The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye by A. S. Byatt

Author:A. S. Byatt [Byatt, A. S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48387-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1994-06-25T16:00:00+00:00

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.

Whenever my heart would wander in Göksu

The garden in my dreams falls on the wood.

At dusk the roses seem a distant veil

The phantom willow boughs a cloak and hood.

Bulbuls and hoopoes of a bygone age

Retell their time-old ballads in the dark

The blue reflecting waters hear and show

The passing of Nedim with six-oared barque …

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