"The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye"

[fiefoe]

Compared to A. S. Byatt's other weightier works this is perhaps a mere bagatelle, but the collection is still very enjoyable.

"The Glass Coffin"
__ And that was a delightful and most alarming sensation, when the long, airy arms of the West Wind reached down through the trees and caught him up, and the leaves were all shivering and clattering and trembling with her passing, and the straws danced before the house and the dust rose and flew about in little earthfountains... He rested his face against his airy pillows, and did not cry out or struggle, and the sighing song of the West Wind, full of fine rain and glancing sunshine, streaming clouds and driven starlight, netted him around and around.
__ Have you remarked, where a fast-flowing stream comes to a little fall, how the racing water becomes glassy smooth and under it the long fine threads of the water-weed are drawn along in its still-seeming race, trembling a little, but stretched out in the flow? So under the surface of the thick glass lay a mass of long gold threads, filling in the whole cavity of the box with their turns and tumbles, so that at first the little tailor thought he had come upon a box full of spun gold,
__ was heard to murmur that the spell was as the spell was, that a kiss received after the successful disintegration of the glass casket was a promise, as kisses are, whether received voluntarily or involuntarily. Whilst they were thus disputing, politely, the moral niceties of their interesting situation

"Gode’s Story"
__ who would by no means let him see that she liked to see him, but looked sideways with glimpy eyes, when he was not watching. And so did many another. It is always so. Some are looked at, and some may whistle for an admiring glance till the devil pounces on them, for so the Holy Spirit makes, crooked or straight, and naught to be done about it.

__ And he said, ‘You are here in the street all the same.’
And she said, ‘I am not what I was.’
And he said, ‘What is that to me? But you did not come.’
And she said, ‘If it is nothing to you, it is much to me. Time has passed. What is past is past. I must go.’

__ ‘Wait, wait,’ and so fell to her death on the needle-rocks below and they got her back at low tide, all bruised and broken, no beautiful sight at all, as you may understand.
But when he came out into the street and saw it, he took her hand and said,
‘This is because I had no faith and would not believe in your little dancing thing. But now I hear it, plain as plain.’

__ He said there were so many Dead, in the boat, on the crests of the waves, that he felt a panic of terror for being so crowded. For though they were all insubstantial so he could put his hand this way or that, yet they packed around him, and shrilled their wild cries on the waves, so many, so many, as though the wake of a ship would have not a flock of gulls calling after it, but the sky and the sea solid with feathers, and every feather a soul, so it was he said, after.

"The Story of the Eldest Princess"

