by A. S. Byatt
Another of Orhan’s students had a little shop in the central square of the market-maze, Iç Bedesten, a shop whose narrow walls were entirely hung with pots, pans, lamps, bottles, leather objects, old tools whose purpose was unguessable, chased daggers and hunting knives, shadow-puppets made of camel skin, perfume flasks, curling tongs.
‘I will give you a present,’ said Orhan. ‘A present to say good-bye.’
(He was leaving the next day for Texas, where a colloquium of narratologists was studying family sagas in Dallas. Gillian had a talk to give at the British Council and three more days in Istanbul.)
‘I will give you the shadow puppets, Karagöz and Hacivat, and here is the magic bird, the Simurgh, and here is a woman involved with a dragon, I think she may be a djinee, with a little winged demon on her shoulders, you might like her.’
The small figures were wrapped carefully in scarlet tissue. Whilst this was happening Gillian poked about on a bench and found a bottle, a very dusty bottle amongst an apparently unsorted pile of new/old things. It was a flask with a high neck, that fitted comfortably into the palms of her hands, and had a glass stopper like a miniature dome. The whole was dark, with a regular whirling pattern of white stripes moving round it. Gillian collected glass paperweights: she liked glass in general, for its paradoxical nature, translucent as water, heavy as stone, invisible as air, solid as earth. Blown with human breath in a furnace of fire. As a child she had loved to read of glass balls containing castles and snowstorms, though in reality she had always found these disappointing and had transferred her magical attachment to the weights in which coloured forms and carpets of geometric flowers shone perpetually and could be made to expand and contract as the sphere of glass turned in her fingers in the light. She liked to take a weight back from every journey, if one could be found, and had already bought a Turkish weight, a cone of glass like a witch’s hat, rough to touch, greenish-transparent like ice, with the concentric circles, blue, yellow, white, blue, of the eye which repels the evil eye, at the base.
‘What is this?’ she asked Orhan’s student, Feyyaz.
He took the flask from her, and rubbed at the dust with a finger.
‘I’m not an expert in glass,’ he said. ‘It could be çesm-i bülbül, nightingale’s eye. Or it could be fairly recent Venetian glass. “çesm-i bülbül” means nightingale’s eye. There was a famous Turkish glass workshop at Incirköy-round about 1845, I think – made this famous Turkish glass, with this spiral pattern of opaque blue and white stripes, or red sometimes, I think. I don’t know why it is called eye of the nightingale. Perhaps nightingales have eyes that are transparent and opaque. In this country we were obsessed with nightingales. Our poetry is full of nightingales.’
‘Before pollution,’ said Orhan, ‘before television, everyone came out and walked along the Bosphorus and in all the gardens, to hear the first nightingales of the year. It was very beautiful. Like the Japanese and the cherry blossom. A whole people, walking quietly in the spring weather, listening.’
Feyyaz recited a verse in Turkish and Orhan translated.
In the woods full of evening the nightingales are silent
The river absorbs the sky and its fountains
Birds return to the indigo shores from the shadows
A scarlet bead of sunshine in their beaks.
Gillian said, ‘I must have this. Because the word and the thing don’t quite match, and I love both of them. But if it is çesm-i bülbül it will be valuable …’
‘It probably isn’t,’ said Feyyaz. ‘It’s probably recent Venetian. Our glassmakers went to Venice in the eighteenth century to learn, and the Venetians helped us to develop the techniques of the nineteenth century. I will sell it to you as if it were Venetian, because you like it, and you may imagine it is çesm-i bülbül and perhaps it will be, is, that is.’
‘Feyyaz wrote his doctoral thesis on Yeats and Byzantium,’ said Orhan.
Gillian gave the stopper an experimental twist, but it would not come away, and she was afraid of breaking it. So the nightingale’s-eye bottle too was wrapped in scarlet tissue, and more rose tea was sipped, and Gillian returned to her hotel. That evening there was a farewell dinner in Orhan’s house, with music, and raki, and generous beautiful food. And the next day, Gillian was alone in her hotel room.
