The Arabian Nightmare

by Robert Irwin

  The Dawadar groaned inwardly.

  Her sister came back at her scornfully, ‘Sleep with a Frank! Better sleep with an ape! At least an ape can get it up.’

  ‘And what would you know about it?’

  The Dawadar lost his temper. ‘Out! Out! Out! Back to the house. Go on, out!’

  He relaxed and some lines by Hafiz of Shiraz ran through his mind:

  O green parrot,

  Who discourses eternally of mysteries,

  May thy beak never want water.

  The green parrot was, he knew, a figure for opium. He took another handful of the stuff from the bronze dish beside him and swallowed it meditatively. He was considering his daughters’ behinds as they moved languorously away from him into the house. The opium had a bitter, nauseous taste and coated his mouth with a dry fur. It was the Dawadar’s opinion that opium gave no positive pleasure. It merely eased the pain of being in a body, the congestion of blood in the veins, the scraping of sinew against bone, the shaking of the brain’s porridge within the skullcase, all part of our everyday level of pain which was to be noticed only when opium alleviated it. For the Dawadar, pleasure was the absence of pain, while good could be defined only as the absence of evil.

  He listened to the shouts and whispers from beyond the wall, the voices of Cairo, whose dangerous tides lapped round the edges of the garden, or sometimes he only imagined them.

  ‘Cairo is worse than Bagdad, full of prostitutes and hashish eaters. I shall be glad to get out of here!’

  ‘A loaf of bread costs two dinars!’

  ‘Foreigners are everywhere in the city. If you believe that they have come here just to trade, you must be mad!’

  ‘Listening to storytellers is a waste of time.’

  ‘These people who go hunting for buried treasure, who are they? In my opinion, they are just trying to escape from their wives.’

  ‘The Laughing Dervishes are on their way from Alexandria. They claim that God has sent them to mock our rulers.’

  ‘He was young, so it was no surprise to us that he was found with his throat cut outside the Bab al-Nasr.’

  ‘I am waiting for permission from the Dawadar. It’s been two years since I sent in my petition.’

  ‘Patience is beautiful.’

  ‘Do you know what is to happen next?’

  The Dawadar’s lids began to droop and then to flutter as he struggled to stay awake. There were certain problems, he thought, that could be considered with safety only in full consciousness; for instance, the Father of Cats and his pursuit of the young Englishman who was having such trouble in leaving the city. Swift or slow, the Dawadar dimly sensed that it was a story that could have only a nasty ending. The Englishman was a natural victim, the Father a master, a tormentor, a manipulator.

  The Dawadar spent most of his days dozing on opium. He saw barely enough of life to fuel his dreams: a couple of hundred faces, the view from the Citadel, a handful of incidents, treasured and constantly reused in inner reflection. The world is all made of one substance; it will suffice to examine any portion of it thoroughly.

  The Dawadar looked through the garden with slitted eyes. His daughters were still moving away from him down the path and little bits of opium still clung to the teeth. The garden was beautiful, but there was nothing to which he could put a name; it was a mass of spikes and blossoms, in the twilight-black shot with purple, releasing a heavy, blended scent. In his mind he moved among its anonymous branches and looked back from the deep shadow of the trees to see himself sitting in the middle of the garden, a lonely figure in a vulnerable sprawl with the idiot smile of opium cutting across his face like a gash in an over-ripe melon. The opiate fantasy weakened and with a lurch he found himself back in the middle of the garden. He passed his thin hands over clouded eyes and waxen skin, dreaming awake of what might be if things were otherwise. Between twenty years of harsh military asceticism in the barracks of the Citadel and a future that teemed with erotic intrigue and political metaphysics, a drugged arrest was achieved.

  He closed his eyes and let himself drift off into reverie. The city was falling apart. Bread supplies could not be assured. It was not safe to walk the streets at night. The end of the Sultanate was prophesied. Curious people had come to Cairo. The doctors of al-Azhar said that a man with the Arabian Nightmare was now in Cairo, but how did they know? The arrival of the Laughing Dervishes was imminent. Then there was this Englishman...

