The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (Vintage International) (17 page)

‘Tell me,’ said Gillian Perholt, interrupting his story, ‘what do women most desire?’

‘Do you not know?’ said the djinn. ‘If you do not know already, I cannot tell you.’

‘Maybe they do not all desire the same thing.’

‘Maybe you do not. Your own desires, Djil-yan Perihan, are not clear to me. I cannot read your thoughts, and that intrigues me. Will you not tell me your life?’

‘It is of no interest. Tell me what happened when you were bought by Princess Mihrimah.’

‘This lady was the daughter of the Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, and his concubine Roxelana, la Rossa, the woman out of Galicia, daughter of a Ukrainian priest and known in Turkish as Hurrem, the laughing one. She was terrible as an army with the banners, Roxelana. She defeated the Sultan’s early love, Gülbahar, the Rose of Spring, whom he adored, and when she bore him a son, she laughed him fiercely into marrying her, which no concubine, no Christian, had ever achieved. And when the kitchens burned – in your year 1540 it must be-she marched her household into the Seraglio-a hundred ladies-in-waiting and the eunuchs, all quaking in their shoes for fear of being disembowelled on the spot – but they were more afraid of her laughter-and so she settled in the palace itself. And Mihrimah’s husband, Rüstem Pasha, was the grand vizir after Ibrahim was strangled. I remember Suleiman the Magnificent-his face was round with blue eyes, the nose of a ram, the body of a lion, a full beard, a long neck-he was a big man, a king of men, a man without fear or compromise, a glorious man…. Those who came after were fools and boys. That was her fault, Roxelana’s fault. She intrigued against his son Mustafa, Gülbahar’s son, who was like his father and would have been a wise ruler-she persuaded Suleiman he was treacherous, and so when he came boldly into his father’s presence they were waiting for him, the mutes with the silk strangling cords, and he tried to cry to the janissaries who loved him, but the stranglers beat him down and stopped his breath. I saw it all, for I had been sent to see it by my new young mistress, a slave girl who belonged to Mihrimah and opened my bottle, believing it contained perfume for her mistress’s bath. She was a Christian and a Circassian, Gülten, pale for my tastes, and tremulous and given to weeping and wringing her hands. And when I appeared to her in that secret bathroom she could only faint and I had great trouble in rousing her and explaining to her that she had three wishes, because she had released me, and that I meant her no harm and could do her no harm, for I was the slave of the bottle until the wishes were performed. And the poor silly thing was distractedly in love with Prince Mustafa and wished immediately that she could find favour in his eyes. Which came about – he sent for her-I spoke to him – I escorted her to his bedchamber, I told her how to please him-he was very much like his father and loved poems, and singing, and good manners. And then the silly girl wished she could become pregnant –’

‘That was only natural.’

‘Natural but very stupid. Better to use the wish
against
pregnancy, my lady, and also foolish to waste the wish in such a hurry, for they were both young and lusty and hot-blooded, and what did happen would have happened without my interference, and I could have helped her in more important ways. For of course when Roxelana heard that Gülten was to bear Mustafa’s child, she ordered her eunuchs to sew her up in a sack and throw her from the Seraglio Point into the Bosphorus. And I thought to myself, having flown back from Mustafa’s execution, that at any moment she would bethink herself of me, and wish-I don’t know exactly what – but wish to be far away-or out of the sack-or back in Circassia-I waited for her to formulate the wish, because once she had made it we would both be free, I to fly where I pleased and she to live, and bear her child. But her limbs were frozen cold, and her lips were blue as lapis with terror, and her great blue eyes were starting out of her head – and the gardeners-the executioners were also the gardeners, you know – bundled her into the sack like a dead rosebush-and carried her away to the cliff over the Bosphorus. And I thought of rescuing her at every moment-but I calculated that she
must
, even involuntarily, wish for her life, and that if I delayed, and went invisibly through the garden in the evening – the roses were in full bloom, the perfume was intense to swooning-and over she went, and drowned, before I could quite make up my mind to the fact that she was in no state to make any wish.

