The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (Vintage International) (19 page)

‘If you say I cannot,’ replied the djinn, obligingly. ‘Why do you tell me this tale? I cannot believe this is what you have not told.’

‘The night before the wedding,’ said Gillian Perholt, ‘we bathed together, in her parents’ little bathroom. It had tiles with fishes with trailing fins and big soulful cartoon eyes –’

‘Cartoon?’

‘Disney. It doesn’t matter.
Comic
eyes.’

‘Comic tiles?’

‘It doesn’t matter. We didn’t share the bath, but we washed together.’

‘And –’ said the djinn. ‘She made love to you.’

‘No,’ said Dr Perholt. ‘She didn’t. I saw myself. First in the mirror, and then I looked down at myself. And then I looked across at her – she was pearly-white and I was more golden. And she was soft and sweet –’

‘And you were not?’

‘I was perfect. Just at that moment, just at the very end of being a girl, and before I was a woman, really, I was perfect.’

She remembered seeing her own small, beautifully rising breasts, her warm, flat, tight belly, her long slender legs and ankles, her waist – her waist –

‘She said, “Some man is going to go mad with desire for you,” ‘ said Gillian Perholt. ‘And I was all proud inside my skin, as never before or since. All golden.’ She thought. ‘Two girls in a suburban bathroom,’ she said, in an English deprecating voice.

The djinn said, ‘But when I changed you, that was not what you became. You are very nice now, very acceptable, very desirable now, but not perfect.’

‘It was terrifying. I was terrified. It was like –’ she found a completely unexpected phrase – ‘like having a weapon, a sharp sword, I couldn’t handle.’

‘Ah yes,’ said the djinn. ‘Terrible as an army with banners.’

‘But it didn’t belong to me. I was tempted to-to love it – myself. It was lovely. But unreal. I mean, it was
there
, it was real enough, but I knew in my head it wouldn’t stay – something would happen to it. I owed it– ‘ she went on, searching for feelings she had never interrogated – ‘I owed it – some sort of adequate act. And I wasn’t going to live up to it.’ She caught her breath on a sigh. ‘I am a creature of the mind, not the body, Djinn. I can look after my mind. I took care of that, despite everything.’

‘Is that the end of the story?’ said the djinn after another silence. ‘Your stories are strange, glancing things. They peter out, they have no shape.’

‘It is what my culture likes, or liked. But no, it is not the end. There is a little bit more. In the morning Susannah’s father brought my breakfast in bed. A boiled egg in a woolly cosy, a little silver-plated pot of tea, in a cosy knitted to look like a cottage, toast in a toast-rack, butter in a butter-dish, all on a little tray with unfolding legs, like the trays old ladies have in Homes.’

‘You didn’t like the-the whatever was on the teapot? Your aesthetic sense, which is so violent, was in revolt again?’

‘He suddenly leaned forwards and pulled my nightdress off my shoulders. He put his hands round my perfect breasts,’ said Dr Perholt who was fifty-five and now looked thirty-two, ‘and he put his sad face down between them – he had glasses, they were all steamed up and knocked sideways, he had a little bristly moustache that crept over my flesh like a centipede, he
snuffled
amongst my breasts, and all he said was “I can’t bear it” and he rubbed his body against my counterpane – I only half-understood, the counterpane was artificial silk, eau-de-nil colour – he snuffled and jerked and twisted my breasts in his hands-and then he unfolded the little legs of the tray and put it over my legs and went away – to give away his daughter, which he did with great dignity and charm. And I felt sick, and felt my body was to blame. As though out of
that,
’ she said lucidly, ‘was spun snuffling and sweat and three-piece suites and artificial silk and teacosies –’

‘And that is the end of the story?’ said the djinn.

‘That is where a storyteller would end it, in my country.’

‘Odd. And you met
me
and asked for the body of a thirty-two-year-old woman.’

‘I didn’t. I asked for it to be as it was when I last
liked
it. I didn’t like it then. I half-worshipped it, but it scared me – This is
my
body, I find it pleasant, I don’t mind looking at it –’

‘Like the potter who puts a deliberate flaw in the perfect pot.’

