The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (Vintage International)

by A. S. Byatt

  ‘That was only natural.’

  ‘Natural but very stupid. Better to use the wish against pregnancy, my lady, and also foolish to waste the wish in such a hurry, for they were both young and lusty and hot-blooded, and what did happen would have happened without my interference, and I could have helped her in more important ways. For of course when Roxelana heard that Gülten was to bear Mustafa’s child, she ordered her eunuchs to sew her up in a sack and throw her from the Seraglio Point into the Bosphorus. And I thought to myself, having flown back from Mustafa’s execution, that at any moment she would bethink herself of me, and wish-I don’t know exactly what – but wish to be far away-or out of the sack-or back in Circassia-I waited for her to formulate the wish, because once she had made it we would both be free, I to fly where I pleased and she to live, and bear her child. But her limbs were frozen cold, and her lips were blue as lapis with terror, and her great blue eyes were starting out of her head – and the gardeners-the executioners were also the gardeners, you know – bundled her into the sack like a dead rosebush-and carried her away to the cliff over the Bosphorus. And I thought of rescuing her at every moment-but I calculated that she must, even involuntarily, wish for her life, and that if I delayed, and went invisibly through the garden in the evening – the roses were in full bloom, the perfume was intense to swooning-and over she went, and drowned, before I could quite make up my mind to the fact that she was in no state to make any wish.

  ‘So there was I,’ said the djinn, ‘half-emancipated, you could say, but still tied to the bottle by the third unperformed task. I found I was free to wander during the day within a certain range of the enchanted flask, but I was compelled to return at night and shrink myself to its compass and sleep there. I was a prisoner of the harem, and likely to remain so, for my bottle was securely hidden under a tile in the floor of a bathroom, a secretly loosened tile, known only to the drowned Circassian. For women closed into those places find many secret places to hide things, for they like to have one or two possessions of their own-or a place to hide letters-that no one else, they fondly think, knows of. And I found I was unable to attract anyone’s attention to the tile and the bottle; these things were out of my power.

  ‘And so I haunted the Topkapi Sarayi for just under a hundred years, attached by a silken cord you might say poetically, to the flask hidden in the bathroom floor. I saw Roxelana persuade Suleiman the Magnificent to write to the Shah Tahmasp of Persia, with whom their youngest son, Bayezid, had taken refuge, and command the Shah to execute the young Prince-which he would not do for hospitality’s sake, but allowed it to be done by Turkish mutes, as was customary, and Bayezid was put to death, with his four sons and a fifth, three years of age, hidden in Bursa. He would have made an excellent ruler, too, I think-and so it was generally thought.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Gillian Perholt.

  ‘It was customary, my lady, and Roxelana wished to assure a safe succession for her eldest son, Selim, Selim the Sot, Selim the drunkard, Selim the poet, who died in a bathhouse after too many flasks of wine. Roxelana was long dead, buried beside the Süleymaniye, and Mihrimah her daughter built a new mosque to commemorate Suleiman, with the help of the great architect Sinan, who made the Süleymaniye in holy rivalry with Haghia Sophia. And I watched sultans come and go – Murad III, who was ruled by women, and strangled five of his brothers, Mehmed HI, who strangled nineteen of his, and then gave them sumptuous burials – he died when a dervish predicted he would live another fifty-five days-on the fifty-fifth, in fear and trembling. I watched Mustafa, the holy madman, who was brought from the cages of the princes, deposed, brought back after the slaughter of the boy Osman, and deposed by Murad IV, who was the most cruel. Can you imagine a man, my lady, who could see a circle of lovely girls dancing in a meadow, and order them all to be drowned because they sang too loudly? No one spoke in those days, in the palace, for fear of attracting his attention. He could have a man killed because his teeth chattered involuntarily for fear of being put to death. And when he was dying he ordered the death of his only surviving brother, Ibrahim. But his mother, Kösem, the Greek, the Valide Sultan, lied to him and said it was done, when it was not. I saw him smile and try to get up to see the corpse, and fall back in his death-throes.

