The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye by A. S. Byatt
‘The tale of the apes, I think, relates to the observations of Sigmund Freud on the goal of all life. Freud was, whatever else he was, the great student of our desire, our will to live happily ever after. He studied our wishes, our fulfilment of our wishes, in the narrative of our dreams. He believed we rearranged our stories in our dream-life to give ourselves happy endings, each according to his or her secret needs. (He claimed not to know what women really wanted, and this ignorance colours and changes his stories.) Then, in the repeated death-dreams of the soldiers of the First World War he discovered a narrative that contradicted this desire for happiness, for wish-fulfilment. He discovered, he thought, a desire for annihilation. He rethought the whole history of organic life under the sun, and came to the conclusion that what he called the “organic instincts” were essentially conservative-that they reacted to stimuli by adapting in order to preserve, as far as possible, their original state. “It would be in contradiction to the conservative nature of the instincts” said Freud, “if the goal of life were a state of things which had never been attained.” No, he said, what we desire must necessarily be an old state of things. Organisms strive, circuitously, to return to the inorganic – the dust, the stone, the earth-from which they came. “The aim of all life is death” said Freud, telling his creation story in which the creation strives to return to the state before life was breathed into it, in which the shrinking of the peau de chagrin, the diminishing of the ape, is not the terrible concomitant of the life-force, but its secret desire.’
This was not all she said, but this was the second point at which she caught a flash of the sapphire glasses.
There were many questions, and Gillian’s paper was judged a success, if somewhat confused.
Back in her hotel bedroom that night she confronted the djinn.
‘You made my paper incoherent,’ she said. ‘It was a paper about fate and death and desire, and you introduced the freedom of wishing-apes.’
‘I do not see what is incoherent,’ said the djinn. ‘Entropy rules us all. Power gets less, whether it derives from the magic arts or is made by nerves and muscle.’
Gillian said, ‘I am ready now to make my third wish.’
‘I am all ears,’ said the djinn, momentarily expanding those organs to the size of elephants’ ears. ‘Do not look doleful, Djil-yan, it may not happen.’
‘And where did you learn that catch-phrase? Never mind. I shall almost believe you are trying to prevent my wish.’
‘No, no. I am your slave.’
‘I wish,’ said Gillian, ‘I wish you could have whatever you wish for – that this last wish may be your wish.’
And she waited for the sound of thunder, or worse, the silence of absence. But what she heard was the sound of breaking glass. And she saw her bottle, the nightingale ‘s-eye bottle, which stood on a glass sheet on the dressing-table, dissolve like tears, not into sharp splinters, but into a conical heap of tiny cobalt blue glass marbles, each with a white spiral coiled inside it.
‘Thank you,’ said the djinn.
‘Will you go?’ asked the narratologist.
‘Soon,’ said the djinn. ‘Not now, not immediately. You wished also, remember, that I would love you, and so I do. I shall give you something to remember me by-until I return – which, from time to time, I shall do –’
‘If you remember to return in my life-time,’ said Gillian Perholt.
‘If I do,’ said the djinn, whose body now seemed to be clothed in a garment of liquid blue flame.
That night he made love to her, so beautifully that she wondered simultaneously how she could ever have let him go, and how she could ever have dared to keep such a being in Primrose Hill, or in hotel bedrooms in Istanbul or Toronto.
And the next morning he appeared in jeans and a sheepskin jacket, and said they were going out together, to find a gift. This time his hair – still fairly improbable – was a mass of dreadlocks, and his skin inclined to the Ethiopian.
In a small shop, in a side-street, he showed her the most beautiful collection of modern weights she had ever seen. It is a modern Canadian art; they have artists who can trap a meshed and rolling geometrical sea, only visible at certain angles, and when visible glitters transparently with a rainbow of particles dusted with gold; they have artists who can enclose a red and blue flame forever in a cool glass sphere, or a dizzy cone of cobalt and emerald, reaching to infinity and meeting its own reflection. Glass is made of dust, of silica, of the sand of the desert, melted in a fiery furnace and blown into its solid form by human breath. It is fire and ice, it is liquid and solid, it is there and not there.
