by John Barth
“This last remark dismayed me the more because it echoed something my late wife had said on our wedding night: that even death at my hands would be sweeter to her than life at another’s. How I despised, resented, missed her! As if it were I who was cut in two, I longed to hold her as in nights gone by, yet would have halved her bloody halves if she’d been restored to me. There lay my new woman on the bed, naked and still now; I stood on my knees between hers, weeping so for her predecessor’s beauty and deceit, my own blindness and cruelty—and the wretched state of affairs between man and womankind that made love a will-o’-the-wisp, jealousy and boredom and resentment the rule—that I could neither function nor dissemble. I told her of all that had taken place between my departure from Samarkand and my return, the oath I’d sworn with my brother, and my resolve to keep it lest I seem chicken-hearted and a fool.
“ ‘Lest you seem!’ the girl cried out. ‘Harems, homicides—everything for the sake of seeming!’ She commanded me then, full of irony for all her fears, to keep my vow if I meant to keep it, or else cut out her tongue before I cut off her head; for if I sent her to the block without deflowering her first, she would declare to any present, even if only her executioner, that I was a man in seeming merely, not in fact, and offer her maidenhood as proof. Her courage astonished me as much as her words. ‘By Allah,’ I vowed to her, ‘I won’t kill you if I can’t get it up for you first.’ But that miserable fellow in your left hand, which had never once failed me before, and which stands up now like an idiot soldier in enemy country, as if eager to be cut down, deserted me utterly. I tried every trick I knew, in vain, though my victim willingly complied with my instructions. I could of course have killed her myself, then and there, but I had no wish to seem a hypocrite even for a moment in her eyes; nor, for that matter, to let her die a virgin—nor, I admitted finally to myself, to let her die at all before she was overtaken like the rest of us by the Destroyer of Delights et cetera. For seven nights we tossed and tumbled, fondled and kissed and played, she reaching such heats of unaccustomed joy as to cry out, no longer sarcastically, that if only I would stick her first with my carnal sword, she’d bare her neck without complaint to my steel. On the seventh night, as we lay panting in a sweat of frustration, I gave her my dagger and invited her to do me and Samarkand the kindness of killing me at once, for I’d rather die than seem unable to keep my vow.
“ ‘You are unable to keep it,’ she told me softly: ‘not because you’re naturally impotent, but because you’re not naturally cruel. If you’d tell your brother that after thinking it over you’ve simply come to a conclusion different from his, you’d be cured as if by magic.’ And in fact, as if by magic indeed, what she said was so true that at her very words the weight was lifted from heart and tool together; they rose as one. Gratefully, tenderly, I went into her at last; we cried for joy, came at once, fell asleep in each other’s arms.
“No question after that of following Shahryar’s lead; on the other hand, I found myself in the morning not yet man enough after all to send word to him of my change of heart and urge him to change his. Neither was I, after all, in love enough with the Vizier’s daughter to risk again the estate of marriage, which she herself considered problematical at best.
“ ‘I never expected you to marry me,’ she told me when I told her these things, ‘though I’d be dishonest if I didn’t say I dreamed and prayed you might. All I ever really hoped for was a love affair with you, and a baby to remember it by. Even if I don’t have the baby, I’ve had the affair: you truly loved me last night.’
“I did, and for many nights after—but not enough to make the final step. What your Genie said concerning marriage could have come from my own mouth if I had the gift of words: to anyone of moral imagination who’s known it, no other relation between men and women has true seriousness; yet that same imagination kept me from it. And I dreaded the day my brother would get word of my weakness. I grew glum and cross; my mistress, intuitive as ever, guessed the reason at once. ‘You can neither keep your vow nor break it,’ she told me: ‘Perhaps you’d better do both for a while, till you find your way.’ I asked her how such a contradiction was possible. ‘By the magic words as if,’ she replied, ‘which, to a person satisfied with seeming, are more potent than all the genii in the tales.’
