The Arabian Nightmare

by Robert Irwin

  It was not until they descended again to the courtyard that Balian began to feel that there were things of interest to be seen. Round a corner, off the courtyard, was the pharmacy, a tiled kiosk with niches set into the walls at close intervals. In the niches, sealed in jars or wrapped in leaves, was ranged an amazing collection of roots, leaves and powders: white hellebore which made men die, suffocated with their vomit; black hellebore which purged in dangerous convulsive spasms; mandragora, the drug of somnolence; garlic for the production of melancholy; qat for exciting the nerves; kola to produce insomnia; opium for the twilight states; harsh, an odorous paste, to be smeared on the teeth; the forty-nine fruits of the zaqqum tree; the sudorific cumin; viper’s bugloss that expanded the heart; chewing seaweed; balsam; fennel; gal-ingale; asafoetida; ambergris; spider’s-web pills; iliaster; aloes; banj and asphodel. Also ostrich feathers, narwhal teeth and hop pillows.

  They descended further to the cellars where, the old man explained, the dormitories for the patients were situated. The dormitories were a fantastic sight. From either side of the stairwell a long hall stretched into darkness, beyond the limits of the light shed by the candles set in great bronze candlesticks, the height of a man, which stood in the centre of the hall.

  It was still only midday, yet even so a few of the beds were occupied. The restless sleepers, arms akimbo or flopped over the side of the mattress, eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling or face flung down into the pillow, were attended by the Father’s assistants, young men mostly, who would move noiselessly from bed to bed, and, squatting on their haunches or reclining on their sides, would whisper through cupped hands into the ears of the sleepers, sending their dreams this way and that. In the middle of the night the hall would be filled with a susurrus of whispers, wheezes and snores, but mostly a tracery of whispers, dictating the pattern of the night. Huge black slaves moved up and down the hall, bringing and removing bedding. Lice were endemic here. From the darkness at one end came the sound of a lute.

  ‘Your disease is rare. The Father will treat you for nothing. ’

  ‘How will he treat me?’

  ‘I do not know. I am only a student of his methods, but I have learnt that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. It may be that there is a disorder in the secretory process in the ventricles of the head, which in turn produces an excess of the sanguine element in the constitution, which in turn leads to spontaneous bleeding.’

  Vane sounded both self-conscious and vague. The old man was conferring with one of his disciples.

  ‘At all events you will not sleep alone tonight. Someone will be watching you. In the morning I will come for you.’

  ‘Me? Sleep here?’

  ‘Why not? This is the safest place in Cairo. It has the patronage of some of the most powerful emirs. In the caravanserai the Venetians may steal your money and the priests may steal your soul, but here you are safe. If you are to stay any length of time in the city, you will need the protection of someone like the Father of Cats and the refuge of a place like the House of Sleep. The city is not safe. There have been murders nightly; there has been talk of riot and revolt; but whatever happens, they will not touch the sleep teacher.’

  But suppose he talked in his sleep? Suppose that he revealed in his sleep that he had come to spy? But that was all right, for the Father and his disciples appeared to understand neither English nor Italian. Yet he would lie there unconscious, watched over by aliens, dreaming perhaps in a foreign tongue and would awake, helplessly bleeding, in a foreign cellar. Something else, though, worried him. What was it? Yes, when did the dream about St Catherine and Zuleyka begin? At sunset or earlier? Did he dream it in the caravanserai or in the hippodrome? Did he dream just about St Catherine and Zuleyka or also about the royal circumcision, even about Cairo?

  Vane, seeing that he was hesitating, took him by the arm. ‘For God’s sake, lad, you will kill yourself if you don’t receive treatment. Kill yourself or be killed. I said just now that it might be a disorder in the process of secretion in the brain. And so it might be, but why are you afflicted only when you sleep? It is quite possibly a form of sorcery by someone who is trying to poison you in your sleep. Christians, Christians from the West anyhow, are not liked in Cairo, and very likely someone is practising a spell on you.’

