Envy lurks, ready to rouse

Eighteen hundred years at the bottom of the sea may have ripened the ’ifrit’s grievance against the world, but it has done nothing for his wits. Though murderously powerful, he is easily tricked into re-imprisoning himself in the brass bottle by our sharp-witted fisherman, who knows not to listen to the desperate pleas and excuses that now come pouring out. “I didn’t mean it!” Of course you didn’t.

The ’ifrit has just enough remaining nous to play everybody’s favourite death deferring card and demands to hear the full story of the vizier and the sage, of which the fisherman has only just (gosh!) been reminded by those same pleas. So we know we are about to hear a story of lies and deceit.

But not at first. First, it’s an uplifting story of healing and gratitude.

Being wealthy and powerful is a great prophylactic, and the rich and influential of the world all too readily acquire the conviction that they are immune to all ills. But they are not. King Yunan, rich and powerful as a fabled despot should be, has a dreadful disease that has not responded to any treatment. So desperate for a cure is he that he offers Sage Duban a robe of honour for the mere promise of healing. And if he should in fact be healed, there will be no end to his rewards.  And who can blame him?.

Sage Duban is no charlatan, luckily for the King, and his unorthodox remedy is effective. Hooray! But consider the contrast between the excess of bitterness we have just seen in the imprisoned ’ifrit and the excess of generosity that now overcomes King Yunan.

On the first day of the King’s new health, Duban’s rewards include:

• robes of honour
• rich meals in the King’s company
• the promise of the King’s ever-lasting friendship
• two thousand dinars
• the King’s horse
• numerous other gifts

On the second day, the King’s generosity shows no let up:

• a seat at the King’s side
• more robes of honour to start the day
• yet more gifts
• a thousand dinars
• and another five robes of honour before he goes home to bed

Deadly Envy by artist Marta Dahlig. Deliciously alluring.

Showing such favour to one person, no matter how well-deserved, risks stirring envy in the breasts of others, where it is always but half-asleep, or, in the case of the envious but nameless vizier, ‘so envious that he is in love with envy‘, not asleep at all.

Envious people are dangerous, because their malice is often unclouded by the desire for personal gain. The wounding or downfall of the object of their envy is enough for them.

It doesn’t look good. But dawn has broken.

How long must I wait?

Our next hero, says Shahrazad, is a fisherman, and what a methodical chap he is, living an orderly life, prepared to work hard to support himself and his family, yet maintaining his work/life balance by having a strict limit on how often he will cast his net in one day. If he catches nothing with his four castings, it is God’s will. He won’t cast his net again that day.

Anyway, he’s got it all sorted with God, the only source of power and might. Do your duty. Say the holy formulas. Remember that you have no power of your own, and no ‘rights’. This will bring God’s favour.

But today he can’t help getting angry with God, who seems to be mocking him with the rubbish he finds in his net. A dead donkey, for God’s sake! A jar full of sand and mud! Broken pots and bottles and bones! He does make an effort to remember that God owes him nothing by dint of reciting a lot of humble poetry, but it’s getting a bit touch and go when he puts his net out for the fourth and final time. I’ve had days like that.

And just when it seems his piety and constancy are at last to be rewarded, the treasure in his hands turns out to be his death warrant. Now I haven’t yet had a day quite  like that…

And what creature is this that the fisherman unwittingly sets free, with his terrible head like a dome in the clouds, his winnowing fork hands, his mast-like legs, his mouth a cave lined with rocks, his eyes burning lamps? The storyteller lets loose with unrestrained hyperbole in an effort to fill us with due shock and awe.

But is not a jinni that you release from its bottle bound to offer you (at the very least) three wishes? You say this as someone already conditioned by bowdlerised versions of the Arabian Nights, but jinnis and ‘ifrits have no truck with your conditioning, and are not to be trucked with, certainly not this murderously angry spirit who has distilled his bitterness at the bottom of the sea for two interminable millennia.

