The PowerBook (2 page)

The sun rose. The ship hoisted sail. I lifted my arms and waved and waved. Then, adjusting my tulip, I went below.

I seemed to dream of buffalo muddying the banks of clear streams that spilled down into the watercress beds. There were crystallised oranges on a table in the sun, and small cups of sweet coffee, and the little workshops and weaving sheds of our town.

There were women at the roadside selling hard-boiled eggs and homemade dolma, while their children wove simple mats and their men unloaded charcoal or packed tobacco, or went in and out of Nikolaus the pawnbroker’s.

I dreamed I was ploughing a field and the stork was following behind me and inspecting the turned earth and waiting by the marshy edges for a frog.

At the bazaar, the copper pots were coming in stacked on the ox-carts. Eager hands carried them to shaded rugs, to burnish up the spatterings with a cloth. All the pots were sealed—it keeps the genie in, and no Turk would want a pot without a genie.

Humble or grand, what is made must keep with it the memory of what cannot be made. In the spun cloth, the thrown earthenware, the beaten pot and the silver box, is Allah—the spirit of God in the things of the world.

Atom and dream.

I awoke to a rattle. The only light in my cabin was a wick in a cruse of oil. I took it from the shelf over my hammock and looked down. I had filled a wooden bucket with water for washing and drinking, and left my metal cup on its chain inside the bucket. Knocking the cup from side to side as it drank was a long-haired rat.

In the morning, as the only paying passenger on the spice ship, I was invited to breakfast with the Captain. He offered me roast chicken and his wife’s hard-baked bread covered in pumpkin seeds.

He was a man of the world and a worldly man, who profited from trade with the English, regularly cargoing the tin, coarse cloth and shot the Sultan needed for his armies, in return for the jewels and luxury stuffs the English loved.

If tin for gold and shot for rubies seems a strange exchange, blame the Pope. The Pope, not one but many Popes, the sum-total-continuous-Pope without beginning or end, had refused to allow his flock to trade with the Infidel, and since his flock was all Europe the Ottoman Empire had trouble supplying its war machine. Then, in 1570, the Pope finally excommunicated Queen Elizabeth and her subjects. We were all infidels now and Britain and the East began to trade.

This Captain had been brought up in Istanbul. His mind was made of minarets and domes. He capped himself with spacious ease. He was his own call to prayer.

‘Be confident,’ he advised me. ‘Be confident even in your mistakes. In Allah there is no wrong road. There is only the road you must travel.’

‘And if the road leads nowhere?’

He shrugged. ‘Turn your Nowhere into Somewhere.’

He smiled. ‘You are young. You have hopes and fears but no experience. You do not know that the gilded palaces and the souks do not really exist.
And that is how it should be. You will live in this world as though it is real, until it is no longer real, and then you will know, as I do, that all your adventures and all your possessions, and all your losses, and what you have loved—this gold, this bread, the green glass sea—were things you dreamed as surely as you dreamed of buffalo and watercress.’

‘Am I always sleeping?’

‘Neither sleeping nor waking. Only the body sleeps and wakes. The mind moves through itself.’

‘And when I am dead?’

‘Only the body lives and dies.’

He threw his chicken carcass into the sea.

An animal hides to save itself. While the Captain pissed extravagantly overboard, I pleaded seasickness and squatted behind a coil of rope.

I know about disguise. I disguise myself from predators. I disguise myself from circumstance. The camouflages I use are elaborate, but I know what they are. Even my body is in disguise today.

But what if my body is the disguise? What if skin, bone, liver, veins, are the things I use to hide
myself? I have put them on and I can’t take them off. Does that trap me or free me?

‘Ali!’

It was the Captain.

‘Let me tell you the story of Antioch …

‘No one who visits Antioch today can imagine a time when men read in the pink marble libraries and argued the limits of existence by the fountains in the square.

‘And yet it was so.

‘No one, riding his donkey through the red dust of the wind-crumbled rocks, can imagine a time when women here bathed in pools as deep as light and freshwater fish criss-crossed in the shadows of the aqueduct.

‘Yet it was so.

‘Sometimes, travelling through valleys so desolate that a hawk can hardly live, I have seen ships of red porphyry from Egypt and a stone sarcophagus now used by herders for their goats. Saddest of all is the desert of Pisidian Antioch, once the site of a city of commerce and learning, now not even a graveyard.

‘Antioch was an aqueduct city. Its stone arches defeated hill and plain alike to draw water from a distant rock tunnel. This sparkling life was carried back to itself and poured over its crops and its citizens until both flourished. They say that the waters of Antioch could cure a blind man and tempt a virgin. Palms were taller than towers.

‘It was so.

‘A civilisation built on an aqueduct is a perilous one. While its people eat and drink, read and argue, someone must defend the life-giving archway. If they fail, and if they sleep, one barbarian with a pickaxe can drought thought.

‘Nobody thinks without a cup of water. The dreams of the dying cannot be irrigated. The world ends, and you with it, to retreat back into the mind of God.

‘The barbarians broke up the marble streets and used the slabs for sheepfolds. Shining pillars brought in ships, and dragged by oxen for the magnificence of the temple, were pulled down to be inserted horizontally as wall supports. Birds nested in the dry cups of the public fountains. The barbarians pitched their tents and scooped up the
water in their hands. That was enough for them. That was why they had come.

‘In the broken aqueduct of Antioch is the history of the downfall of Ephesus, of Miletus, of Pergamum, and of other proud cities of Asia Minor, which once shone among the great names of the world.’

I said, ‘Who were the barbarians?’

The Captain said, ‘You. The Turks destroyed the aqueduct to Antioch.’