Time passes differently in the solitude of hotel rooms. The mind expands, but lazily, and the body contracts in its bright box of space. Because one may think of anything at all, one thinks for a long time of nothing. Gillian in hotel rooms was always initially tempted by channel-surfing on the television; she lay amongst crimson and creamy roses on her great bed and pointed the black lozenge with its bright buttons imperiously at the screen. Transparent life flickered and danced across it: Gillian could make it boom with sound, the rush of traffic and violins, voices prophesying war and voices dripping with the promise of delectable yogurt/Orangina/tutti-frutti/Mars Bars frozen stiff. Or she could leave it, which she preferred, a capering shadow – theatre. Ronald Reagan, smiling and mouthing, glassy in the glass box between the glassy wings of his speech, or an aeroplane falling in flames on a mountain, fact or stunt? a priest driving a racing-car round a corniche, narrative or advertisement? Turks discussing the fullness and fatness of tomatoes in a field, more new cars, in cornfields, up mountains, falling from skyscrapers, a houri applying a tongue tip to raspberry fudge and sighing, an enormous tsetse fly expending enormous energy in puncturing a whole screenful of cowflesh, jeeps full of dirty soldiers in helmets brandishing machine-guns, trundling through dusty streets, fact or drama, which? tennis.
Tennis in French, from courts like red deserts, tennis from Monte Carlo where it was high noon, under the sun past which Istanbul had begun to roll two hours ago, tennis male and, it appeared, live, on a channel where nothing ever happened but the human body (and mind, indeed, also) stretched, extended, driven, triumphant, defeated, in one endless, beautifully designed narrative. Dr Perholt was accustomed to say, in her introductory talks on narratology, that whoever designed the rules and the scoring-system of tennis was a natrative genius of the first order, comparable to those ancient storytellers who arranged animal-helpers in threes and thought up punishments for disregarded prohibitions. For the more even the combat, said Dr Perholt, the more difficult the scoring makes it for one combatant to succeed. At deuce, at six-all, the stakes are raised, not one but two points are needed to assure victory, not one but two games, thus ensuring the maximum tension and the maximum pleasure to the watchers. Tennis in the glass box she loved as she had loved bedtime stories as a child. She loved the skill of the cameramen-the quick shot of a sweating face in a rictus of strain, the balletic shot of the impossibly precise turning feet, the slow lazy repeat of the lung-bursting leap, taken at the speed with which a leaf falls slowly through the air, slowly, slowly, resting on air, as the camera can make these heavy muscled men hang at rest in their billowing shirts. She had only come to love tennis so much when she was beyond being expected to take part in it; when her proper function was only as audience. Now she delighted in its geometry, the white lines of increasing difficulty, of hope and despair, the acid gold sphere of the ball, the red dust flying, the woven chequered barrier of the net. She had her narrative snobbisms. A live match was always more enticing than a recorded one, even if it was impossible for her to find out first the score of the latter, for someone, somewhere, knew who had won, the tense was past, and thus the wonderful open-endedness of a story which is most beautifully designed towards satisfactory closure but is still undecided would be lost, would be a cheat. For darkness might descend on a live match, or the earth open. A live match was live, was a story in progress towards an end which had not yet come but which must almost certainly come. And in the fact of the almost was the delight.
A live match (Becker-Leconte) was promised within an hour. She had time for a shower, she judged, a good hot shower, and then she could sit and dry slowly and watch the two men run. So she turned on the shower,
which was large and brassy, behind a glass screen at one end of the bath, an enclosing screen of pleasing engraved climbing roses with little birds sitting amongst their thorny stems. It had a pleasant brass frame, the glass box. The water was a little cloudy, and a little brassy itself in colour, but it was hot, and Gillian disported herself in its jets, soaped her breasts, shampooed her hair, looked ruefully down at what it was better not to look at, the rolls of her midriff, the sagging muscles of her stomach. She remembered, as she reached for her towel, how perhaps ten years ago she had looked complacently at her skin on her throat, at her solid enough breasts, and had thought herself well-preserved, unexceptionable. She had tried to imagine how this nice, taut, flexible skin would crimp and wrinkle and fall and had not been able to. It was her skin, it was herself, and there was no visible reason why it should not persist. She had known intellectually that it must, it must give way, but its liveliness then had given her the lie. And now it was all going, the eyelids had soft little folds, the edges of the lips were fuzzed, if she put on lipstick it ran in little threads into the surrounding skin.