• the third was one of those Sabbath daughters who are bonny and bright and good and gay, of whom everything and nothing was expected. When the eldest Princess was born, the sky was a speedwell blue, covered with very large, lazy, sheep-curly white clouds. When the second Princess was born, there were grey and creamy mares’ tails streaming at great speed across the blue. And when the third Princess was born, the sky was a perfectly clear pane of skyblue, with not a cloud to be seen, so that you might think the blue was spangled with sun-gold
• And her mother told her to be sensible and patient and it would blow over, and in about a month the sky was blue, or mostly blue, but only for few days, and streaked, ominously, the people now felt, with aquamarine.
• The ministers said nothing could be done, though a contingency-fund might usefully be set up for when a course of action became clear. The priests counselled patience and self-denial, as a general sanative measure, abstention from lentils, and the consumption of more lettuce. The generals supposed it might help to attack their neighbour to the East, since it was useful to have someone else to blame, and the marches and battles would distract the people.
• They all gathered at the city gate to wish her well, and a trumpeter blew a clear, silver sound into the emptiness ahead
• She was by nature a reading, not a travelling princess. This meant both that she enjoyed her new striding solitude in the fresh air, and that she had read a great many stories in her spare time, including several stories about princes and princesses who set out on Quests
• (Scorpion:) ‘Of course I am. I am quick and elegant and versatile and delightfully intricate. I am surprised, however, that you can see it.’
  The Princess listened only distractedly to this last remark. She was thinking hard. She said, mostly to herself:
  ‘I could just walk out of this inconvenient story and go my own way.
• ‘I will come gladly,’ said the Toad. ‘But she must not suppose I shall turn into a handsome Prince, or any such nonsense. I am a handsome Toad, or would be, if I had not been hacked at. A handsome Toad is what I shall remain.’
• when a dry little voice in her basket, a voice like curling wood-shavings rustling, added these lines:
  And you may scour and sweep and scrub / With bleeding hands and arms like lead
• Her way was to make them tell the story of their hurts, and as they told, she applied ointments and drops with tiny feathery brushes and little bone pins, uncurling and splinting the Scorpion’s tail as it rasped out the tale of its injuries, swabbing and stitching the Toad’s wounded head with what looked like cobweb threads, and unknotting the threads that entwined the cockroach with almost invisible hooks and tweezers.
• And the Princess, telling the story, felt pure pleasure in getting it right, making it just so, finding the right word, and even – she went so far – the right gesture to throw shadow-branches and shadow-figures across the flickering firelight and the yellow pool of candlelight on the wall.
• ‘You are a born storyteller,’ said the old lady. ‘You had the sense to see you were caught in a story, and the sense to see that you could change it to another one. And the special wisdom to recognise that you are under a curse – which is also a blessing – which makes the story more interesting to you than the things that make it up.
  And the Princess, telling the story, felt pure pleasure in getting it right, making it just so, finding the right word, and even – she went so far – the right gesture to throw shadow-branches and shadow-figures across the flickering firelight and the yellow pool of candlelight on the wall.

"Dragons’ Breath"

• Afterwards it might have been easy to agree that it was always clear that the village stood squarely in the path of that terrible descent, but hope misleads, and inertia misleads, and it is hard to imagine the vanishing of what has seemed as stable as stone. So the villagers left it very late to make a plan to evacuate their village,
• Eva felt such amazement now, about her own work, the stubborn persistence of wood and wool and bone shuttle, or the unfinished tree with its squatting pheasants and fat pomegranates. She felt inwardly moved and shaken, also, by this form of her own past, and the past of her mother and grandmother, and by the traces of her moments of flowing competence, and of her periods of bunching, tension, anxiety, fumbling.
• Both embraced Boris, restored and rescued, feeling his wet snout and warm flanks. Such wonder, such amazement, are the opposite, the exact opposite, of boredom, and many people only know them after fear and loss. Once known, I believe, they cannot be completely forgotten; they cast flashes and floods of paradisal light in odd places and at odd times.
• Jack told of Harry’s impetuous bravery, rushing into the billowing smoke to save his pig, and nobody told the day-to-day misery of the slowly diminishing hope of his return. The resourcefulness and restoration of the pig were celebrated, but not his inevitable fate, in these hard days. And these tales, made from those people’s wonder at their own survival, became in time, charms against boredom for their children and grandchildren, riddling hints of the true relations between peace and beauty and terror.

"The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye"

