The Barnum Museum: Stories (American Literature Series)
Page 11
I tore my eyes away and saw on the lamp table the small, flat paper bag. Quickly I thrust the postcard into the bag.
I turned off the lamp and could not sleep. The oppressive postcard, the clattering rain, the labyrinth of tangled bedclothes, my racing mind, all lashed me into heavy wakefulness. Sometime in that hellish night I heard a dim cry, a thud, a splash, but I was sick to death of Broome, I was sick to death of it all, and lay with clenched fists in the streaming dark, imagining the bloody stone, the circle of spreading ripples, the floating hair. Toward dawn I slept, and was wakened not long after by the banging of the bathroom door.
I was the first one down for breakfast, and I rose wiping my lips as two silent couples were studying the menu. Through the cold morning rain I made my way down the steep street, leaning forward in the wind and holding my umbrella with two hands, one on the curving handle and one under the spokes. Though it was ten of eight, Plumshaw was there. I had known she would be. The look she gave me, when I entered under the tinkling bell, seemed to say: no returns accepted. I balanced my dripping umbrella carefully against the counter and strode toward the passage as the handle began to slide in a dream-slow arc. In the warren of rooms and passages I lost my way and came to a room filled with old furniture: a flattish rolled-up carpet lay bent across an armchair, and a dressmaker’s dummy, wearing nothing but a wide-brimmed black hat, rose up from behind an upside-down bicycle. After that I found myself in a room with a boarded-up window, and then I stepped through a narrow passage into the room with the rack of postcards. At the table I kept looking at the entrance, but Plumshaw didn’t appear. Furtively I pulled the paper bag from my pocket and slipped out the postcard, pausing for an instant before thrusting it into the middle of a cluster of cards. In that pause I glanced at it, but in the poor light I saw only a vague brown scene, with something dim, perhaps a figure, at the end of the rocky point. Wildly I spun the teetering rack and turned away. At that moment I was seized by a violent curiosity, like a hand gripping my throat, and stepping back to the rack I began searching desperately through postcards of baroque fountains and Alpine huts and old railroad trains. It was Plumshaw who saved me: she walked into the room and I whirled around. She was carrying a shoebox under one arm.
“I thought you might like to see these,” she said, taking off the lid and holding out a box tightly stuffed with postcards. “There are some very nice views.”
“Not today, no, not right now. Here, allow me.” I took the box from her, tucked it under my arm, and followed her to the front of the shop. My umbrella hung by its handle from the side of the counter. I set down the box next to the cash register and pulled from the candy rack a cellophane bag of gumdrops. “One of these instead.” There was no price on any of the candy; I looked forward to being amazed. Plumshaw disappointed me by ringing up seventy-five cents. “More rain,” I said, gesturing vaguely toward the window.
“It rains often, here in Broome.” She paused a moment, drew herself up, and added, “The jellybeans are also very good.”
In my room I ate two gumdrops and packed my bag, which seemed to contain nothing but damp clothes. As I swung across the landing I nearly knocked into the woman with the book, who looked at me in alarm and stepped back against a wall. “Wonderful weather!” I said. She blinked at me through her glasses and said quietly, as if reproachfully, “I love it when it rains.” She looked disapprovingly at my suitcase. I reached into my pocket and held out the open bag of gumdrops. She shook her head quickly. I imagined staying at Broome, taking her out to dinner, marrying her. “I don’t like gumdrops,” she said. “Goodbye,” I said, and bounded down the stairs. At the desk in the front hall Mrs. Kearns looked at my suitcase with red, rheum-glittering eyes. I had paid for three nights; she said nothing at all as I nodded at her and stepped onto the front porch.
