The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (Vintage International) (18 page)

‘And did that count as a wish?’ asked Gillian severely.

‘Not really’ The djinn was evasive. ‘I taught her a few magical skills – to help her-because I loved her –’

‘You loved her –’

‘I loved her anger. I loved my own power to change her frowns to smiles. I taught her what her husband had not taught her, to enjoy her own body, without all the gestures of submission and non-disturbance of his own activities the silly man seemed to require.’

‘You were in no hurry for her to escape – to exercise her new powers somewhere else –’

‘No. We were happy. I like being a teacher. It is unusual in djinns-we have a natural propensity to trick and mislead your kind. But your kind is rarely as greedy for knowledge as Zeflr. I had all the time in the world –’

‘
She
didn’t,’ said Gillian, who was trying to feel her way into this story, occluded by the djinn’s own feelings, it appeared. She felt a certain automatic resentment of this long-dead Turkish prodigy, the thought of whom produced the dreaming smile on the lips of what she had come to think of – so quickly – as
her
djinn. But she also felt troubled on Zefir’s behalf, by the djinn’s desire to be both liberator and imprisoner in one.

‘I know,’ said the djinn. ‘She was mortal, I know. What year is it now?’

‘It is 1991.’

‘She would be one hundred and sixty-four years old, if she lived. And our child would be one hundred and forty, which is not possible for such a being.’

‘A child?’

‘Of fire and dust. I planned to fly with him round the earth, and show him the cities and the forests and the shores. He would have been a great genius-maybe. I don’t know if he was ever born.’

‘Or she.’

‘Or she. Indeed.’

‘What happened? Did she wish for
anything at all}
Or did you prevent her to keep her prisoner? How did you come to be in my çesm-i bülbül bottle? I do not understand.’

‘She was a very clever woman, like you, Djil-yan, and she knew it was wise to wait. And then – I think-I know-she began to wish-to desire-that I should stay with her. We had a whole world in her little room. I brought things from all over the world-silks and satins, sugar-cane and paw-paw, sheets of green ice; Donatello’s Perseus, aviaries full of parrots, waterfalls, rivers. One day, unguardedly, she wished she could fly with me when I went to the Americas, and then she could have bitten off her tongue, and almost wasted a second wish undoing the first, but I put a finger on her lip-she was so quick, she understood in a flash – and I kissed her, and we flew to Brazil, and to Paraguay, and saw the Amazon river, which is as great as a sea, and the beasts in the forests there, where no man treads, and she was blissfully warm against my heart inside the feathered cloak – there are spirits with feathered cloaks out there, we found, whom we met in the air above the forest canopy – and then I brought her back to her room, and she fainted with joy and disappointment.’

He came to another halt, and Dr Perholt, savouring loukoum, had to encourage him.

‘So she had two wishes. And became pregnant. Was she happy to be pregnant?’

‘Naturally, in a way, she was happy, to be carrying a magic child. And naturally, in another, she was afraid: she said perhaps she should ask for a magic palace where she could bring up the child in safety in a hidden place-but that was not what she wanted-she said also she was not sure she wanted a child at all, and came near wishing him out of existence –’

‘But you saved him.’

‘I loved her. He was mine. He was a small seed, like a curved comma of smoke in a bottle; he grew and I watched him. She loved me, I think, she could not wish him undone.’

‘Or her. Or perhaps you could see which it was?’

He considered.

‘No. I did not see. I supposed, a son.’

‘But you never saw him born.’

‘We quarrelled. Often. I told you she was angry. By nature. She was like a squall of sudden shower, thunder and lightning. She berated me. She said I had ruined her life. Often. And then we played again. I would make myself small, and hide. One day, to amuse her, I hid in the new çesm-i bülbül bottle that her husband had given her: I flowed in gracefully and curled myself; and she began suddenly to weep and rail and said, “I wish I could forget I had ever seen you.” And so she did. On the instant.’

‘But– ‘said Dr Perholt.

‘But?’ said the genie.

