The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (Vintage International) (13 page)

The party admired the goddess. Orhan bowed to her, and Leyla Doruk and Leyla Serin explained her cult to Gillian Perholt, how she was certainly really a much older goddess than the Greek Artemis or the Roman Diana, an Asian earth-goddess, Cybele, Astarte, Ishtar, whose temple was served by virgins and temple prostitutes, who combined extremes of abundant life and fierce slaughter, whose male priests castrated themselves in a frenzy of devotion, like those dying gods, Tammuz, Attis, Adonis, with whose blood the rivers ran red to the sea. The women wept for these dying divinities, said Leyla Serin. It was believed that Coleridge found his wonderful phrase ‘woman wailing for her demon lover’ in descriptions of these ritual mournings.

There was a priest, said Leyla Doruk, the Mega-byxus; that is a Persian word, and it means set free by God. He was probably a foreign eunuch. There were three priestesses-the Virgin Priestess, the Novice, the Future Priestess, and the Old Priestess who taught the young ones. The priestesses were called Melissae, which is bees. And there were priests called the Acrobatae who walked on tiptoe, and priests called the Essenes, another non-Greek word, Essen means king bee – the Greeks didn’t know that the queen bee is a queen, but we know now….

‘Her breasts are frightening,’ said Gillian Perholt. ‘Like Medusa’s snakes, too much, but an orderly too much.’

‘Some people now say the breasts are not breasts but eggs,’ said Attila. ‘Symbols of rebirth.’

‘They
have
to be breasts,’ said Gillian Perholt. ‘You cannot see this figure and not read those forms as breasts.’

‘Some say,’ said Leyla Doruk, smiling, ‘that they were bulls’ testicles, sacrificed to her, you know, hung round her in her honour, as the – the castrated priests’-parts – once were.’

They were ripe and full and stony.

‘They are metaphors,’ said Orhan. ‘They are many things at once, as the sphinxes and winged bulls are many things at once.’

‘You admire her, our goddess,’ said Leyla Doruk.

She is not yours, thought Gillian. You are latecomers. She is older and stronger. Then she thought: but she is more yours than mine, all the same. The brick wall behind the Güzel Artemis, the beautiful Artemis, was hung with plastic ivy, fading creamy in the sunlight.

The two Leylas stood with Gillian Perholt in front of the Güzel Artemis and each took her by one arm, laughing.

‘Now, Dr Perholt,’ said Leyla Serin, ‘you must make a wish. For here, if you stand between two people with the same name, and wish, it will come true.’

Leyla Doruk was large and flowing; Leyla Serin was small and bird-like. Both had large dark eyes and lovely skin. They made Gillian Perholt feel hot, anglo-saxon, padded and clumsy. She was used to ignoring these feelings. She said, laughing,

‘I am enough of a narratologist to know that no good ever comes of making wishes. They have a habit of twisting the wishers to their own ends.’

‘Only foolish wishes,’ said Leyla Serin. ‘Only the uninstructed, who don’t think.’

‘Like the peasant who saved a magic bird which gave him three wishes, and he wished for a string of sausages in his pan, and they were there, and his wife said that that was a foolish wish, a stupid wish, a string of sausages with the whole world to wish for, and he was so mad at her, he wished the sausages would stick to her nose, and they did, and that was two wishes, and he had to use the third on detaching them.’

For a moment this fictive Nordic peasant’s wife, decorated with sausage strings, was imaginatively present also before the goddess with her rows of dangling breasts. Everyone laughed. ‘Wish, Gillian,’ said Orhan. ‘You are quite intelligent enough not to wish for anything silly.’

‘In England,’ said Gillian, ‘when we wish, when we cut our birthday-cakes, we scream out loud, to turn away the knife, I suppose.’

‘You may scream if you want to,’ said Leyla Serin.

‘I am not in England,’ said Gillian Perholt. ‘And it is not my birthday. So I shall not scream, I shall concentrate on being intelligent, as Orhan has commanded.’

She closed her eyes, and concentrated, and wished, seeing the red light inside her eyelids, as so often before, hearing a faint drumming of blood in her ears. She made a precise and careful wish to be asked to give the keynote address at the Toronto Conference of narratologists in the Fall and added a wish for a first-class air-fare and a hotel with a swimming-pool, as a kind of wishing-package, she explained to the blood thrumming in her eyes and ears, and opened the eyes again, and shook her head before the smiling Artemis. Everyone laughed. You looked so serious, they said, squeezing her arms before they let go, and laughing.