He did originally intend to offer the customary wishes and wealth to whoever released him, but the wait was just too long. Unable to take revenge on the one who imprisoned him, he will instead attack and kill the one who frees him.

There’s a cock-eyed sort of sense to it, where the bitterness of long incarceration comes to outweigh the joy of freedom. Or maybe it’s not so cock-eyed, for do we not regularly observe that the long-incarcerated, even where outwardly glad to be let out, are never fully ‘free’ again?

If you are inside, you know you are inside, and all your dreams are of how wonderful it will be to get out. When you get out, it is truly terrible to discover that the inside is still keeping you in.

Enough to make you murderous, perhaps.

Interruption

Interruptions are a narrative device. They give the story teller leeway to pursue obvious and other than obvious ends without derailing the main thrust of their tale. Interruptions introduce sub-plots, explore tangential matters, elucidate character. Sometimes interruptions are simply ornamentation, like the tedious elvish poesy that interrupts the storming narrative of The Lord of the Rings. All sensible readers hurry past, glad not to be listening to a live story teller through pages of quaint quatrains.

Sometimes the interruption comes from without.

My peregrination, only just begun, through Shahrazad’s tales has suffered an interruption which took me away into an unexpected story of my own. I was carried away on a flying carpet of pain, accompanied by demonic wailing and strange blue and orange lights, body and mind filled with potions more powerful than any jinni, while wizards wielded their silver wands over my supine form and sorceresses in white and blue sprinkled magic water over me and translated me into a new form of being.

Groggy and sore, I could not support the hefty weight of Volume I and resorted to lighter tomes to distract me from my woes. Well, I say ‘lighter’…

The Catcher in the Rye by artist Diana Bryan

I re-read The Catcher in the Rye for the first time in some 40 years. I was grateful for the miracle that caught me and saved me from falling over the cliff on whose edge I lay.

Holden Caulfield is a painful character to read, awkward and unpolished, not pleasant company. He is a first generation ‘teenager’ – I don’t think they existed as a breed before 1950.

Holden does not cast himself as a story teller, nor think of himself as having a story. He utters the contents of his heart and his head unfiltered and unshaped, mouthed in the teenage vernacular, as far from ‘writing’ as it may be possible to get.

His ‘voice’ is raw, disenchanted, lost, ardent, idealistic, inarticulate. He speaks in the idiom of his class and age, without regard to impression. He doesn’t know what he thinks, what he feels, what he wants, why he does not fit in, only that life hurts, and he aches for the anguish he sees all around, not just his own, and does not know what to do with it.

I remember what it was like to read Catcher as a rather young person myself, and feel the shock of every word  loaded with significance and resonance. Holden expresses what it’s like to be a young person, surrounded by elders and betters who do not see what is really happening to you, dismissing your concerns as juvenile and trivial, while you conceal a huge burning love of the world in your heart that could well get you crucified if you ever let on.

It’s strange to read it in middle age, having raised my own teenagers. I have seen them too manifest that love for the world that must be at all costs be hidden. I look round at the ‘yoof’ of today, and see the children of the first consumer age, indoctrinated with the dogma that happiness is acquisition rather than participation, loud, brazen and uncouth, whatever social strata they occupy, seemingly without aspiration beyond the fame of being famous, or winning the lottery, boozing and bingeing, texting and surfing, rejecting every notion of ‘authority’. Who among them could admit to love? It is more dangerous than ever.

I could weep.

It had to happen

Silver dappled mule

The excitement is intense in the orchard of wherever it is. Entranced by the stories of the gazelle-wife and the dog-brothers, the vengeance seeking ‘ifrit has surrendered two thirds of the blood debt due for the accidental killing of his son from the hapless merchant, and is now ready to let the last old man gamble for the remaining third with his story of the mule-wife. He promises it will be even  ‘more amazing’ than the first two!