Rain splashed on the flagstone path and ran from the roof gutters. I turned up the collar of my trench coat and made my way through cuff-high wet grass to the gravel parking lot pooled with rain. My windshield was covered with large wet leaves. I threw my dripping suitcase in the car and backed out onto the muddy lane, remembering suddenly the black-and-silver ballpoint I had left on the writing table, and making a mental gift of it to John Kearns. It would look good in the pocket of his corduroy jacket. As I turned onto the steep street, in the uphill direction, I saw the shops plunging downhill in the rearview mirror, and I was seized by the certain feeling that the moment the street vanished from view, suddenly the clouds above the shops would part, a big yellow sun would burst forth, the sky would turn bright, dazzling blue.
THE
EIGHTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD
For Mark Lehman
Late afternoon, the slant sun bright and the sky blue fire, Sinbad the merchant sits in the warm shade of an orange tree, in the northeast corner of his courtyard garden. Through half-closed eyes he sees spots of sun in leafshade, the white column of the marble sundial, the flash of light on a far white fountain’s rim. The voyages flicker and tremble like sunlight on fountain water, and Sinbad cannot remember on which of the seven voyages he arrives at a shore where the trees have ripe yellow fruit and the streams flow crystal clear, he cannot remember, he cannot remember whether the old man clinging to his back comes before or after the hairy apelike creatures who swarm upon the ship, gnawing the ropes and cables with their sharp teeth.
The first European translation of The Arabian Nights was made by the French orientalist Antoine Galland, in twelve volumes published between 1704 and 1717. Galland’s Les Mille et Une Nuit [sic], Contes Arabes, contains only twenty-one stories, including the Histoire de Sindbad le Marin. It is interesting to consider that neither Shakespeare, nor Milton, nor Dante, nor Rabelais, nor Cervantes knew the story of Sinbad the Sailor, or indeed of The Arabian Nights, which did not exist in the imagination of Europe until the eighteenth century.
I abode awhile in Baghdad-city savoring my prosperity and happiness and forgetting all I had endured of perils and hardships and sufferings, till I was again seized with a longing to travel and see strange sights, whereupon I bought costly merchandise meet for trade, and binding it into bales, repaired to Bassorah. There I found a tall and noble ship ready to sail, with a full crew and a company of merchants. I took passage with them and set forth in all cheer with a fair wind, sailing from island to island and sea to sea, till one day a great darkness came over the sun, whereat the captain cried out, “Alas! Alas!” and cast his turban to the deck. Then the merchants and the sailors crowded around him and asked in great fear, “O master, what is the matter?” Whereupon he answered, “Know, O my brethren (may Allah preserve you!), that we have come to the sea of whirling waters. There is no might save in Allah the Most High, who alone can deliver us from destruction.” Hardly had he made an end of speaking when the ship struck a great swirling and tumbling of waters, which carried it round and round. Some of the merchants were thrown from the ship and drowned, and others made shift to shelter themselves; I seized a rope and lashed myself to the mast, from which post I saw our ship plunge down in the turning water-funnel till the walls of ocean reached high overhead. Then as I fell to weeping and trembling, and besought the succor of Allah the Almighty, behold, a great force smote the ship and broke it into planks, throwing me into the sea where I seized a piece of mast and continued to be carried down by the turning water; and I was as a dead man for weariness and anguish of heart.
From the pillowed divan in the northeast corner of the courtyard garden, under the shady orange tree, Sinbad can see, through leafshade and sunshine, the white column of the marble sundial that stands in a hexagon of red sand in the center of the courtyard. He cannot see the black shadow on top of the sundial, cast by the triangle of bronze, but he can see the slightly rippling shadow of the column on the red sand. The shadow is twice the length of the column and extends nearly to the edge of the hexagon. Sometimes he remembers only what he has spoken of, say the tall white dome soaring above him and how he walked all around it, finding no
door. But sometimes he remembers what he has never spoken of: the stepping from sun to shadow and shadow to sun as he circled the white dome of the roc’s egg, the grass, crushed by his footsteps, rising slowly behind him, the sudden trickle of perspiration on his cheek, the itching of his left palm scraped on a branch of the tree he had climbed shortly before, his head among the leaves, and there, beyond the great white thing in the distance, a greenish-blue hill shaped like a slightly crushed turban, a slash of yellow shore, the indigo sea.
