The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye by A. S. Byatt
Gillian Perholt nodded. She had a headache herself-she had had a kind of penumbral headache, accompanied by occasional stabs from invisible stilettos or ice-splinters, since she had seen the Griselda-ghoul, and everything shimmered a little, with a grey shimmer, in the space between the gate and the narratives carved in relief on the stone tablets. The old soldier had become more and more animated, and now began to act out Gilgamesh’s arrival at the gates of Mount Mashu, almost dancing like a bear, approaching, stepping back, staring up, skipping briskly from the courtyard to the space between the gateposts, raising his fingers to his bald skull for horns and answering himself in the person of the scorpion-men. (These are good genies, ma’am, said the old soldier parenthetically. The scorpion-men might have been dangerous ones, edimmu or worse, arallu, who came out of the underworld and caused pestilence, they sprang from the goddess’s bile, you must imagine terrifying scorpion-men in the place of these bulls with wings.) They say, ‘Why have you come?’ And Gilgamesh says, ‘For Enkidu my friend. And to see my father Uta-Napishtim among the gods.’ And they say, ‘No man born of woman has gone into the mountain; it is very deep; there is no light and the heart is oppressed with darkness. Oppressed with darkness.’ He skipped out again and strode resolutely in, as Gilgamesh. She thought, he is a descendant of the ashiks of whom I have read, who dressed in a uniform of skins, and wore a skin hat and carried a club or a sword as a professional prop. They made shadows with their clubs on cafe walls and in market squares. The old soldier’s shadow mopped and mowed amongst the carved utukku: he was Gilgamesh annihilated in the dark; he came out into the light and became Siduri, the woman of the vine, in the garden at the edge of the sea with golden bowl and golden vats of wind; he became Urshanabi, the ferryman of the Ocean, disturbed at the presence of one who wore skins and ate flesh, in the other world. He was, Gillian Perholt thought suddenly, related to Karagöz and Hacivat, the comic heroes and animators of the Turkish shadow-puppets, who fought both demons from the underworld and fat capitalists. Orhan Rifat was a skilled puppeteer: he had a leather case full of the little figures whom he could bring to life against a sheet hung on a frame, against a white wall.
‘And Uta-Napishtim,’ said the Ancient Mariner, sitting down suddenly on a stone lion, and fixing Gillian Perholt with his eye, ‘Uta-Napishtim told Gilgamesh that there was a plant, a flower, that grew under the water. It was a flower with a sharp thorn that would wound his hands-but if he could win it he would have his lost youth again. So Gilgamesh tied heavy stones to his feet and sank into the deep water and walked in the seabed, and came to the plant which did prick him, but he grasped it and brought it up again into the light. And Gilgamesh set out again with Urshanabi the ferryman to take the flower back to the old men of his city, Uruk, to bring back their lost youths. And when they had travelled on and on,’ said the Ancient Mariner, weaving his way between the ancient monuments in his shuffling dance, ‘he came to a deep well of cool water, and he bathed in it, and refreshed himself. But deep in the pool there was a snake, and this snake sensed the sweetness of the flower. So it rose up through the water, and snatched the flower, and ate it. And then it cast off its skin, in the water, and swam down again, out of sight. And Gilgamesh sat down and wept, his tears ran down his face, and he said to Urshanabi the ferryman, “Was it for this that I worked so hard, is it for this that I forced out my heart’s blood? For myself I have gained nothing-I don’t have it, a beast out of the earth has it now. I found a sign and I have lost it.”’
The heavy bald head turned towards Gillian Perholt and the lashless eyelids slid blindly down over the eyeballs for a moment in what seemed to be exhaustion. The thick hands fumbled at the pockets of the fleece-lined jacket for a moment, as though the fingers were those of Gilgamesh, searching for what he had lost. And Gillian’s inner eye was full of the empty snakeskin, a papery shadowy form of a snake which she saw floating at the rim of the well into which the muscular snake had vigorously vanished.