She advanced naked towards the bathroom mirror in room 49 in the Peri Palas Hotel. The mirror was covered with shifting veils of steam, amongst which, vaguely, Gillian saw her death advancing towards her, its hair streaming dark and liquid, its eyeholes dark smudges, its mouth open in its liquescent face in fear of their convergence. She dropped her head sadly, turned aside from the encounter, and took out the hanging towelling robe from its transparent sheath of plastic. There were white towelling slippers in the cupboard with Peri Palas written on them in gold letters. She made herself a loose turban of a towel and thus solidly enveloped she remembered the çesm-i bülbül bottle and decided to run it under the tap, to bring the glass to life. She took it out of its wrappings-it was really very dusty, almost clay-encrusted – and carried it into the bathroom, where she turned on the mixer-tap in the basin, made the water warm, blood-heat, and held the bottle under the jet, turning it round and round. The glass became blue, threaded with opaque white canes, cobalt-blue, darkly bright, gleaming and wonderful. She turned it and turned it, rubbing the tenacious dust-spots with thumbs and fingers, and suddenly it gave a kind of warm leap in her hand, like a frog, like a still-beating heart in the hands of a surgeon. She gripped and clasped and steadied, and her own heart took a fierce, fast beat of apprehension, imagining blue glass splinters everywhere. But all that happened was that the stopper, with a faint glassy grinding, suddenly flew out of the neck of the flask and fell, tinkling but unbroken, into the basin. And out of the bottle in her hands came a swarming, an exhalation, a fast-moving dark stain which made a high-pitched buzzing sound and smelled of woodsmoke, of cinnamon, of sulphur, of something that might have been incense, of something that was not leather, but was? The dark cloud gathered and turned and flew in a great paisley or comma out of the bathroom. I am seeing things, thought Dr Perholt, following, and found she could not follow, for the bathroom door was blocked by what she slowly made out to be an enormous foot, a foot with five toes as high as she was, surmounted by yellow horny toenails, a foot encased in skin that was olive-coloured, laced with gold, like snakeskin, not scaly but somehow mailed. It was between transparent and solid. Gillian put out a hand. It was palpable, and very hot to the touch, not hot as a coal but considerably hotter than the water in which she had been washing the bottle. It was dry and slightly electric. A vein beat inside the ankle, a green-gold tube encasing an almost emerald liquid.
Gillian stood and considered the foot. Anything with a foot that size, if at all proportionate, could not be contained in one hotel room. Where was the rest? As she thought this, she heard sounds, which seemed to be speech of some kind, deep, harsh, but musical, expletives perhaps, in a language she couldn’t identify. She put the stopper back in the bottle, clutching it firmly, and waited.
The foot began to change shape. At first it swelled and then it diminished a little, so that Gillian could have squeezed round it, but thought it more prudent not to try. It was now the size of a large armchair, and was drawn back, still diminishing, so that Gillian felt able to follow. The strange voice was still muttering, in its incomprehensible speech. Gillian came out and saw the djinn, who now took up half her large room, curled round on himself like a snake, with his huge head and shoulders pushing against the ceiling, his arms stretched round inside two walls, and his feet and body wound over her bed and trailing into the room. He seemed to be wearing a green silk tunic, not too clean, and not long enough, for she could see the complex heap of his private parts in the very centre of her rosy bed. Behind him was a great expanse of shimmering many-coloured feathers, peacock feathers, parrot feathers, feathers from birds of Paradise, which appeared to be part of a cloak that appeared to be part of him, but was not wings that sprouted in any conventional way from shoulder-blade or spine. Gillian identified the last ingredient of his smell, as he moved his cramped members to look down on her. It was a male smell, a strong horripilant male smell.
