The Friday Book Page 34

  Consider: The vizier has told Shahryar “all about his dispute with his daughter from first to last.” Will that account not also have included the information that except for her there remains in the city not a young person fit for carnal copulation, partly because Shahryar has exhausted the supply and partly because his subjects are “voting with their feet”? Won’t all parties then have been exquisitely aware that when Shahryar has deflowered and killed this last one, the game is over in any case? That should he nevertheless do so, he will most certainly have lost the loyalty of his “wisest of Counsellors,” whether or not he puts the vizier to death for nonprocurement of what can no longer be procured, and that that final atrocity might well be the last straw for an already outraged populace? Finally, and most directly to our purpose, won’t the king, the diplomatist, and the diplomatist’s daughter all have recognized that (if we round down that “space of three years” as aforeproposed from 1062 to 1000 nights) this critical day, when no nubile virgins remain except the most eligible one of all, coincides with the day when Shahryar’s rash original vow will have been fulfilled? Despite all his dire face-saving protestations to the contrary, if Scheherazade is Shahryar’s 1001st sacrificial virgin (not to say his 1063rd), he should be free to rescind without loss of face a policy that there is every political reason to rescind in any case—particularly if its absolute and public rescindment be preceded by a tacit moratorium… of a certain duration.

  I like to imagine that all these unmentioned but perfectly reasonable things are so, and that this coincidence of numbers is among the reasons for Scheherazade’s waiting till just now to put into action the stratagem for which she has long since prepared herself. It is surely also one of at least three reasons why the success of the critical initial phase of that stratagem (not being killed on the first morning after) is followed by a second phase (the consolidation of her position) lasting exactly 1000 rather than more or fewer nights, before the third phase (rescindment of the vow and formal marriage to the king) ends her storytelling and our story.

  The second of those three reasons—and the only one noticed by the indefatigable but unpredictable Burton in the Terminal Essay to his edition of the Nights (X:75)—is a matter of cultural numerology. “Amongst the Arabs,” he says, “as amongst the wild Irish, there is a divinity… in odd numbers” and bad luck in even ones; “… the number Thousand and One,” in particular, “is a favourite in the East…” He cites e.g., the Cistern of the Thousand and One Columns at Constantinople, the “mille et unum mausolea” of the Dervishes near Iconium, and the seventeenth-century Dervish Book of a Thousand and One Days, which echoes the Nights as it in turn echoes the earlier Hazar Afsanah, a book of tales told over a thousand nights from which our Kitab Alf Laylah Wah Laylah derives. In some such instances, as when Edward Lear’s owl and pussycat sail away for a year and a day, or when somebody writes the book of 101 Uses for a Dead Cat, the number means no more than “plenty and then some”; but Burton also cites a curious Hindu practice of determining hundreds by affixing the required figure to the end—for 100 writing 101; for 1000, 1001, etc.—since “the number of cyphers not followed by a significant number is indefinite…” On this view (Burton says the Hindu practice is to be found “throughout Asia where Indian influence extends”), the number 1001 means not only a lot and then some; it means specifically 1000. He does not report how the Hindus write the number 1001 when they mean a thousand plus one.

  In any case, 1001—not “plenty” or 1000 or 1002 or any other number—is the number of formulaically subtitled nights in Burton’s translation, which he justifies at some length as faithful to the consensus of the manuscript versions. Some of those nights are but two or three pages long and contain as little as one one-hundredth of whatever story is in progress; some are many times that length and contain more than one complete sub-subtale or sub-sub-subtale as well as an installment of the subtale in progress. But when at last we read in Volume X the formula “Now when it was the Thousand and First Night,” the number that Scheherazade and Shahryar (and Dunyazade and we) have spent together is—count ’em—exactly that.

  And for this fact I believe there to be yet a third circumstance, or set of circumstances, beyond cultural numerology and the formal symmetry—not to mention the dramatical foreshadowing and strategical opportunity, which we shall return to—of there being just as many nights of narrative creation as there were nights of programmatic defloration-murder and of threatened victims in Shahryar’s idle vengeful vow.