  ‘I am not staying here. Thank you nevertheless.’ Balian made what he hoped was a polite gesture towards the Father and, without looking back, climbed out of the cellar and made his way out into the street, into the blinding light of day, and lost himself in the crowd.

  The crowd was a mindless beast which moved slowly and complained noisily when goaded. It moved at the pace of the slowest, that is to say, at the pace of the very old and the sick. It was said that the greater part of the population of Cairo did not work but begged or resigned itself to dying slowly. Balian struggled against this crowd, vainly willing it to part before him like the Red Sea before Moses, but it looked at him with obstinate dead eyes and shuffled its feet. He saw gangs of old men with linked arms, proceeding majestically along the thoroughfares of the city, carrying all before them, their naked, bony feet kicking up the dust as they moved. He would learn that these crowds were dangerous too; sometimes several processions would converge upon one place, and then people would die in the press.

  But Vane and the Father could not follow him through this, and eventually Balian relaxed, letting the crowd carry him where it would, aimlessly in movement, seeing what there was to be seen.

  One’s eyes could tell one more in this city than in Venice or Norwich: the green turban of a hajji, the yellow robe of a Jew, the great double-headed axe and begging bowl of a Bektashi dervish. One’s clothes revealed one’s faith and one’s ambitions.

  So he came, desultorily and aimlessly, to encounter Yoll. At a street corner the crowd had halted and gathered round a qasas, a storyteller. He sat on a sort of wooden throne deep in the shadow of a corbelled house. An uncomfortable ape on a chain squatted on one of the qasas’s shoulders. At the foot of the throne a musician sat hunched, playing the rebec softly to the storyteller’s words, and a boy served out coffee on a brass tray. Otherwise every eye was focused on the qasas. A young woman, unveiled and strikingly beautiful, sat adoringly at his feet. The older men stood or squatted in a circle around him, pushing the children out to the periphery. The circle was a wide one, Balian was amused to note, for gobs of spit flew from the storyteller’s mouth. The story was an entrancing one; the wail of the rebec rose and fell and the arms of the qasas swept and cleft the air, working on his slack-jawed and glasseyed audience. The storyteller, unusually, was a young man, shock-headed, his face drawn with concentration. Sweat clung to his face, and sand clung to the sweat. He was the dirtiest person Balian had ever seen. He seemed to be utterly lost in his story, yet as Balian approached the group, the qasas halted, apparently in mid-sentence, leaving the rebec player to continue to play. Holding Balian with his eyes, the qasas gestured dramatically at himself with his thumb.

  3

  Roda Island

  A pleasing picture that.

  Now, too late of course, I wonder if I have started my tale at the right place. It might have been easier to start by explaining the relationship of Michael Vane to the Father of Cats or, better yet, to begin with the true story of the origins of Fatima the Deathly. And have I mentioned the Ape yet? I cannot remember. For some reason I thought it best to start with the entry of this innocent young man into Cairo. Privately I am not fond of him, and I ask myself what he will think of me. I doubt if I will ever know. Certainly he does not seem to think about other people very much.

  Too late to start again, and anyway it is now time to introduce myself...

  ‘I am Yoll,’ The storyteller spoke Italian with a heavy accent. Stranger yet was his next sentence. ‘I have been telling these people your story.’

  ‘My story?’

  The crowd turned to regard Balian appreciatively and let him pass through them to stand before t
he throne of the storyteller. Yoll gestured impatiently. ‘Yes, your story. How you came to Cairo on your way to the holy monastery of Mount Sinai. How you saw the arrest of an Italian painter, were attacked by visions in the night of ill omen and fell into the clutches of the Father of Cats and an English alchemist.’

  He paused to see if Balian thought that he had got the story right and went on, ‘We all know the places and the people. It is a good story. It is easy for somebody like myself, who estimates information at its true value, to reconstruct this tale from a hundred sources in the city. I am Yoll, the only storyteller in all Cairo who makes a living from telling true stories. Sometimes people pay me to tell their story in public places, perhaps in the hope that it may edify the crowds or that it may bring lustre on the family name. At other times I select an individual and honour him or ruin him by telling his story.’ He paused. ‘Sometimes I am paid not to tell the story.’

