The Arabian Nightmare

by Robert Irwin

  Karagoz, as well as having only one eye, was hook-nosed, pot-bellied and equipped with an enormous phallus. He longed to stop work and leave the house to spend his hard-earned money, but the ever-watchful Ali Anna kept him at his job. A lady and a doctor, Dr Said, passed by the emir’s house and watched Karagoz working.

  ‘He works hard,’ said the lady.

  ‘If he did not work hard, he would not be tired enough to sleep,’ said the doctor, ‘and he likes sleep better than anything else. He is a very lazy fellow really, but he is asking me to commend him to you and to let you know that he hopes he may find a place in your affections.’

  ‘I hadn’t noticed him doing anything of the sort, ’ replied the lady.

  ‘That is because perhaps you are unacquainted with the Language of Flowers? See the yellow gillyflowers and willow branches he is arranging in a vase? A branch of willow signifies a graceful lady. The gillyflower signifies the unsatisfied lover.’

  ‘Well, he has stopped arranging flowers now.’

  ‘Yes, but he is going upstairs. That is the Language of Symbolic Action. It means that he wants to have sex, and now look! He is picking up a broom. That is the emblem of an erect penis.’

  ‘And what does his enormous erect penis signify?’

  ‘It stands for a broom and it means therefore that he wants to get on with his sweeping.’

  The silhouettes capered about and the children tittered uneasily.

  Balian was unable to enjoy it. Could they find him in here? Why not? This was some sort of dream, wasn’t it? He struggled to wake and found himself lying on a bed. He lay there with his eyes closed, listening to scuffling sounds. He did not know how long he had been vaguely aware of those sounds. At some point the scuffling changed to rapid and irregular thumping accompanied by shrill squeaks. Not daring to move from the mattress, he opened his eyes and turned them unwillingly to one side.

  A man lay quivering on the bed beside him. He appeared to be sinking into the mattress. As soon as he saw that Balian was awake, he began to cry in a thin voice, ‘Help me up, help me up, ’ and extended an arm to Balian. Balian, now on his knees and peering into the half light, took it with some reluctance and pulled. A sudden jerk and he saw what it was. He released his grip, falling back on the bed. The creature was up, though, and it hopped round the room continuing to squeak. It had to hop. It had one leg, one hand, one eye, half a head and half a torso. Its mad bounds took it round and round the mattress, always keeping its profile towards Balian, a glittering eye, bared teeth and an arm that it repeatedly raised to its forehead and dropped again in an uninterpretable gesture. Its bright eye and pallid skin gave the impression of fevered nervous energy. After a while it left the room, summoned elsewhere, Balian surmised.

  He shook himself free from the vision and found himself sitting up in the kiosk, describing the dream to Zuleyka. Zuleyka was sitting cross-legged on the floor, hands together in her bosom. She found no difficulty in giving a name to the apparition and reciting the story.

  ‘That was Shikk al-Insaan, close friend and companion of Saatih ibn Rabia, whom you also met. When they were children their mothers spat in their mouths to give them dream power, but now they are very old and marked by their corrupt practices. Saatih was always thinking and thinking, and he asked men questions that should not be answered, questions whose answers would destroy them. Driven by intellectual curiosity, he denied his bodily instincts to such an extent that his body began to deny him and decay. So he lolls, as you saw him, on his bed ofleaves and palm branches, lost in thought. Now the rot is beginning to attack the jaw and soon he will have only the top of his head to live in.

  ‘Shikk is similar. Saatih and Shikk are from the profusion of forms of an uncertain creation. God gave every man a female soul and every woman a male soul, but Shikk denied his soul and is accursed. According to al-Idrisi, he comes from the China Sea or, it is said, from the woods of the Yemen. The latter opinion is more correct, for yemen in our tongue signifies the right hand. When pilgrims and spice merchants, coming from the Indies, enter the Arab Sea, then the Yemen is on their right and Africa is on their left. Africa is where his other half lives. The Africans call her Barin Mutum, and she is of the left hand. In Africa everything is different from what you see in the lands of Islam. In Africa the hair growing from the point at the back of a man’s head circles round to the left; in the lands of Islam it circles round to the right.