  ‘As for Ibrahim. He was a fool, a cruel fool, who loved things of the harem where he had grown up. He listened to an old storyteller in the harem-a woman from north of the Ukraine, who told him of northern kings who made love to their concubines in rooms entirely lined with sables, and with sables on their couches and sables on their bodies. So he made himself a great robe, sable without, sable within, with great jewels for buttons, which he wore whilst he satisfied his lust – smell was not good, after a time. And he believed that the pleasures of the flesh would be more intense the larger the expanse of flesh with which he coped, so he sent out janissaries over all his lands to seek out the fleshiest, the hugest women, and bring them to his couch, where he scrambled all over them dragging the edges of his dark furs like a beast. And that is how I came to return to my bottle, for the fattest of all, the most voluptuous, the most like a sweet-breathed cow, whose anklets were twice your present waist, madame-she was an Armenian Christian, she was docile and short of breath – it was she who was so heavy that she dislodged the tile under which my bottle lay concealed – and so I stood before her in the bathroom and she wheezed with anxiety. I told her that the Valide Sultan planned to have her strangled that night at the banquet she was dressing for, and I thought she would utter a wish-wish herself a thousand miles away, or wish that someone would strangle the Valide Sultan-or even wish a small wish, such as “I wish I knew what to do,” and I would have told her what to do, and rushed on wide wings to the ends of the earth afterwards.

  ‘But this globular lady was self-satisfied and slow-witted, and all she could think of to say was “I wish you were sealed up in your bottle again, infidel Ifrit, for I want nothing to do with dirty djinns. You smell bad,” she added, as I coiled myself back into atomies of smoke and sighed myself into the flask and replaced the stopper. And she carried my flask through the rose-garden where my white Circassian had been carried, and threw me over the Seraglio Point into the Bosphorus. She undertook this herself; I could feel the voluptuous rippling and juddering of her flesh as she progressed along the paths. I was about to say she had not taken so much exercise in years, but that would be unjust – she had to use her musculature very vigorously in certain ways to cope with the more extreme projects of Sultan Ibrahim. And Kösem did have her strangled that night, just as I had told her. It would have been more interesting to have been released by those doughty Sultanas, by Roxelana or Kösem, but my luck was femininity.

  ‘And so I tossed about in the Bosphorus for another two hundred and fifty years and was then fished up by another fisherman and sold as an antique to a merchant of Smyrna, who gave me – or my flask – as a love-token to his young wife, Zefir, who had a collection of curious-shaped bottles and jars in her quarters in the harem. And Zefir saw the seal on the bottle and knew what it was, for she was a great reader of tales and histories. She told me later she spent all night in fear, wondering whether to open the flask, in case I might be angry, like the djinn who threatened to kill his rescuer because he had become enraged, over the centuries, that the poor man had taken so long to come to his aid. But she was a brave creature, Zefir, and ardent for knowledge, and mortally bored, so one day, alone in her chamber, she pushed away the seal.

  ‘What was she like?’ said Gillian, since the djinn appeared to have floated off into a reminiscent reverie.

