by Anna Tambour
The stone nightingale cage on the threshold of her father’s house has been empty for many years. Who needs a nightingale, when they only sing for their supper, while Mulliana works for hers. Her father is as celebrated for her rugs as he is for her voice.
He wandered lonely, as a cloud
THE OMNISCIENT DISGUISED HIMSELF as mustiness, and used- bookstore crawled till he was so filled with stories that had gone right with their authors that he forgot his own life.
He woke in The Call of the Wild. That author had been a good scribe, damn fine.
The Call (story #UY9* * *) was a favourite of the Omniscient’s—a more complex job than some. With Call, not only had the Omniscient given the writer the story, but he’d given the writer (an old clerk who had never lived anywhere other than his mother’s house) a life.
Oren H. Entsminger is a terrible name for an author, the Omniscient had subtly made known. So the clerk took the Omniscient’s advice and assumed the name and history of a man the Omniscient had watched and admired—a man who had actually done things, been a man as the Omniscient would have liked to be, if he could ever settle down.
What a damn fine time the Omniscient remembered—though Oren was duller than a pencil stub. He was a damn fine author: conscientious, always getting the message right, always checking with the Omniscient, “Is this the truth?”
Damn fine.
Truth was so easy then, only a speck of time ago. The Omniscient, in Oren’s day, had no problem seeing everything, recollecting perfectly, retelling with the accuracy of that reliable court witness whom he celebrated in story #G/84* * * (unfortunately, every time he gave that story to an author, the author failed to sell it).
“Damn fine. Oren. Or did I call him Jack?”
The Omniscient roused himself enough to examine where he was. Nestled right in the beginning of The Call, the ditty that has the line “chafing at custom’s call”.
Chafed was a good word for how he felt, and why come to custom’s call if I’m not appreciated? He began to feel mighty depressed again, and was thinking about wandering out for another almighty jag—maybe to end up in a Decameron, when his senses awoke enough to allow him to feel the rawsome pain of his grief.
His recent attempts to learn from people made him dose himself with self-analysis.
The stress of work is making you want to escape into books. And that leads to more stress, and more escape. These bookstore-crawling jags will only end in disaster.
“Love yourself,” he said. “And accept yourself as you are.”
Easy for some to say.
But then he thought of the shame of his last encounter, and he wanted to sink into pages again—never to come out. He could, in this bookstore. There were many comforting books that he could lose himself in, never to be disturbed.
Never to be used again.
“Damn them all!”
Is cursing the world the answer? And would Buck and D’artagnon and Scaramouche and Parker and Modesty curse the world? or run away, let alone choose suicide? They had no time for cowards.
But the pain of it, the shame:
Another best-selling author, my best scribe . . .
Everything had been going swimmingly, till page 487, when the Omniscient forgot. He could not, for the life of him remember what came next. “What did you see?” he asked himself overandover again. He had always remembered everything he’d ever seen and told it in every detail. It made me who I am today, he kept telling himself . . . or who I was. The great bulk of that story (a long one, the Omniscient remembered that) wandered like a cloud in the Omniscient’s memory. The closer he looked into the cloud, the more misty his memory became, till the cloud that was a story became an angry grey opaquity, and his memory of what he had formerly seen became its own unfathomable cloud, and his memory of what he had reported of the story in times past became . . . O! He felt that he could not move, as all around him was turmoiled. He might as well have been the eye of a storm, so calm looking, yet . . .
The author was patient for a time. Then he was furious. Then he was frantic. The book was expected by the author’s publisher. The story was expected by the author. And, though the Omniscient turned his memory inside out and shook it, not one word fell from him into the mind of the author, whose face purpled as he began to fulminate at volcanic blast.
In a panic, the Omniscient told the author the ending of quite a different story—just to have an end, or because I thought it was the correct ending? Either way, the shame was unbearable.
But if that were the only shame, the Omniscient would only suffer unbearable shame, a common enough sight in his observation of people.
But the false ending that he’d given the best-selling author wasn’t his only source of shame.