‘What does it mean, my lady?’ asked the old man. ‘It means that Gilgamesh must die now-he has seen that he could grasp the thorn and the flower and live forever-but the snake took it just by chance, not to hurt him, but because it liked the sweetness. It is so sad to hold the sign and lose it, it is a sad story-because in most stories where you go to find something you bring it back after your struggles, I think, but here the beast, the creature, just took it, just by chance, after all the effort. They were a sad people, ma’am, very sad. Death hung over them.’
When they came out into the light of day she gave him what Turkish money she had, which he looked over, counted, and put in his pocket. She could not tell if he thought it too little or too much: the folds of his bald head wrinkled as he considered it. The British Council driver was waiting with the car; she walked towards him. When she turned to say good-bye to the Mariner, he was no longer to be seen.
Turks are good at parties. The party in Izmir was made up of Orhan’s friends – scholars and writers, journalists and students. ‘Smyrna,’ said Orhan, as they drove into the town, holding their noses as they went along the harbour-front with its stench of excrement, ‘Smyrna of the merchants,’ as they looked up at the quiet town on its conical hill. ‘Smyrna where we like to think Homer was born, the place most people agree he was probably born.’
It was spring, the air was light and full of new sunshine. They ate stuffed peppers and vineleaves, kebabs and smoky aubergines in little restaurants; they made excursions and ate roasted fishes at a trestle table set by a tiny harbour, looking at fishing boats that seemed timeless, named for the stars and the moon. They told each other stories. Orhan told of his tragi-comic battle with the official powers over his beard, which he had been required to shave before he was allowed to teach. A beard in modern Turkey is symbolic of religion or Marxism, neither acceptable. He had shaved his beard temporarily but now it flourished anew, like mown grass, Orhan said, even thicker and more luxuriant. The conversation moved to poets and politics: the exile of Halicarnassus, the imprisonment of the great Nazim Hikmet. Orhan recited Hikmet’s poem ‘Weeping Willow’, with its fallen rider and the drumming beat of the hooves of the red horsemen, vanishing at the gallop. And Leyla Serin recited Faruk Nafiz çamlibel’s ‘Göksu’, with its own weeping willow.
Whenever my heart would wander in Göksu
The garden in my dreams falls on the wood.
At dusk the roses seem a distant veil
The phantom willow boughs a cloak and hood.
Bulbuls and hoopoes of a bygone age
Retell their time-old ballads in the dark
The blue reflecting waters hear and show
The passing of Nedim with six-oared barque …
And Gillian told the story of her encounter with the old soldier in the Anatolian museum. ‘Maybe he was a djinn,’ said Orhan. ‘A djinn in Turkish is spelled CIN and you can tell one, if you meet it, in its human form, because it is naked and hairless. They can take many forms but their human form is hairless.’
‘He had a hairy coat,’ said Gillian, ‘but he was hairless. His skin was ivory-yellow, beeswax colour, and he had no hair anywhere.’
‘Certainly a djinn,’ said Orhan.
‘In that case,’ said the young Attila, who had spoken on ‘Bajazet in the Harem’, ‘how do you explain the Queen of Sheba?’
‘What should I explain about her?’ said Orhan.
‘Well,’ said Attila, ‘in Islamic tradition, Solomon travelled from Mecca to Sheba to see this queen, who was said to have hairy legs like a donkey because she was the daughter of a djinn. So Solomon asked her to marry him, and to please him she used various unguents and herbs to render her legs as smooth as a baby’s skin…’
‘Autres pays, autres moeurs,’ said Leyla Doruk. ‘You can’t pin down djinns. As for Dr Perholt’s naqqual, he seems to be related to the earth-spirit in the story of Camaralzaman, don’t you think so?’
• • •
They went also on an excursion to Ephesus.