The djinn put into Dr Perholt’s hands a huge, slightly domed sphere inside which were suspended like commas, like fishing-hooks, like fireworks, like sleeping embryos, like spurts of coloured smoke, like uncurling serpents, a host of coloured ribbons of glass amongst a host of breathed bubbles. They were all colours – gold and yellow, bright blue and dark blue, a delectable clear pink, a crimson, a velvet green, a whole host of busy movement. ‘Like rushing seed,’ said the djinn poetically. ‘Full of forever possibilities. And impossibilities, of course. It is a work of art, a great work of craft, it is a joyful thing, you like it?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Dr Perholt. ‘I have never seen so many colours in one.’
‘It is called “The Dance of the Elements”,’ said the djinn. ‘I think that it is not your sort of title, but it suits it, I think. No?’
‘Yes,’ said Dr Perholt, who was sorrowful and yet full of a sense of things being as they should be.
The djinn watched the wrapping of the weight in shocking-pink tissue, and paid for it with a rainbow-coloured credit card with a hologram of the Venus de Milo, which caused an almost excessive fizzing amongst the terminals in the card machine.
On the pavement he said,
‘Good-bye. For the present.’
‘“Now to the elements,” ‘ said Dr Perholt, ‘“Be free and fare thou well.”’
She had thought of saying that some day, ever since she had first seen his monstrous foot from her bathroom door. She stood there, holding her glass weight. And the djinn kissed her hand, and vanished towards Lake Ontario like a huge cloud of bees, leaving behind on the pavement a sheepskin jacket that shrank slowly, to child size, to doll size, to matchbox size, to a few fizzing atoms, and was gone. He left also a moving heap of dreadlocks, like some strange hedgehog, which stirred a little, ran along a few feet, and vanished down a drain.
And did she ever see him again, you may ask? Or that may not be the question uppermost in your mind, but it is the only one to which you get an answer.
Two years ago, still looking thirty-five and comfortable, she was walking along Madison Avenue in New York, during a stop on the way to a narratological gathering in British Columbia, when she saw a shop window full of paperweights. These were not the work of artists like the Toronto artists who play with pure colour and texture, ribbons and threads and veils, stains and illusory movement. These were pure, old-fashioned, skilful representations: millefiori, lattice-work, crowns, canes, containing roses and violets, lizards and butterflies. Dr Perholt went in, her eyes gleaming like the glass, and there in the dark shop were two courteous and charming men, happy men in a cavern bright with jewels, who for half an hour and with exquisite patience fetched out for Dr Perholt sphere after sphere from the glass shelves in which they were reflected, and admired with her basket-work of fine white containing cornflower-blue posies, multi-coloured cushions of geometric flowers, lovely as Paradise must have been in its glistening newness, bright with a brightness that would never fade, never come out into the dull air from its brilliant element.
Oh glass, said Dr Perholt to the two gentlemen, it is not possible, it is only a solid metaphor, it is a medium for seeing and a thing seen at once. It is what art is, said Dr Perholt to the two men, as they moved the balls of light, red, blue, green, on the visible and the invisible shelves.
‘I like the geometrically patt
‘On the whole,’ said one of the two. ‘On the whole, the whole effect is better with the patterning, with the geometry of the glass and the geometry of the canes. But have you seen these? These are American.’
And he gave her a weight in which a small snake lay curled on a watery surface of floating duckweed-a snake with a glass thread of a flickering tongue and an almost microscopic red-brown eye in its watchful but relaxed olive head. And he gave her a weight in which, in the solidity of the glass as though it were the deep water of a well, floated a flower, a flower with a rosy lip and a white hood, a green stem, long leaves trailing in the water, and a root specked and stained with its brown juices and the earth it had come from, a root trailing fine hair-roots and threads and tendrils into the glassy medium. It was perfect because the illusion was near-perfect, and the attention to the living original had been so perfect that the undying artificial flower also seemed perfect. And Gillian thought of Gilgamesh, and the lost flower, and the snake. Here they were side by side, held in suspension.
She turned the weight over, and put it down, for its price was prohibitive.
She noticed, almost abstractedly, that there was a new dark age-stain on the back of the hand that held the weight. It was a pretty soft dried-leaf colour.
‘I wish– ‘ she said to the man behind the glass cage of shelves.
‘You would like the flower,’ said a voice behind her. ‘And the snake with it, why not? I will give them to you.’