  Some aspects of this third factor are incontrovertibly given in the denouement of the frame-story; indeed they are its denouement. Others are the merest enchanted speculation on my part. I shall make clear which is which after digressing to review, again in some detail, how the sexual-narrative formula of the Nights develops from the crucial First Night—on the eve of which we left our principals (all but the vizier) each eager in his/her own way to get on with it—into the routine which is then sustained for just under 36 lunar months, or about two years nine months by the Gregorian calendar (two years ten months by the Islamic).

  On that first night, after giving Dunyazade certain careful instructions, Scheherazade presents herself to Shahryar. They go to bed; he “fails to toying with her” and prepares to mount. She weeps; he asks what ails her; she says she can’t bear to be parted from her little sister on this last night of her life. The king sends for Dunyazade at once and seats her at the foot of the bed; then he “[rises] and [does] away with his bride’s maidenhead”—the term “bride” is of course euphemistic—and the three fall asleep. At midnight, per plan, Scheherazade wakes Dunyazade, who by prearrangement complains of sleeplessness and asks her sister for a story to while away the hours till dawn. The text takes no note of what an odd request this is to make of one about to die; perhaps Dunyazade has not been told. In any case, Scheherazade cheerfully declares her readiness and asks the king’s permission; he grants it, happening to be “sleepless and restless” himself. Is it the politically delicate prospect of ordering his chief counselor to kill his own daughter, we wonder, that spoils his sleep? Or the unnerving equanimity with which this pearl of the city, for no apparent reason, has volunteered herself to die and now confronts that imminent prospect? Is the king, instead of counting sheep, perhaps counting nights and realizing that Night 1 with Scheherazade is Night 1001 of his vow? We are not told.

  Scheherazade begins her first story: In all editions, it is The Tale of the Trader and the Genie. What she tells, in fact, on this first night, is half of her first story, to be continued, and half of the first of three subtales which will be framed by that first story: subtales narrated in turn by the characters in it. At the first sign of dawn she falls silent in mid-sentence, leaving not one but two plots suspended as a kind of narrative insurance. (Both plots, by the way, have to do with innocent victims under imperious and imminent threat of death, the first of whom, like Scheherazade herself, is playing for time by telling his would-be executioner a story! We are reminded for the 1001st time that “self-reflexivity” is as old as the narrative imagination.) Dunyazade now dutifully praises the tale thus far, as she has been instructed to do; Scheherazade shrugs off the praise with what will become a refrain of authorial self-deprecation—“What is this [compared] to what I could tell thee on the coming night, were I to live and the King would spare me?”—and Shahryar makes the fateful remark to himself which will become his dreadful, hope-giving refrain: “By Allah, I will not slay her, until I shall have heard the rest of her story.” We have speculated already what motives, beyond his pleasure in the young woman and her stories, might lie behind Shahryar’s new vow: As day dawns, it may well be dawning ever more clearly upon him that Scheherazade’s indirect plea for a stay of execution is his opportunity not only to save face but to save his political ass as well. We are not told; we are not told. What we are told is that the two now sleep in mutual embrace—the emphasis is mine, but the phrase is the text’s—until day is fully dawned. The king,
having said nothing to Scheherazade, rises and goes forth to hold court. The vizier approaches with a shroud under his arm, expecting to be commanded to lead his daughter to the chopping block. Again the king says nothing—an exquisite saving of face indeed!—but proceeds with the day’s business. The vizier “wonder[s] thereat with exceeding wonder,” and no wonder.

  At day’s end Shahryar returns to his bedchamber and to a no doubt secretly jubilant Scheherazade. When the time comes, Dunyazade, in her role of primer of the pump, in effect says On with the story, and in a burst of narrative virtuosity Scheherazade completes the first and tells entirely the second and third of the subtales framed by her first main story (she has arranged these subtales, I ought to add, in an order of increasing marvelousness, and has made very sure that the trader, the genie, and all hands in the main tale acknowledge and applaud that increase). The main tale itself, however, she leaves strategically suspended as before, virtually guaranteeing the king’s consent when Dunyazade repeats her praise and Scheherazade her deprecation of what she has produced thus far by comparison to what she’s capable of producing. Again they lie in mutual embrace till full daylight; the king goes forth; the vizier comes forward; nothing is acknowledged; business is done—and the formula is established for the 999 nights to follow.