  His eyelids were half-closed and the edges of his huge nostrils fluttered.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Zefir. She had been married at fourteen to the merchant who was older than she was, and was kind enough to her, kind enough, if you call treating someone like a toy dog or a spoiled baby or a fluffy fat bird in a cage being kind. She was good-looking enough, a sharp, dark person, with secret black-brown eyes and an angry l
ine of a mouth that pulled in at the corners. She was wayward and angry, Zefir, and she had nothing at all to do. There was an older wife who didn’t like her and didn’t talk to her, and servants, who seemed to her to be mocking her. She spent her time sewing huge pictures in silk-pictures of stories – the stories from the Shahnama, of Rüstem and the Shah Kaykavus, who tried to emulate the djinns and fly, and devised a method of some ingenuity-he tied four strong yet hungry eagles to a throne, and four juicy legs of mutton to the rising posts of the canopy of the throne-and then he seated himself, and the eagles strove to reach the meat, and lifted the throne-and the shah – towards the heavens. But the eagles tired, and the throne and its occupant fell to earth-she had embroidered him coming down headlong and head first, and she had sewed him a rich carpet of flowers to fall on, for she thought him aspiring, and not a fool. You should have seen the beauty of her silk legs of mutton, like the life – or rather, death. She was a great artist, Zefir, but no one saw her art. And she was angry because she knew she was capable of many things she couldn’t even define to herself, so they seemed like bad dreams-that is what she told me. She told me she was eaten up with unused power and thought she might be a witch – except, she said, if she were a man, these things she thought about would be ordinarily acceptable. If she had been a man, and a westerner, she would have rivalled the great Leonardo, whose flying machines were the talk of the court of Suleiman one summer –

  ‘So I taught her mathematics, which was bliss to her, and astronomy, and many languages, she studied secretly with me, and poetry – we wrote an epic poem about the travels of the Queen of Sheba-and history, I taught her the history of Turkey and the history of the Roman Empire, and the history of the Holy Roman Empire-I bought her novels in many languages, and philosophical treatises, Kant and Descartes and Leibnitz –’

  ‘Wait,’ said Gillian. ‘Was this her wish, that you should teach her these things?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said the djinn. ‘She wished to be wise and learned, and I had known the Queen of Sheba, and what it was to be a wise woman

  ‘Why did she not wish to get out of there?9 asked Gillian.

  ‘I advised against it. I said the wish was bound to go wrong, unless she was better-informed about the possible places or times she might wish herself into-I said there was no hurry –’

  ‘You enjoyed teaching her.’

  ‘Rarely among humankind can there have been a more intelligent being,’ said the djinn. ‘And not only intelligent.’ He brooded.

  ‘I taught her other things also,’ he said. ‘Not at first. At first I flew in and out with bags of books and papers and writing things that I then hid by temporarily vanishing them into her bottle collection-so she could always call on Aristotle from the red glass perfume-bottle, or Euclid from the green tear-bottle, without needing me to re-embody them –’

  ‘And did that count as a wish?’ asked Gillian severely.

  ‘Not really’ The djinn was evasive. ‘I taught her a few magical skills – to help her-because I loved her –’

  ‘You loved her –’

  ‘I loved her anger. I loved my own power to change her frowns to smiles. I taught her what her husband had not taught her, to enjoy her own body, without all the gestures of submission and non-disturbance of his own activities the silly man seemed to require.’

  ‘You were in no hurry for her to escape – to exercise her new powers somewhere else –’

  ‘No. We were happy. I like being a teacher. It is unusual in djinns-we have a natural propensity to trick and mislead your kind. But your kind is rarely as greedy for knowledge as Zeflr. I had all the time in the world –’

  ‘She didn’t,’ said Gillian, who was trying to feel her way into this story, occluded by the djinn’s own feelings, it appeared. She felt a certain automatic resentment of this long-dead Turkish prodigy, the thought of whom produced the dreaming smile on the lips of what she had come to think of – so quickly – as her djinn. But she also felt troubled on Zefir’s behalf, by the djinn’s desire to be both liberator and imprisoner in one.

  ‘I know,’ said the djinn. ‘She was mortal, I know. What year is it now?’

  ‘It is 1991.’

  ‘She would be one hundred and sixty-four years old, if she lived. And our child would be one hundred and forty, which is not possible for such a being.’

  ‘A child?’

  ‘Of fire and dust. I planned to fly with him round the earth, and show him the cities and the forests and the shores. He would have been a great genius-maybe. I don’t know if he was ever born.’

  ‘Or she.’

  ‘Or she. Indeed.’

