The Arabian Nightmare

by Robert Irwin

  ‘Let us eat some now and take the rest away with us.’ They nodded together excitedly, then paused. Finally Barfi broke off a finger and set to work chewing. Ladoo followed suit. Barfi could not have believed that anything could taste so nasty. It was dry and bitter, and the crumbling stuff clung around the back edges of the teeth. He recollected what it once had been, gagged twice and then it, and more besides, came vomiting out. Ladoo was taken the same way. They coughed and cried.

  ‘When the stomach laughs, the body vomits.’

  The Father of Cats was standing in the doorway, towering above them. They threw themselves into their vomit before his feet.

  ‘Strong stuff for little men. Up! Who are you?’

  ‘Barfi and Ladoo,’ one of them replied.

  ‘Yes, I do know you. You run a sweet stall near the Zuweyla Gate.’ To their amazement the grim old man began to giggle and then to caper in the doorway. ‘And have you been eating mumia? It’s not so good that way, is it? It tastes better when dissolved in alcohol. And what were you doing here?’

  Barfi and Ladoo shuffled on their knees.

  ‘Come on. I’m not angry.’ Indeed, he seemed to them to be smiling sweetly.

  ‘Looking for treasure.’

  ‘Looking for treasure! Well, there is none here, but I will give you treasure, if you will work for it.’

  Ladoo thought that treasure was not treasure if one had to work for it, but he did not voice this thought. ‘We shall do whatever you command.’

  ‘First I want you to try to remember. You have been talking. The word has gone all round Cairo. Some months ago a man came to your stall by night and engaged you in conversation. A strange man, doubtless, and almost certainly behaving very oddly. He told you that he had the Arabian Nightmare. I want you to describe him to me in as much detail as you can.’

  ‘We get a lot of customers late at night. Our sweets are very popular. Our halva is deemed particularly good. People come from other quarters to buy our halva. The fudges, though, are almost as popular—’

  Ladoo broke in. ‘Some of our customers, it is true, are a little odd, insomniacs who come to talk to us as much as to buy our sweets. We have to talk to them for the sake of our sales, but we don’t usually find much of profit to remember in those chats.’

  The Father of Cats tapped his foot impatiently.

  ‘But, of course,’ Ladoo resumed, ‘we do remember being told by some character that he had the Arabian Nightmare. Don’t we?’

  ‘Yes, but I can’t remember what he looked like.’

  ‘Neither can I.’

  The Father of Cats took this easily enough. ‘No matter. These memories can be recovered. I am going to take you downstairs now and put you to sleep. All that I want you to do is tell me what you have dreamed when you wake up, and there will be piles of money waiting beside your beds.’

  They descended into the cellars. The Father of Cats took Barfi by the ear and, tweaking it fiercely, forced him down on to one of the beds. Ladoo stood and watched.

  ‘Lie back,’ the Father of Cats said to Barfi, ‘and think of your toes falling asleep, then your feet and ankles, now your legs are heavy with sleep, your chest... your eyelids are too heavy to keep open. You lie there in the dark and you see things. You are near the Zuweyla Gate and you are going to meet a man.’

  He continued to whisper.

  The chaos of shape and colour adjusted itself. Barfi was near the Zuweyla Gate. It was late and the acrobats and equilibrists were packing up their benches. A few remaining people had gathered round a talking ape who was telling the story of the two kahins. Barfi believed that his brother Ladoo was beside him but he could not see him.

  A voice came from behind his left shoulder. ‘You are Barfi, are you not? Please help me. I think that I have the Arabian Nightmare.’

  Barfi turned and stared incredulously. It was the Father of Cats, haggard with pain. The Father’s head wavered from side to side for no apparent reason.

  In a feeble voice, the Father continued. ‘I need your help. Praises to God that you are here, but who sent you?’

  ‘You did.’

  The old man seemed unable to concentrate for pain. ‘I? But I am only a dream, as are you. Where was I when I sent you here?’

  Barfi reflected for a long time before replying, ‘Outside, outside everything, beyond all this. In your house, the House of Sleep. You sent me here to find the man who suffers the Arabian Nightmare.’