  ‘You were lucky. Shikk is swift and cruel, for he has no heart, and with his half-brain he thinks and talks but he never knows what he thinks or says or does. Barin Mutum is as capricious and cruel as he is. They are never bored but they have no conscience. Shikk is unhappy. His penis is too small and, while he may eat with the right hand, in the lands of the Arabs one may wipe the bum only with the left hand. The laws of etiquette so prescribe it, therefore Shikk is forever looking for men to enslave them in their dreams and make them perform this task for him.

  ‘In the last hundred years Shikk and Saatih have grown greatly in power. Even twenty years ago there were still many of the Invisible College of Sleep Teachers, besides the Father of Cats, residing in Cairo. There was Rabanus who performed conjuring tricks to demonstrate the properties of the human soul; a man called Ancient who invented the dream notation we still use; Haitham the Taleb who recited the whole of the Koran nightly in his sleep, thereby bringing blessings to the creatures of the Alam al-Mithal; Sulami the Master of Black-Bodied meditation; the Sleep Runners; the School of Sabean Interpreters; and many others.

  ‘Even ten years ago a few of these men were still alive, but Shikk and Saatih visited them frequently, brought them to impotence and finally killed them. Some died young. Only the Father of Cats made himself their master and made them his hounds with whom he hunts through the night. One by one he destroyed his colleagues. He is the last of the Invisible College.’

  ‘What does Shikk look like,’ asked Balian, ‘on the side that does not have the eye and the arm?’

  ‘You will never see that side. It is in Africa.’

  ‘Zuleyka—’ he began.

  ‘Yes. Go on. Failure to ask the question is always fatal.’ But a familiar breeze was blowing across his face and he already knew the answer to the question he was going to ask. He awoke in the gutter and the blood started to rise within him and came vomiting out.

  5

  A Panoramic View of the City

  One mosque looks very like another. Slum areas reduplicate themselves in every quarter of the city. The inhabitants are unhelpful or unable to give directions. It is so easy to get lost and so often in wandering round a strange city, without intending it, a man will return to where he started and yet in returning to the place he will fail to recognize it as his starting point, so that when he picks up his steps again, he starts from the same place for the first time. I cannot provide a plan or map. I have never had one. Perhaps an overview of the city might help. Distance might make things clearer...

  Fearing lest he lose himself again, that day and in the many days that followed, Balian set himself to master the geography of Cairo, a difficult thing to do, for most ways looked alike and twisted and turned under the buildings without any obvious purpose or direction, but he took his bearings from the peripheries of the city and the skyline.

  First there was the Citadel, perched on its crag of limestone to the south and visible from almost anywhere in the city, a ramshackle accumulation of fortifications and pleasure houses that had grown together in the last three centuries.

  In front of the mount of the Citadel the curious and highly elaborate minarets of the Sultan Hasan mosque were often visible. Further to the south, overlooking both the mosque and the Citadel, were the chalky yellow cliffs of Mount Muqattam.

  To the north and east were the domes and cupolas of the City of the Dead, a necropolis of mausolea and cemeteries. Some of the tombs of the greater Mamlukes were palaces of marble and porcelain. By day a place of diversion, by night the area became the haunt
of cut-throats and the indigent; nightly violence and starvation swelled the population of the City of the Dead. Beyond the City of the Dead and towering almost as high as Mount Muqattam was a ridge of white hills running from north to south along the eastern edge of the city. These hills were artificially formed by centuries of debris and refuse. When the wind blew from the east, a putrescent stench crept over the chilly and deserted streets of the City of the Dead and fine white dust swept all the way across Cairo, making one choke and one’s eyes run. This could last for weeks at a time especially in late summer; the Venetians called it the tramontana. Sometimes, often at night, one of these mounds of rubbish would spontaneously ignite, shooting jets of fire and garbage spectacularly into the air.

  Due north the city slowly petered out beyond the wall in scrubby clumps of palm. It was here that the livestock markets were and the camel pens.