• Two or three times a year she flew to strange cities, to China, Mexico and Japan, to Transylvania, Bogota and the South Seas, where narratologists gathered like starlings, parliaments of wise fowls, telling stories about stories.
• (In flight:)I am nearer the sun than any woman of my kind, any ancestress of mine, can ever have dreamed of being, I can look in his direction and stay steadily here, floating redundant. The phrase was, of course, not her own; she was, as I have said, a being of a secondary order. The phrase was John Milton’s, plucked from the air, or the circumambient language, at the height of his powers, to describe the beauty of the primordial coils of the insinuating serpent in the Paradise garden. Gillian Perholt remembered the very day these words had first coiled into shape and risen in beauty from the page, and struck at her, unsuspecting as Eve.
• In those days she had been taught to explain ‘floating redundant’ as one of Milton’s magical fusings of two languages – ‘floating’, which was Teutonic and to do with floods, and ‘redundant’, which was involved and Latinate, and to do with overflowings. Now she brought to it her own wit, a knowledge of the modem sense of ‘redundant’, which was to say, superfluous, unwanted, unnecessary, let go. ‘I’m afraid we shall have to let you go,’ employers said, everywhere, offering freedom to reluctant Ariels, as though the employees were captive sprites, only too anxious to rush uncontrolled into the elements.
• The young soldiers, Gillian Perholt observed, listened intently and took assiduous notes. The three scarved women, on the other hand, stared proudly ahead, never meeting the speakers’ eyes, as though completely preoccupied with their own conspicuous self-assertion.
• We all like to look at brides. Brides and princesses, those inside the story, imagined from the outside.
• But the story goes inexorably on, past the wedding, into the ominous future foreshadowed by the pledge exacted and vouchsafed. And consider this, said Gillian Perholt at this point in the story:-in almost all stories of promises and prohibitions, the promises and prohibitions carry with them the inevitability of failure, of their own breaking.
• could measure the red rims of those swollen eyes, could see the cracks in the stretched lips of that toothless, mirthless mouth, could see that it was many colours, and all of them grey, grey.
• For these tales are not psychological novels, are not concerned with states of mind or development of character, but bluntly with Fate, with Destiny, with what is prepared for human beings. And it has been excellently said by Pasolini the filmmaker that the tales in the Thousand and One Nights all end with the disappearance of destiny which ‘sinks back into the somnolence of daily life’.
• (colossal Artemis:)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 West is fickle, said Bulent the carpetseller, they say they want these insipid colours this year, and the women in India and Iran buy the wool and the silk, and the next year, when the carpets are made, they want something else, black and purple and orange, and the women are ruined, their profit is lost, heaps of carpets lie round and rot.
• ‘Before pollution,’ said Orhan, ‘before television, everyone came out and walked along the Bosphorus and in all the gardens, to hear the first nightingales of the year. It was very beautiful. Like the Japanese and the cherry blossom. A whole people, walking quietly in the spring weather, listening.’
• Time passes differently in the solitude of hotel rooms. The mind expands, but lazily, and the body contracts in its bright box of space.
• Dr Perholt was accustomed to say, in her introductory talks on narratology, that whoever designed the rules and the scoring-system of tennis was a narrative genius of the first order, comparable to those ancient storytellers who arranged animal-helpers in threes and thought up punishments for disregarded prohibitions. For the more even the combat, said Dr Perholt, the more difficult the scoring makes it for one combatant to succeed.
• She had tried to imagine how this nice, taut, flexible skin would crimp and wrinkle and fall and had not been able to. It was her skin, it was herself, and there was no visible reason why it should not persist. She had known intellectually that it must, it must give way, but its liveliness then had given her the lie. And now it was all going, the eyelids had soft little folds, the edges of the lips were fuzzed
• ‘They will not be able to continue,’ said Gillian crossly, and then put her hand to her mouth in amazement, that a woman with a live djinn on her bed should still be interested in the outcome of a tennis match, only part of which she had seen.
• never have I desired any creature so, woman or djinn or peri or boy like a fresh-peeled chestnut.
• she had embroidered him coming down headlong and head first, and she had sewed him a rich carpet of flowers to fall on, for she thought him aspiring, and not a fool. You should have seen the beauty of her silk legs of mutton, like the life – or rather, death. She was a great artist, Zefir, but no one saw her art. And she was angry because she knew she was capable of many things she couldn’t even define to herself, so they seemed like bad dreams – that is what she told me. She told me she was eaten up with unused power and thought she might be a witch – except, she said, if she were a man, these things she thought about would be ordinarily acceptable.
• she also felt troubled on Zefir’s behalf, by the djinn’s desire to be both liberator and imprisoner in one.
• All English stories get bogged down in whether or not the furniture is socially and aesthetically acceptable. This wasn’t. That is, I thought so then. Now I find everything interesting, because I live my own life.’
• ‘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.’
• 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.’
• 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.
• 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,
• 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.’