  The Father seemed dispirited and at a loss. He mumbled to himself and only slowly did he become audible. ‘Yet how do I dream when I never sleep...? Well, you won’t be much use then. Awake, I could never bear this. No, it would be terrible. No, no, no, no. I must never know and you must never tell. You must swear to me—but no, oaths sworn in dreams are not binding... Here is a difficulty. What shall we do then?’ He swayed about and contorted his face in indecision and then, with a sad gleam in his eye, produced a little box and continued, ‘Those who have the Arabian Nightmare remember nothing. To remember nothing is sweet. Won’t you look inside my little box?’

  ‘I think that if I did not have the Nightmare already, you would not be showing the box to me.’ And Barfi shook his head violently. Indeed, he found that his whole body was shaking violently, yet he was peering into the little box all the same. Its deep sides shelved downwards steeply and drew the eye inwards. In the centre of the box was a small, dark object that appeared to get nearer and then further, yet the further position was always nearer and nearer, if I did not have the Nightmare already, you would not be showing the box to me, me, me, me.’ He listened to his voice echo in the box. It was fascinating and repelling. Almost swooning, he peered closer, shaking.

  The shaking came from outside. He was being shaken awake in the cellar of the House of Sleep. The Father of Cats and Ladoo stood over him.

  ‘Well?’ said the Father of Cats.

  ‘I remember nothing,’ said Barfi.

  ‘Nothing at all?’ The old man was grim. ‘Well, I shall not be thwarted. I have a second string to my bow. Ladoo, take your brother’s place on the bed. Relax your toes, your ankles, your feet... Your eyes are sealed. Let the visions rise. I want you to go to my house and ask for me or, to be more accurate, my dream image, my khayal. My khayal shall assist you. Together you and he will go to the market place and meet the man who has the Arabian Nightmare. My khayal will tell you what to say when you return to us. You must do better than your brother.’

  Ladoo found himself in a street in the Ezbekiyya Quarter by night. The houses appeared a little shaky at first, but soon everything appeared natural. Ladoo drifted towards the House of Sleep. He had no will, for all dreamers lack the power of will, yet he was driven on by his mysterious mission.

  He entered the House of Sleep. The door pushed open easily. There was no porter and everywhere there were signs of dilapidation. Still a torch at the gate was lit, and it showed that the courtyard was covered with cockroaches. A few mangy cats continued to inhabit the place. From time to time one of them would pounce on a cockroach, breaking its back with its claws. Ladoo stood there scratching his head.

  ‘Welcome, stranger. I am Saatih. ’ It flowed across the paving stones and cockroaches towards him. ‘Shikk also welcomes you.’

  Shikk stood deep in the shadows, only half visible, like a marabout stork in a rigid pose of attention.

  ‘Peace, Masters, ’ said Ladoo. ‘I am sent to find the Father of Cats. Is he here? If not, where can I find him?’

  ‘You are sent? Who sent you?’

  ‘Somebody from outside. It is difficult. I cannot remember.’

  ‘It is difficult to think here. This is the Rat level of dreams. Our thoughts are cramped. Everything is small, very small. See how low the sky is. Since everything here is small, you have not noticed how even your dwarfish frame has shrunk.’

  They laughed. Saatih’s laugh was low and throaty. Shikk’s was shrill.

  ‘You will not find the Father of Cats here,’ Saatih
went on. ‘He has not been here for a very long time. We ask ourselves, is he sick or is he afraid to come? Perhaps he fears that he himself has the Nightmare or, rather, that it has him.’

  ‘I think I have it too,’ Ladoo ventured uncertainly.

  They laughed again.

  ‘Everybody does, but it is quite a different thing actually to have it. But we should like to see our old friend the Father of Cats again. In fact, if you are a friend of his too, take that message to him. Tell him that we are doing our best to keep his house tidy but that also we are waiting. Remind him too that one of the oldest stories in the Alam al-Mithal is that of the magical monster that escaped its inventor’s control. We like company and we are lonely; we like to know what is going on. You don’t enjoy our company, though, do you?’