  That formula, as made clear on the third night, is this: Each evening the king retires and “has his will of the vizier’s daughter”; Dunyazade then asks her sister to continue the unfinished story-in-progress; Scheherazade does so, always addressing it to the king. (Some commentators assume the storytelling to take place immediately after the sex. Burton argues, on the evidence of the detailed first night and the ritual of Scheherazade’s ceasing when she “perceives the dawn of the day,” that it’s done after their postcoital sleep, anytime between midnight and the crack of dawn.) Whenever she actually completes one of her primary stories, as she does on this third night, she immediately begins another. This first time she says, “And yet this tale is not more wondrous than the fisherman’s story,” and waits for the king to ask, “What is the fisherman’s story?” Later, more confident of his permission, she’ll simply say “And there is also the story of” etc.—and launch forthwith into the next main tale without even indenting for a new paragraph. Always she interrupts it in mid-plot, not infrequently in mid-sentence, when she perceives the first light of dawn.

  Once established, the formula becomes increasingly perfunctory in all the manuscript versions (in many translations it is dropped altogether, as is even the numbering of the nights): Only occasionally now will Dunyazade’s praise be repeated, Scheherazade’s deprecation of her oeuvre to date, the king’s silent vow, the mutual embrace, the king’s going forth, the vizier’s approach with shroud, the king’s return at evening, the sex, the sleep, the request. There is however one startling anomaly, unnoticed by Burton: About five months along, on Night 145, Scheherazade winds up The Tale of King Omar bin al-Nu’uman and His Sons, the longest story in the Nights (it has taken her exactly 100 nights to tell it)—and, mirabile dictu, she does not begin a new one! Instead, the king says to her, in Burton’s English, “I desire that thou tell me somewhat about birds,” and having so said, promptly falls asleep. Instead of applauding the long tale just done, little Dunyazade declares to her sister that she’s never seen the man cheerful before this night; she even dares to hope, aloud, that his good humor bodes well for the outcome between them. It is a deviation from the formula without precedent or succedent, until the last night of all, which however it certainly foreshadows, from an extraordinarily long remove. On Night 146, Scheherazade comes up with the requested bird-story (which happens to be the oldest story in the Nights), and the abbreviated formula is resumed.

  Abbreviated or not, we are to understand that the ritual is essentially maintained right through a thousand nights. Indeed, at the end of Night 1000 it is repeated in its entirety, by way of preparation for the denouement, and Burton is at pains to footnotice that in thus fully reprising it he is following the originals: The king still vows not to slay Scheherazade until he has heard the end of her story; even the vizier, like a figure out of Kafka now, still presents himself on that thousandth morning-after, shroud under arm, waiting for his dread instructions; once again the king says nothing to him, but proceeds as always to “bid and forbid between man and man”; then on this last of the nights he “return[s] to his Harim‡ and, according to his custom, [goes] in to his wife Scheherazade.” After the sex, Dunyazade asks as always for the continuation of the story-in-progress; as always Scheherazade asks Shahryar’s permission; as always, he grants it; and she winds up the tale of Ma’aruf the Cobbler and his wife Fatimah the Turd (Burton’s word is Dung, but that was 1885), a story which she has been spinning out for the past eleven nights. It is an exemplary tale of a cobbler’s shrewish and deceitful wife who fully deserves to be killed and is, thus permitting her injured spouse, by this time a king, to marry guess whom, his vizier’s excellent young daughter…

  It is also the end of a truly staggering narrative production. Burton himself declares that there are “upwards of 400 stories” in the several manuscript versions of the Nights. In his own ten-volume edition, which (not counting the seven volumes of Supplemental Nights which Burton published later) is shorter than the less reliable of the manuscript versions, Scheherazade tells by my count 169 primary tales; she moves to the second degree of narrative involvement on no fewer than nineteen occasions, to tell 87 tales within the primary tales, and to the third degree on four occasions, to tell eleven tales-within-tales-within-tales—267 complete stories in all, which by the way include about 10,000 lines of verse, by Burton’s estimate (I:xv). To appreciate the scale of this accomplishment, one might remember that the Homeric bards are supposed to have required a mere four evenings to sing the Odyssey. And the fabled Brihat Katha, or Great Tale—which the god Siva once told his consort Parvati in return for an especially good copulation, and which reputedly came to 700,000 distichs, and of which Somadeva’s huge eleventh-century Sanskrit Katha Sarit Sagara, or Oceans of Streams of Story, is but a radical abridgement—if recited at Homeric pace, would require by my calculation a mere 509 evenings, it being no more than 64 times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. Scheherazade—indefatigable, inexhaustible Scheherazade—has doubled the performance of the god of destruction and creation himself.