The atmosphere is equally tense in King Shahriyar’s bedchamber. Shahrazad is only on her second night of tale spinning and she hasn’t yet mastered exactly how to judge how long each story will take, how much she must spin out, how much she must condense, so that she can place her cliff-hanger to best effect, and sufficiently pique her husband’s interest to ensure her another night.

All right, I made that up. But it seems a not unreasonable assumption. Because this ‘more amazing’ story is a right dud.

Or maybe this should not be laid at Shahrazad’s door, but at the feet of the poor scribe who’s trying to keep up with all this.

Just imagine. A crowd of townspeople gathered in a moonlit square, walking about, or sitting in groups, pressing up against the storyteller. Smoke drifting from flares and fires. The warmth of day giving way before the cool of night. Sudden eddies of dust lifting through the air. Cries of children and animals in the dark. The stench of beasts. Smells of food from the peddlers’ baskets. And the scribe on his stool, hand cramped from writing, writing, writing. He’s had enough. He sits back to listen, promises himself that tomorrow, yes, tomorrow, he’ll remember this last story, for sure, he’ll write it down tomorrow…

And so what you get is not a transcription of what the storyteller said, but the scribe’s later brain-wracking attempt to remember how on earth it went. We must assume that the version that the ‘ifrit, and King Shahriyar and little Dunyazad, were treated to had more to it, because if this was all they got, I doubt the merchant would have been spared, nor Shahrazad herself.

Nul points for narrative appeal, then, but this tale of a naughty wife (!) who turns her husband into a dog (!) only to have her sorcery turned back on her by another sorceress (!) and find herself turned into a mule (a ‘dappled mule’ – last vestige of the storyteller’s actual words, perhaps) still offers some food for thought.

For example, being only the bare bones, you can’t miss the essential themes –

• sexual jealousy and curiosity
• sprinkling water and uttering words of power transforms people
• magic will get you round modesty taboos
• women practise sorcery to deceive men, but men win in the end

I sense there’s going to be a lot of this!

Going to the dogs

We are always being exhorted to be charitable, and of course charity begins at home, but helping out your elder brothers when they’re down on their luck through their own stupid fault carries its own risks.

They might be glad indeed not to be in the gutter after all, but will they be able to hack the unrepayable debt of gratitude they must now forever bear, not to mention the constant and inescapable reminder that you, kid brother, have done better than they, and are an altogether smarter chap?

And how do you, defender of family values and the blood tie, you man of charity and good deeds, seeking no reward beyond your own sense of virtue, you savvy and successful merchant who knows how to turn a good profit and make sensible provision for the proverbial rainy day, how do you handle your role of benefactor? Does not your virtue render you a clearly superior being? You may not mean to rub their noses in it, but some feeling of satisfaction must ensue, and be hard to hide. Or maybe you don’t try to hide it.

And then, you have the gall to become the love object of a beautiful and mysterious girl, and start devoting all your time – and your wealth – to her, and ignoring your blood brothers! You are just asking for it, aren’t you?

Okay, maybe you’re not actually asking to be murdered. But you are very annoying.

It’s a good thing the beautiful and mysterious girl turns out to be an ‘ifrita, and a convert ‘ifrita to boot, believing in God and his Apostle, but still retaining her magical powers, and so able to whisk you off in mid-murder to a magical island, and thence back to your homeland, safe and sound!

Is it not supremely charitable of you now not to wish your brothers dead? They certainly deserve it! Being magically turned into Salukis – such beautiful creatures – for ten years, while not exactly fun for them, I‘m sure, is hardly commensurate with their evil deed. And what are you doing now the ten years have passed? Going about the world seeking the one who will release them from their spell!

I hope you’re not expecting gratitude.

Still, it’s a mind boggling enough tale to merit the redemption of the second third of the merchant’s blood debt. Will the third old man’s story be a match for the other two?