‘So there was I,’ said the djinn, ‘half-emancipated, you could say, but still tied to the bottle by the third unperformed task. I found I was free to wander during the day within a certain range of the enchanted flask, but I was compelled to return at night and shrink myself to its compass and sleep there. I was a prisoner of the harem, and likely to remain so, for my bottle was securely hidden under a tile in the floor of a bathroom, a secretly loosened tile, known only to the drowned Circassian. For women closed into those places find many secret places to hide things, for they like to have one or two possessions of their own-or a place to hide letters-that no one else, they fondly think, knows of. And I found I was unable to attract anyone’s attention to the tile and the bottle; these things were out of my power.

‘And so I haunted the Topkapi Sarayi for just under a hundred years, attached by a silken cord you might say poetically, to the flask hidden in the bathroom floor. I saw Roxelana persuade Suleiman the Magnificent to write to the Shah Tahmasp of Persia, with whom their youngest son, Bayezid, had taken refuge, and command the Shah to execute the young Prince-which he would not do for hospitality’s sake, but allowed it to be done by Turkish mutes, as was customary, and Bayezid was put to death, with his four sons and a fifth, three years of age, hidden in Bursa. He would have made an excellent ruler, too, I think-and so it was generally thought.’

‘
Why?
’ asked Gillian Perholt.

‘It was customary, my lady, and Roxelana wished to assure a safe succession for her eldest son, Selim, Selim the Sot, Selim the drunkard, Selim the poet, who died in a bathhouse after too many flasks of wine. Roxelana was long dead, buried beside the Süleymaniye, and Mihrimah her daughter built a new mosque to commemorate Suleiman, with the help of the great architect Sinan, who made the Süleymaniye in holy rivalry with Haghia Sophia. And I watched sultans come and go – Murad III, who was ruled by women, and strangled five of his brothers, Mehmed HI, who strangled nineteen of his, and then gave them sumptuous burials – he died when a dervish predicted he would live another fifty-five days-on the fifty-fifth, in fear and trembling. I watched Mustafa, the holy madman, who was brought from the cages of the princes, deposed, brought back after the slaughter of the boy Osman, and deposed by Murad IV, who was the most cruel. Can you imagine a man, my lady, who could see a circle of lovely girls dancing in a meadow, and order them all to be drowned because they sang too loudly? No one spoke in those days, in the palace, for fear of attracting his attention. He could have a man killed because his teeth chattered involuntarily for fear of being put to death. And when he was dying he ordered the death of his only surviving brother, Ibrahim. But his mother, Kösem, the Greek, the Valide Sultan, lied to him and said it was done, when it was not. I saw him smile and try to get up to see the corpse, and fall back in his death-throes.

‘As for Ibrahim. He was a fool, a cruel fool, who loved things of the harem where he had grown up. He listened to an old storyteller in the harem-a woman from north of the Ukraine, who told him of northern kings who made love to their concubines in rooms entirely lined with sables, and with sables on their couches and sables on their bodies. So he made himself a great robe, sable without, sable within, with great jewels for buttons, which he wore whilst he satisfied his lust – smell was not good, after a time. And he believed that the pleasures of the flesh would be more intense the larger the expanse of flesh with which he coped, so he sent out janissaries over all his lands to seek out the fleshiest, the hugest women, and bring them to his couch, where he scrambled all over them dragging the edges of his dark furs like a beast. And that is how I came to return to my bottle, for the fattest of all, the most voluptuous, the most like a sweet-breathed cow, whose anklets were twice your present waist, madame-she was an Armenian Christian, she was docile and short of breath – it was she who was so heavy that she dislodged the tile under which my bottle lay concealed – and so I stood before her in the bathroom and she wheezed with anxiety. I told her that the Valide Sultan planned to have her strangled that night at the banquet she was dressing for, and I thought she would utter a wish-wish herself a thousand miles away, or wish that someone would strangle the Valide Sultan-or even wish a small wish, such as “I wish I knew what to do,” and I would have told her what to do, and rushed on wide wings to the ends of the earth afterwards.