  The Dawadar was committed to the siesta, or what he thought of as his beauty sleep, in an almost professional sense. He was writing a book on beauty care for soldiers, administrators and other men of action. He had provisionally entitled it The Key of Embellishment and the Way of Adornment for the Slaves of the Sultan and the Swords of the Faith. In it he demonstrated the importance of the siesta in relaxing the muscles of the face and smoothing away those worried wrinkles. Whatever crisis raged within, one should strive always to keep the face limpid. In it he also suggested that the sweating fit that accompanied an opiate doze cleansed the pores and produced a nice clear skin.

  The range of the book was broad, its depth profound. How could the man in the saddle preserve his skin’s natural oils while on campaign? Could tattooing ever be recommended? What sort of make-up should one wear to attract women and what sort to attract other men? The use of resin as a depilatory. Massage. Toupees. Codpieces. Kohl, henna and varnishes. Nor did he neglect the psychological aspects. For instance, in the struggle to look beautiful, just as in armed combat, it was crucially important to feel oneself to be young. It was important too to acquire the élite face, to look like money, for money rouses desire more surely than perfume... It was difficult. A pioneer thinker, he did not underestimate the problems of working with those heavy Turkish features, often battle-scarred and lined with the stress of affairs of state.

  He awoke, as he always did from his siesta, shaky and cold and with the sense of rising from great depths. The same troubles of the day returned to plague him. The city was falling apart. Bread supplies could not be assured. It was not safe to walk the streets at night. The end of the Sultanate was prophesied. The doctors of al-Azhar said that there was a victim of the Arabian Nightmare even now in Cairo, but how did they know? The arrival of the Laughing Dervishes was imminent. Then there was this mystifying Englishman, and something would have to be done about that Italian...

  Giancristoforo awoke to find again a dark figure, humped and shrouded, standing almost on his feet, looking down over him. Then it disappeared. This was his only visitor. Even before coming to Cairo, he had been familiar with it and known its name; it was called Azrael, the Angel of Death. Azrael visited everyone, but not everyone saw him. He appeared at the weak points of a man’s life. The closer he was to the foot of the bed, the closer the man was to death. When he bent over the man’s head, then death was indeed imminent. Azrael pulled the soul out of the body, beginning with the toes; it was very painful. Giancristoforo never awoke without a sense of dreadful anticipation. To open his eyes in an empty room was always a joyous relief. But sometimes the room was not empty. A dozen times now Azrael had stood before Giancristoforo, each time a little closer. Closer, closer and closer, Azrael was the shadow of his life, steadily shortening.

  ‘Millions now living will never die,’ he had been told. A bitter intelligence, for he now knew that he would not be one of them. Yet there was comfort of a sort in the knowledge that he was not alone here and that someone watched him while he slept. The blobs of colour which had formed the angel danced momentarily on his pupils and then dispersed, leaving only the faint reflections of a torch in the outer chamber.

  He was in the Citadel, in the subterranean area known as al-Jubb; more specifically, he had learnt that he was in that portion of it which was known as Arqana, the Oozer, for obvious reasons. He was sodden wet, yet very hot. The foetid heat crawled over his body like sensual ants. Water glistened on the walls which were very close. Drowsily he ran his hands over his sticky body and then up to
feel the closely pressing walls of this unnatural womb. He disgusted himself. He pad-died his hands listlessly in the waters around him. He recalled dimly how, years ago, lying on a hillside near Pavia with friends under the sun, he had vowed to himself that, no matter what might happen to him in the future, the intense pleasure of this moment was more than sufficient to compensate him in advance for it. But as he now reflected, God had heard him on that hillside near Pavia so many years ago and accepted his challenge. Now his anguish was so intense that his body, his soul and his life were all scarred for ever by present pain. Nothing balances against anything, he thought. The I that laughs and the I that weeps are two different Is... That morning, in the coffee house, Balian must have thought him touched in the head by the heat. He wondered at the impulse that had led him to summon over that rather dreamy and witless young man and to talk so intensely at him. Perhaps he had seen some element in him that was common to them both. In any case it had probably been a mistake. Giancristoforo had not realized at the time how closely he was being watched by the sleep teacher and his men. Presumably suspicion would fall on Balian for having talked to him. They might be looking for that book too; Giancristoforo had abstracted it from Vane’s baggage.