  The north-west, the area between the Nile and the old city, was as yet unwalled. The river boats docked at Bulaq, and from there their cargoes were brought on pack animals into the city proper. The great emirs and the Karimi merchants dwelt in the west. Some way to the south was the Ezbekiyya, the newest of the suburbs to rise out of the swamps formed by the shifting of the Nile’s course towards the west. Here was the palace of the Emir Ezbek (now somewhat decayed), his stables and a great artificial lake, bordered by pleasure pavilions, on whose waters the boats were rowed by prostitutes. Further to the south were the Lake of the Elephant and the Island of Roda. Finally Saladin’s Aqueduct and the Hill of Zeinhom, another rubbish tip surmounted by windmills, approximately marked the south-western limits of the inhabited city, but on almost all sides the fringes were being surrendered to the plague and the nomads with their flocks.

  This year foreign visitors were not allowed to cross the Nile’s western bank and visit the pyramids. According to the authorities, the danger from the bedouin was too great. Even on the east bank the bedouin sometimes raided the City of the Dead. As for the Nile itself, even when one could not see it one could trace its course below Roda by following with one’s eyes the vultures and kites that hung and swooped over the river, for the Nile bore the carrion of the slaughter houses of Cairo north to the sea.

  The core of the city itself was circumscribed by the river and hills of refuse, the castle, the aqueduct and the abandoned slums. Most of the bazaars lay in the densely packed quarters of the north-east, nestling in among, and parasitic upon, the rubble of the old Fatimid palaces, and behind the commercial streets one found small courtyards and large tenements, into which were crowded communities of closely knit creeds and tribes. This was old Cairo, so crowded that often a man and his mules might take a day to press their way across it. The main street, the Qasaba, ran through its heart, down from the Gate of Victory, between the ruined palaces and out through the Zuweyla Gate south to the Citadel. The Jewish, Coptic and Armenian quarters lay within the old walls. The quarters of the Blacks and the Tartars straggled along the Qasaba outside them.

  Balian found himself spending a great deal of time in the vicinity of the Zuweyla Gate, where the dancers and entertainers gathered. This was also the place where criminals were brought to be garotted or beheaded; their bodies were then impaled outside the gate on the long poles which bent uneasily under their weight.

  If one followed the Qasaba south from the Zuweyla Gate, through the Tartar Ruins, one penetrated the zone of the barracks and the military élite; arms markets, horse markets, stables, exercise yards and finally the Black Hippodrome, where the Mamluke soldiery exercised daily in ritual mock combat. The city was like a disordered mind, an expression of archaic wishes and half submerged memories of vanished dynasties.

  Habitually Balian lay down to sleep in an alleyway, close to the Zuweyla Gate. One night Yoil came and squatted down beside him. The monkey clung to Yoll’s back, arms tightly wrapped round his neck.

  ‘It’s the Englishman! What’s wrong with you? You look terribly ill.’ Yoll too looked ill, tense and strained, but Balian did not remark on this, fearing to be impolite.

  ‘Those dreams... Yoll, have I got the Arabian Nightmare? What is the Arabian Nightmare?’

  Yoll winced and settled himself and his load on the ground before beginning. ‘The Arabian Nightmare is a disease. It is said to be transmitted from person to person by sleeping close together. It comes out of the mouth at night like smoke. They say that the person who was first to be afflicted with this disease has come to Cairo, all unawares of what he is bringing with him.

  ‘The story goes like this. Some years ago there was a couple living in Damascus who had no children. The husband indeed was impotent and did not seem to desire his wife at all. Whether this was sorcery or one of God’s afflictions I cannot say, but the wife decided that their problem might be solved by magic, so after making many inquiries of the wise men in the town, she learnt of a powerful magician and set off to seek his help.

  ‘Now this magician lived in a castle on a sunny hill near Mecca. The way from Damascus was long and dangerous but the magician received her kindly when she arrived and he showed her all but one of the marvels of his castle; he showed her the ape that he kept on a silver chain and whom he had trained to play chess.’ Here Yoll winced a second time. ‘He showed her his bed of satin, which floated on a pool of quicksilver, and he showed her the eagles which he bred in the towers of the castle and which he used to hunt with.