His face was huge, oval, and completely hairless. He had huge bruised-green oval eyelids over eyes sea-green flecked with malachite. He had high cheekbones and an imperious hooked nose, and his mouth was wide and sculpted like Egyptian pharaohs’.
In one of his huge hands was the television, on whose pearly screen, on the red dust, Boris Becker and Henri Leconte rushed forward, jumped back, danced, plunged. The smack of the tennis ball could be heard, and the djinn had turned one of his large, elegantly carved ears, to listen.
He spoke to Gillian. She said,
‘I don’t suppose you speak English.’
He repeated his original remark. Gillian said,
‘Français? Deutsch? Español? Português?’ She hesitated. She could not remember the Latin for Latin, and was not at all sure she could converse in that language. ‘Latin,’ she said finally.
‘Je sçais le français,’ said the djinn. ‘Italiano anche. Era in Venezia.’
‘Je préfère le français,’ said Gillian. ‘I am more fluent in that language.’
‘Good,’ said the djinn in French. He said, ‘I can learn quickly, what is your language?’
‘Anglais.’
‘Smaller would be better,’ he said, changing tack. ‘It was agreeable to expand. I have been inside that bottle since 1850 by your reckoning.’
‘You look cramped,’ said Gillian, reaching for the French words, ‘in here.’
The djinn considered the tennis players.
‘Everything is relative. These people are extremely small. I shall diminish somewhat.’
He did so, not all at once, so that for a moment the now only slightly larger-than-life being was almost hidden behind the mound of his private parts, which he then shrank and tucked away. It was almost a form of boasting. He was now curled on Gillian’s bed, only one and a half times as large as she was.
‘I am beholden to you,’ said the djinn, ‘for this release. I am empowered, indeed required, to grant you three wishes on that account. If there is anything you desire.’
‘Are there limits,’ asked the narratologist, ‘to what I may wish for?’
‘An unusual question,’ said the djinn. He was still somewhat distracted by the insect-like drama of Boris Becker and Henri Leconte. ‘In fact different djinns have different powers. Some can only grant small things –’
‘Like sausages –’
‘A believer – a believing djinn – would find it repugnant to grant anyone of your religion pork sausages. But they are possible. There are laws of the praeternatural within which we work, all of us, which cannot be broken. You may not, for instance, wish to have all your wishes granted in perpetuity. Three is three, a number of power. You may not wish for eternal life, for it is your nature to be mortal, as it is mine to be immortal. I cannot by magic hold together your atomies, which will dissolve –’
He said,
‘It is good to speak again, even in this unaccustomed tongue. Can you tell me what these small men are m
ade of, and what they are at? It resembles royal tennis as it was played in the days of Suleiman the Magnificent –’
‘It is called “lawn tennis” in my language. Tennis sur gazon. As you can see, this is being played on clay. I like to watch it. The men,’ she found herself saying, ‘are very beautiful.’
‘Indeed,’ agreed the djinn. ‘How have you enclosed them? The atmosphere here is full of presences I do not understand – it is all bustling and crowded with-I cannot find a word in my language or your own, that is, your second tongue – electrical emanations of living beings, and not only living beings but fruits and flowers and distant places-and some high mathematical game with travelling figures I can barely seize, like motes in the invisible air-something terrible has been done to my space-to exterior space since my incarceration-I have trouble in holding this exterior body together, for all the currents of power are so picked at and intruded upon … Are these men magicians, or are you a witch, that you have them in a box?’
‘No, it is science. It is natural science. It is television. It is done with light waves and sound waves and cathode rays – I don’t know how it is done, I am only a literary scholar, we don’t know much, I’m afraid-we use it for information and amusement. Most people in the world now see these boxes, I suppose.’
‘Six-all, première manche,’ said the television. ‘Jeu décisif. Service Becker.’
The djinn frowned.
‘I am a djinn of some power,’ he said. ‘I begin to find out how these emanations travel. Would you like a homunculus of your own?’