  The book’s title in elegant rhyming Arabic, The Dream of the Old Pilgrim in Search of the Bezoar Stone of Wisdom, in which the Tongue of Informed Eloquence is Let Loose on the Pastures of Ignorance, had left him at first uncertain as to whether he had found what he sought. The preface however reassured him.

  He said, ‘The Old Pilgrim awoke from a long dream and asked, “Tell me in what animal is the Bezoar Stone of Wisdom to be found?”

  The figure of Good Counsel appeared and he said, “The Bezoar Stone is a secretion of the Rukh.”

  “Good, and what is the Rukh?”

  “The Rukh is a bird with a name but no body.”’

  Then Good Counsel advised the Old Pilgrim to inquire no further, but, of course, the interrogation went on. Fleetingly Giancristoforo recalled how the dialogue and attached commentary continued, but he hastily relegated it to the area of his mind in which he tried not to think about his intentions towards God. He tried to think of something else and thought of the real purpose of his mission to Cairo. He hastily tried to think of something else again.

  Doubtless that old fool of a consul was making protests about his arrest. The only effect of those protests would be to stimulate the authorities to fetch him from his cell and to try to determine why he was so important, to put him to the question. He did not exactly look forward to the Dawadar and his torturers, but it was the Father and his assistants whom Giancristoforo really feared. But his friends in Cairo were not without resources, and it was far from improbable that his escape could be engineered before he came before the inquisition of the Mamlukes and that he would see blue sky once more before his final meeting with Azrael.

  7

  Inside the House

  of the Father of Cats

  In the beginning I described my tale as a romance, and it is in a sense, yet of course it is also a true tale. My audience may feel that an air of unreality is given to my narrative by the fact that the narrator features in the dreams of the sleeping Englishman. Yet you too may have featured in the dreams of those who know you. Have you given thought to how you may appear to them then...?

  Vane was recrossing the city, supporting the Father of Cats on his arm. Birds cruised at the periphery of his vision, raising their wings like lead and bringing their heavy fans down to beat the syrupy, gleaming air. Dust stirred upwards around their feet and hung in the syrupy gleam. The cries of street vendors came from far away. It was the light of late afternoon and the colours seemed not to come from our sun. All was quiet and slow, like a city under water. They were looking for Balian.

  ‘Rashid thinks that he saw him in a dream last night, but he cannot be sure where.’

  They crossed out of the Ezbekiyya district into the Street of the Cross-Legged Tailors. Seated at its entrance a man raised the severed stumps of his arms to them in supplication. They passed on down the street into the Suq of the Perfumers. In the suq three children with hideously advanced conjunctivitis tried to take them into a certain house; the reason for this was not clear. A man intervened to shoo them away. As they thanked him, he turned towards them and revealed that half his face was falling away in rotting red lumps. As they doubled back towards the Citadel, they passed a cat basking in the sun. One of its eyes hung out loosely from its socket, connected only by the ganglion.

  ‘Have you ever noticed,’ asked the Father of Cats, ‘how on some days one encounters many more crazy men or cripples than on others?’

  Vane made no reply. It would have been hard not to notice.

  ‘It is a manifestation of the power of my enemy. On certain days he draws them into the streets from the suburbs and the cellars as a warning, to show us the extent of his kingdom. Now there are more of the leprous and palsied in the city than there are healthy men. One of these days, he will give the signal and they will rise to kill us all.’

  Vane shuddered inwardly. He recalled that he had heard talk that the Thieves’ Guild was not always satisfied with money. If they found that the victim was carrying too little, they might also take an arm and a nose as well, so initiating the victim into their brotherhood. Christians and Jews were particularly vulnerable, for they were not allowed to wear a sword within the territories of the Sultan.

