself. Her bridegroom, on the contrary, wished only what his brother wished; admired only what his brother admired. If she couldn’t spin yarns like Scheherazade, he pouted, they might as well go back to sleep.

  They did. But the second problem surfaced on Night Two: the first night in six years that Shah Zaman had gone to bed with the same woman he’d waked up with. As Dunyazade undressed for his pleasure, he could scarcely pay attention; he had seen already what was under her sari. Her yoga positions could perhaps have been enticing if each had been assumed by a different virgin, but he was not fooled; copulating with a woman he’d already once mounted and deflowered was like hearing the same risqué limerick again and again. By the third night he felt as if they’d been married for three years. On Scheherazade’s advice, Dunyazade acted out stories in pantomime, drew them in watercolor panels, embroidered them in silk—all to no avail. By the end of the week, Shah Zaman was impotent. By the end of the month he had switched to young boys, and by the end of the season he had young boys switching him. Before the year was out, he died of acute inanition.

  Dunyazade shrugged, went to visit her father in Samarkand, and arrived to find him dying as well, from uncongenial responsibility. Many a first-rate concertmaster fails as a conductor. On his deathbed, the former grand vizier confessed to his daughter that the most satisfying days of his career had been those terrifying thousand when, shroud under arm, he would appear each morning before Shahryar, expecting to be ordered to lead Scheherazade to her execution, and the king would say nothing, and they would proceed with the business of the day. There, he said with his dying breath, was diplomacy.

  As there were no male heirs, and Dunyazade had no interest in politics, the government of Samarkand was taken over by those Amazonians whom Shah Zaman had victimized incompletely or not at all, and who now returned in force to rejoin their parents and/or claim reparation. To her surprise (she had not thought to flee the country), Dunyazade herself had been briefly arrested as the dead tyrant’s consort, and all her property confiscated. Knowing her limitations in the field of oral narrative, instead of pleading her defense in person she wrote an account of her thousand nights at the foot of Shahryar’s bed and her half-dozen or so in Shah Zaman’s. What was irrelevant to the point of the narrative, she omitted from it; what was relevant, she included; what happened to be out of most effective place, she artfully rearranged; what was missing, she boldly invented—but so far from exaggerating her effects, she understated them, letting eloquent details speak for themselves. And because she knew the Amazonian junta to be women of action, not given to such leisurely pastimes as reading or listening to stories, she kept the thing terse: more like thirty pages than like Scheherazade’s thirty-volume work in progress.

  The result was so lifelike, convincing, and moving a story that it gained its author not only a full pardon from the Amazonians and the restitution of her confiscated property, but the love of Samarkand’s new chairperson, with whom Dunyazade cohabited for several years thereafter, and a certain literary notoriety. Samarkandians, like the citizens of the Islands of India and China, were accustomed to hearing stories to which they were accustomed, told typically at considerable length and enlivened with genies, rocs, flying carpets, and talking fish. The idea of a story written out, not to be memorized and told with appropriate embellishment to a circle of listeners but rather to be read silently by individuals word for word from the page, and dealing moreover in ordinary language with the intimate but ordinary life-details of characters rather like the writer and the reader, in a few pages devoid of both grandiloquence and marvels—it was caviary to the millions, but much admired by a discriminating few. So much so, in fact, that Dunyazade had followed that first story with a slender volume of others, similar in style and substance but more or less made up: narratives as unastonishing, as marvelless, as fact . . . presented as fiction!

  Fan-tastic, marveled her lover and a few others: few not only because the novelty of Dunyazade’s art itself put off a people disinclined to innovation but because the novel method of production and dissemination—where literacy was rare and printing unknown—limited even her potential audience. Undaunted, Dunyazade pressed on: At the time of her sister’s visit, twenty years later, she was just winding up an almost superrealistic little piece about two women making slow love in the bath while one reads silently a story that the other is writing. Fan-tastic, the reader character marvels at the climax, though the story is programmatically devoid of fantasy. The author character is left, in the last line, wondering at what exactly her reader marvels.

  I wonder the same thing, Scheherazade confessed. But I didn’t really come to Samarkand to read stories, Dun; I came to tell you one.

  Dunyazade shrugged and set aside her work in progress. Wouldn’t it have been easier to write me a letter? But go ahead; tell along. It will be good regressive fun to sit and listen to you again, as in the old days. Just let me call my friend Kuzia Fakan; she knows all about you, and she’d love to hear you perform.

  No Kuzia Fakan, said Scheherazade, for the same reason I didn’t send you a letter. This is not only an ears-only story; it’s an only-your-ears story. Put your pen down now, and listen:

  Once upon a time, you may remember—back when I was the one who was menstruating and you were the one who wasn’t—I saved the day in a thousand and one nights with the help of the only bit of literal magic I’ve ever personally experienced before or since.

  I was there, Dunyazade reminded her. The key to the treasure, et cet.

  Right. But since Kuzia Fakan wasn’t there, when Dunyazade writes this story out for her latest bed-and-bathtub partner to read, she’ll include the following retrospective exposition, dialogue and all:

  It is one thing to resolve, as young Scheherazade did, to save the virgin daughters of the Muslims and rescue a revenge-maddened, sexist king from his madness by going to bed with him herself and beguiling him postcoitally with some sort of magic charm to make him change his ways. It is quite another to know wh
at magic will work and how to practice it. After nearly three years of researching the literature of the known world in vain, Scher cried out in despair one afternoon to her sister, “We need a miracle, Dun: a literal miracle. And the only genies I’ve ever met are in these made-up stories, not in Moormen’s-rings or Jews’-lamps. It’s in words that the magic is—’Abracadabra,’ ‘Open Sesame,’ and the rest—but the magic words in one story aren’t magical in the next. It seems to me that the real magic is to understand which words work, and when, and for what. The trick is to understand the trick.”

  “If I understand you correctly [Dunyazade will say she said], you’re saying that if for example this whole situation here were fiction instead of fact, and if in this piece of fiction you found the right way, after the king deflowers you, to make him want to go on sleeping with you night after night instead of cutting your head off in the morning—that whatever magic trick you found, it would come down to particular words on the page of the story of you and the king, right?”

  “You’ve got it: words made from a couple dozen letters we can draw with this pen. Squiggle squiggle squiggle! These dumb little ink-marks are the key to the whole puzzle, Dun. If I knew exactly which ones to make, our troubles would be over.”

  “Not only that,” observed shrewd Dunyazade: “Since your reward for saving king and country would also be described in particular words in the story—like ‘happily ever after,’ et cetera—those little ink-marks might be said to be the treasure as well as the key. Do you follow me? The key to the treasure is the treasure.”