“She then set forth a remarkable proposal: legend had it that far to the west of Samarkand was a country peopled entirely with women, adjoining another wholly male: for two months every spring they mated freely with each other on neutral ground, the women returning home as they found themselves pregnant, giving their male children to the neighboring tribe and raising the girls as members of their own. Whether or not such a community in fact existed, she thought it a desirable alternative to the present state of affairs, and unquestionably preferable to death; since I couldn’t treasure her as she treasured me (and not for a moment did she blame me for that incapacity), she proposed to establish such an alternative society herself, with my assistance. I was to proclaim my brother’s policy as my own, take to bed a virgin every night and declare her executed in the morning; but instead of actually raping and killing them I would tell them of her alternative society and send them secretly from Samarkand, in groups of a hundred or so, to organize and populate it. If, knowing their destiny, they chose to spend their last night in Samarkand making love with me, that was their affair; none, she imagined, would choose death over emigration, and any who found their new way of life not to their liking could return to Samarkand if and when I changed my policy, or migrate elsewhere in the meanwhile. In any case they’d be alive and free; or, if the pioneers were captured and made slaves of by barbarians before the new society was established, they’d be no worse off than the millions of their sisters already in that condition. On the other hand, separate societies of men and women, mingling freely at their own wills as equals on neutral ground, might just make possible a true society of the future in which the separation was no longer necessary. And in the meantime, of course, for better or worse, it would be as if I’d kept my dreadful vow.
“At first hearing, the plan struck me as absurd; after a few nights it seemed less so, perhaps even feasible; by the end of a week of examining passionately with her all the alternatives, it seemed no less unreasonable than they. My angel herself, in keeping with her Tragic View, didn’t expect the new society to work in the naïve sense: what human institutions ever did? It would have the vices of its virtues; if not nipped in the bud by marauding rapists, it would grow and change and rigidify in forms and values quite different from its founders’—codifying, institutionalizing, and perverting its original spirit. No help for that.
“Was there ever such a woman? I kissed her respectfully, then ardently a final time. After one last love-making in the morning, while my hand lingered on her left breast, she declared calmly her intention, upon arriving at her virgin kingdom, to amputate that same breast for symbolic reasons and urge her companions to do the same, as a kind of initiation rite. ‘We’ll make up a practical excuse for it,’ she said: ‘ “The better to draw our bows,” et cetera. But the real point will be that in one aspect we’re all woman, in another all warrior. Maybe we’ll call ourselves The Breastless Ones.’
“ ‘That seems extreme,’ I remarked. She replied that a certain extremism was necessary to the survival of anything radically innovative. Later generations, she assumed, established and effete, would find the ancestral custom barbaric and honor its symbolism, if at all, with a correspondingly symbolic mammectomy—a decorative scar, perhaps, or cosmetic mark. No matter; everything passed.
“So did our connection: with a thousand thanks to her for opening my eyes, a thousand good wishes for the success of her daring enterprise, and many thousands of dinars to support it (which for portability and security she converted into a phial of diamonds and carried intravaginally), I declared her dead, let her father the Vizier in on our secret, and sent her off secretly to one of my country castles on a distant lake, where she
prepared for the expedition westward while her companions, the ostensible victims of my new policy, accumulated about her. Perhaps a third, apprised of their fate, chose to remain virginal, whether indignantly, ruefully, or gratefully; on the other two-thirds who in whatever spirit elected to go hymenless to the new society, I bestowed similar phials of jewels. Somewhat less than fifty percent of this number found themselves impregnated by our night together, and so when the first detachment of two hundred pioneers set out across the western wastes, their actual number was about two hundred sixty. Since I pursued this policy for nearly two thousand nights, the number of pilgrims and unborn children sent west from Samarkand must have totaled about twenty-six hundred; corrected for a normal male birth rate of somewhat over fifty per cent, a rather higher than normal rate of spontaneous abortion, and infant as well as maternal mortality owing to the rigors of traveling and of settling a new territory, and ignoring—as one must to retain one’s reason—the possibility of mass enslavement, rape, massacre, or natural catastrophe, the number of pioneers to the Country of the Breastless must be at least equal to the number of nights until Shahryar’s message concerning your sister arrived from the Islands of India and China.