Barren

Childlessness is a curse, our ancient cultural baggage insists. The imperative of life is to reproduce. Humans alone go beyond the natural impulse to a moral order. The right and the duty to have children has through most of history been claimed by men, though it is women who bear them. But if children are not forthcoming, it is the woman’s fault and no blame attaches to the man. Her deficiency is moral, her childlessness the penalty. As a corollary, spinsterhood is really the threat of childlessness, from which a husband will rescue you if you are worthy.

Roman Mosaic of a Gazelle in a Medallion, 1st century-2nd century AD, Tunis, Tunisia; from the Brooklyn Museum

Our old man with his gazelle-wife closely echoes, I doubt accidentally, a very much older story of another childless couple, Abraham and Sarah, way back in the Book of Genesis. In order to allow Abraham to fulfil his duty of fatherhood, and thus in some sense be a ‘mother’ herself, the childless Sarah suggests a concubine, her servant girl Hagar. But when the concubine produces a child, and a male child at that (so important to your manliness), the dynamic in the household turns toxic.

The concubine now feels she can act superior to the wife/mistress. The husband dotes upon his son and (by extension) his son’s mother. The wife is excluded and spurned and made to feel her barrenness more painfully than before, and nobody cares that the arrangement was her idea in the first place. She becomes bitter and vengeful. How can she be rid of these ingrates?

If she only had the sorcery skills of her later shadow, I have no doubt the wounded Sarah would be more than happy to turn mother and son into cows and dupe her unwitting husband into slaughtering them for a religious sacrifice. How fitting! Not having such power, she merely throws them out.

Supernatural powers are nonetheless not wanting in this story because a) an angel rescues Hagar and the child from death by thirst and b) Sarah is promised a pregnancy by no less a power than God himself and miraculously produces a son decades after her menopause and c) both Abraham’s sons become founders of great nations on another promise from the munificent deity. So all ends well, praise be to God.

Not so for the gazelle-wife. Her trick with the cows is only partially successful, for though she manages to dispose of the concubine, she gets found out in her sorcery by another woman skilled in witchcraft, who undoes the spell upon the son and casts a new one upon the wife, so rendering her a gazelle –

‘a beautiful shape and not a brutish one, repellent to the sight.’

More than she deserved?

Whose child is the child you bear for another woman? This ancient dilemma has not lost its resonance. We no longer speak of ‘concubines’ but of ‘surrogacy’ and childless couples pay handsomely for the service. The difficult emotions of all the parties, however, cannot be paid to go away, or cast out by magic.

But anyway, the ‘ifrit is impressed enough by the sorry saga to accept it as a fair exchange for one third of the merchant’s blood debt, and so the second old man is emboldened to have a go at buying another third with his remarkable story of the two dogs.

Blind date

Shahrazad’s dramatic situation would keep a writer going for many pages, but your invisible storyteller has little interest in it beyond manoeuvring her into position so she can get going with her foolhardy plan to entertain the king out of wanting to kill her. Her story is less important than her stories.

So in a few cursory sentences she is wedded to King Shahriyar, little Dunyazad is invited to the nuptial part of the nuptials (why did she have to sit under the bed? Mr Lyons cannot have chosen this word lightly, but what a picture it conjures up!), the rumpy-pumpy is all done with, and the long wakeful hours of the night stretch emptily ahead.

What a stroke of genius to make Dunyazad the instigator of the storytelling! This way no shadow of suspicion can fall upon Shahrazad, who only seeks to comfort and entertain her little sister through a night whose morning will be dark indeed.

And what will be the opening shot in her battle with death? What else but a story of escape from death?

A story of the life that is owed for the life that is taken, a story of justice and honour, a story of how you can get caught up by the powers of heaven not even knowing they are there, a story of how an innocent and apparently harmless act can have terrible consequences.

A bunch of dates. All blind.

The merchant only threw away a date! How was he to know it would strike the invisible son of an invisible spirit and kill him?

