The Arabian Nightmare

by Robert Irwin

  When it was over Balian told her of his meeting with Yoll and asked her, ‘If the story of the magician at Mecca was a fable of the market place, why did he tell it to me?’

  ‘Yoll loves telling stories, but no one had heard that one in the market place. It is an allegory aimed at you.’

  ‘What was that monkey doing on Yoll’s back?’

  ‘That was no monkey. That was an ape, a different animal altogether. Apes have no tails.’

  ‘Well, what was it doing there?’

  ‘I wish you would rest from these questions. You give more away by asking them than you gain from their answers. The ape is Yoll’s genius. Only he will not recognize that. You did well to leave the pair of them. But, if you should see him again, ask him about my Chinese box. He took it without my permission.’

  ‘Zuleyka, do I have the Arabian Nightmare?’

  She scowled and bit her nails before replying, ‘The Arabian Nightmare cannot be remembered when awake. You are awake now but you can remember the night’s dreams. It follows that you are not a victim of the Arabian Nightmare.’

  ‘But I am not awake. Yet.’

  He awoke, bloody, in the gutter. However, he still remembered his dreams. He was beginning to wish he did not. He went back to the Citadel to see the Dawadar, but it seemed that the Dawadar was not giving audiences that day.

  He trudged off dizzily to continue his exploration of the city. There was a Cairo of buildings and monuments and another Cairo which knew nothing of them. A second city moved in perpetual motion on bare, calloused feet: cooks, water vendors, axemen, letter writers, tinkers, porters and dairy maids took their trade with them from quarter to quarter and served their customers wherever it suited them.

  At night a different city came into being. Many streets and quarters shut themselves off behind strong gates, which barred the way against the riots of disorderly Mamlukes. Other parts of the city, particularly towards the west, along the Nile and in the Ezbekiyya, were brilliantly lit all through till dawn by thousands of naphtha torches.

  In the Bayn al-Qasreyn, the only extensive open place in old Cairo, it was the custom for the men and even a few of the women to promenade in the cool twilight. Later, when respectable people had gone back to their homes, the streets were left to the lamplighters, carousing Mamlukes, prostitutes and the sleepers. Balian, of course, was not alone in sleeping in the streets. Most of Cairo, the vast mass of its poor, slept in the open. By day the larger families formed gipsy-like encampments at street corners and in abandoned ruins; by night they were eerie, hunched figures in shapeless huddles of cloth.

  Day or night one pressed through seething masses of sweaty cloth and gleaming flesh, a maggoty concourse of crowds and over-ripeness. Yet, though he walked through the streets of Cairo ceaselessly, the city was almost totally unknown to him. The real city was perhaps elsewhere, a world of private interiors, etiquette and familial duties guarded by the huge nailstudded double doors, the porters watching from their benches and the lattices of meshrabiyya, thousands of secret beds and gardens. The appeals of the beggars, the cries of street vendors, the military orchestras: these were public voices. Only rarely, late at night and by chance, did he hear a family arguing or a woman quietening her child.

  Day and night Balian studied Arabic, both the language of the street corner and the more formal prose of his oneiric teachers. It was not that he mastered the language but rather that it mastered him. He found himself thinking in a language in which nouns shaded imperceptibly into verbs, a language which seemed to discount being in the present, a language with a special verb form for colours and physical deformities, a language of rhythmic syntax and many tiered layers of sense, communicated through hawking stops, gutturals, odd emphases and doublings.

  Distorted echoes and vaporous images radiated from short clusters of sound. One such complex, with which he was to become very familiar, revolved around the letter sequence Q, R, D. Qird meant ape but it also meant Iblis, the Devil. Qarada meant to be worm-eaten, to collect butter and to keep silent. Qarida meant to heap up clouds. Qarrada meant to take the ticks off a camel, to deceive and to invoke the Devil in cursing. Finally taqarrada meant to curl and twine tightly, while maqrud meant exhausted.

  The Arabic they spoke, he found, did not contain meaning, only hinted at it, like a finger pointing somewhere else. He learned how to notate and interpret their tongue by watching and matching their gestures. The voice might say yes, but the eyes flicking away said no. The extended palm and fingers fanning the air signified temporizing. The index and ring fingers emerged to avert the Evil Eye. A finger scratched the side of the nose in warning. Hand pressed to the heart indicated gratitude. Beneath the babble of tongues spoken in New Babylon, Arabic, Turkish, Mongol, Italian, Armenian, Berber and others, there lay one silent language underpinning them all. Everybody used it, though Bulbul and Yoll used it most flamboyantly of all.

  Balian had become one of the international brotherhood of beggars that met in Cairo and one of its humbler members, moreover, for within the homeless, propertyless dregs there was nevertheless an élite—the harafish— gangs of beggars and petty criminals organized under the patronage of one or other of the wealthy emirs. It was the job of the harafish to demonstrate in favour of their emir if he should be summoned to the Citadel, to collect information and rumour and to combat the activities of the harafish of the other emirs.

  In return, registered supporters would receive bread daily at the emirs’ doors. Daily too the military orchestras played outside the houses of the emirs, so that in the morning, in the area around the Citadel, the air was filled with the sullen rolling thunder of drums and ragged choruses of the harafish.