“Of the success or failure of those founding mothers I know nothing; kept myself ignorant deliberately, lest I learn that I was sending them after all to the Destroyer of Delights and Severer of Societies. The folk of Samarkand never rose against me; nor did my vizier, like Shahryar’s, have difficulty enlisting sacrificial virgins; even at the end, though my official toll was twice my brother’s, about half the girls were volunteers—from all which, I infer that their actual fate was an open secret. For all I know, my original mistress never truly intended to found her gynocracy; the whole proposal was perhaps a ruse; perhaps they all slipped back into the country with their phials of gems for dowry, married and lived openly under my nose. No matter: night after night I brought them to bed, set forth their options, then either glumly stripped and pronged them or spent the night in chaste sleep and conversation. Tall and short, dark and fair, lean and plump, cold and ardent, bold and timid, clever and stupid, comely and plain—I bedded them all, spoke with them all, possessed them all, but was myself possessed by nothing but despair. Though I took many, with their consent, I wanted none of them. Novelty lost its charm, then even its novelty. Unfamiliarity I came to loathe: the foreign body in the dark, the alien touch and voice, the endless exposition. All I craved was someone with whom to get on with the story of my life, which was to say, of our life together: a loving friend; a loving wife; a treasurable wife; a wife, a wife.
“My brother’s second message, when it came, seemed a miraculous reprise of that fatal first, six years before: I turned the kingdom over to my vizier and set out at once, resolved to meet this Scheherazade who had so wooed and yarned him back to the ways of life that he meant to wed her. ‘Perhaps she has a younger sister,’ I said to myself; if she does, I’ll make no inquiries, demand no stories, set no conditions, but humbly put my life in her hands, tell her the whole tale of the two thousand and two nights that led me to her, and bid her end that story as she will—whether with the last goodnight of all or (what I can just dimly envision, like dawn in another world) some clear and fine and fresh good morning.”
Dunyazade yawned and shivered. “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about. Am I expected to believe that preposterous business of Breastless Pilgrims and Tragic Views?”
“Yes!” cried Shah Zaman, then let his head fall back to the pillow. “They’re too important to be lies. Fictions, maybe—but truer than fact.”
Dunyazade covered her eyes with her razor-hand. “What do you expect me to do? Forgive you? Love you?”
“Yes!” the King cried again, his eyes flashing. “Let’s end the dark night! All that passion and hate between men and women; all that confusion of inequality and difference! Let’s take the truly tragic view of love! Maybe it is a fiction, but it’s the profoundest and best of all! Treasure me, Dunyazade, as I’ll treasure you!”
“For pity’s sake stop!”
But Shah Zaman urged ardently: “Let’s embrace; let’s forbear; let’s love as long as we can, Dunyazade—then embrace again, forebear and love again!”
“It won’t work.”
“Nothing works! But the enterprise is noble; it’s full of joy and life, and the other ways are deathy. Let’s make love like passionate equals!”
“You mean as if we were equals,” Dunyazade said. “You know we’re not. What you want is impossible.”
“Despite your heart’s feelings?” pressed the King. “Let it be as if! Let’s make a philosophy of that as if!”
Dunyazade wailed: “I want my sister!”
“She may be alive; my brother, too.” More quietly, Shah Zaman explained that Shahryar had been made acquainted with his brother’s recent history and opinions, and had vowed that should Scheherazade ever attempt his life, he’d manage himself somewhat similarly: that is (as he was twenty years older, and more conservative), not exactly granting his wife the power to kill him, but disarming and declining to kill her, and within the bounds of good public relations, permitting her a freedom comparable to his own. The harem was a royal tradition, necessarily public; Scheherazade could take what lovers she would, but of necessity in private. Et cetera.
“Did you really imagine your sister fooled Shahryar for a thousand nights with her mamelukes and dildoes?” Shah Zaman laughed. “A man couldn’t stay king very long if he didn’t even know what was going on in the harem! And why do you suppose he permitted it, if not that he loved her too much, and was too sick of his other policy, to kill her? She changed his mind, all right, but she never fooled him: he used to believe that all women were unfaithful, and that the only way to spare himself the pain of infidelity was to deflower and kill them; now he believes that all people are unfaithful, and that the way to spare oneself the pain of infidelity is to love and not to care. He chooses equal promiscuity; I choose equal fidelity. Let’s treasure each other, Dunyazade!”
She shook her head angrily, or desperately. “It’s absurd. You’re only trying to talk your way out of a bad spot.”