  ‘Moreover he agreed to sell her a magical aphrodisiac in the form of a cloud of smoke in a bottle. But the vital essence would require many weeks of distillation before it was ready, and the magician had to go away for a few weeks on pressing business. Then, on reflection, a solution occurred to him, though he had to stifle some misgivings. The woman should stay in the castle and, in return for his hospitality, do something for him; this was to look after the last and greatest of all the marvels of his castle. The magician took her into a room that he had not shown her before and revealed to her his son.

  ‘This boy was indeed a marvel of human beauty: his eyelashes were long, his cheeks were fat, his eyebrows were like crescent moons and his mouth like a scarlet bow. The boy showed her that he could understand the speech of birds, and the woman knew that the magician was speaking the truth when he told her that his son would be the Fifth Messiah.’

  ‘The Fifth Messiah?’

  ‘It is a heresy very prevalent in Cairo these days. Its devotees hold that since the Prophet Mohammed prophesied the coming of the Messiah and the End of the World, there have been four Messiahs and four Ends of the World, but the great mass of uninitiated humanity have been too dull to notice, so things have gone on much as before. But the Fifth Messiah, when he comes, will take vengeance on those who failed to recognize the four Invisible Messiahs. It is a shocking heresy. They hold that he will depose the Caliph and the Sultan and set new ones in their place. He will reconcile the Muslim with the Christian and the Jew, and the lion with the lamb. His followers say that he too is in Cairo at this very moment, in disguise and waiting only until the time is right to proclaim himself.

  ‘To return to your original question, the magician with all his arts had studied the ancient prophecies of the birth of the Messiah and the signs that would attend his birth. Then he purchased an Abyssinian slave girl and, with his knowledge of starcraft, had her conceive with his seed at the ordained time.

  ‘So the magician left his treasured and miraculous son with the woman and set out on his journey. But the woman, as one might expect, was suffering from years of sexual frustration and she desired this youth very greatly, while he for his part had not seen a woman, apart from his wet nurse (who was old), since the day he was born, so he was very interested in the woman. So they came together and only a few days had passed before the woman had seduced him. They spent blissful weeks together making love on the bed which floated on a pool of quicksilver.

  ‘Then one day they saw from the battlement that the magician was returning. The woman swore the boy to silence, but the magician, ente
ring the castle, saw from the boy’s face in an instant what had happened and how the virtue of the Chosen One had been deflowered, yet he was cunning and said nothing. Instead he continued to make the woman welcome, until at last he said that the aphrodisiac gas that he had promised for her husband was ready and he handed her a brown bottle. The foolish woman thanked him profusely, said her farewells to the magician and his son and hurried back to Damascus, where her husband was waiting for her with some impatience. That night they eagerly unstoppered the bottle and the unfortunate husband inhaled its coloured vapours with enthusiastic snorts. What they then discovered was that the contents of the bottle did nothing for the man’s virility; his penis hung as limp as ever. What they never learnt, because of the very nature of the affliction, was that first the husband and then, shortly afterwards, the wife had been smitten with the infinite torments of the Arabian Nightmare. And so this terrible scourge was released upon mankind.’

  ‘What a ridiculous story!’

  ‘It is a fable of the market place.’

  ‘And the Arabian Nightmare, is there no cure for it?’

  ‘None, unless indeed the blemished Messiah may still heal the leper and the cripple and has also the power to lift the curse of his father.’

  Balian thought for a while. Then: ‘Yoll, why is there a monkey clinging to your back?’

  ‘Ah, yes, there is, isn’t there? Well, thereby hangs a tale...’ But Balian did not want to listen to any more of Yoll’s tales and he pulled away to other visions. Sun and moon whirled over the city, day and night alternated with dizzying rapidity as he moved from one to another. Some women asked him to look down a bottomless well; he refused. The Sphinx, which the Arabs call the Father of Terror, barred him entry to the pickled treasures of the pyramids. He was brought before an image of a lady in a mask, suckling two children. He read, in the book which Giancristoforo had left him, about the brain which is ‘of the colour of lampblack or the Nubian’. Arab voices whispered in his ear. He caught glimpses of Vane and the Father of Cats and avoided them. And so, on and on, until towards the end of the night he re-encountered Zuleyka. Zuleyka, in effect, raped him, teaching him in the process the Abyssinian nutcracker technique and the Dolorous Kiss.