In the museum are two statues of the Artemis of Ephesus, whose temple, the Artemision, was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, rediscovered in the nineteenth century by a dogged and inspired English engineer, John Turtle Wood. The colossal Artemis is more austere, and like Cybele, the Magna Mater, turret-crowned, with a temple on her head, under whose arches sit winged sphinxes. Her body is a rising pillar: her haunches can be seen within its form but she wears like a skirt the beasts of the field, the wood, the heavens, all geometrically arranged in quadrangles between carved stone ropes, in twos and threes: bulls, rams, antelopes, winged bulls, flying sphinxes with women’s breasts and lion-heads, winged men and huge hieratic bees, for the bee is her symbol, and the symbol of Ephesus. She is garlanded with flowers and fruit, all part of the stone of which she is made: lions crouch in the crook of her arm (her hands are lost) and her headdress or veil is made of ranks of winged bulls, like the genies at the gates in the Ankara museum. And before her she carries, as a date-palm carries dates, her triple row of full breasts, seven, eight, eight, fecundity in stone. The lesser Artemis, whom the Turks call Güzel Artemis and the French La Belle Artemis, stands in front of a brick wall and has a less Egyptian, more oriental, faintly smiling face. She too wears the beasts of earth and air like a garment, bulls and antelopes, winged bulls and sphinxes, with the lions couched below the rows of pendent breasts in their shadow. Her headdress too is woven of winged bulls, though her temple crown is lost. But she has her feet, which are side by side inside a reptilian frill or scallop or serpent-tail, and at these feet are honeycombed beehives. Her eyes are wide, and heavy-lidded: she looks out of the stone.
The party admired the goddess. Orhan bowed to her, and Leyla Doruk and Leyla Serin explained her cult to Gillian Perholt, how she was certainly really a much older goddess than the Greek Artemis or the Roman Diana, an Asian earth-goddess, Cybele, Astarte, Ishtar, whose temple was served by virgins and temple prostitutes, who combined extremes of abundant life and fierce slaughter, whose male priests castrated themselves in a frenzy of devotion, like those dying gods, Tammuz, Attis, Adonis, with whose blood the rivers ran red to the sea. The women wept for these dying divinities, said Leyla Serin. It was believed that Coleridge found his wonderful phrase ‘woman wailing for her demon lover’ in descriptions of these ritual mournings.
There was a priest, said Leyla Doruk, the Mega-byxus; that is a Persian word, and it means set free by God. He was probably a foreign eunuch. There were three priestesses-the Virgin Priestess, the Novice, the Future Priestess, and the Old Priestess who taught the young ones. The priestesses were called Melissae, which is bees. And there were priests called the Acrobatae who walked on tiptoe, and priests called the Essenes, another non-Greek word, Essen means king bee – the Greeks didn’t know that the queen bee is a queen, but we know now….
‘Her breasts are frightening,’ said Gillian Perholt. ‘Like Medusa’s snakes, too much, but an orderly too much.’
‘Some people now say the breasts are not breasts but eggs,’ said Attila. ‘Symbols of rebirth.’
‘They have to be breasts,’ said Gillian Perholt. ‘You cannot see this figure and not read those forms as breasts.’
‘Some say,’ said Leyla Doruk, smiling, ‘that they were bulls’ testicles, sacrificed to her, you know, hung round her in her honour, as the – the castrated priests’-parts – once were.’
They were ripe and full and stony.
‘They are metaphors,’ said Orhan. ‘They are many things at once, as the sphinxes and winged bulls are many things at once.’
‘You admire her, our goddess,’ said Leyla Doruk.
She is not yours, thought Gillian. You are latecomers. She is older and stronger. Then she thought: but she is more yours than mine, all the same. The brick wall behind the Güzel Artemis, the beautiful Artemis, was hung with plastic ivy, fading creamy in the sunlight.
The two Leylas stood with Gillian Perholt in front of the Güzel Artemis and each took her by one arm, laughing.
‘Now, Dr Perholt,’ said Leyla Serin, ‘you must make a wish. For here, if you stand between two people with the same name, and wish, it will come true.’
Leyla Doruk was large and flowing; Leyla Serin was small and bird-like. Both had large dark eyes and lovely skin. They made Gillian Perholt feel hot, anglo-saxon, padded and clumsy. She was used to ignoring these feelings. She said, laughing,
‘I am enough of a narratologist to know that no good ever comes of making wishes. They have a habit of twisting the wishers to their own ends.’