But now his life is forfeit, a life for a life, and being a man of honour and faith, he prepares for death by winding up his affairs, saying his prayers and returning on the appointed day so that the ‘ifrit (not to be confused with a jinni) may do the deed that will restore the balance of nature.

Now Shahrazad lines them up. Not one, not two, but three old men appear, each with a mysterious animal (or two) in tow. The merchant’s sorry tale is poured out to each in turn, and you and they can only pity him for the cruel fate which has condemned an innocent man.

It’s not unknown for innocent acts to lead to condemnation, but who, knowing they were only accidentally responsible, would not run away from execution in such circumstances if given the opportunity that this man had?

The first old man tries to bargain with the ‘ifrit for a share of the merchant’s blood debt with – a story. His story. Is it a good bargain? It’s certainly not a pretty story. It’s a domestic tragedy, and one with a rather familiar ring.

But dawn is breaking…

And King Shahriyar wants to know what happened when the old man raised his knife to kill his own son with his own hand…

What is a father to do?

Shahrazad’s father knows all too well what fate awaits her, for he is none other than vizier (lovely word, ‘vizier’) to King Shahriyar, and it has been his unfortunate duty to ensure the perfect satisfaction of the king’s resolve never to be betrayed again by conducting a new virgin bride to his bed every night for three years, and seeing to her execution in the morning.

Three years makes about a thousand and one dead virgins. A coincidence?

Your story teller doesn’t say whether these girls enjoyed their single night of passion, but only comments drily that this

led to unrest among the citizens; they fled away with their daughters until there were no nubile girls left in the city.

Except Shahrazad, of course, not to mention her younger sister, Dunyazad, who will play her own curious role in this saga, but her father must have been keeping them hidden – and that must be why Shahrazad has had so much time to read all those books and learn all those stories.

But now poor papa is scouring the city, fearing for the safety of his own head if he cannot produce a virgin. Nonetheless, he is horrified when Shahrazad says she will go and sort something out or die in the attempt. He tries to dissuade her with a dissuasive story, as you do.

It’s a bit of a donkey and bull and cock and dog story. First, the donkey tries to help the bull get an easy life, and gets a whole lot of trouble for his pains, and so admonishes himself that he would have done better to mind his own business. Wise advice, pay heed. Second, the wife of the merchant who owns this fine pair demands to know the secret whose revelation will, for some entirely unexplained reason, lead to his instant death. (Pssst! He can understand what the animals are saying!)

Because he

has a deep love for her, she being his cousin and the mother of his children, while he himself was a hundred and twenty years old

the stupid man is actually prepared to reveal all, until the dog and the cock remind him that he is the man round here and that wives who don’t behave should be beaten. With mulberry twigs. Of course, after this they

lived in the happiest of circumstances until their deaths.

So that’s all right, then. He can’t have lived that much longer anyway, being already one hundred and twenty.

But clearly papa is not in the same league as Shahrazad, as she is dissuaded neither by the pointed moral nor by the implied threat. You should never issue a threat you do not mean to carry out.

Poor man. Imagine your beloved daughter talking you into leading her by the hand, in her bridal finery, to her certain death. Mind you… that’s rather what most fathers feel at their daughter’s weddings, is it not?

Unhappiest man in the world

In a far away land in another time two brothers grow to manhood in circumstances most auspicious. Everyone loves them and everything goes their way. They take this for granted, naturally, for is this not how it should be? In due course, they find two beautiful brides, set up in their separate establishments, and all is peace and harmony and joy…

Where does it all go wrong?

Women! No matter how good they’ve got it, they want more! They will trample over any man and most especially their husbands to get it. And what is this more that women want? Shoes? Jewels? Palaces? Chariots?

No.

Shah Zaman’s first reaction to his wife’s betrayal is murderous rage. He promptly cuts off her head and that of her lover. Then he falls into a depression. How could this have happened to him? He must be the unhappiest man in the world! But then he accidentally witnesses the infidelity of his sister-in-law – and lo! she is far more licentiously fickle than his own wife. This cheers him up no end. He is not the unhappiest man in the world after all!