  ‘What will happen next in this story?’

  Yoll paused again and a big grin spread over his face. ‘You will meet a storyteller called Yoll, and he will give you some extremely valuable advice, if you will be good enough to wait a few moments. You will forgive my interest in you, but a good storyteller strives to give his stories some shape, even if they are true ones.’

  Without waiting for a reply, Yoll turned back to address his audience. He spoke for what seemed quite a long time, gesturing occasionally at Balian. The audience eyed Balian sympathetically. At length the discourse ceased and the little boy passed among the audience, collecting coins in a velvet bag. Yoll stepped down from his throne, leaving the boy to dismantle it. The rebec player had disappeared. The sun had vanished behind a bank of clouds and the wind was rising, sending little dust devils down the street. It was time for the mid-afternoon prayer. The melancholy complaints of the muezzins rang out across the city, ‘There is only one God... ’ Yoll smiled at Balian. ‘Will you deign to accept my hospitality? The house is some distance away, but,’ and here he affected to lower his voice in a mock whisper, ‘there is wine there. ’ Balian inclined his head and Yoll waved his arms wildly with pleasure. The house was indeed some distance away, but they did not talk on the way. By the time they reached the house it was late afternoon and, though the sky was still a deep blue, in the dark streets below it was almost night. Shutters were going up in the covered markets and whole areas of the city seemed to be deserted, while others were thronged with people promenading up and down, eyeing one another curiously.

  The house Yoll took him to was very small but strikingly comfortable. No walls, floors or windows were visible. Rather, they reclined in a cavern of cushions, carpets and hanging silks; all were somewhat frayed and most had stuffing coming out.

  Yoll produced a jug of wine and grinned. ‘I need seclusion from the outside world for my great work. The stories I tell in the market place serve only to keep body and soul together. They are a way of earning a living, nothing more. You ask what my great work is?’ Balian did not. ‘I will tell you. It is really something, as you shall hear. The sultans and emirs have their monuments: the Sultan Hasan Mosque, the Sultan Qalaoun Hospital, the Emirjaqmaq Fountain. They dominate the streets of our city, and in their shadow the oppressed poor, God’s children, must walk in awe. The poor have no monuments. But I, Yoll, am creating one for them.’

  Yoll’s speech became a torrent. He was, Balian learnt, writing a work, more precisely a compendium of stories, loosely related to one another. ‘I shall call it “One Thousand Nights and One Night”.’ Every night he dictated a portion to a calligrapher friend of his. As Balian listened he became aware of Yoll’s extraordinary and twisted cunning, for the stories Yoll was inventing were not just to entertain the poor of the city but also were written in a deliberately unpretentious, muddled and colloquial fashion, designed by Yoll to give the impression that these were actually the creation of the tradesmen and paupers of Cairo.

  Yoll was full of compassion for the people of his city. Yet, mingled within the pity, Balian detected a strain of contempt for the tradesmen and their lack of imagination, and a fierce disapproval of their passivity and materialism and, above all, their orderliness. There was nothing orderly about Yoll. ‘These poor folk have no voice. They have no dreams, they sit like rag dolls beside their merchandise, but I am becoming their voice and I shall create their dreams for them.’

  Yoll followed his vocation with a maniac’s intensity. He wanted to submerge his own very strong personality in these tales and to become only a filter for the feelings and hopes, slender though they were, of the street people. To this end, whenever he was not working or dictating, he used to wander through the alleys and squares of the city, backwards and forwards, taking nothing in consciously, taking everything in somehow, floating in the airs of Cairo. He would return to his home on the edge of the Armenian Quarter and let himself drift, with his eyes shut, until images began to dance on his eyelids and a story began to form around them. Yoll’s stories came, he claimed, from a twilight area, somewhere between conscious creation and the seethings of pure nonsense. ‘Take, for instance, the story of the two Haroun al-Rashids, which I produced a few evenings ago. The story goes like this... ’ At this point Balian could restrain his impatience no longer and broke in upon the torrent. ‘But tell me, how is it that you speak Italian?’

  ‘Boccaccio has long been my inspiration. We like Italians.’

  ‘We? And do you like Englishmen as well?’

  Yoll pointed to a corner of the room. While they had been talking a woman had slipped in. It was the woman who had been sitting at the front of the audience.

  ‘Mary the Copt, my sister. Actually we are both Copts, but people call me Dirty Yoll.’

  She smiled and sat down. When the smile had gone, it was as it it had never been. She was a sombre, heavy girl who seemed to smoulder with fury—or was it impatience, or suppressed desire?—as she hung on to Yoll’s every word. The wine jar was replenished.

  Yoll continued, replying to Balian’s previous question. ‘We shall see. You are the first Englishman I have ever met, apart from Vane.’

  ‘What can you tell me about Vane?’

  ‘Enough, I hope, to persuade you to shun his presence. This has been a fortunate meeting. I do not like to see people, particularly Christians, fall into the hands of that pair.’

  ‘That pair?’

  ‘Vane and the Father of Cats. I warn you, they take people over, and people who have fallen under their influence are impossible to talk to afterwards. They are guardians of a common secret, or at least that is the impression they seem to wish to give.’

  ‘Has Vane known the Father of Cats a long time?’

  ‘Yes. Vane has been a regular visitor to Cairo for a long time. Sometimes he was resident in the city for years at a stretch and then he used to stay in the House of Sleep. No, there is something very odd about that pair, that bag of old bones and that cutpurse picaroon. Oh yes, when Vane first came to Cairo, he was scarcely more than a petty criminal. He could have been a galley slave for all I know. Certainly he had lived very rough. He didn’t comport himself like a signor and a scholar or discourse learnedly on physics and metaphysics, as he does now. No, he was a cutpurse, a clever and ambitious cutpurse, but a cutpurse nevertheless. He went to the House of Sleep and the Father of Cats must have seen his potentialities, for he educated him as if he were his own son. Vane studied with him the languages of the civilized world, Arabic, Persian and Hebrew; he learnt manners; and he studied alchemy, medicine, gematria, physics and oneiromancy. Above all he has learnt to serve his masters.’

  ‘You mean—?’

  ‘I am not sure what I mean... Vane works for the Sultan and his officers as a spy probably. So, I think, does the Father of Cats. There is a lot of coming and going between the House of Sleep and the Citadel. They must traffic in information. How they come by that information is not easy to see. Maybe it is from clients who come to have their dreams interpreted and their fortunes told?

  �
�You should try to leave the city as soon as possible. The Father of Cats is a dangerous man to know, as a friend or as an enemy. Forgive my insistence on this, but I must tell you that the origins of the Father of Cats are hardly less disreputable than I suspect Vane’s to be. Let me tell you a story.’

  Yoll drank deeply and continued. ‘I heard it many years ago from the lips of the Father of Cats himself, before he became the important person he is now. The Father of Cats was not always master of the House of Sleep. In his youth, when he was new in the city and there were many more skilled in the hidden sciences than he was himself, he subsisted by casting spells and selling potions for small sums of money. He specialized in aphrodisiac potions and emblems, images to lure men into bed. These emblems were very dangerous things to deal in, for he used to paint them on the bodies of his customers. He always ran the risk of having the husbands notice the signs painted on the bodies of their wives and discovering who had put them there, but it was a good trade, for the signs were powerful and came from the Arbatel of Magic. One day a woman, who called herself Fatima, came to him with the usual story about her husband ceasing to desire her, so the Solomonic signs were painted on her navel and the insides of her thighs and between her breasts. He was well paid and she departed. Not long afterwards, one morning, a youth with his throat cut was discovered floating down the Nile. These things happen from time to time, and no one paid any particular attention.