The Palace of Dreams (5 page)

“Well, it’s not a legend—it’s a fact. And it gives work to hundreds of people in the Master-Dream department.”

He looked at Mark-Alem for some time before going on.

“And—-would you believe it?—a dream like that, with its significant omens, is sometimes more useful to the Sovereign than a whole army of soldiers or all his diplomats put together.”

Mark-Alem listened openmouthed.

“So now do you see why the position of the Master-Dream officers is so superior to ours?”

What a gigantic mechanism, thought Mark-Alem. Yes, the Tabir Sarrail really was unimaginably vast.

“You never see any of them about,” the other went on. “They even have their coffee and
salep
in a place of their own.

“A place of their own …” Mark-Alem echoed.

His new friend had just opened his mouth to supply more information when the sound of a bell, the same one as had announced the coffee break, put a sudden stop to everything that was going on around them.

Mark-Alem had neither time nor need to ask what it meant. Even before the ringing had stopped, everyone started to rush for the exits. Those who hadn’t finished the drinks in front of them emptied their cups and glasses in one gulp. Others, who’d only just been served with beverages still too hot to drink, just abandoned them and made off like the rest. Mark-Alem’s companion had fallen silent just as suddenly, then nodded curtly and turned away. Mark-Alem would have tried to detain him and ask him one last question, but as he was about to do so he was jostled first to the left and then to the right, and so lost sight of him.

As he let himself be swept out along with the crowd, he realized he’d forgotten to ask his new acquaintance his name. If only I knew what section he works in, he sighed. Then he consoled himself with the thought that they might meet again at the next day’s coffee break and be able to have another chat.

The crowd was thinning by now, and Mark-Alem tried to find one of the faces he’d seen before in the Selection department. In vain. He had to ask the way back there twice. When he arrived he crept in quietly, trying not to be noticed. The last chairs were still being scraped into place. Nearly all the clerks were ensconced at their long tables again. Mark-Alem tiptoed to his desk, drew out his chair, and sat down. He did nothing for a few moments, then bent over his file and started to read:
Three white foxes on the minaret of the local mosque …
then suddenly he looked up. He felt as if someone were hailing him from a long way away, sending out some strange, faint, doleful signal like a call for help or a sob. What is it? he wondered. The question soon absorbed him absolutely. Without knowing why, he looked at the high windows. It was the first time he’d done so. Beyond the windowpanes the rain, so familiar but now so distant, mingled as it fell with delicate flakes of snow. The flakes eddied wildly in the morning light, now distant too—so far away it seemed to belong to another life, another world from which perhaps that ultimate signal had been sent out to him.

With a vague sense of guilt he looked away and bent over his file. But before he started reading again he heaved a deep sigh: Oh, God!

SELECTION

ii

It was a Tuesday afternoon
.

The offices would be stopping work in an hour. Mark-Alem looked up from his papers and rubbed his eyes. He’d started this job a week ago, but he still hadn’t got used to so much reading. His right-hand neighbor fidgeted about on his chair, but went on reading. From the whole length of the long table came the regular rustle of turned pages. All the clerks had their eyes glued to their files.

It was November. The files were getting thicker and thicker. The flow of dreams tended to increase at this time of year. That was one of the main things Mark-Alem had noticed during his first week. People would go on having dreams and sending them in for ever and ever, but they varied in number from season to season. And this was one of the busy periods. Tens of thousands of dreams were arriving from all over the Empire, and would go on doing so at the same rate until the end of the year. The files would swell as the weather grew colder. Then, after the New Year, things would slacken off until spring.

Mark-Alem gave another surreptitious glance at his right-hand neighbor, then shot a look at the one on the left. Were they really reading or merely pretending? He leaned his head on his hand and looked down at the page in front of him, but instead of letters he seemed to see only spidery scrawls against a background of gray. No, he couldn’t go on reading. Many of the others poring over their files were probably only shamming. It really was an awful job.

As he sat with his brow propped on his palm, he remembered what the older hands in Selection had been telling him that week about the ebb and flow of dreams, and the way their numbers varied according to time of year, rainfall, temperature, atmospheric pressure, and humidity. The veterans of the department were experts on this sort of thing. They knew all about the influence of snow, wind, and lightning on the quantity of dreams, not to mention the effect of earthquakes, comets, and eclipses of the moon. Some people in the department were probably real adepts in the analysis of dreams, genuine scientists who could detect strange hidden significances in visions that to the ordinary eye seemed like meaningless mental doodlings. And in no other department in the Tabir Sarrail could you find old campaigners like those in Selection, able to foretell the size of the crop of dreams as easily as ordinary graybeards could predict bad weather from their rheumatics.