  Let us say, rather, all but indefatigable; all but inexhaustible. For now, the tale of Ma’aruf the Cobbler done, she makes obeisance to the king and for the first time asks, not for his permission to begin another story, but for a favor in return for those 1001 nights of past narrative production. Shahryar immediately grants her anything she might ask. Burton notes that some French recensions of the story have the king add ungratefully at this point, “… inasmuch as your last several stories in particular have bored me to death.” Apparently this cynical reading is not without basis in some of the manuscripts; Burton rejects it, however, and so do I, as insulting to my favorite storyteller and inconsistent both with Shahryar’s subsequent lavish praise of her narrative talent and with his freedom to kill her anytime he gets bored.

  At least his apparent freedom: for now we learn for the first time that stories are not the only thing Scheherazade has produced in these 1001 nights. She calls out to the nurses and eunuchs “Bring me my children!” and they fetch forth three sons whom she has borne to her imperious auditor: “one walking,” the text specifies, “one crawling, and one suckling.” It is on their behalf that she pleads now for her life: to be exempt forever from his decree of execution, without (it is implied but not stated) having to earn each day’s reprieve with another night of narrative output. The king grants her wish: not on those grounds, but out of respect for her moral character, for her family, and, it is presently made clear, for her stories, which, after the double marriage of himself to her and of his brother Shah Zaman to her sister Dunyazade, he orders transcribed into thirty volumes, which are to include the story of himse
lf and Scheherazade.

  I shall return to this last detail, the implications of his imprimatur, after reflecting upon the surprise revelation of these three children and their bearing on the number of the Nights. The unknown authors of the Kitab Alf Laylah Wah Laylah are not interested in the middle of their frametale. Indeed, it has no middle: only the ingenious and elaborate headpiece, the climactic and ceremonious tailpiece, and the formulaic transitions from night to night in between. Scheherazade’s three pregnancies and deliveries, and any menstruations before, between, and after them, are not mentioned, nor as we have seen is any gradual softening of Shahryar’s attitude, except for that anomalous and momentary lapse on Night 145. Though the coital motif is not explicitly reprised night by night, the conceit itself requires us to presume that the pair (the trio) have at least slept together every night of the 1001—this despite strict Moslem injunctions against e.g., coition during menstruation, which Burton declares many Islamites to believe responsible for leprosy and elephantiasis (VIII:24)

  Very well, then: We are obliged to infer that there must have been nights of narrative without sex—at least without sex between the king and Scheherazade (and we may safely exempt little Dunyazade, inasmuch as she was non-nubile on Night 1 and is still virginal on her and Shah Zaman’s wedding day). We have seen what a canny strategist Scheherazade is: Without asking of this marvelous story an inappropriate degree of verisimilitude, I believe we may presume that, its mainspring being sexual, Scheherazade would not likely for example have volunteered herself to Shahryar while she was in mid-menstruation, or on the verge of menstruation. To do so would have been suicidal. It seems reasonable further to imagine that she’d want to conceive by the king as early in the game as possible, both to insure her sexual availability for at least some months in that critical first stage of her strategy and to bind herself to him with a child-in-progress: There is no mention, either in headpiece or tailpiece, of Shahryar’s having children by his unfaithful first wife or by other members of his harem, if there are any. Human biology being rather less various across the centuries and cultures than some other things, I have set to work with my pocket calculator, a standard manual of gynecology, obstetrics, and pediatrics, and a few assumptions and constraints (notably the phrase “one walking, one crawling, and one suckling”); I have come up with some results and speculations which, if they do not further illuminate the number of the Nights, may at very least shed some light upon the great ground-symbol of Scheherazade the storyteller.