  The Father of Cats found signs of the coming troubles enciphered everywhere. Deep in the Alam al-Mithal, in a remote region where there were more signs than meanings, more causes than events, pressure was building up and flowing over from basin into basin, until it had begun now to trickle into the real world, but the Father knew more than he was prepared to tell Vane about these things.

  He was, Vane thought, a shrivelled intellectual toad, sitting at the centre of a web of impersonal relationships... a spinning toad. Vane had been with the Father of Cats twelve years now, yet the latter’s character and aims remained profoundly enigmatic.

  The Father never talked about his past and his own instruction in oneirology and the related sciences. It was a point of pride with him, Vane thought, to discover more about other people than he divulged about himself to them. Cold, cagey and austere, he never seemed to relax with visitors until he had assured himself that he had a hold over them or had indeed recruited them as disciples. The School thrived and the Father was certainly master of all the levels of dreaming as far as Vane knew them, yet he never felt that the School and its mysteries were an all-consuming preoccupation for the Father. He always seemed to have some other project in hand. On some days he would be visited by Mamluke officers, tradesmen and other people whose faces and bearing made it obvious that they were not interested in the inner world. The Father, he surmised, had projects in hand, projects of staggering complexity, projects within projects linked to yet others, schemes the failure of which were essential to the success of other greater designs, and these in turn were covered and insured by feints and bluffs in other directions, all moving towards some overwhelming plan whose objective could not even be guessed at by others and of which the old man himself was, perhaps, only dimly conscious. All this was to be gathered by allusion.

  Occasionally the schemes, if indeed they were schemes, appeared not to be going well and the Father sat moodily tense in a corner of his room, seeming not to know Vane’s name, seeming hardly to know his own. More often these days, though, he gave the appearance of confidence.

  Something was coming into being and it would fall easily into the old man’s grasp. Then he was alert and spry. Vane thought that he listened not with his ears but with his hooded eyes, and then the Father issued decisive, often waspish, directives. Elated or moody, there was always something hard about him. He was too lean and sinewy to make a good meal, Vane irreverently judged. It was hard to imagine him asleep, and he did not allow anyone to see him asleep.

  Vane recalled their first meeting. The gat
e of the House of Sleep was masked; around its corner, hunched in a niche, the porter had nodded Vane by. Vane had walked on, noting as he did so the swirl of calligraphy over the gate which read, ‘O you who are about to sleep, entrust your soul to God, who never sleeps’ (a piece of conventional piety to which the Father, Vane was later to discover, had no commitment whatsoever). A servant had vaguely indicated where the Father was to be found, and Vane walked in unannounced. The Father had been sitting on the floor with his back to him.

  ‘I have been expecting you.’

  ‘How do you know who I am?’

  ‘I dreamt last night that you would come.’

  ‘How extraordinary!’

  ‘Not at all. I have dreamt that dream every night for the last fifteen years.’

  That was to be the pattern of the years to come, for the Father customarily employed a blend of flattery and mockery in his education of Vane.

  In his youth Vane had commenced the study of theology at Oxford. He was an enthusiastic student, but since he was also poor, he had supported his studies by petty theft, only to be told before the end of his first year that his suspect conduct and notorious morals would forever debar him from receiving his bachelorship. So he had crossed to Europe to serve first as a routier, then to work for himself as a mercenary and jack of all low trades, but times were hard and his enterprises dangerous.

  A temporary common interest in grave robbery had brought him together with the Jew, Elias de Medigo, from whose lips he first heard casually muttered reference to the sleep teachers who moved up and down the roads of Europe and Asia like tinkers. These sleep teachers, according to Elias the Cabalist, subsisted by telling fortunes from dreams, but to the initiate they taught the art of conscious mastery and self-fulfilment in dreams. So far Vane’s career in crime had not brought him the wealth and women he craved so desperately. He was curiously attracted to the notion of achieving this sort of self-gratification in a secret inner world.