  ‘What happened? Did she wish for anything at all} Or did you prevent her to keep her prisoner? How did you come to be in my çesm-i bülbül bottle? I do not understand.’

  ‘She was a very clever woman, like you, Djil-yan, and she knew it was wise to wait. And then – I think-I know-she began to wish-to desire-that I should stay with her. We had a whole world in her little room. I brought things from all over the world-silks and satins, sugar-cane and paw-paw, sheets of green ice; Donatello’s Perseus, aviaries full of parrots, waterfalls, rivers. One day, unguardedly, she wished she could fly with me when I went to the Americas, and then she could have bitten off her tongue, and almost wasted a second wish undoing the first, but I put a finger on her lip-she was so quick, she understood in a flash – and I kissed her, and we flew to Brazil, and to Paraguay, and saw the Amazon river, which is as great as a sea, and the beasts in the forests there, where no man treads, and she was blissfully warm against my heart inside the feathered cloak – there are spirits with feathered cloaks out there, we found, whom we met in the air above the forest canopy – and then I brought her back to her room, and she fainted with joy and disappointment.’

  He came to another halt, and Dr Perholt, savouring loukoum, had to encourage him.

  ‘So she had two wishes. And became pregnant. Was she happy to be pregnant?’

  ‘Naturally, in a way, she was happy, to be carrying a magic child. And naturally, in another, she was afraid: she said perhaps she should ask for a magic palace where she could bring up the child in safety in a hidden place-but that was not what she wanted-she said also she was not sure she wanted a child at all, and came near wishing him out of existence –’

  ‘But you saved him.’

  ‘I loved her. He was mine. He was a small seed, like a curved comma of smoke in a bottle; he grew and I watched him. She loved me, I think, she could not wish him undone.’

  ‘Or her. Or perhaps you could see which it was?’

  He considered.

  ‘No. I did not see. I supposed, a son.’

  ‘But you never saw him born.’

  ‘We quarrelled. Often. I told you she was angry. By nature. She was like a squall of sudden shower, thunder and lightning. She berated me. She said I had ruined her life. Often. And then we played again. I would make myself small, and hide. One day, to amuse her, I hid in the new çesm-i bülbül bottle that her husband had given her: I flowed in gracefully and curled myself; and she began suddenly to weep and rail and said, “I wish I could forget I had ever seen you.” And so she did. On the instant.’

  ‘But– ‘said Dr Perholt.

  ‘But?’ said the genie.

  ‘But why did you not just flow out of the bottle again? Solomon had not sealed that bottle –’

  ‘I had taught her a few sealing-spells, for pleasure. For my pleasure, in being in her power, and hers, in having power. There are humans who play such games of power with manacles and ropes. Being inside a bottle has certain things – a few things – in common with being inside a woman-a certain pain that at times is indistinguishable from pleasure. We cannot die, but at the moment of becoming infinitesimal inside the neck of a flask, or a jar, or a bottle – we can shiver with the apprehension of extinction – as humans speak of dying when they reach the height of bliss, in love. To be nothing, in the bottle – to pour my seed into her-it
was a little the same. And I taught her the words of power as a kind of wager-a form of gambling. Russian roulette,’ said the djinn, appearing to pluck these unlikely words from the air.

  ‘So I was in, and she was out, and had forgotten me,’ he concluded.

  ‘And now,’ said the djinn, ‘I have told you the history of my incarcerations, and you must tell me your history.’

  ‘I am a teacher. In a university. I was married and now I am free. I travel the world in aeroplanes and talk about storytelling.’

  ‘Tell me your story.’

  A kind of panic overcame Dr Perholt. It seemed to her that she had no story, none that would interest this hot person with his searching look and his restless intelligence. She could not tell him the history of the western world since Zefir had mistakenly wished him forgotten in a bottle of çesm-i bülbül glass, and without that string of wonders, how could he understand her?

  He put a great hand on her towelled shoulder. Through the towel, even, his hand was hot and dry.