‘But why did you not just flow out of the bottle again? Solomon had not sealed that bottle –’

‘I had taught her a few sealing-spells, for pleasure. For my pleasure, in being in her power, and hers, in having power. There are humans who play such games of power with manacles and ropes. Being inside a bottle has certain things – a
few
things – in common with being inside a woman-a certain pain that at times is indistinguishable from pleasure. We cannot die, but at the moment of becoming infinitesimal inside the neck of a flask, or a jar, or a bottle – we can shiver with the apprehension of extinction – as humans speak of dying when they reach the height of bliss, in love. To be nothing, in the bottle – to pour my seed into her-it was a little the same. And I taught her the words of power as a kind of wager-a form of gambling. Russian roulette,’ said the djinn, appearing to pluck these unlikely words from the air.

‘So I was in, and she was out, and had forgotten me,’ he concluded.

‘And now,’ said the djinn, ‘I have told you the history of my incarcerations, and you must tell me your history.’

‘I am a teacher. In a university. I was married and now I am free. I travel the world in aeroplanes and talk about storytelling.’

‘Tell me your story.’

A kind of panic overcame Dr Perholt. It seemed to her that she had no story, none that would interest this hot person with his searching look and his restless intelligence. She could not tell him the history of the western world since Zefir had mistakenly wished him forgotten in a bottle of çesm-i bülbül glass, and without that string of wonders, how could he understand her?

He put a great hand on her towelled shoulder. Through the towel, even, his hand was hot and dry.

‘Tell me anything,’ said the djinn.

She found herself telling him how she had been a girl at a boarding-school in Cumberland, a school full of girls, a school with nowhere to hide from gaggles and klatsches of girls. It may be she told him this because of her imagined vision of Zefir, in the women’s quarters in Smyrna in 1850. She told him about the horror of dormitories full of other people’s sleeping breath. I am a naturally
solitary
creature, the Doctor told the djinn. She had written a secret book, her first book, she told him, during this imprisonment, a book about a young man called Julian who was in hiding, disguised as a girl called Julienne, in a similar place. In hiding from an assassin or a kidnapper, she could barely remember, at this distance, she told the djinn. Her voice faded. The djinn was impatient. Was she a lover of women in those days? No, said Dr Perholt, she believed she had written the story out of an emptiness, a need to imagine a boy, a man, the Other. And how did the story progress, asked the djinn, and could you not find a real boy or man, how did you resolve it? I could not, said Dr Perholt. It seemed silly, in writing, I could see it was silly. I filled it with details, realistic details, his underwear, his problems with gymnastics, and the more realism I tried to insert into what was really a cry of desire-desire for nothing specific – the more silly my story. It should have been farce or fable, I see that now, and I was writing passion and tragedy and buttons done with verisimilitude. I burned it in the school furnace. My imagination failed. I got all enmeshed in what was realism and what was reality and what was true – my need not to be in that place-and my imagination failed. Indeed it may be because Julian/Julienne was such a ludicrous figure that I am a narratologist and not a maker of fictions. I tried to conjure him up-he had long black hair in the days when all Englishmen had short back-and-sides-but he remained resolutely absent, or almost absent. Not quite. From time to time, he had a sort of being, he was a sort of wraith. Do you understand this?

‘Not entirely,’ said the djinn. ‘He was an emanation, like this Becker you would not let me give you.’

‘Only the emanation of an absence.’ She paused. ‘When I was younger there was a boy who was real.’

‘Your first lover.’

‘No. No. Not flesh and blood. A golden boy who walked beside me wherever I went. Who sat beside me at table, who lay beside me at night, who sang with me, who walked in my dreams. Who disappeared when I had a headache or was sick, but was always there when I couldn’t move for asthma. His name was Tadzio, I don’t know where I got that from, he came with it, one day, I just looked up and I saw him. He told me stories. In a language only we two spoke. One day I found a poem which said how it was, to live in his company. I did not know anyone else knew, until I read that poem.’