Such good news cannot be kept to himself for long, but King Shahriyar is naturally not delighted to learn he has inherited the position. And what is his reaction?

You’re wrong again.

King Shahriyar get depressed first, and drags his brother off with him to find someone – anyone – to take over the role. For, as he says dolefully to his not-quite-so-sad-as-he-ought-to-be brother

Until we can find someone else to whom the same kind of thing happens, we have no need of a kingdom, and otherwise we would be better dead.

A man who knows his priorities.

Fortunately, or fatefully, they soon encounter a genie, whom I now learn I must call a jinni, who’s clearly much worse off than either of them, for despite his terrifying magic powers and despite having captured for himself the most beautiful woman that ever was, he has been cuckolded by this beauty no less than five hundred and seventy times before the two brothers pitch up on their tragic quest, to be promptly added to her conquests while the genie, sorry jinni, sleeps soundly at their feet.

They’re not as keen as you might expect. What if the jinni should wake while they are at it? But if they don’t give it to her forthwith as she demands, she will herself rouse the jinni and set him on them! Between the jinni and the deep blue sea, what course is open to them other than courtesy? You first! After you!

A chest from the bottom of the sea

The moral of this story is that though you imprison a woman with magic, shut her in a box, put it in a chest and sink it to the bottom of the sea, you don’t have a hope of stopping her from getting what she wants. And you know what that is.

But now King Shahriyar, having successfully cast off the mantle of unhappiest man in the world, hatches a cunning plan…

Are you sitting comfortably?

The first story in The Arabian Nights is not the one Shahrazad told on the first night of her mission to save all young Muslim girls (and herself) from execution by the deranged King Shahriyar. No indeed.

First you must learn the story of how Shahrazad arrived in the bed of King Shahriyar, and it is not she who tells you this, but your invisible story teller, now concealed behind the curtain of the printed word. Nor is she the first story teller your story teller tells you of, for that honour falls to her father, a worthy man in his way, though mysteriously nameless. Surely the father of a world famous celebrity, even a mythical one, deserves some celebrity of his own?

It’s a little disconcerting to find that my first reactions are of discomfort.

Firstly, I am reading a translation from a language very different from my own of material that was itself ‘translated’ from oral fables carried by many different wandering story tellers of distant times and so became fixed in the form of words on paper.

The original transcribers and Mr Lyons our modern English translator all sought to be true to their source material, and it makes for a bumpy read. The oral story teller didn’t have to worry about gaps and glitches, glossing over any inconsistency with the pace and drama of his tale. Nobody would shout from the back, “Hey! That doesn’t make sense! Two minutes ago you said it was a donkey!”

Sometimes you can almost sense the scribe sitting there dipping his quill in the inkwell and spattering ink over the page as he battles to keep up with the performance and get everything down. No polish, no corrections. This happened, then that happened. He said this. She did that. Just keep it coming. And then in the next breath (as it were) a finely crafted miniature of elegant prose flowers brightly onto the page.

I will need to cultivate a new discipline as a reader to stop tripping over things which are, after all, right where they belong.

The other source of discomfort may be more difficult to allay.

I recognise I cannot read these stories with an innocent eye or mind, or even heart, however willing I am to engage. I already have a history. I have ‘views’. I was a young educated European woman who crossed with others of my generation from unquestioning acceptance of the way things were between men and women to a realisation that ‘the way things were’ was not a given. I know how to deconstruct a text and find the patriarchy and misogyny and other unattractive cultural manifestations lurking within.

But I am not reading The Arabian Nights to attack or defend a particular world view. I am reading them to explore for myself their magic kingdom and see what I make of it. I am reading them to discover whether they have anything to say to me. I am reading them to enjoy by proxy a form of entertainment all too rarely accessible now.

To do this, I must somehow travel into the past, that other country, where they do things differently.

Coming?