There are two different versions of the Sinbad story, each of which exists in several Arabic texts, which themselves differ from one another. The A version is “bald and swift, even sketchy” (Gerhardt, The Art of Story-Telling: A Literary Study of the Thousand and One Nights, 1963); the B version is “much more circumstantial.” The B redaction may be an embellished version of A, as Gerhardt thinks likely, or else A and B may both derive from an earlier version now lost. The matter of embellishment deserves further attention. B does not simply supply an additional adjective here and there, but regularly provides details entirely lacking in A. In the first voyage, for example, when Sinbad is shipwrecked and reaches an island by floating on a washtub, he reports in the B version that “I found my legs cramped and numbed and my feet bore traces of the nibbling of fish upon their soles” and that, waking the next morning, “I found my feet swollen, so made shift to move by shuffling on my breech and crawling on my knees” (Burton)—details not present in A. In this sense, B is a series of different voyages, experienced by a different voyager.
So clinging to my piece of broken mast and turning in the sea I bemoaned myself and fell to weeping and wailing, blaming myself for having left Baghdad and ventured once again upon the perils of voyages; and as I thus lamented, lo! I was flung forth from the whirling waters, and felt land beneath my side. And marveling at this I lifted my head and saw the sides of the sea rising far above me and at the top a circle of sky. At this my fear and wonder redoubled and looking about me I saw many broken ships lying on the ocean floor, and in the mud of the floor I saw red and green and yellow and blue stones. And taking up a red stone I saw it was a ruby, and taking up a green stone I saw it was an emerald; and the yellow stones and blue stones were topazes and sapphires; for these were jewels that had spilled from the treasure chests of the ships. Then I went about filling my pockets with treasure until I could scarcely walk from the heaviness of the jewels I had gathered. And looking up at the water-walls all about me I berated myself bitterly, for I knew not how I could leave the bottom of the sea; and I felt a rush of wind and heard a roar of waters from the ocean turning in a great whirlpool about me. And seeing that the walls of the sea were coming together, my heart misgave me, and I looked where I might run and hide, but there was no escape from drowning. Then I repented of bringing destruction on myself by leaving my home and my friends and relations to seek adventures in strange lands; and as I looked about, presently I caught sight of a ring of iron lying in the mud and seaweed of the ocean floor. And lifting the ring, which was attached to a heavy stone, I saw a stairway going down, whereat I marveled exceedingly.
Odor of oleander and roses. From a window beyond the garden a dark sound of flutes, soft slap of the black feet of slave girls against tiles. The shout of a muleteer in the street. Although he can no longer reconstruct the history of each voyage, although he is no longer certain of the order of voyages, or of the order of adventures within each voyage, Sinbad can summon to mind, with sharp precision, entire adventures or parts of adventures, as well as isolated images that suddenly spring to enchanted life behind his eyelids, there in the warm shade of the orange tree, and so it comes about that within the seven voyages new voyages arise, which gradually replace the earlier voyages as the face of an old man replaces the face of a child.
According to Gerhardt (The Art of Story-Telling), the story of Sinbad was probably composed at the end of the ninth or beginning of the tenth century. According to Joseph Campbell (The Portable Arabian Nights, 1952), the story probably dates from the early fifteenth century. According to P. Casanova (Notes sur les Voyages de Sindbâd le Marin, 1922), the story dates from the reign of Haroun al Raschid (786–809). According to the translator Enno Littmann (Die Erzählungen aus den Tausendundein Nächten, 1954), the story probably dates from the eleventh or twelfth century.