‘Only foolish wishes,’ said Leyla Serin. ‘Only the uninstructed, who don’t think.’
‘Like the peasant who saved a magic bird which gave him three wishes, and he wished for a string of sausages in his pan, and they were there, and his wife said that that was a foolish wish, a stupid wish, a string of sausages with the whole world to wish for, and he was so mad at her, he wished the sausages would stick to her nose, and they did, and that was two wishes, and he had to use the third on detaching them.’
For a moment this fictive Nordic peasant’s wife, decorated with sausage strings, was imaginatively present also before the goddess with her rows of dangling breasts. Everyone laughed. ‘Wish, Gillian,’ said Orhan. ‘You are quite intelligent enough not to wish for anything silly.’
‘In England,’ said Gillian, ‘when we wish, when we cut our birthday-cakes, we scream out loud, to turn away the knife, I suppose.’
‘You may scream if you want to,’ said Leyla Serin.
‘I am not in England,’ said Gillian Perholt. ‘And it is not my birthday. So I shall not scream, I shall concentrate on being intelligent, as Orhan has commanded.’
She closed her eyes, and concentrated, and wished, seeing the red light inside her eyelids, as so often before, hearing a faint drumming of blood in her ears. She made a precise and careful wish to be asked to give the keynote address at the Toronto Conference of narratologists in the Fall and added a wish for a first-class air-fare and a hotel with a swimming-pool, as a kind of wishing-package, she explained to the blood thrumming in her eyes and ears, and opened the eyes again, and shook her head before the smiling Artemis. Everyone laughed. You looked so serious, they said, squeezing her arms before they let go, and laughing.
They walked through old-new Ephesus and came to the theatre. Orhan stood against the ruined stage and said something incantatory in Turkish which he then explained to Gillian was Dionysus’ first speech, his terrible, smiling, threatening speech at the beginning of The Bacchae. He then threw one arm over his shoulder and became cloaked and tall and stiffly striding where he had been supple and smiling and eastern. ‘Listen, Gillian,’ he said:
‘I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood.’
‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us,’ said Gillian, laughing, remembering the young Orhan stalking the English student stage; thinking too of Mehmet the Conqueror, as Bellini saw him, eloquent, watchful and dangerous.
‘I was good,’ said Orhan, ‘in those days. It was his part. Shakespeare himself played the Ghost. Did you know that, Attila? When y
‘Not on this stage,’ said Attila.
‘Now,’ said Orhan. ‘Now it is here.’
Angels had made Gillian think of Saint Paul. Angels had sprung open Saint Paul’s prison in Ephesus. She had sat in Sunday school, hearing a fly buzzing against a smeared high window in the vestry, and had hated the stories of Saint Paul and the other apostles because they were true, they were told to her as true stories, and this somehow stopped off some essential imaginative involvement with them, probably because she didn’t believe them, if required to believe they were true. She was Hamlet and his father and Shakespeare: she saw Milton’s snake and the miraculous flying horse of the Thief of Baghdad, but Saint Paul’s angels rested under suspicion of being made-up because she had been told they were special because true. Saint Paul had come here to Ephesus to tell the people here that Artemis was not true, was not real, because she was a god made with hands. He had stood here, precisely here, in this theatre, she understood slowly; this real man, a provincial interloper with a message, had stood here, where she now stood. She found this hard to believe because Saint Paul had always seemed to her so cardboard, compared, when she met them later, to Dionysus, to Achilles, to Priam. But he had come here with his wrath against hand-made gods. He had changed the world. He had been a persecutor and had been blinded by light on the road to Damascus (for that moment he was not cardboard, he was consumed by light) and had set out to preach the new god, whom he had not, in his human form, known. In Ephesus he had caused ‘no small stir’. His preaching had angered Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines for the goddess. And Demetrius stirred up the people of Ephesus against the saint, who claimed ‘they be no gods which are made with hands’, and told them that the foreign preacher would not only set their craft at naught but also ‘the temple of the great goddess Diana should be despised, and her magnificence should be destroyed, whom all Asia and the world worshippeth.’