I was angry. I said, ‘The Turks are not barbarians.’

He looked at me keenly. ‘There is always a city. There is always a civilisation. There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilisation, but to become that city, that civilisation, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated was what you did not understand.

‘Antioch was commerce, refinement, leisure, fastidiousness, ideas. Its citizens dressed in silks when we Turks could barely sew a goatskin. What were their libraries and temples to us?

‘And now Istanbul is wealthier than Venice and Allah trades across the world. We give our children rubies to play with and the shutters of the seraglios are lined with gold.’

‘We are invincible,’ I said.

‘Do you think so?’ he said. ‘In three hundred years the Turks may be back among his goats.’

‘Impossible!’ I cried. ‘And if, as you say, nothing exists, then there can be no such place as the future.’ (I was pleased with myself for saying this.)

The Captain laughed and kicked me fondly. ‘There will be a future. We believe in our unreality too strongly to give it up.’

I was silent. The Captain’s kick had dislodged me, and my own unreality was beginning to press on me. I longed to scratch.

‘Life is a blessing, Ali, but death is a chance.’

How could Ali barter philosophies when his bulbs were itching? He would gladly have sacrificed the vaporous universe for a chance to get both hands down his trousers, and that is exactly what he was doing when the pirates from Genoa swarmed over the ship.

These men were as burnt as bread in the fire, though their eyes were clear as fire. They murdered the crew, beheaded the Captain, and were about to squeeze Ali like a pomegranate, when one of them noticed his hands clutching his bulbs—that is, his balls.

‘Pissing yourself are you?’ said the chief pirate.

Ali was so scared that he just told the truth.

‘Protecting my treasure,’ he said, and his reply was so stupid that it made the pirate laugh. He pulled out his own cock and held it under Ali’s nose.

‘This is treasure. You aren’t worth a flea’s ransom.’

Ali sucked it. What else could he do? He had never done it before, but desperation is a good teacher and he soon found his tongue as fluent as any whore’s in the marketplace.

The pirate grunted.

‘Why kill you when we could sell you?’

And that is how Ali found himself in the apartments of the Italian envoy to the Turks.

Trembling, hungry, dirty and alone, Ali sat on the floor and wondered what could become of
him. Two servants entered. One filled a copper bath, while the other laid out food and fresh clothes. Neither spoke to Ali until they had finished their tasks. Then one said, ‘You are to eat and bathe and dress yourself and be ready at sundown.’

‘Ready for what?’

‘The Princess.’

I unstrapped myself and lay in the bath. I reckoned I should make a clean breast of it, though my breasts were not the part in dispute. As a woman, what would be my fate? Mercy or death?

As a boy, I had nothing to look forward to, except perhaps …

‘Sexual congress,’ said the Princess.

She was walking round and round me as though I were a fountain, pausing now and then to dabble her hands. She was beautiful, young, haughty.

‘I am to be married in one month, and my husband wishes me to learn something of the arts of love. He has appointed you to teach me.’

‘I know nothing,’ I said.

‘That is why you have been chosen. You are only a boy and can do me neither hurt nor insult. You will be gentle. You will be slow. If I do not like you I shall behead you.’

‘Yourself?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Lady,’ I said, ‘there must be many in your kingdom better equipped than I am.’

‘They have not your treasure,’ she said. ‘We have heard how you feared less for your life than for your member.’

‘My treasure is not what you think it is.’

‘I think nothing. Kiss me.’

I kissed her. It wasn’t so bad.

Days and nights passed. I kissed her mouth and her neck. I kissed her breasts and her belly. I kissed her lower than her belly and was pleased with the ripples of pleasure I found there. She was dainty and sweet, a dish of figs in fine weather.

We were approaching the inevitable, but we weren’t there yet.

Days and nights. Days and nights connected by rivets of pleasure. Our furnace of love heated time and welded together the separateness of the hours, so that time became what the prophet says it is—continuous, unbroken.

To me, these days will never end. I am always there, in that room with her, or if not I, the imprint of myself—my fossil-love and you discover it.

‘Take off your trousers and let me see you.’

So this was the moment. All would be revealed. I no longer cared. Come death, come life, there is a part to play and that is all.

Hesitatingly, I let down the blue and gold of my trousers. There was a silence. Then the Princess said …

‘I have never seen a man before.’

(You’re not seeing one now.)

‘The stories I have heard … the fleshiness, the swelling … but you are like a flower.’

(This was true.)

She touched my bulbs.

‘They are like sweet chestnuts.’

(Tulips, my darling, tulips.)

She stroked the waxy coating I kept fresh to protect them. The tips of her fingers glistened.

‘What do you call these?’

‘This one is Key of Pleasure, and this one is Lover’s Dream.’ I said this quite sincerely because it was so.

‘And what do you call this?’

Her fingers had reached the centre now. I had to think fast.

‘I call it my Stem of Spring.’

She laughed delightedly and kissed the red flower, its petals fastened tight into a head. Fortunately my mother had made it quite secure and the Princess could play with it all she liked.

Then a strange thing began to happen. As the Princess kissed and petted my tulip, my own sensations grew exquisite, but as yet no stronger than my astonishment, as I felt my disguise come to life. The tulip began to stand.

I looked down. There it was, making a bridge from my body to hers.

I was still wearing my tunic and the Princess could not see the leather belt that carried
everything with it. All she could see, all she could feel, was the eagerness of my bulbs and stem.

I kneeled down, the tulip waving at me as it had done on the hillside that afternoon I cut it down.

Very gently the Princess lowered herself across my knees and I felt the firm red head and pale shaft plant itself in her body. A delicate green-tinted sap dribbled down her brown thighs.

All afternoon I fucked her.