And there he was behind her, this time in a dark overcoat and a white scarf, with a rather large wide-brimmed black velvet hat, and the sapphire glasses.
‘What a nice surprise to see you again, sir,’ said the shopowner, holding out his hand for the rainbow credit card with the Venus de Milo. ‘Always unexpected, always welcome, most welcome.’
And Dr Perholt walked out into Madison Avenue with a gold-dark man and two weights, a snake and a flower. There are things in the earth, things made with hands and beings not made with hands that live a life different from ours, that live longer than we do, and cross our lives in stories, in dreams, at certain times when we are floating redundant. And Gillian Perholt was happy, for she had moved back into their world, or at least had access to it, as she had had as a child. She said to the djinn,
‘Will you stay?’
And he said, ‘No. But I shall probably return again.’ And she said, ‘If you remember to return in my lifetime.’
‘If I do,’ said the djinn.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Cevat Çapan for help with things Turkish, my first introduction to çesm-i bülbül, and information about Cins, and I am grateful to Abdulrazak Gurnah who first drew my attention to the oddity of the third djinn in the story of Prince Camaralzaman. I am also generally grateful to Peter Carraciolo, whose enthusiasm for The Arabian Nights is infectious. Robert Irwin’s splendid The Arabian Nights: A Companion came out whilst I was writing ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ and affected its ideas and its construction. Ruth Christie and Richard McKane who present the translation of the poems of Oktay Rifat in Voices of Memory (Rockingham Press, 1993) and the editors of The Penguin Book of Turkish Verse and of the recent Modern Turkish Poetry (Rockingham Press) must also be thanked. The British Council Literature Department has changed my vision of the world by sending me to many places. There was also a certain guide in the museum in Ankara …
‘Dragons’ Breath’ was commissioned by Ineke Holzhaus and Ilonka Verdurment of the Sheherezade 2001 Foundation, and was read aloud in a shortened version during their project for Sarajevo. ‘The Eldest Princess’ was commissioned by Christine Park and Caroline Heaton for the Vintage collection of adult fairy stories, Caught in a Story. Christine had the idea that writers should write the fairy-tale of their own life, and I have always been worried about being the eldest of three sisters.
Jane Turner, as so often before, has given invaluable help with illustrations-we should make another book of her discoveries alone. Carmen Callil made the book beautiful and elegant and Jenny Uglow and Jonathan Burnham smoothed its progress.
ALSO BY A. S. BYATT
“A novelist of dazzling inventiveness.”
—Time
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Fiction/Literature/0-679-73680-8
THE MATISSE STORIES
These three stories celebrate the eye even as they reveal its unexpected proximity to the heart. For if each of Byatt’s narratives is in some way inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse, each is also about the intimate connection between seeing and feeling – about the ways in which a glance we meant to be casual may suddenly call forth the deepest reserves of our being.
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POSSESSION
Winner of England’s Booker Prize and an international bestseller, Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, what emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas.
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ALSO AVAILABLE:
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VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
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FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, NOVEMBER 1998
Copyright © 1994 by A. S. Byatt
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
This work was originally published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus Limited, London, a division of Random House UK, in 1994.
“The Glass Coffin” and “Gode’s Story” were originally published in Possession. Copyright © 1990 by A. S. Byatt. “The Eldest Princess,” copright © 1992 by A. S. Byatt. “Dragons’ Breath” and “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” copyright © 1994 by A. S. Byatt.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Osman Streater: Excerpts from “Göksu” by Faruk Hafiz çamlibel and “Evening” by Ahmet Hasim, translated by Nermin Menemencioglu Streater in The Penguin Book of Turkish Verse (Penguin Books UK, 1978). Copyright © 1978 by Nermin Menemencioglu and Fabir Ir.
The Library of Congress has cataloged
the Random House edition as follows:
Byatt, A. S. (Antonia Susan).
The Djinn in the nightingale’s eye: five fairy stories /
A.S. Byatt.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Contents: The glass coffin—Gode’s story—The story of the eldest princess—Dragons’ breath—The Djinn in the nightingale’s eye.
eISBN: 978-0-307-48387-4
1. Fantastic fiction, English.
2. Fairy tales—England.
I. Title.
PR6052.Y2D58 1997
823′.914—dc21 96–46330
www.randomhouse.com
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A. S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye
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