  ‘I am not enjoying this at all,’ said Ladoo and struggled to wake. When he opened his eyes, he found himself in the shadow of a wall, staring out on the open wastes of the Tartar Ruins. Everything was light and airy, by comparison at least with the previous scene. A young and ragged foreigner lay sleeping beside him. An ape squatted over him.

  ‘This is the Ape’s level of the mind,’ said the ape who grinned in welcome.

  ‘I have a message,’ said Ladoo. ‘Shikk and Saatih wish to see the Master of the House of Sleep and they wish to tell him that one of the oldest stories in the Alam al-Mithal is of the magical monster that escaped its inventor’s control.’

  ‘One of the oldest, indeed, but not one of the best,’ said the ape. ‘Let me tell you better.’ And he told Ladoo stories about savage children, sinister infidels, walking heaps of clay and cities at the end of the World.

  Ladoo sat listening, his fearful encounter and his mission fast fading from his mind. The stories were enchanting, but, despite the sunlight, Ladoo found himself shivering, shaking, being shaken awake.

  He awoke again in the cellar of the House of Sleep. The Father of Cats and a very perturbed Barfi stood beside his bed. ‘Well?’ said the Father of Cats. i had such a beautiful dream. This ape told me stories. There was one about an old Jew who took some clay and The Father of Cats spat. ‘You have failed me, both of you,’ he said.

  Just then a slave ran down the steps and tugged at the sleeve of the Father of Cats. ‘Master, come quick. We have the Englishman.’

  The Father followed the slave up. Balian’s sleeping body had been discovered and brought within the gate.

  Later, when Balian awoke, he found himself lying strapped to a bed. It was difficult to see properly. The sun streamed through the shutters and sun-drenched motes of dust danced before his eyes. The lowness of the ceiling signified that it must be an upstairs room. The Father of Cats and his assistants were gathered in a huddle at the far edge of the room, almost beyond the range of his vision, all except Vane who was to explain each stage of the operation as it happened.

  For the moment he ignored his surroundings. The actual situation was threatening enough, yet the melancholia that seemed to sit upon him like a fat cat asleep on his stomach was more powerful. He struggled to trace back its origins to the dreams he had been having. The act of recalling a dream brought back to him the vision of fishermen he had seen on the shore at Alexandria, straining at the ropes, drawing in the net. Slowly it surfaced and was hauled on to land. Quite suddenly the water seeped out and thousands of silvery minnows could be seen flickering within.

  He had been in the kiosk with Zuleyka. They had been arguing and were angry with one another.

  ‘It’s the end. I am bored with your dreams,’ she had said. And he had replied, ‘But you are in my head with all my dreams, you and this kiosk!’

  ‘Well, if you wish, I am bored with being in your dreams. I am bored with what you dream.’

  ‘I can walk out of this kiosk and you will vanish for ever.’

  ‘This kiosk fills your head. You can’t walk out of your head. You can’t leave me either. I am as much part of you as you are. You thought that you dreamt that you were a man hiding in a garden. Actually you dreamt that you were a garden containing a hidden man.’

  ‘But if I can’t leave you, you can’t leave me.’

  ‘Of course I can. You can’t leave the dream but the dream can leave you.’

  ‘But you can’t leave me. I love you.’

  ‘You love the phantasm you have created, the initiatrix, the wise and golden-hearted prostitute who opens her legs and admits you to mysteries. But you don’t give me anything. You are passive. You are lying there waiting to be entertained and instructed.’

  That was the nastiest part of the dream, but it was not the beginning of their argument. He had awoken in the kiosk, thinking of Khatun, and the first thing he had said was, ‘That adventure we had in the garden of the Dawadar was very like an encounter I had previously had with an anonymous lady in Cairo in waking life.’

  ‘That is natural. Dreams are like stories. They both ride on the back of real life. Dreams feed on reality.’

  ‘Why did I see Emmanuel lying dead in the garden? Did you kill him?’

  ‘We killed him. He recognized us. At least he recognized my master.’

  ‘That man with the monkey, your master is —’

  ‘Have you ever heard of a secret book called The Galleon of the Apes? I should not expect you to have heard of it. It is guarded closely, we are told, by the devotees of the cult of the Laughing Dervish in Happy Valley. But Emmanuel had heard something of the contents of the book and encountered members of the Order as he travelled along the upper reaches of the Nile, and he recognized one of them that night and guessed our purpose in the garden.