They walked through old-new Ephesus and came to the theatre. Orhan stood against the ruined stage and said something incantatory in Turkish which he then explained to Gillian was Dionysus’ first speech, his terrible, smiling, threatening speech at the beginning of
The Bacchae.
He then threw one arm over his shoulder and became cloaked and tall and stiffly striding where he had been supple and smiling and eastern. ‘Listen, Gillian,’ he said:

‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us,’ said Gillian, laughing, remembering the young Orhan stalking the English student stage; thinking too of Mehmet the Conqueror, as Bellini saw him, eloquent, watchful and dangerous.

‘I was good,’ said Orhan, ‘in those days. It was his part. Shakespeare himself played the Ghost. Did you know that, Attila? When you speak these words you speak the words he spoke.’

‘Not on this stage,’ said Attila.

‘Now,’ said Orhan. ‘Now it is here.’

Angels had made Gillian think of Saint Paul. Angels had sprung open Saint Paul’s prison in Ephesus. She had sat in Sunday school, hearing a fly buzzing against a smeared high window in the vestry, and had hated the stories of Saint Paul and the other apostles because they were true, they were told to her as true stories, and this somehow stopped off some essential imaginative involvement with them, probably because she didn’t believe them, if required to believe they were true. She was Hamlet and his father and Shakespeare: she saw Milton’s snake and the miraculous flying horse of the Thief of Baghdad, but Saint Paul’s angels rested under suspicion of being made-up because she had been told they were special because
true.
Saint Paul had come here to Ephesus to tell the people here that Artemis was not true, was not real, because she was a god made with hands. He had stood here, precisely here, in this theatre, she understood slowly; this real man, a provincial interloper with a message, had stood here, where she now stood. She found this hard to believe because Saint Paul had always seemed to her so cardboard, compared, when she met them later, to Dionysus, to Achilles, to Priam. But he had come here with his wrath against hand-made gods. He had changed the world. He had been a persecutor and had been blinded by light on the road to Damascus (for that moment he was not cardboard, he was consumed by light) and had set out to preach the new god, whom he had not, in his human form, known. In Ephesus he had caused ‘no small stir’. His preaching had angered Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines for the goddess. And Demetrius stirred up the people of Ephesus against the saint, who claimed ‘they be no gods which are made with hands’, and told them that the foreign preacher would not only set their craft at naught but also ‘the temple of the great goddess Diana should be despised, and her magnificence should be destroyed, whom all Asia and the world worshippeth.’

‘And when they heard these sayings, they were full of wrath, and cried out, saying, Great is Diana of the Ephesians.

‘And the whole city was filled with confusion: and having caught Gaius and Aristarchus, men of Macedonia, Paul’s companions in travel, they rushed with one accord into the theatre.

‘And there for two hours they continued to cry Great is Diana of the Ephesians.’

And because of the uproar, which was calmed by the town clerk, Paul left the city of Ephesus and set off for Macedonia.

So the bristling apostle was beaten by commerce and the power of the goddess.

•  •  •

‘You know,’ said Leyla Doruk, ‘that your Virgin Mary came and died here. It is not certain, as it is not certain that Homer was born in Izmir, but it is said to be so, and her house was discovered because of a sick German lady in the nineteenth century who saw it in visions, the house and the hills, and when they came to look it was there, or so they say. We call it Panaya Kapulu, there is a Christian church too. She came with John, they say, and died here.’

At a nightclub in Istanbul once, Gillian had been shocked, without quite knowing why, to find one of those vacant, sweetly pink and blue church Virgins, life-size, standing as part of the decorations, part hat-stand, part dumb-waitress, as you might find a many-handed Hindu deity or a plaster Venus in an equivalent occidental club. Now suddenly, she saw a real bewildered old woman, a woman with a shrivelled womb and empty eyes, a woman whose son had been cruelly and very slowly slaughtered before her eyes, shuffling through the streets of Ephesus, waiting quietly for death until it came. And then, afterwards, this old woman, this real dead old woman had in part become the mother goddess, the Syria Dea, the crowned Queen. She was suddenly aware of every inch of her own slack and dying skin. She thought of the stone eyes of the goddess, of her dangerous dignity, of her ambiguous plump breasts, dead balls, intact eggs, wreathed round her in triumph, and understood that real-unreal was not the point, that the goddess was still, and always had been, and in the foreseeable future would be, more alive, more energetic, infinitely more powerful than she herself, Gillian Perholt, that she would stand here before her children, and Orhan’s children, and their children’s children and smile, when they themselves were scattered atomies.