‘I know those beings –’ said the djinn. ‘Zefir had known one. She said he was always a little transparent but moved with his own will, not hers. Tell me your poem.’

‘I love that poem,’ said Dr Perholt. ‘It has two things: names and the golden boy. The names are not the names of the boy, they are the romance of language, and
he
is the romance of language – he is more real than-reality-as the goddess of Ephesus is more real than I am –’

‘And I am here,’ said the djinn.

‘Indeed,’ aid Dr Perholt. ‘Incontrovertible’

There was a silence. The djinn returned to the topic of Dr Perholt’s husband, her children, her house, her parents, all of which she answered without – in her mind or his – investing any of these now truly insignificant people with any life or colour. My husband went to Majorca with Emmeline Porter, she said to the djinn, and decided not to come back, and I was glad. The djinn asked about the complexion of Mr Perholt and the nature of the beauty of Emmeline Porter and received null and unsatisfactory answers. They are wax images, your people, said the djinn indignantly.

‘I do not want to think about them.’

‘That is apparent. Tell me something about yourself – something you have never told anyone – something you have never trusted to any lover in the depth of any night, to any friend, in the warmth of a long evening. Something you have kept for me.’

And the image sprang in her mind, and she rejected it as insignificant.

‘Tell me,’ said the djinn.

‘It is insignificant.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Once, I was a bridesmaid. To a good friend from my college who wanted a white wedding, with veils and flowers and organ music, though she was happily settled with her man already, they slept together, she said she was blissfully happy, and I believe she was. At college, she seemed very poised and formidable – a woman of power, a woman of sexual experience, which was unusual in my day –’

‘Women have always found ways –’

‘Don’t sound like the
Arabian Nights.
I am telling you something. She was full of bodily grace, and capable of being happy, which most of us were not, it was fashionable to be disturbed and anguished, for young women in those days-probably young men too. We were a generation when there was something shameful about being an unmarried woman, a spinster – though we were all clever, like Zefir, my friends and I, we all had this greed for knowledge – we were scholars –’

‘Zefir would have been happy as a teacher of philosophy, it is true,’ said the djinn. ‘Neither of us could quite think what she could be-in those days –’

‘And my friend – whom I shall call Susannah, it wasn’t her name, but I can’t go on without one-my friend had always seemed to me to come from somewhere rather grand, a beautiful house with beautiful things. But when I arrived for the wedding her house was much like mine, small, like a box, in a row of similar houses, and there was a settee, there was a three-piece suite in moquette –’

‘A three-piece suite in moquette?’ enquired the djinn. ‘What horrid thing is this to make you frown so?’

‘I knew it was no good telling you anything out of my world. It is too big for those rooms, it is too heavy, it
weighs everything down
, it is chairs and a sofa that sat on a beige carpet with splashy flowers on –’

‘A sofa– ‘ said the djinn, recognising a word. ‘A carpet.’

‘You don’t know what I’m talking about. I should never have started on this. All English stories get bogged down in whether or not the furniture is socially and aesthetically acceptable. This wasn’t. That is, I thought so then. Now I find everything interesting, because I live my own life.’

‘Do not heat yourself. You did not like the house. The house was small and the three-piece suite in moquette was big, I comprehend. Tell me about the marriage. The story is presumably about the marriage and not about the chairs and sofa.’

‘Not really. The marriage went off beautifully. She had a lovely dress, like a princess out of a story-those were the days of the princess-line in dresses – -I had a princess-line dress too, in shot taffeta, turquoise and silver, with a heart-shaped neck, and she was wearing several net skirts, and over those silk, and over that white lace – and a
mass
of veiling – and real flowers in her hair-little rosebuds-there wasn’t room for all those billows of wonderful stuff in her tiny bedroom. She had a bedside lamp with Peter Rabbit eating a carrot. And all this shimmering silk and stuff. On the day, she looked so lovely, out of another world. I had a big hat with a brim, it suited me. You can imagine the dresses, I expect, but you can’t imagine the house, the place.’