  ‘The Galleon of the Apes is in the first instance a study of the building of the pyramids and the Sphinx. It laboriously demonstrates what is obvious—that such marvels could not be built today, and everywhere similar ruins testify to the former greatness of Man. The book teaches that there were once, thousands of years ago, great and elaborate civilizations on Earth and that, with their ingenious mechanical contrivances, they ruled the skies and the seas. The book teaches also the doctrine of the plurality of worlds and holds that there are other stars that are inhabited. Further it holds that millennia ago a fleet of galleons appeared over Earth, carrying apes from another star. They descended to Earth and mated with the humans. Ever since that ill-starred moment civilization has degenerated. The ingenious mechanical devices have been lost. Standards have been abandoned and the ape in Man takes over. Triviality and mass cruelty abound. To speak figuratively, the Ape rules the world.

  ‘The man with us in the garden was a Laughing Dervish who wished to test the doctrine of the book by seeing if apes and humans could indeed breed, for many hold such miscegenation to be impossible. The game of forfeits was proposed for no other purpose. It was our misfortune to have brought on before you Emmanuel, the one man in all Cairo who could detect our design and would try to stop it.’

  ‘Those ideas are absurd. To kill a man for them absurder yet. The doctrine of the Laughing Dervishes is ajoke, a parody of true knowledge, which, as the Blessed Niko of Cologne teaches us, should conduct us always to virtue.’

  ‘To discover or invent something is to put two familiar things together in an unfamiliar way, and that is the way of the joke and the riddle too.’

  ‘And how do I know that I too am not the victim of some elaborate joke or experiment designed by your colleague?’

  ‘What sort of answer do you want?’

  ‘I want the truth.’

  Her sigh was like a long, slow deflation. ‘You ask too many questions.’

  And then the argument had become more personal. It all ended up with them returning to the subject of Emmanuel. ‘You are looking at me as if I were a murderess, but it was you who wished him dead and the Spirit of the Alam al-Mithal acts always to fulfil your wishes. You knew he would have disapproved of your relationship with me and of what was going on in the garden. Secretly you wished him dead, so you had us kill him covertly in your sleep.’

  ‘But it
was only a dream!’

  ‘So it was your truest wish.’ All of a sudden she softened. ‘You still have the snake between your eyes, haven’t you? You never did attain relief that night. There comes a point when it is positively dangerous to delay the climax.’

  She ran her fingers down his penis as if it were a flute. ‘You know, the penis wishes not so much to discharge as to rest after discharge.’

  ‘My penis has no wishes.’

  She ignored this. ‘Similarly every story has its death wish, rushing on to become silence. And, similarly again, in reality we desire not what we think we desire but that we should not desire.’

  Once more the serpent was uncoiling. The knots were being smoothed away, a painful unwinding of knowledge and sexual frustration. Closer. Closer and closer. The moment was imminent, but as it approached something within him beyond his control recoiled from Zuleyka’s manipulation. He tried to cling to her, but it was like clinging to the ropes of the wind. He was waking up. A false climax. He lay there remembering and listened to the Father of Cats sharpen a knife on a whetstone. Vane sat beside him, explaining.

  20

  The Administration of Justice

  Dirty Yoll is Dirty Yoll no longer. While he lived his friends could never persuade him, either by teasing or by bullying, to accompany them to the public baths. It must be admitted that his filthy state was not all the Ape’s fault. Now that Yoll is dead his friends have had their way with him. It is the custom in these parts to wash the entire corpse. Both Christians and Muslims do this. Yoll will have been thoroughly washed. I cannot see into the grave, but I am sure that even his fingernails are immaculately clean.

  Since his death you have not, I am sure, had dreams of Dirty Yoll creeping up to pester you with his new theory about wet dreams. You have had no visions of Dirty Yoll showing you those miserable, half starved chickens that some rich man is raising at Bulaq. You have heard no mysterious rapping sounds in your house. The dry earth does not crack. No muffled story comes up from underground.