Suddenly Mark-Alem thought of the man he’d met on his first day. Where was he? For several days Mark-Alem had looked for him among the crowd of clerks in the coffee break, but he’d never seen him anywhere. Perhaps he’s not well, he thought. Or he might have been sent on an assignment to some distant province. He might be one of the Tabir’s inspectors, who spent most of their time away on official missions; or he might be just an ordinary messenger.

Mark-Alem imagined the thousands of Tabir Sarrail offices scattered all over the vast country—the makeshift buildings, sometimes mere shacks, housing them and their even more modest staff. This usually consisted of two or three hard-worked, ill-paid clerks ready to bow to the ground before the meanest courier from the Tabir when he came to collect the dreams, stammering and stuttering and crawling to him just because he represented the Center. In some remote areas the inhabitants of subprefectures would set out before dawn and trudge through the rain and mud to relate their dreams in these dismal little offices. They’d bellow from outside, not bothering to knock at the door: “Are you open yet, Hadji?”

Most of them couldn’t read or write, so they came very early in the day so as not to forget their dreams, not even stopping for a drink at a nearby tavern. Each one would tell his story to a drowsy-eyed copyist who cursed both the dream and the dreamer. “God grant us better luck this time!” some would say when they’d finished. There was a time-honored legend about some poor wretch who lived in a forgotten byway and whose dream saved the State from a terrible calamity. As a reward the Sovereign summoned him to the capital, received him in his palace, told him to take his choice among the royal treasures, and even offered him one of his nieces in marriage. And so on. “God grant …” the yokels would repeat as they set off through the mud again, most of them probably heading for the tavern. The copyist would watch them go sardonically, and before they disappeared around the bend in the road, he would mark their dreams “Useless.”

Despite strict instructions that they should judge dreams completely impartially and without prejudice, this was how the clerks carried out the first selection. The local inhabitants were an open book to them. Even before a new arrival crossed the threshold of their office they knew whether he was a hellraiser, a drunk, a layabout, or suffered from an ulcer. This attitude had often caused problems, and a few years before it had been decided that the first sifting should no longer be entrusted to the local offices. But the ensuing flood of dreams converging on central Selection was so great the decision had to be revoked, and the first sifting continued to be done locally for want of a better solution.

Naturally the dreamers themselves knew nothing of all this. Every so often they would come to the door and ask, “Well, Hadji, any answer about my dream?”

“No, not yet,” replied Hadji. “Patience, Abdul Kader! The Empire’s a big place, and even though they work day and night the central office can’t keep up with all the dreams they’re sent.”

“Yes, of course. You’re right,” the other would answer, gazing at the horizon in the direction where he imagined the Center to be. “How can we know anything about affairs of State?” And he’d clump off in his clogs to the pothouse.

Mark-Alem had learned all this the morning before from an inspector at the Tabir with whom he’d had coffee. The inspector was just back from a distant Asian province and was about to set out again for the European part of the Empire. What he said took Mark-Alem aback. Could everything really begin in so humble a manner? But the inspector, as if sensing his disappointment, hastened to explain that it wasn’t like that everywhere. Some local sections were in solid buildings in imposing cities in Asia and Europe, and those who brought their dreams there were not poor yokels but distinguished people loaded down with honors and titles and university degrees—people of wit, intelligence, and ambition. The inspector expatiated for a while on this point, and Mark-Alem’s image of the Tabir Sarrail gradually regained its former luster. The inspector was just launching into an account of some other episodes in his travels when the bell interrupted him; and now Mark-Alem was trying to imagine the rest for himself. He thought of the peoples who lived on the left side of the Empire and of those who lived on the right; of those who had many dreams and those who had few; of those who were quite ready to tell their dreams and those, like the Albanians, who were very reserved about them (Mark-Alem set great store by his Albanian origins and automatically registered anything that concerned Albania). He thought of the dreams dreamed by peoples in a state of revolt, by peoples who’d been the victims of cruel massacres, by peoples who suffered from periods of insomnia. The latter were a source of special anxiety to the State, since after a latent period a sudden resurgence was to be expected. So special measures were taken in advance to deal with it.

When his informant had spoken of whole peoples suffering from insomnia, Mark-Alem had looked at him in astonishment.

“I know it may strike you as strange,” said the other, “but it has to be understood relatively. A people is deemed to be suffering from insomnia when its total amount of sleep descends appreciably below the norm. And where is anyone in a better position to assess this difference than in the Tabir Sarrail?”

“Of course,” agreed Mark-Alem. He remembered his own recent sleepless nights, though he quickly told himself the sleeplessness of a whole nation must be very different from that of an individual.

He started glancing covertly again to right and left. All the other members of staff seemed to be deep in their papers, as spellbound as if the files, instead of consisting merely of written pages, were braziers giving off intoxicating fumes. Perhaps I’ll gradually succumb to that fascination too, thought Mark-Alem morosely, and end up forgetting all about the world and the human race.