  In the summer everyone was dirty and ill-tempered. When the winds blew in the wrong direction, then clouds of dust from the stinking white artificial mountains beyond the walls moved down into the city, and rivers of dirt flowed up the great thoroughfares and across the ceremonial parade grounds. There were fights between rival gangs of harafish. Sometimes a foreigner, Copt orjew was set upon. The harvest had been bad, there were rumours of corruption, and violence simmered.

  Balian shunned the caravanserai and his co-religionists. He feared that for them he was tainted by enchantment or the plague. He never stayed long in one place for fear of being traced by the Father of Cats and Vane. Sleeping made him only more tired, so he slept a lot during the daytime too now. It came upon him rapidly, first rolling black waves that clouded his vision and then, usually, a plummeting fall into total unconsciousness. Wakefulness came equally suddenly. With sickening abruptness he would find himself sprawled in the sunshine and the blood. His stomach empty, his head heavy with dreams, he walked through the city half asleep. Yet he no longer needed to find his way from sightings of minarets or dust mounds; the tilt of the ground under his feet or the angle of sunlight on a wall at a particular time of day told him enough.

  One day he became conscious that something was following him, a lazy white dog, a bitch with heavy dugs, padded behind him, whining continuously. When Balian sat collapsed in the shadows of the houses, the dog would circle him, breathing heavily and whining, her lips hanging loose in a sly sort of grin. In streets, in deserted ruins and in crowded market places Balian was aware that a flabby white shadow trailed behind him, and at nights, when Balian slept in the open, the dog would lie down too at a distance, panting in the hot night air.

  But slowly the conviction grew upon Balian that he was being haunted and that the dog was an illusion seen by him alone. Considering the matter carefully, he came to see how it was that the white bitch faithfully mirrored the inner corruption of his own soul, intellectually and spiritually passive, idle and easily amused. These were aspects of his soul he could no more throw off than he could lose the white bitch. He lay by now a little delirious from fatigue and loss of blood in the shadow of the Tartar Ruins. Facing him in the sun, sitting like a sphinx, was the white bitch, her saliva dribbling into the sand below her chin. Suddenly t
he bitch staggered to her feet and padded unsteadily towards him. My last hour, he thought. He stretched out an arm to shield his face and found himself touching fur. The bitch was real. She licked his face, between wafts of stale breath smelling of rotten meat, and staggered away to be seen no more.

  Still, it is a sign, he thought. He was no longer sure of himself. Other voices, survivors of the night, clamoured all the time for attention.

  All night long the man who suffers the Arabian Nightmare moves under the blankets. He sees what is happening. He knows what is happening, but he can do nothing for he forgets. He dreams that his penis is cut in half like a banana, that red-hot pokers pass from ear to ear through his head and that he retches drily on an empty stomach. He dreams of fainting; he dreams he is unconscious and, unconscious, finds that he is powerless to mitigate the pain by thought. The experience is purified and redoubled. He dreams that he dreams in this tortured body. He dreams of his body tossing and writhing on a little bed and his mind prey to horrible illusions. He suspects, no, he is horribly and totally convinced, that the figure tossing in the bed is dreaming of having his penis cut in half like a banana. If the pain were not so awful, if he were not asleep, he could do something about it. If he could only awaken the figure on the bed. If the figure on the bed could only awaken him.

  Then it seemed that the two of them were shaking each other awake, shivering with pain in the dawn light. There was a dialogue they half understood. The awful thing was that they knew that this moment was not itself the Arabian Nightmare, though it was imminent again; it grew within them or hung perhaps in the shadows of the room. My brother, my double, he brings the Nightmare with him, they thought of each other. The figure tossing on the bed turns his attention away from them, though only with an effort, for logical space is getting smaller.

  The tools he had to work with were very small, almost invisible, like complicated traceries of threads and, like threads, they broke easily. He took a few steps, logical steps it seemed, in a certain direction and found the way shrinking. Then claustrophobia began to close in and he began to fear that what he was doing led to a cul-de-sac anyway. It was becoming more and more difficult to separate mental images from visual images. Both brought pain. There was, though, he dimly remembered, a paradox about two sleepers who dreamed each other. Or was it really about one sleeper who dreamed of two sleepers dreaming each other? It was difficult to be sure. If there had been such a problem, how had he ever escaped it? He had a swift image of a man first treading in a treadmill and then being hurled around within its momentum. That should have been him. He was sure it should be so.

  It occurred to him to wonder how it was that he should have reached this rather uncertain conclusion and sought to retrace his steps. Then he knew that he was delirious and that he did not wish to experience again what he already had been through that night.

  Then he thought that his suffering was made more acute by being invisible, bloodless and logical, so he lay there trying to visualize the city that he was in. Cairo. Every street was something that had to be traversed, every door a mystery. His bones glowed with pain like red-hot charcoal. It was a painful problem. Somewhere in this city he lay dreaming, or rather, he thought with unusual clarity, in a city very like it. Over in the corner of the market under the Sultan Hasan mosque, he saw two dwarfish men selling sweets, or was it that he made himself see them?