‘But this globular lady was self-satisfied and slow-witted, and all she could think of to say was “I wish you were sealed up in your bottle again, infidel Ifrit, for I want nothing to do with dirty djinns. You smell bad,” she added, as I coiled myself back into atomies of smoke and sighed myself into the flask and replaced the stopper. And she carried my flask through the rose-garden where my white Circassian had been carried, and threw me over the Seraglio Point into the Bosphorus. She undertook this herself; I could feel the voluptuous rippling and juddering of her flesh as she progressed along the paths. I was about to say she had not taken so much exercise in years, but that would be unjust – she had to use her musculature very vigorously in certain ways to cope with the more extreme projects of Sultan Ibrahim. And Kösem did have her strangled that night, just as I had told her. It would have been more interesting to have been released by those doughty Sultanas, by Roxelana or Kösem, but my luck was femininity.

‘And so I tossed about in the Bosphorus for another two hundred and fifty years and was then fished up by another fisherman and sold as an antique to a merchant of Smyrna, who gave me – or my flask – as a love-token to his young wife, Zefir, who had a collection of curious-shaped bottles and jars in her quarters in the harem. And Zefir saw the seal on the bottle and knew what it was, for she was a great reader of tales and histories. She told me later she spent all night in fear, wondering whether to open the flask, in case I might be angry, like the djinn who threatened to kill his rescuer because he had become enraged, over the centuries, that the poor man had taken so long to come to his aid. But she was a brave creature, Zefir, and ardent for knowledge, and mortally bored, so one day, alone in her chamber, she pushed away the seal.

‘What was she like?’ said Gillian, since the djinn appeared to have floated off into a reminiscent reverie.

His eyelids were half-closed and the edges of his huge nostrils fluttered.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Zefir. She had been married at fourteen to the merchant who was older than she was, and was kind enough to her, kind enough, if you call treating someone like a toy dog or a spoiled baby or a fluffy fat bird in a cage being kind. She was good-looking enough, a sharp, dark person, with secret black-brown eyes and an angry line of a mouth that pulled in at the corners. She was wayward and angry, Zefir, and she had nothing at all to do. There was an older wife who didn’t like her and didn’t talk to her, and servants, who seemed to her to be mocking her. She spent her time sewing huge pictures in silk-pictures of stories – the stories from the Shahnama, of Rüstem and the Shah Kaykavus, who tried to emulate the djinns and fly, and devised a method of some ingenuity-he tied four strong yet hungry eagles to a throne, and four juicy legs of mutton to the rising posts of the canopy of the throne-and then he seated himself, and the eagles strove to reach the meat, and lifted the throne-and the shah – towards the heavens. But the eagles tired, and the throne and its occupant fell to earth-she had embroidered him coming down headlong and head first, and she had sewed him a rich carpet of flowers to fall on, for she thought him aspiring, and not a fool. You should have seen the beauty of her silk legs of mutton, like the life – or rather, death. She was a great artist, Zefir, but no one saw her art. And she was angry because she knew she was capable of many things she couldn’t even define to herself, so they seemed like bad dreams-that is what she told me. She told me she was eaten up with unused power and thought she might be a witch – except, she said, if she were a man, these things she thought about would be ordinarily acceptable. If she had been a man, and a westerner, she would have rivalled the great Leonardo, whose flying machines were the talk of the court of Suleiman one summer –

‘So I taught her mathematics, which was bliss to her, and astronomy, and many languages, she studied secretly with me, and poetry – we wrote an epic poem about the travels of the Queen of Sheba-and history, I taught her the history of Turkey and the history of the Roman Empire, and the history of the Holy Roman Empire-I bought her novels in many languages, and philosophical treatises, Kant and Descartes and Leibnitz –’

‘Wait,’ said Gillian. ‘Was this her wish, that you should teach her these things?’

‘Not exactly,’ said the djinn. ‘She wished to be wise and learned, and I had known the Queen of Sheba, and what it was to be a wise woman

‘Why did she not wish to
get out of there?9
asked Gillian.

‘I advised against it. I said the wish was bound to go wrong, unless she was better-informed about the possible places or times she might wish herself into-I said there was no hurry –’

‘You enjoyed teaching her.’

‘Rarely among humankind can there have been a more intelligent being,’ said the djinn. ‘And not only intelligent.’ He brooded.

‘I taught her other things also,’ he said. ‘Not at first. At first I flew in and out with bags of books and papers and writing things that I then hid by temporarily vanishing them into her bottle collection-so she could always call on Aristotle from the red glass perfume-bottle, or Euclid from the green tear-bottle, without needing me to re-embody them –’