‘Maybe. If having lived a little is a flaw. Which it is. That girl’s ignorance was a burden to her.’

‘Do you know now what other things you will wish for?’

‘Ah, you are anxious to be free.’

‘On the contrary, I am comfortable, I am curious, I have all the time in the world.’

‘And I have everything I wish for, at present. I have been thinking about the story of the Queen of Sheba and what the answer might be to the question of what all women desire. I shall tell you the story of the Ethiopian woman whom I saw on the television box.’

‘I am all ears,’ said the djinn, extending himself on the bedspread and shrinking himself a little, in order to be able to accommodate himself at full length. ‘Tell me, this box, you can turn it to spy anywhere you desire in the world, you can see Manaus or Khartoum as you please?’

‘Not exactly, though partly. For instance the tennis was coming live – we call it “live” when we see it simultaneously with its happening-from Monte Carlo. But also we can make images – stories – which we can replay to ourselves. The Ethiopian woman was part of a story – a film – made for the Save the Children Fund-which is a charitable body-which had given some food to a village in Ethiopia where there had been drought and famine, food specifically to give to the children, to keep them alive through the winter. And when they brought the food, they filmed the people of the village, the head men and the elders, the children playing, and then they came back, the research workers came back, half a year later, to see the children and weigh them, to see how the food they had given had helped them.’

‘Ethiopia is a fierce country of fierce people,’ said the djinn. ‘Beautiful and terrible. What did you see in your box?’

‘The aid workers were very angry-distressed and angry. The head man had promised to give the food only to the families with the small children the project was helping and studying – “project” is –’

‘I know. I have known projectors in my time.’

‘But the head man had not done as he was asked. It was against his beliefs to feed some families and not others, and it was against everyone’s beliefs to feed small children and not grown men, who could work in the fields, if anything could be grown there. So the food had been shared out too sparsely-and everyone was thinner-and some of the children were dead-many, I think – and others were very ill because the food had not been given to them.

‘And the workers – the relief workers-the charitable people from America and Europe – were angry and upset – and the cameramen (the people who make the films) went out into the fields with the men who had had the food, and had sowed their crops in hope of rain-and had even had a little rain – and the men lifted the seedlings and showed the cameramen and the officials that the roots had been eaten away by a plague of sawfly, and there would be no harvest. And those men, standing in those fields, holding those dying, stunted seedlings, were in complete despair. They had no hope and no idea what to do. We had seen the starving in great gatherings on our boxes, you must understand – we knew where they were heading, and had sent the food because we were moved because of what we had seen.

‘And then, the cameras went into a little hut, and there in the dark were four generations of women, the grandmother, the mother and the young girl with her baby. The mother was stirring something in a pot over a fire – it looked like a watery soup – with a wooden stick – and the grandmother was sitting on a kind of bed against the wall, where the hut roof-which seemed conical-met it. They were terribly thin, but they weren’t dying-they hadn’t given up yet, they hadn’t got those eyes looking out at nothing, or those slack muscles just waiting. They were beautiful people still, people with long faces and extraordinary cheekbones, and a kind of dignity in their movement-or what westerners like me read as dignity, they are upright, they carry their heads up –

‘And they interviewed the old woman. I remember it partly because of her beauty, and partly because of the skill of the cameraman-or woman-she was angular but not awkward, and she had one long arm at an angle over her head, and her legs extended on this bench – and the photographer had made them squared, as it
were framed
in her own limbs-she spoke out of an enclosure made by her own body, and her eyes were dark holes and her face was long, long. She made the edges of the box out of her body. They wrote in English letters across the screen a translation of what she was saying. She said there was no food, no food any more and the little girl would starve, and there would be no milk, there would be no more food. And then she said, “It is because I am a woman, I cannot get out of here, I must sit here and wait for my fate, if only I were not a woman I could go out and do something-” all in a monotone. With the men stomping about in the furrows outside kicking up dry dust and stunted seedlings in perfect despair.