Now when I had descended four of the stairs I replaced the stone over my head, for fear the waters of the sea would rush down on me; after which I continued down the stairway, till the steps of stone grew wet and I came to a dark stream, into which the steps passed. Presently I saw floating on that stream a raft whereon sat an old man of reverend aspect who wore black robes and a black turban, and I cried out to him, but he spake not a word; and stopping at the steps he waited till I sat down behind him. Then we two set forth along the dark stream, which flowed between walls of black marble. Though I accosted him, he turned not his head toward me, nor uttered a word; so in silence we passed along that stream for two days and two nights, till waking on the third day I saw that our way was along the banks of a broad river in sunlight, past date groves and palm groves and stately gardens that came down to the river. Then I saw white minarets and the gilded domes of mosques, and I cried out in astonishment and wonder, for it was Baghdad-city. So I called out to people passing over a bridge, but no one took notice of me; and seizing the pole from the old man, who made no motion to resist, I pushed to shore. Then I passed along the riverbank till I came to the bridge-gate that led into the market street, where I saw people passing; and though I cried out to them, none answered me, nor looked at me; nor did I hear any sound of voices or of passing feet, but all was still as stone. And a great fear coming over me, I wept over myself, saying, “Would Heaven I had died at the bottom of the sea.”
Above the rows of orange trees that border the south and west sides of the courtyard, Sinbad sees the tops of pink marble pillars. The deep, pillared corridor runs along all four sides of the courtyard and is surmounted by a gallery upon which all the rooms of the upper story open. Beyond the south wall is a second courtyard with a corridor of pillars, and beyond that a garden, and beyond the garden wall a grove of date palms and orange trees, leading down to the Tigris. The seven voyages have enriched him. In the warm shade and stillness of the garden, it seems to Sinbad that the dreamlike roc’s egg, the legendary Old Man of the Sea, the fantastic giant, the city of apes, the cavern of corpses, all the shimmering and insubstantial voyages of his youth, have been pressed together to form the hard marble of those pillars, the weight of that orange bending a branch, that sharp-edged shadow. Then at times it is quite different: the pillars, the gallery, the slave girls and concubines, the gold-woven carpets, the silk-covered divans, the carved fruits and flowers on the ceilings, the wine-filled flagons shimmer, tremble, become diaphanous, and dissolve to reveal the unwound turban binding his waist to the leg of the roc, the giant’s sharp eyeteeth the size of boar’s tusks, the leg bone of the corpse with which he smashes the skulls of wives and husbands buried alive in the cavern, the shadow of the roc darkening the sun, the jewels torn from the necks of corpses, the legs of the clinging old man black and rough as a buffalo hide.
The three major English translations of The Arabian Nights are by Edward William Lane (three volumes, 1839–41), John Payne (nine volumes, 1882–84), and Richard Burton (ten volumes, 1885; six supplemental volumes, 1886–88). The translation by Lane contains roughly two fifths of the original material; the tales he does include are heavily bowdlerized. In the story of Sinbad, for example, the episode of the mating horses in the first voyage is omitted. The translation by John Payne is the first complete and unexpurgated version in English. Burton’s translation is likewise complete and unexpurgated; it relies so heavily on Payne, borrowing entire sentences and even paragraphs, that Burton cannot escape the charge of plagiarism. “Burton’s translation,” Gerhardt states, “really is Payne’s with a certain amount of stylistic changes.” Burton, in his Terminal Essay (vol. X),
defines the difference between Payne’s translation and his own thus: “Mr. Payne’s admirable version appeals to the Orientalist and the ‘stylist,’ not to the many-headed; and mine to the anthropologist and student of Eastern manners and customs.” He is here calling attention to his voluminous footnotes. Burton, who never fails to praise Payne’s style, is less kind to Lane, referring to his “curious harsh and latinized English, at once turgid and emasculated.” Gerhardt finds Lane’s style “plodding but honest” he says of Payne’s translation that it is written in “a tortured and impossible prose, laboriously constructed out of archaic and rare words and turns.” Campbell finds Payne’s translation “superb” and calls it the “most readable” version in English, which “omits, moreover, not a syllable of the vigorous erotica.” Gerhardt judges Burton’s translation to be generally reliable but adds: “The English prose in which it is written, however, is doubtless still worse than Payne’s.”