Medusa's Ankles by A. S. Byatt

Author:A. S. Byatt [Byatt, A. S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

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She was later to wonder how she could be so matter-of-fact about the presence of the gracefully lounging oriental daimon in a hotel room. At the time, she unquestioningly accepted his reality and his remarks as she would have done if she had met him in a dream—that is to say, with a certain difference, a certain knowledge that the reality in which she was was not everyday, was not the reality in which Dr. Johnson refuted Bishop Berkeley’s solipsism with a robust kick at a trundling stone. She was accustomed also to say in lectures that it was possible that the human need to tell tales about things that were unreal originated in dreams, and that memory had certain things also in common with dreams; it rearranged, it made clear, simple narratives, certainly it invented as well as recalling. Hobbes, she told her students, had described imagination as decayed memory. She had at no point the idea that she might “wake up” from the presence of the djinn and find him gone as though he had never been; but she did feel she might move suddenly—or he might—into some world where they no longer shared a mutual existence. But he persisted, his fingernails and toenails solid and glistening, his flesh with its slightly simmering quality, his huge considering eyes, his cloak of wings, his scent, with its perfumes and smokiness, its pheromones, if djinns have pheromones, a question she was not ready to put to him. She suggested ordering a meal from Room Service, and together they chose charred vegetable salad, smoked turkey, melons and passion fruit sorbet; the djinn made himself scarce whilst this repast was wheeled in, and added to it, upon his reappearance, a bowl of fresh figs and pomegranates and some intensely rose-perfumed loukoum. Gillian said that she need not have ordered anything if he could do that, and he said that she did not allow for the effects of curiosity on one who had been cramped in a bottle since 1850 (your reckoning, he said in French)—he desired greatly to see the people and way of life of this late time.

“Your slaves,” he said, “are healthy and smiling. That is good.”

“There are no slaves, we no longer have slaves—at least not in the West and not in Turkey—we are all free,” said Gillian, regretting this simplification as soon as it was uttered.

“No slaves,” said the djinn thoughtfully. “No sultans, maybe, either?”

“No sultans. A republic. Here. In my country we have a Queen. She has no power. She is—a representative figure.”

“The Queen of Sheba had power,” said the djinn, folding his brow in thought, and adding dates, sherbet, quails, marrons glacés, and two slices of tarte aux pommes to the feast spread before them. “She would say to me, as her spies brought her news of his triumphal progress across the desert, the great Suleiman, blessed be his memory, she would say, ‘How can I, a great Queen, submit to the prison

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