‘I don’t know why I tell you this. I will tell you something else. I was told to wish on a pillar in Haghia Sophia-and before I could stop myself – it was-not a good pillar-I wished what I used to wish as a child.’

‘You wished you were not a woman.’

‘There were three veiled women laughing at me, pushing my hand into that hole.

‘I thought, perhaps, that was what the Queen of Sheba told Solomon that all women desired.’

The genie smiled.

‘It was not. That was not what she told him. Not exactly.’

‘Will you tell me what she told him?’

‘If you wish me to.’

‘I wish-Oh, no. No, that isn’t what I wish.’

Gillian Perholt looked at the djinn on her bed. The evening had come, whilst they sat there, telling each other stories. A kind of light played over his green-gold skin, and a kind of glitter, like the glitter from the Byzantine mosaics, where a stone here or there will be set at a slight angle to catch the light. His plumes rose and fell as though they were breathing, silver and crimson, chrysanthemum-bronze and lemon, sapphire-blue and emerald. There was an edge of sulphur to his scent, and sandalwood, she thought, and something bitter – myrrh, she wondered, having never smelt myrrh, but remembering the king in the Christmas carol

The outsides of his thighs were greener and the insides softer and more golden. He had pulled down his tunic, not entirely adequately: she could see his sex coiled like a folded snake and stirring.

‘I wish,’ said Dr Perholt to the djinn, ‘I wish you would love me.’

‘You honour me,’ said the djinn, ‘and maybe you have wasted your wish, for it may well be that love would have happened anyway, since we are together, and sharing our life stories, as lovers do.’

‘Love,’ said Gillian Perholt, ‘requires generosity. I found I was jealous of Zefir and I have never been jealous of anyone. I wanted-it was more that I wanted to give
you
something – to give you my wish –’ she said, incoherently. The great eyes, stones of many greens, considered her and the carved mouth lifted in a smile.

‘You give and you bind,’ said the djinn, ‘like all lovers. You give yourself, which is brave, and which I think you have never done before-and I find you eminently lovable. Come.’

And without moving a muscle Dr Perholt found herself naked on the bed, in the arms of the djinn.

Of their love-making she retained a memory at once precise, mapped on to every nerve-ending, and indescribable. There was, in any case, no one to whom she could have wished to describe the love-making of a djinn. All love-making is shape-shifting – the male expands like a tree, like a pillar, the female has intimations of infinity in the spaces which narrow inside her. But the djinn could prolong everything, both in space and in time, so that Gillian seemed to swim across his body forever like a dolphin in an endless green sea, so that she became arching tunnels under mountains through which he pierced and rushed, or caverns in which he lay curled like dragons. He could become a concentrated point of delight at the pleasure-points of her arched and delighted body; he could travel her like some wonderful butterfly, brushing her here and there with a hot, dry, almost burning kiss, and then become again a folding landscape in which she rested and was lost, lost herself for him to find her again, holding her in the palm of his great hand, contracting himself with a sigh and holding her breast to breast, belly to belly, male to female. His sweat was like a smoke and he murmured like a cloud of bees in many languages-she felt her skin was on fire and was not consumed, and tried once to tell him about Marvell’s lovers who had not ‘world enough and time’ but could only murmur one couplet in the green cave of his ear. ‘My vegetable love should grow/Vaster than empires and more slow.’ Which the djinn smilingly repeated, using the rhythm for a particularly delectable movement of his body.

And afterwards she slept. And woke alone in her pretty nightdress, amongst her pillows. And rose sadly and went to the bathroom, where the çesm-i bülbül bottle still stood, with her own finger-traces on its moist sides. She touched it sadly, running her fingers down the spirals of white – I have had a dream, she thought – and there was the djinn, bent into the bathroom like the Ethiopian woman in the television box, making an effort to adjust his size.

‘I thought –’

‘I know. But as you see, I am here.’

‘Will you come to England with me?’

‘I must, if you ask me. But also I should like to do that, I should like to see how things are now, in the world, I should like to see where you live, though you cannot describe it as interesting.’

‘It will be, if you are there.’

But she was afraid.