The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (Vintage International) (12 page)

See here, he said, with momentary excitement, see here is the story of Gilgamesh carved in stone if you know how to read it. See here is the hero clothed in skins and here is his friend the wild man with his club-here is their meeting, here they wrestle and make friends on the threshold of the king’s palace. Do you know Enkidu? He was huge and hairy, he lived with the beasts in the woods and fields, he helped them escape the trappers and hunters. But the trappers asked Gilgamesh the king to send a woman, a whore, who tempted Enkidu to leave the world of the gazelles and the herds and come to the king, who fought him and loved him. And they were inseparable, and together they killed the giant Humbaba-tricked and killed him in the forest. They trick and kill him, they are young and strong, there is nothing they cannot do. But then Gilgamesh’s youth and strength attract the attention of the goddess Ishtar – she was the goddess of Love, and also of War – she is the same goddess you know, ma’am, as Cybele and Astarte-and when the Romans came with their Diana she was the same goddess-terrible and beautiful-whose temples were surrounded by whores – holy whores – whose desires could not be denied. And Ishtar wanted to marry Gilgamesh but he repelled her-he thought she would trick him and destroy him, and he made the mistake of telling her so, telling her he didn’t want her, he wanted to remain free-for she had destroyed Tammuz, he said, whom the women wailed for, and she had turned shepherds into wolves and rejected lovers into blind moles, and she had destroyed the lions in pits and the horses in battle, although she loved their fierceness. And this made Ishtar angry – and she sent a great bull from heaven to destroy the kingdom, but the heroes killed the bull-see here in the stone they drive their sword behind his horns-and Enkidu ripped off the bull’s thigh and threw it in the face of Ishtar. And she called the temple whores to weep for the bull and decided Enkidu must die. See here, he lies sick on his bed and dreams of death. For young men, you know, they do not know death, or they think of it as a lion or a bull to be wrestled and conquered. But sick men know death, and Enkidu dreamed of His coming-a bird-man with a ghoul-face and claws and feathers – for the loathsome picture of death, you see, is from the vulture-and Enkidu dreamed that this Death was smothering him and turning him into the bird-man and that he was going to the Palace of the gods of the underworld-and there, Enkidu saw in his dream, there was no light at all and no joy and the people ate dust and fed on clay. There is a goddess down there too-here she is-Ereshkigal the Queen of the underworld. And both Gilgamesh and Enkidu wept at this dream-it terrified them-it took away all their strength-and then Enkidu died, in terrible pain, and Gilgamesh could not be comforted. He would not accept that his friend was gone and would never come back. He was young and strong, he would not accept that there was death walking in the world. Young men are like that, you know, it’s a truth – they think they can defy what’s coming because their blood is hot and their bodies are strong.

And Gilgamesh remembered his ancestor Uta-Napishtim, who was the only man who had survived when the earth was flooded; they said he lived in the underworld and had the secret of living forever. So Gilgamesh travelled on and travelled on, and came to a mountain called Mashu, and at the mountain’s gate were the man-scorpions, demons, you know, like dragons. We can pretend that this gate is the gate of the underworld-the Sumerian people, the Babylonian people, they made great solid gates to their buildings and built guardians into the gates. See here are lions, and here, at this gate, are genies – you say genies?-yes, genies-there were good genies and bad genies in Babylon, they were called
utukku
and some were good and some were evil – the good ones were like these guardians here who are bulls with wings and wise faces of men – they are called
shedu
or
lamassu –
they stand here as guardians, but they could take other shapes, they walked invisibly behind men in the streets; every one had his genie, some people say, and they protected them – there is an old saying ‘he who has no genie when he walks in the streets wears a headache like a garment’. That’s interesting, don’t you think?

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.

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. This is a white city risen, in part, from the dead: you can walk along a marble street where Saint Paul must have walked; columns and porticoes, the shell of an elegant library, temples and caryatids are again upright in the spring sun. The young Attila frowned as they paced past the temple façades and said they made him shiver: Gillian thought he was thinking of the death of nations, but it turned out that he was thinking of something more primitive and more immediate, of earthquakes. And when he said that, Gillian looked at the broken stones with fear too.

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.