by A. S. Byatt
‘It was not. That was not what she told him. Not exactly.’
‘Will you tell me what she told him?’
‘If you wish me to.’
‘I wish-Oh, no. No, that isn’t what I wish.’
Gillian Perholt looked at the djinn on her bed. The evening had come, whilst they sat there, telling each other stories. A kind of light played over his green-gold skin, and a kind of glitter, like the glitter from the Byzantine mosaics, where a stone here or there will be set at a slight angle to catch the light. His plumes rose and fell as though they were breathing, silver and crimson, chrysanthemum-bronze and lemon, sapphire-blue and emerald. There was an edge of sulphur to his scent, and sandalwood, she thought, and something bitter – myrrh, she wondered, having never smelt myrrh, but remembering the king in the Christmas carol
Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume
Breathes a life of gathering gloom,
Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying
Sealed in a stone-cold tomb.
The outsides of his thighs were greener and the insides softer and more golden. He had pulled down his tunic, not entirely adequately: she could see his sex coiled like a folded snake and stirring.
‘I wish,’ said Dr Perholt to the djinn, ‘I wish you would love me.’
‘You honour me,’ said the djinn, ‘and maybe you have wasted your wish, for it may well be that love would have happened anyway, since we are together, and sharing our life stories, as lovers do.’
‘Love,’ said Gillian Perholt, ‘requires generosity. I found I was jealous of Zefir and I have never been jealous of anyone. I wanted-it was more that I wanted to give you something – to give you my wish –’ she said, incoherently. The great eyes, stones of many greens, considered her and the carved mouth lifted in a smile.
‘You give and you bind,’ said the djinn, ‘like all lovers. You give yourself, which is brave, and which I think you have never done before-and I find you eminently lovable. Come.’
And without moving a muscle Dr Perholt found herself naked on the bed, in the arms of the djinn.
Of their love-making she retained a memory at once precise, mapped on to every nerve-ending, and indescribable. There was, in any case, no one to whom she could have wished to describe the love-making of a djinn. All love-making is shape-shifting – the male expands like a tree, like a pillar, the female has intimations of infinity in the spaces which narrow inside her. But the djinn could prolong everything, both in space and in time, so that Gillian seemed to swim across his body forever like a dolphin in an endless green sea, so that she became arching tunnels under mountains through which he pierced and rushed, or caverns in which he lay curled like dragons. He could become a concentrated point of delight at the pleasure-points of her arched and delighted body; he could travel her like some wonderful butterfly, brushing her here and there with a hot, dry, almost burning kiss, and then become again a folding landscape in which she rested and was lost, lost herself for him to find her again, holding her in the palm of his great hand, contracting himself with a sigh and holding her breast to breast, belly to belly, male to female. His sweat was like a smoke and he murmured like a cloud of bees in many languages-she felt her skin was on fire and was not consumed, and tried once to tell him about Marvell’s lovers who had not ‘world enough and time’ but could only murmur one couplet in the green cave of his ear. ‘My vegetable love should grow/Vaster than empires and more slow.’ Which the djinn smilingly repeated, using the rhythm for a particularly delectable movement of his body.
And afterwards she slept. And woke alone in her pretty nightdress, amongst her pillows. And rose sadly and went to the bathroom, where the çesm-i bülbül bottle still stood, with her own finger-traces on its moist sides. She touched it sadly, running her fingers down the spirals of white – I have had a dream, she thought – and there was the djinn, bent into the bathroom like the Ethiopian woman in the television box, making an effort to adjust his size.
‘I thought –’
‘I know. But as you see, I am here.’
‘Will you come to England with me?’
‘I must, if you ask me. But also I should like to do that, I should like to see how things are now, in the world, I should like to see where you live, though you cannot describe it as interesting.’
‘It will be, if you are there.’
But she was afraid.
And they went back to England, the narratologist, the glass bottle, and the djinn; they went back by British Airways, with the bottle cushioned in bubble plastic in a bag at Gillian Perholt’s feet.
And when they got back, Dr Perholt found that the wish she had made before Artemis between the two Leylas was also granted: there was a letter asking her to give the keynote paper in Toronto in the fall, and offering her a Club-class fare and a stay in the Xanadu Hotel, which did indeed have a swimming-pool, a blue pool under a glass dome, sixty-four floors above Lake Ontario’s shores. And it was cold and clear in Toronto, and Dr Perholt settled herself into the hotel room, which was tastefully done in warm colours for cold winters, in chestnuts, browns and ambers, with touches of flame. Hotel rooms have often the illusory presence of a magician’s stage set-their walls are bare concrete boxes, covered with whipped-up white plaster, like icing on a cake, and then the soft things are hung from screwed-in poles and hooks, damask and voile, gilt-edged mirror and branching candelabra, to give the illusion of richness. But all could be swept away in a twinkling and replaced by quite other colours and textures – chrome for brass, purple for amber, white-spotted muslin for gold damask, and this spick-and-span temporariness is part of the charm. Dr Perholt unpacked the nightingale ‘s-eye bottle and opened the stopper, and the djinn came out, human-size, and waved his wing-cloak to uncramp it. He then shot out of the window to look at the lake and the city, and returned, saying that she must come with him over the water, which was huge and cold, and that the sky, the atmosphere, was so full of rushing faces and figures that he had had to thread his way between them. The filling of the air-waves with politicians and pop-stars, TV evangelists and vacuum cleaners, moving forests and travelling deserts, pornographic bottoms and mouths and navels, purple felt dinosaurs and insane white puppies-all this had deeply saddened the djinn, almost to the point of depression. He was like someone who had had the habit of riding alone across deserts on a camel, or rushing off across savannah on an Arab horse, and now found himself negotiating an endless traffic-jam of film-stars, tennis-players and comedians, amongst the Boeings circling to find landing-slots. The Koran and the Old Testament, he told Dr Perholt, forbade the making of graven images, and whilst these were not graven, they were images, and he felt they were infestations. The atmosphere, he told her, had always been full of unseen beings-unseen by her kind-and still was. But it now needed to be negotiated. It is as bad, said the djinn, in the upper air as in bottles. I cannot spread my wings.
‘And if you were entirely free,’ said Dr Perholt, ‘where would you go?’
‘There is a land of fire – where my kind play in the flames –’
They looked at each other.
‘But I do not want to go,’ said the djinn gently. ‘I love you, and I have all the time in the world. And all this chatter and all these flying faces, they are also interesting. I learn many languages. I speak many tongues. Listen.’
And he made a perfect imitation of Donald Duck, followed by a perfect imitation of Chancellor Kohl’s orotund German, followed by the voices of the Muppets, followed by a surprising rendition of Kiri Te Kanawa which had Dr Perholt’s neighbours banging on the partition wall.
The conference was in Toronto University, ivy-hung in Victorian Gothic. It was a prestigious conference, to use an adjective that at this precise moment is shifting its meaning from magical, from conjuring-tricks, to ‘full of renown’, ‘respectable in the highest’, ‘most honourable’. The French narratologists were there, Todorov and Genette, and there were various orientalists too, on the watch for western sentiment a
nd distortion. Gillian Perholt’s title was ‘Wish-fulfilment and Narrative Fate: some aspects of wish-fulfilment as a narrative device’. She had sat up late writing it. She had never learned not to put her lectures together under pressure and at the last minute. It was not that she had not thought the subject-matter out in advance. She had. She had thought long and carefully, with the çesm-i bülbül bottle set before her like a holy image, with its blue and white stripes enfolding each other and circling and diminishing to its mouth. She had looked at her own strong pretty newish fingers travelling across the page, and flexed the comfortable stomach-muscles. She had tried to be precise. Yet she felt, as she stood up to speak, that her subject had taken a great twist in her hands, like a magic flounder trying to return to the sea, like a divining-rod pointing with its own energy into the earth, like a conducting-rod shivering with the electrical forces in the air.
As usual, she had tried to incorporate the telling of a story, and it was this story that had somehow twisted the paper away from its subject. It would be tedious to recount all her arguments. Their tenor can be guessed from their beginning.
‘Characters in fairy-tales,’ said Gillian, ‘are subject to Fate and enact their fates. Characteristically they attempt to change this fate by magical intervention in its workings, and characteristically too, such magical intervention only reinforces the control of the Fate which waited for them, which is perhaps simply the fact that they are mortal and return to dust. The most clear and absolute version of this narrative form is the story of the appointment in Samarra-of the man who meets Death, who tells him that he is coming for him that evening, and flees to Samarra to avoid him. And Death remarks to an acquaintance that their first meeting was odd “since I was to meet him in Samarra tonight.”
‘Novels in recent time have been about choice and motivation. Something of the ineluctable consequentiality of Samarra still clings to Raskolnikov’s “free” act of murder, for it calls down a wholly predictable and conventional vengeance. In the case of George Eliot’s Lydgate, on the other hand, we do not feel that the “spots of commonness” in his nature are instruments of inevitable fate in the same way: it was possible for him not to choose to marry Rosamund and destroy his fortune and his ambition. We feel that when Proust decides to diagnose sexual inversion in all his characters he is substituting the novelist’s desires for the Fate of the real world; and yet that when Swann wastes years of his life for a woman who was not even his type, he made a choice, in time, that was possible but not inevitable.
‘The emotion we feel in fairy-tales when the characters are granted their wishes is a strange one. We feel the possible leap of freedom-I can have what I want – and the perverse certainty that this will change nothing; that Fate is fixed.
‘I should like to tell you a story told to me by a friend I met in Turkey-where stories are introduced bit var mis, bir yok mis, perhaps it happened, perhaps it didn’t, and have paradox as their inception.’
She looked up, and there, sitting next to the handsome figure of Todorov, was a heavy-headed person in a sheepskin jacket, with a huge head of white hair. This person had not been there before, and the white mane had the look of an extravagant toupee, which, with blue-tinted glasses, gave the newcomer a look of being cruelly in disguise. Gillian thought she recognised the lift of his upper lip, which immediately changed shape under her eyes as soon as she had this thought, becoming defiantly thin and pursed. She could not see into the eyes: when she tried, the glasses became almost sapphire in their rebarbative glitter.
‘In the days when camels flew from roof to roof,’ she began, ‘and fish roosted in cherry trees, and peacocks were as huge as haystacks, there was a fisherman who had nothing, and who moreover had no luck fishing, for he caught nothing, though he cast his net over and over in a great lake full of weeds and good water. And he said, one more cast, and if that brings up nothing, I shall give up this métier, which is starving me, and take to begging at the roadside. So he cast, and his net was heavy, and he pulled in something wet and rolling and malodorous, which turned out to be a dead ape. So he said to himself, that is not nothing, nevertheless, and he dug a hole in the sand and buried the ape, and cast his net again, for a second last time. And this time too, it was full, and this time it struggled under the water, with a life of its own. So he pulled it up, full of hope, and what he had caught was a second ape, a moribund toothless ape, with great sores and scabs on its body, and a smell almost as disagreeable as its predecessor’s. Well, said the fisherman, I could tidy up this beast, and sell him to some street musician. He did not like the prospect. The ape then said to him-If you let me go, and cast again, you will catch my brother. And if you do not listen to his pleas, or make any more casts, he will stay with you and grant you anything you may wish for. There is a snag, of course, there is always a snag, but I am not about to tell you what it is.
‘This limited honesty appealed to the fisherman, who disentangled the thin ape without much more ado, and cast again, and the net struggled away with satisfactory violence and it took all his force to bring it to shore. And indeed it contained an ape, a very large, glossy, gleaming ape, with, so my friend particularly told me, a most beautiful bottom, a mixture of very bright subtle blue, and a hot rose-colour, suffused with poppy-coloured veins.’
She looked at the sapphire-coloured dark glasses to see if she had done well and their owner nodded tersely.
‘So the new ape said that if the fisherman would release him, and cast again, he would draw up a huge treasure, and a palace, and a company of slaves, and never want again. But the fisherman remembered the saying of the thin ape, and said to the new one, “I wish for a new house, on the shore of this lake, and I wish for a camel, and I wish for a feast-of moderate proportions-to be ready-cooked in this house.”
‘And immediately all these things appeared, and the fisherman offered a share of the delicious feast to the two apes, and they accepted.