  I shall examine these men, he thought, and see how well they can ape reality. I shall ask them something, the answer to which I do not know. He paused and wondered whether he could give true value to such an answer, then drifted across towards the men. They saw him coming and grinned.

  ‘What is my name?’

  One of them smiled, gap-toothed. ‘My name is Barfi and his is Ladoo.‘

  ‘No. What is my name?’

  ‘I am sorry. I did not hear you correctly. Did I hear you ask me to tell you your name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Barfi scratched his head. ‘Did you know our names before we told you them?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. I am not sure.’ Had he known before they spoke? If he had, then he would surely know what Barfi would say next. He felt a horrid sense of mounting inevitability.

  ‘It is a very strange question.’

  It seemed the inevitable thing that he would say, and yet had he known that it was exactly this that Barfi would say? And was this the test of anything anyway? And after all he did not always know himself what he would say next, waking or sleeping. What was it that he hoped to verify? Perhaps Barfi or Ladoo would tell him. He felt confused and bored. One particular pain disengaged itself from the general mesh of pain; he wanted to urinate very badly, but this investigation must be pursued to its end.

  This time Ladoo spoke. ‘Perhaps you are Yunis, the dealer in rags.’

  Barfi looked at Ladoo oddly. ‘We have never met Yunis. Are you Yunis, and are you testing us, please?’

  Barfi and Ladoo moved closer together. They looked baffled and frightened. He, for his part, felt that fate was offering him some obscure sort of challenge. Something had been begun that had to be gone through.

  ‘Yes.’

  No, it was not fate, but some inexorable and unpleasant logic, only now it was clothed with visible menace. He looked desperately around for other people or animals or birds.

  ‘If you are Yunis, you are behaving very oddly.’

  It had to be played out to the end. The pressure in his bladder was excruciating. He could not imagine what he could reply, nor how Barfi and Ladoo would respond to his reply, and it seemed for a moment impossible to continue without some image, no matter how vague, of how this adventure might go on. There was no range of possibilities and probabilities within which he could work. Yet somehow he managed to croak, thinking as he did so how odd his voice sounded in the still dawn air, ‘I might be Yunis. I have come out into the streets looking for human companionship.’ It seemed such an odd thing to have said that he could not even imagine how someone might reply to that in the waking world.

  Once again things were off on the wrong foot. He considered fleetingly whether he dared urinate in front of them. He should have avoided all this from the first by asking about their merchandise. But perhaps he was being too self-conscious. They probably saw that he was a little strange and gave the matter no great weight, but he raised his eyes and saw that they did. They were whispering together.

  ‘The nights are hard for me. I beg you to pass the few hours which remain in talking to me. I really should be most grateful.’

  There’s no point in trying to catch them out, he thought. I know that I am dreaming them. I must just be grateful for their company.

  Ladoo nodded, though they still looked suspicious, and Barfi began to talk. He talked about their trade and the profits to be made by working at night, though on this particular night they had sold nothing. And, of course, there were dangers in working at night too. The Mamlukes liked to keep a protective and profitable interest in such businesses. And then there were these horrible murders. It was said that Fatima the Deathly walked the streets again.

  ‘They say that she cuts men’s penises in half like bananas,’ interjected Ladoo jovially.

  The man passed his hand over his brow. ‘Please help me. I think that I have got the Arabian Nightmare.’ Then he remembered his appointment with the Ape and knew that the night was only just beginning.

  6

  From the Dawadar’s Garden

  to the Arqana

  One of the mysteries in my tale is who is the man who suffers the Arabian Nightmare? From the nature of the affliction it is apparent that it could be anyone, even you. But no, I did not wish to suggest that you had the Arabian Nightmare. At the very least that would be an impertinence and I digress inexcusably. No, what I wished to say here is that the tale I have embarked upon is more complex than I had bargained for. Balian, the Italian painter, the mysterious prostitute, the sailor called Emmanuel, the Dawadar, the Father of Cats, Vane,
my sister Mary, my good friend Bulbul: so many characters and there are more to come. We still have not met Fatima the Deathly but only heard of her by report. I grow nervous lest after all I may not be able to hold it all in my head and bring their stories to a successful conclusion. It is best now that we pause so that some of the characters may be better known.

  The Dawadar was in his garden, reclining on a pile of cushions. On either side of him knelt his two beautiful, moonfaced daughters. As the shadows spread through the garden the birds had begun to sing again. A swan swished through the long grass. It was sick and drugged and regarded them with a myopic eye. The heat, far from diminishing, continued to build up. The Dawadar’s thoughts were boiling in his brain. He absently shredded a palm frond between his fingers, so as to leave only its skeleton intact. It was surely too hot to move at all, yet beyond the walls he could hear the city in its usual turmoil. It was too tiring even to visualize it. As always the girls were talking about men and sex.

  ‘Bint Azaz says that in the lands of the Franks it is all very different. They never shave their private parts, and the husband and wife spend the whole night together in the same bed, and when they make love the wife lies on her back. Do you think that it could be better when the husband is uncircumcised?’