And when she thought this, standing amongst a group of smiling friends in the centre of the theatre at Ephesus, she experienced again the strange stoppage of her own life that had come with the vision of Patient Griselda. She put out a hand to Orhan and could move no more; and it seemed that she was in a huge buzzing dark cloud, sparking with flashes of fire, and she could smell flowers, and her own blood, and she could hear rushing and humming in her veins, but she could not move a nerve or a muscle. And after a moment, a kind of liquid sob rose in her throat, and Orhan saw the state she was in, and put an arm round her shoulder, and steadied her, until she came to herself.

In the aeroplane on the way back to Istanbul, Orhan said to Gillian:

‘Forgive me, are you quite well?’

‘Never better,’ said Gillian, which was in many senses true. But she knew she must answer him. ‘I do truly mean, I feel more alive now than ever before. But lately I’ve had a sense of my fate-my death, that is-waiting for me, manifesting itself from time to time, to remind me it’s there. It isn’t a battle. I don’t fight it off. It takes charge for a moment or two, and then lets go again, and steps back. The more alive I am, the more suddenly it comes.’

‘Should you see a doctor?’

‘When I am so
well
, Orhan?’

‘I am delighted to see you so well,’ said Orhan. The plane came down into Istanbul and the passengers began a decorous and delightful clapping, applause perhaps for the pilot’s skill, applause perhaps for another successful evasion of fate.

In Istanbul Orhan Rifat, a very happily married man, returned to his family, and Gillian Perholt settled in for a few days in the Peri Palas Hotel, which was not the famous Pera Palas, in the old European city across the Golden Horn, but a new hotel, of the kind Gillian liked best, combining large hard beds, elegant mirrored bathrooms, lifts and a swimming pool with local forms and patterns – tiled fountains, Turkish tiles with pinks and cornflowers in the bathrooms, carpets woven with abundant silky flowers in the small sitting rooms and writing rooms. It was constructed around a beehive of inner courtyards, with balconies rising one above the other, and silky translucent white-gold curtains behind functional double-glazed balcony doors. Gillian had developed a late passion for swimming. Flying distorts the human body-the middle-aged female body perhaps particularly-the belly balloons, the ankles become cushions of flesh and air, the knees round into puffballs, toes and fingers are swollen and shiny. Gillian had learned never to look in the mirror on arrival, for what stared out at her was a fleshy monster. She had learned to hurry to the pool, however little she felt inclined to exert herself, for what air pressure inflates, water pressure delicately makes weightless and vanishing. The pool at the Peri Palas was empty on the day of Gillian’s arrival, and very satisfactory, if small. It was underground, a large tank, tiled in a dark emerald green, lit from within by gold-rimmed lamps, and the walls of its cavern were tiled with blue and green tiles covered with chrysanthemums and carnations, edged with gold mosaic, glinting and gleaming in the golden light. Oh the bliss, said Gillian to herself as she extended her sad body along the green rolls of swaying liquid and felt it vanish, felt her blood and nerves become pure energy, moved forward with a ripple like a swimming serpent. Little waves of her own making lapped her chin in this secret cistern; her ears were full of the soft whisper and plash of water, her eyes were wide upon green and green, woven with networks of swaying golden light. She basked, she rolled, she flickered ankles and wrists, she turned on her back and let her hair fan on the glassy curves. The nerves unknotted, the heart and lungs settled and pumped, the body was alive and joyful.

When Orhan took her to Topkapi her body was still comfortable from the swimming, which her skin remembered as the two of them looked down from the Sultan’s upper window on the great dark tank under cedars where once the women of the harem swam together in the sun. In the harem, too, was the Sultan’s bath, a quite different affair, a central box inside a series of carved boxes and cupboards inside the quarters of the Valide Sultan, his mother, where his nakedness could be guarded by many watchful eyes from assassin’s knives. Here too, as in Ephesus, Gillian Perholt struggled with the passions of real stories. Here in the cages the sons of the sultans had waited for the eunuchs with the silken cords that would end their lives and make the throne safe for the chosen one. Here intriguing or unsatisfactory women had been caught and tied in sacks and drowned; here captives, or unsatisfactory servants, had been beheaded for a whim of an absolute ruler. How did they live with such fear? She said to Orhan: