The Arabian Nightmare Read online

  Once—a momentary triumph, this—he walked or dreamt he walked out through the suburbs of Cairo and into the leafy paths and orchards on the northern edge of the city only to find, as he walked on, that the houses were appearing more frequently again and then more closely packed until indeed he was not far short of a Zuweyla Gate, centre of a second Cairo, the mirror of the first.

  ‘Such cities are like falling drops of water, reflecting one another on their surface.’

  He walked on. A boy was flying a kite and running along a ridge of dust heaps to maintain its height. He stopped to watch. The sight was so unusual. Children did not play in Cairo, but, sinister and dwarfish little adults, they gathered on street corners and sold their services in the market as secret messengers, untrustworthy guides. The kite danced and bobbed among the brown storm clouds. The boy, without ceasing to run, turned his face to Balian and bared his teeth in a fierce smile, pointing to his kite as he did so. Then he disappeared over the dust ridge, leaving Balian depressed.

  I can no longer imagine a world outside Cairo, he decided calmly, but the apprehension that his imagination might shrink yet further saddened him.

  10

  Cairo’s Freaks

  Every visitor finds it difficult to leave Cairo. It unfolds itself like a story that will never end. My audience are foreigners to this place. It attracts them (if it attracts them at all) precisely by its exotic nature. I have been at pains to single out and emphasize the exotic elements in my story. As now with these freaks. I mean no harm by calling them freaks. Some people would regard me as a freak myself...

  The dwarf lay asleep, thinking. At least he thought he was asleep. He listened to the rhythm of his snoring. Yes, he was asleep. But wait a moment. Were those his snores? He listened to their even rhythm more carefully. Surely that was Ladoo’s nasal rasp? Or, now, hang on, did he mean Barfi, he being Ladoo and too tired to think at this late hour? If I am not thinking clearly he thought, it is surely because I am asleep. It is difficult to think properly in one’s sleep. No, it is impossible. I am sure I am asleep. First, because I am not thinking. Secondly, because I am snoring or, if not me, then someone I cannot distinguish from me is snoring, so it comes to the same thing. Thirdly, I am motionless. Fourthly, I can see nothing.

  Of course, he thought with a flash of nocturnal brilliance, this does not rule out the possibility that I am dreaming, dreaming indeed that I am asleep. It is unusual certainly but not impossible. Passers-by do well to distrust what a sleeping man says in his dreams. If I were my companion Ladoo (or do I mean Barfi?), I certainly should not believe me when a voice issued from my recumbent form saying, ‘I am asleep.’ I should say to myself that the man to whom the recumbent form belonged was either shamming or deluded and I should give him a good kick to clarify his ideas.

  The darkness was filled with snoring. He lay there pondering the pros and cons of being kicked, by a friend perhaps or maybejust by a casual passer-by. There was the physical pain, of course. But against that there was the considerable clarification of mind that would go with it.

  He went on to consider in a leisurely fashion which he would mind more, being kicked by Barfi or being kicked by Ladoo? It was perhaps one way of determining which of the pair he was. Perhaps. On balance he thought that he would prefer to be kicked by Barfi. Now, did that mean that he was Barfi and only he, Barfi, was a fit and proper person to correct and clarify his mental processes, or did it mean that he knew that Barfi was his, Ladoo’s, best friend?

  Those snores! Were they really his? If they were, they were keeping him awake and that was intolerable. It did not seem to him, from what he could recall of the tastes and susceptibilities of the distinctly similar personalities of Barfi and Ladoo, that either of them would put up with this racket for a minute. Unless they were asleep, of course. Unless he and I are asleep, he corrected himself. Even so, the snoring seems terribly loud. Surely it would have awakened one of us?

  ‘Are you awake?’ he called out into the darkness.

  ‘Yes. I’m awake all right,’ came the comforting answer.

  ‘I didn’t wake you, did I?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  Then quite suddenly he realized that the snoring had stopped, but which of them had ceased snoring in order to participate in this conversation? This would be a tricky matter to approach. For two reasons. First, no man likes to have it hinted that he snores. Second, still less does he like to encounter and converse with individuals who labour under the delusion that they may be he. Both propositions could be construed as insulting.

  ‘It is said that the snoring of a virtuous man is pleasing in the ears of God.’

  A long pause, then the reply came. ‘It is said also that God never sleeps.’

  Another tack would be preferable.

  ‘Do you know, when I woke up just now, I had no idea at all who I was? I just lay there in the darkness without a name or an identity. I even thought I might be you! Such was the extent of my confusion on awakening from my dreams that for a few seconds I could not think of a single characteristic that distinguished me from you.’

  ‘That was certainly most distressing. I should certainly have been most cast down had that ever happened to me. Tell me, I beg you, what in the end allowed you to make the crucial distinction between our two natures?’

  This was difficult. Then he remembered that there was now a third person sharing their room. On this night, as on other nights recently, the man with the Arabian Nightmare had accompanied them back from their sweet stall near the Zuweyla Gate.

  The man with the Arabian Nightmare huddles, shaking, in a corner of their room. To him their nightly dialogue is only an extension of his nightmare, their words and thoughts only echoes of his delirium. For, in his nightmare, he too cannot distinguish Barfi from Ladoo or the nonsense they talk when awake from the nonsense they mumble in their sleep. Such thin creations of the vapours of the Alam al-Mithal scarcely exist. The pain muddles his thoughts, but a thin megrimous drivel continues to whisper and whistle in his skull.

  ‘Yet to be Barfi means not to be Ladoo. To be alive as Barfi means to be dead as Ladoo. To be alive as a man means to be dead as a horse. To be dead. Not to know that one was dead. Not to be, not even to be the thing that was ignorant of its own death.’

  It was the certainty that one day he would be dead and, when dead, not even disturbed by that awful state that so disturbed him now. Better to lie for centuries in the dark than to be truly dead.

  ‘Yet asleep here, now, I don’t know whether I am a sultan or a beggar. I might as well be dead.’

  The man with the Arabian Nightmare stirs and whimpers.

  The staring eyes and bulbous noses of Barfi and Ladoo loom over his face. He sees that the dwarves have turned on him. They have decided that it was he who was snoring and they are now trying to shake him awake. He struggles to resist, but his struggles only bring him closer to awakening and his thoughts begin to turn themselves into images.

  He dreams that he awakens men who are dreaming of shaking dreaming men awake—all like a stumbling column of blind men, each man with his hand upon his predecessor’s shoulder. He hears the worm crying for its brothers and the worm’s brothers crying for their putrid feast.

  The Ape rattles its chains. He has looked into The Dream of the Old Pilgrim and read there that he ought not to have looked into it. In waking life he is being sought and, if he is identified and his nightmare brought out into the daylight, then he will learn to anticipate his sleep with dread. The night is slipping away from him.

  The hunt for Balian was only desultorily pursued by the Father and Vane, for the Father now had other schemes in hand and Vane had not yet been told clearly why they were looking for him at all. The Father’s schemes seemed to be very close to fruition and he stood beside Vane, relaxed and reminiscing, almost as if, Vane reflected, his career was due to end imminently.

  They stood in front of the cage of the somnambulist, not far from the Zuweyla Gate.
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  ‘I created him while you were in Constantinople, ’ the Father said, almost purring with pride, before sharply looking into Vane’s face to see if his cleverness was appreciated and to assure himself that Vane was not smiling privately at an old man’s vanity. Vane, however, had learnt never to smile unless he knew that the Father required it, so the Father continued, ‘One of the ulema at al-Azhar had declared that men have their dreams only in the instant before awakening, the development of action and the sense of duration being both delusions formed retrospectively upon awakening. I determined to give a public demonstration that he was wrong. I purchased this specimen as a slave—his real name is Habash, by the way—and issued invitations to the doctors at al-Azhar to come to the House of Sleep one night in Muharram and see me demonstrate the true nature of dreaming. The demonstration took place in the cellars. I had the slave drugged into insensibility and Hussein strapped him to the floor. I had his head shaved over the middle of the skull.

  ‘My aim was to cut out the gland which enables a man to distinguish sleep from wakefulness. I therefore made an incision as near to the top of the skull as I could judge in the unsteady torchlight. Although I had performed a trepanation before, it was much harder than I remembered, first to penetrate the skull and then to remove the bone, but fortunately the gland is close to the surface of the skull and I was scarcely off my mark at all. I removed the gland and the patient continued to breathe heavily as he had done throughout the whole operation.

  ‘Nothing happened for a long time. We had some tea and the doctors talked drivel about the location of the spirit within the body. Then one of my servants drew our attention to the fact that, while we had been talking, Habash’s eyes had opened. I should say distended rather, for they were open to their fullest possible extent, so that the white was visible all the way around the pupils. The pupils, though, moved ceaselessly from side to side and Habash’s whole body twitched and quivered under his bonds. I gave orders for him to be unstrapped and set upon his feet. This was done, though he did not seem to be conscious of it at all. He stood in the middle of the cellar, staring intently into a corner where no one was. What he said could not be understood. He stood there talking and smiling at that dark corner with such conviction that my slaves thrust their torches into it to prove to themselves that there was no one and nothing there.

  ‘It was also clear to us all, though nobody dared remark upon it, that he had an erection. The doctors from al-Azhar were in a panic. So were some of my slaves. They thought he was talking to a djinn.’ The Father smiled. ‘One does not talk to a djinn with a smile and an erection. I stood up and explained how with my knife I had cut out the inhibitor which prevents us from using our bodies as well as our minds in dreaming. Some say that the theatre of dreaming is the head alone, but my negro was in every sense dreaming in my cellar. I think the doctors were too shocked to listen properly to what I had to say and one of them raised the objection that he was drugged, not sleeping. We watched him make his approach to his invisible lady, his rebuff and his apparently successful attempt subsequently to rape her. Then he collapsed.

  ‘The doctors departed, professing themselves disgusted, but there proved to be a market for such a sight and Habash has fetched a good price here at the Zuweyla Gate.’

  ‘An interesting experiment,’ Vane murmured politely.

  ‘A demonstration, not an experiment. I knew what its outcome would be before I started.’

  Vane looked on. Habash’s cage was the centre piece of a group of other attractions: snake charmers, iron eaters, yogis and such like. Habash the somnambulist slept (for it was late) on his feet and in motion, dancing, howling and waggling his fingers at the sky. Occasionally his rapid and uncontrolled movements brought him crashing against the bars of the cage, and he would stand hanging on to the bars, briefly awake, before relapsing, whimpering, into sleep. Some of the audience jeered; some sat open-mouthed. Vane felt faintly nauseated. It was not the cruelty but the vulgar pride of his—certainly learned and cunning—master that nauseated him.

  ‘He was the first of the channels through which the Alam al-Mithal could break into reality.’ The Father gestured expansively, then fell sombre. ‘It is better that they keep him caged. His keeper tells me that of late he has begun to dream of murder.’

  The Father was pointed out to the audience by the proprietor. The crowd around them looked at him and Vane with a mixture of respect and dislike. Vane surmised that, to them, the Father was in no way different from those surgeons who mutilated the children of beggars to give them a living.

  Embarrassed, they moved away from the Zuweyla Gate.

  ‘The reverse case is equally interesting and has been treated by me. It is the case of a channel being used by the Dunya, the real world, to flow into the Alam al-Mithal. A very ordinary man was honoured by becoming this channel, but he was a patient of mine, a grocer called Abu’l-Mejid. He dreams that he is lying on his mattress asleep. When he dreams that it is raining outside, it is raining outside and when he dreams that someone has come into the room, someone has come into the room. All his dreams are like that—very boring. He is a strange, dull man and his dreams are strangely dull, but one can see quite easily, I think, that they are dreams. Abu’l Mejid dreams with his eyes shut. If someone comes into his room and he dreams that he sees someone come into his room, then he is deluded, for his eyes are closed.

  ‘The logical problem is easy to solve, but the grocer did not come to me for lessons in logic. He came because his life is being eaten away by monstrous boredom. I am still treating him. With the right foods, I have hopes of giving him nightmares.’

  He paused.

  ‘It is still true, however, that many of the disorders we have been treating are logical disorders. One needs only to point out to the patient the ground on which his error is founded and he is cured, as if by a miracle; the mysterious depression disperses. You know them—Ahmed the cobbler dreams that he is Hasan the prince, who dreams that he is Ahmed the cobbler. They profess not to be able to distinguish life from dream and they tell you that they are dying of paradoxes.

  ‘One cannot doubt that such sicknesses arise from the inappropriateness of the images they use to think with. They visualize life and dream as containers, and they think either that the dream is locked within the casket of waking life or that waking life is locked inside the dream. But, as we know, dream and life are not boxes and their relationships to one another must be seen in quite a different way. That is why your training in lucid dreaming was so important.’

  ‘Was?’

  ‘Was. Soon these skills will be irrelevant. Things are on the move. Things are due to change.’

  ‘No. Nothing ever happens in this place. Things are always being supposed to be just about to happen.’

  Vane had hoped to draw him on this, but the Father only looked at him hard and whistled tunelessly through his remaining teeth. Then, ‘By the way, I never asked. Did you have any luck with your little quest?’ Another indecipherable stare.

  ‘No, you never did. No.’

  ‘Well, well. Today’s quest too seems fruitless. I propose that we leave the hunt for Balian to the Mamlukes. Besides, there will be others looking for him soon. I have other business in the city, but I expect to see you at dinner.’

  And with that they separated.

  Vane walked on, enjoying the coolness of late afternoon. Crossing the open spaces of the city was like moving across a chess board, chill and dark in the shadows, still brilliantly warm in the places the sun could reach. He was crossing a dark square now near the Bab al-Luq, where the rich merchants’ houses were, when he saw a face, high up in the dark shadows of an upper-storey casement, staring down at him. It was a woman’s face, round and plump and shining silver as if it was the moon. Vane stopped. His heart throbbed and ached, as if an invisible hand was squeezing and shaking it. Fatima, Fatima, it must be, but she is so pale! Mutely the woman at the window pointed to the door in the street below.

>   An old Mooress sat beside the door, drinking beer. She watched him curiously as he came towards her and she shook her head vigorously as he went in. It was dark inside but Vane could just make out the broad stone staircase in front of him and he began to climb. He had climbed about a dozen steps when he became aware that somebody was quietly climbing up behind him, matching him step for step, but making an odd sort of flapping noise as he or she did so. Vane turned, braced for trouble, his fists clenched and ready, if necessary, to launch himself on his invisible attendant, but the figure behind him also stopped and coughed loudly. Then, in throaty Arabic, ‘Go right up. She awaits you.’

  Vane threw a few coins down and, turning as he did so, raced up to the door and into the room.

  ‘Enter Michael Vane, false knight who never yet was dubbed!’

  The door swung back behind him.

  ‘Hail to the Knight of Dreams!’

  ‘Welcome to the undertaker’s assistant!’

  ‘You have come to us.’

  ‘You have found your whore.’

  ‘Welcome. We would have words with you.’

  ‘If you have never had dreams of us before, you will have dreams of us now.’

  ‘Be at peace. Your life is not in danger.’ Laughter.

  A candle in the middle of the floor. Glints of silver and of white. Fluttering white draperies. Two spotted hands gripping a sword hilt. A pestiferous smell.