The author, after having sat, raged, and swallowed lots of pills, didn’t take the false ending the Omniscient gave him. He had known that it was false. The author lost faith in him . . . And shame of shame, horror of horrors, called upon the Muse.
“I’ve med up many a new tale,” she said, “when I hadn’t nobody to talk to, and was feeling a bit down, but I never think nothing more about ’em, and if you was to ask me to tell you one I couldn’t for the life o’ me; they’re all clean gone out’n my head.”
—Eva Gray *
* quoted by Thomas William Thompson in his “The Gypsy Grays as Storytellers”, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, 3rd series, vol. I, 1922; excavated from library stacks, displayed and discussed by Neil Philip (self-confessed “precious apothegmaticall Pedant”
** in his The Penguin Book of English Folktales (pp xviii, xix), Penguin Books, London, 1992.
** Dear Mr Philip,
We should form a Society.
Yrs in solidarity,
the O.
The relativity of pillows
WHILE SHE SAT ON THE NEST and he stood beside her, waiting for her eggs to hatch, a stork couple shared their time of luxury, watching the street below. They saw the normal clump of little boys clustered around the sweet shop. They saw the honey merchant’s donkey, standing half hidden in the doorway, blocking the entrance not by its bulk but by the promise of its swift back hooves. The stork couple saw the usual bustle of people, but they saw no Burhanettin nor Ekmel, for Burhanettin had practically wrenched Ekmel’s arm off in the rush to pull him into the privacy of Burhanettin’s kitchen in the back, where Burhanettin, the helvassi, made his secret- reciped honeyed sweets.
On the way, Burhanettin reached into his robe and pulled out a leather sack. He counted five coins into the hand of an old man behind the counter. “Go, uncle,” he said. “My toe is aflame again, so take this to Marwalitep with my respects.”
The old man bowed, but remained where he was.
“The storks miss your presence,” Burhanettin said, “and the shop needs a bit of quiet, so don’t come back today.”
Like a cedar in a storm, the top of the man moved slightly.
“The sweets will wait for you like your wife did when she was alive,” Burhanettin assured him.
So the old man bowed, not to Burhanettin but to the counter where the sweets sat under their veils of silk, protected from the flies that craved them, and the bees that always came, confused by this hive that was not a hive. Then he grunted some concurrence to Burhanettin and squeezed past the donkey, leaving Burhanettin and Ekmel alone.
Burhanettin pushed Ekmel into the back room and pulled shut the thick wooden door.
Ekmel trembled. Burhanettin’s secrets lived here, and in his head. Each helvassi had his own—the specialities that made them masters far above tradesmen; and in the case of Burhanettin, Ekmel knew as well as the whole town: Burhanettin was the master above masters. Burhanettin could teach the bees about honey, could teach the Heavenly One himself about Heaven (Holy be His Name, He who says Keep the Truth for it is holy).
But now to Ekmel, whose teeth ached always from Burhanettin’s sweets—the sharper the pain, the sharper the pleasure—Ekmel’s teeth ached now from the mere sugge
stion of their presence. His saliva flowed, pricked by the rich scents and sights of nougats, jellies, helvas, pastes, syrups, piles of pistachios and almonds and candied honey shards.
But Ekmel’s teeth always ached. And Ekmel always trembled in Burhanettin’s presence. He noticed now, neither his trembling nor the complicated feelings of his teeth. Burhanettin was all—or rather, Burhanettin’s attention to the glass in Burhanettin’s hand.
The helvassi’s face had turned the deep red of a baked quince. The veins on his forehead stood out and pulsed. He poked the olivewood stick up and down in the glass, pulling up a shiny red rope each time that slipped smoothly from the stick into the glass. He sniffed it, stuck his tongue out and almost touched it, and pulled his tongue back each time at the critical moment.
“Kirand-luhun?” Burhanettin said—out loud for the first time.
“Kirand-luhun.” A shiver ran down Ekmel’s back as he said the word.
“How much?”
Ekmel, an expert himself in the gauging of desire, saw with a sense of joy that surpassed everything on earth except his joy in eating Burhanettin’s helvas, that Burhanettin would pay anything he asked. Anything.