‘And he was a fisherman who had heard a great many tales in his time, and had an analytic bent, and he thought he understood that the danger of wishes lay in being overweening or hasty. He had no wish to find himself in a world where everything was made of gold and was quite inedible, and he had a strong intuition that the perpetual company of houris or the perpetual imbibing of sherbet and sparkling wine would be curiously wearisome. So he wished quietly for this and that: a shop full of tiles to sell and an assistant who understood them and was honest, a garden full of cedars and fountains, a little house with a servant-girl for his old mother, and finally a little wife, such as his mother would have chosen for him, who was not to be beautiful as the sun and moon but kind and comfortable and loving. And so he went on, very peacefully, creating a world much more like the peaceful world of “happy-ever-after” outside tales than the hectic one of the wishes granted by Grimm’s flounder, or even Aladdin’s djinn. And no one noticed his good fortune, much, and no one envied him or tried to steal it, since he was so discreet. And if he fell ill, or his little wife fell ill, he wished the illness away, and if someone spoke harshly to him he wished to forget it, and forgot.
‘And the snag, you ask?
‘This was the snag. He began to notice, slowly at first, and then quicker and quicker, that every time he made a wish, the great gleaming ape became a little smaller. At first just a centimetre there, and a centimetre here, and then more and more, so that he had to be raised on many cushions to eat his meals, and finally became so small that he sat on a little stool on top of the dining-table and toyed with a tiny junket in a salt-cellar. The thin ape had long gone his way, and returned again from time to time, now looking quite restored, in an ordinary sort of hairy way, with an ordinary blue bottom, nothing to be excited about. And the fisherman said to the thin ape,
‘“What will happen if I wish him larger again?”
‘“I cannot say,” said the ape. “That is to say, I won’t say.”
‘And at night the fisherman heard the two apes talking. The thin one held t
he shining one in his hand and said sadly,
‘“It goes ill with you, my poor brother. You will vanish away soon; there will be nothing left of you. It is sad to see you in this state.”
‘“It is my Fate,” said the once-larger ape. “It is my Fate to lose power and to diminish. One day I shall be so small, I shall be invisible, and the man will not be able to see me any more to make any more wishes, and there I shall be, a slave-ape the size of a pepper-grain or a grain of sand.”
‘“We all come to dust,” said the thin ape sententiously.
‘“But not with this terrible speed,” said the wishingape. “I do my best, but still I am used and used. It is hard. I wish I were dead but none of my own wishes may be granted. Oh, it is hard, it is hard, it is hard.”
‘“And at this, the fisherman, who was a good man, rose out of his bed and went into the room where the two apes were talking, and said,
‘“I could not help hearing you and my heart is wrung for you. What can I do, O apes, to help you?”
‘And they looked at him sullenly and would not answer.
‘“I wish,” said the fisherman then, “that you would take the next wish, if that is possible, and wish for your heart’s desire.”
‘And then he waited to see what would happen.
‘And both apes vanished as if they had never been.
‘But the house, and the wife, and the prosperous business did not vanish. And the fisherman continued to live as well as he could-though subject now to ordinary human ailments with the rest of us-until the day he died.’
‘In fairy-tales,’ said Gillian, ‘those wishes that are granted and are not malign, or twisted towards destruction, tend to lead to a condition of beautiful stasis, more like a work of art than the drama of Fate. It is as though the fortunate had stepped off the hard road into an unchanging landscape where it is always spring and no winds blow. Aladdin’s genie gives him a beautiful palace, and as long as this palace is subject to Fate, various magicians move it violently around the landscape, build it up and cause it to vanish. But at the end, it goes into stasis: into the pseudo-eternity of happy-ever-after. When we imagine happy-ever-after we imagine works of art: a family photograph on a sunny day, a Gainsborough lady and her children in an English meadow under a tree, an enchanted castle in a snowstorm of feathers in a glass dome. It was Oscar Wilde’s genius to make the human being and the work of art change places. Dorian Gray smiles unchangingly in his eternal youth and his portrait undergoes his Fate, which is a terrible one, a fate of accelerating deterioration. The tale of Dorian Gray and also Balzac’s tale of La Peau de Chagrin, the diminishing piece of wild-ass’s skin that for a time keeps Fate at bay, are related to other tales of the desire for eternal youth. Indeed we have methods now of granting a kind of false stasis, we have prostheses and growth hormone, we have plastic surgery and implanted hair, we can make humans into works of some kind of art or artifice. The grim and gallant fixed stares of Joan Collins and Barbara Cartland are icons of our wish for this kind of eternity.