“Of course I am! And of course it’s absurd! Treasure me!”
“I’m exhausted. I should use the razor on both of us, and be done with it.”
“Treasure me, Dunyazade!”
“We’ve talked all night; I hear the cocks; it’s getting light.”
“Good morning, then! Good morning!”
3
Alf Laylah Wa Laylah, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, is not the story of Scheherazade, but the story of the story of her stories, which in effect begins: “There is a book called The Thousand and One Nights, in which it is said that once upon a time a king had two sons, Shahryar and Shah Zaman,” et cetera; it ends when a king long after Shahryar discovers in his treasury the thirty volumes of The Stories of the Thousand Nights and a Night, at the end of the last of which the royal couples—Shahryar and Scheherazade, Shah Zaman and Dunyazade—emerge from their bridal chambers after the wedding night, greet one another with warm good mornings (eight in all), bestow Samarkand on the brides’ long-suffering father, and set down for all posterity The Thousand Nights and a Night.
If I could invent a story as beautiful, it should be about little Dunyazade and her bridegroom, who pass a thousand nights in one dark night and in the morning embrace each other; they make love side by side, their faces close, and go out to greet sister and brother in the forenoon of a new life. Dunyazade’s story begins in the middle; in the middle of my own, I can’t conclude it—but it must end in the night that all good mornings come to. The Arab storytellers understood this; they ended their stories not “happily ever after,” but specifically “until there took them the Destroyer of Delights and Desolator of Dwelling-places, and they were translated to the ruth of Almighty Allah, and their houses fell waste and their palaces lay in ruins, and the Kings inherited their riches.” And no man knows i
t better than Shah Zaman, to whom therefore the second half of his life will be sweeter than the first.
To be joyous in the full acceptance of this dénouement is surely to possess a treasure, the key to which is the understanding that Key and Treasure are the same. There (with a kiss, little sister) is the sense of our story, Dunyazade: The key to the treasure is the treasure.
Perseid
1
Good evening.
Stories last longer than men, stones than stories, stars than stones. But even our stars’ nights are numbered, and with them will pass this patterned tale to a long-deceased earth.
Nightly, when I wake to think myself beworlded and find myself in heaven, I review the night I woke to think and find myself vice-versa. I’d been long lost, deserted, down and out in Libya; two decades past I’d overflown that country with the bloody Gorgon’s head, and every drop that hit the dunes had turned to snake—so I learned later: at twenty years and twenty kilometers high, how could I have known? Now there I was, sea-leveled, forty, parched and plucked, every grain in my molted sandals raising blisters, and beleaguered by the serpents of my past. It must have been that of all the gods in heaven, the two I’d never got along with put it to me: sandy Ammon, my mother-in-law’s pet deity, who’d first sent Andromeda over the edge, and Sabazius the beer-god, who’d raised the roof in Argos till I raised him a temple. Just then I’d’ve swapped Mycenae for a cold draught and a spot of shade to dip it in; I even prayed for the rascals. Nothing doing. Couldn’t think where I’d been or where was headed, lost track of me entirely, commenced hallucinating, wow. Somewhere back in my flying youth I’d read how to advertise help wanted when you’re brought down: I stamped a whopping PERSEUS in the sand, forgot what I was about, writing sets your mind a-tramp; next thing I knew I’d printed PERSEUS LOVES ANDROMED half a kilometer across the dunes. Wound up in a depression with the three last letters; everything before them slipped my mind; not till I added USA was I high enough again to get the message, how I’d confused what I’d set out to clarify. I fried awhile longer on the dune-top, trying to care; I was a dying man: so what if my Mayday had grown through self-advertisement to an amphisbane graffito? But O I was a born reviser, and would die one: as I looked back on what I’d written, a fresh East breeze sprang from the right margin, behind, where I’d been aiming, and drifted the A I’d come to rest on. I took its cue, erased the whole name, got lost in a vipered space between object and verb, went on erasing, erasing all, talking to myself, crazy man: no more LOVES, no more LOVE, clean the slate altogether—me too, take it off, all of it. But I’d forgot by that time who I was, re-lost in the second space, my first draft’s first; I snaked as far as the subject’s final S and, frothing, swooned, made myself after that seventh letter a mad dash—