He forced his feet to move, his head to turn. He forced himself to stroke his little moustache, to stretch out his joy, the flow of pleasure from Burhanettin’s attention wholly centred upon him in a most delightful, newly respectful way.
“I haven’t decided,” he said. “Who did you get this from?” Burhanettin blurted, silly as a foreigner.
Ekmel’s trembling stopped, he was so surprised—Burhanettin was smitten, crazed with desire.
Ekmel smiled, drawing out his pleasure. His eyes closed like a cat’s, and he opened his mouth and yaw—
“Aaaaaggh!”
Burhanettin’s hand gripped Ekmel’s throat. The sweet maker’s eyes peered into Ekmel’s.
“Who?” Burhanettin thundered. “Before I peel your eyes like grapes.”
Ekmel’s hands flapped. His slippers fell off his waggling feet. His throat made noises but Burhanettin’s grip was too tight for words. “I tell,” was what he was trying to say, and finally Burhanettin dropped him, carefully, in a corner where the honey merchant’s body wouldn’t get in his way.
“Who did you get this from?” Burhanettin demanded. Ekmel knelt on the floor, trying to suck air at first, then pretending for precious seconds.
The question was outrageous. Ekmel’s commercial contacts were as much his trade as Burhanettin’s recipes were his. Burhanettin’s desire had driven the man insane, dangerously so. The mighty Burhanettin had flown into tempers before, had always frightened and excited Ekmel, but all cooks have their moods— and helvassis are the moodiest of master cooks. May he spend eternity with another as sweet as himself, Ekmel had prayed on other occasions. But Burhanettin had never done anything this surprising.
Now Ekmel was alarmed. Burhanettin’s eyes were mad as a thirst-crazed horse. But the theft of Ekmel’s livelihood—the demand to know who sold him the Kirand-luhun was nothing less—this outrage gave Ekmel strength. He stood up and dusted himself off, and a fine mist of powdered sugar fell from his clothes.
“I gathered it myself,” he said. “In my distant travels.”
And with that announcement, his knees began to shake. Somehow, he made his way to the door and opened it, and in the shop the old man was behind the counter as usual, and the sweets beckoned as always, and the donkey brayed from the doorway, and somehow Ekmel made his way to the counter where he purchased a three-occa bag of assorted sweets, including a long stick of nougat.
He bent his head to leave the shop, and still stooping at the threshold, broke off a piece of the nougat stick, handing it to the donkey who was blocking the way to the street. Then he slipped by.
The donkey turned around, following the rest of the piece and, incidentally, Ekmel the honey merchant.
If Burhanettin had wanted to stop Ekmel’s escape, he could have done so, easily as cracking an egg. He shut the door instead.
In his room of secrets, the master helvassi blew out the oil lamps. Now the only way he could tell night from day was the light that came from a high window with a stone-filigree screen, and the voice of the hour-keeper.
Burhanettin sat on a stool, his back against the windowed wall. His right arm held out the little glass, hung from the tips of his fingers.
The hours passed till the lace that mantled benches and the far wall dissolved. By the time the hour-keeper’s voice changed, Burhanettin was in no doubt. The glass held honey that possessed an undistinguished smell, but its colour! Not of honey, nor bled from alkanet root, nor sandalwood, nor even crushed kirmiz bugs, brilliant though their reds all shone in Burhanettin’s many helvas.
The stuff in the glass changed reds as the light dimmed without, and each red was more terrifyingly beautiful.
Kirand-luhun. Take too little, and madness seizes you. Take too much, and Death swoops you up. Take just the right amount (which must be as expertly judged as the amount of powdered pearl to stir into a batch of helva-i-golub) and the Kirand-luhun gives the unearthly sweetness that is love (mocking the stuff that rots the teeth). Burhanettin had never married, never dallied with a woman, because none had ever rivalled the ones in his dreams.
As a master helvassi, Burhanettin pondered the stuff in the glass. No recipe had ever eluded him, but he always tasted to find his way. The Kirand-luhun was not to be tasted.
“Be temperate in your taking, or . . . ” Burhanettin murmured the legend and strictures till they melded into a song.
“A man must know exactly how much Kirand-luhun to take,” to leap over the chasm of madness, defy Death’s grasp, and reach the place where the Kirand-luhun would give him Love—love that Burhanettin had yearned for and never sought. Why the Kirand- luhun had chosen to come to him, and why suspended in honey, Burhanettin studiously avoided considering.
“Never question the inexplicable.” He had no choice but to treat this as a Personal Order to be obeyed with more alacrity than a Decree from the Sultan himself.
The glow in the glass beckoned, commanded, tantalised and shamed. Burhanettin massaged his toes in the pre-dawn chill while his mind ran over the names for his most popular helvas. Pillows of delight. Lips of love. Pshaw! The higher the pile of pillows of delight, the lonelier the lover of my sweets. The hotter the tongue that melts my helva, the icier the bed.
When the hour-keeper’s nightstick tapped two hours past midnight, Burhanettin pushed himself away from the wall and stood, with much cracking of knee-joints. Normally he would have sighed at the pain, but he didn’t notice now, there was so much work to be done.
The librarian wore gloves
THE LIBRARIAN WORE GLOVES, common enough when handling precious works, but these gloves were fingerless and lined with sheepskin. He put down his pencil and blew on his blue-tipped fingers.
He had spent his day like most days, writing, or to be exact in today’s case, trying to. Today the plot had frustrated him so much that he spent much of the day staring at faint-ruled lines. A migraine trifled with him as he agonised over whether adhering to the story he was converting to present day was the ripper he’d once thought, or a bloated bore, and if a bore, where can I find inspiration, the pains of rising panic exacerbated by the pangs of guilt over Unproductive Time (he did try to reach 2,000 WPD). The migraine stabbed his right eye playfully with a shard of broken- glass light till he raised his hand to rub his face and noticed that time had, for once in his life, flown. Hah! Too late to worry today. “He smiled ruefully,” he said. The migraine withdrew, miffed.
He changed his spectacles and stood, uncricking his back. There was only one client left in the library.
“Check out a book today. And take his Chequers away,” he chanted in the dimly lit room. The sound cheered him. He’d yelled that ditty with two thousand others on that glorious Sunday in May when librarians from McMurdoo Blight in the north of North to Ill of Tinks in the money-dripping South conve
rged in London for the only demo in which he’d ever participated, in all his twenty-nine years.
“Will we have to burn wee books to keep warm?” fiery Fiona something-or-other (University of Edinburgh Special Collections) had asked the admiring throng, to the exciting heckle of “Don’t give ’em big ideas!” and the throng-swell in reply of “Librarians . . . unheated . . . will never be defeated!”
That was some day . . . and the next morning, at that flat (he never caught whose), there must have been fifty librarians sleeping it off. Whoever thinks of librarians as staid would have blushed to have seen the pictorial tumble of limbs in the lounge.
He smiled at the memory. “Pictorial tumble’s good,” he said, toward the woman whom-you-would-know-by-her-picture-on-the- back-of-scads-of-books-and-the-top-of-many-Books-pages sitting at one of the two precious-volume-examination tables.
“Pictorial tumble’s good,” he repeated, louder.
Louder yet, she tore a page from her yellow pad.
He walked over to her. “Shall I be keeping this for you?” he said, closing the book and picking it up.
She gave him one of her looks.
“Her eyes smouldered,” he said.
“Worm, thou’rt.” She rearranged her black and mirror-things shawl so that it covered half her grinning face.
As she pushed open the priceless door, she tossed back, “Quit while you’re nowhere.”
Giles Moneyfeather grinned to himself. He liked her, the batface. And she could write a damn good historical thingamy. Actually, many. She was like a queen bee, popping them out with a regularity that kept many workers in work. She was one of Giles’ constant ‘clients’, as the library called them these days.
A bit soppy for his taste, her books. And for anyone he cared to write for. That’s why, he supposed, she hadn’t felt threatened when he’d shown her his efforts. Paltry, he’d called them.
Not so, she’d corrected.
So kind, he’d said, but what is one to say?