Tales and Imaginings Read online

  *

  At the top I caught up with myself, and found Persimmon on a terrace among little trees hung with hourglass fruit each with a rag tied round its middle. Between swaying branches I saw below us the city beginning to map itself in lights; it showed no trace of the grand symmetries Persimmon had evoked. Purple columns of cloud were staggering towards us from the blazing horizon; above, the sky still held huge upsidedown pyramids of green light.

  ‘Eighty-seven steps exactly‚’ announced Midgley, coming clicking round the corner after us.

  ‘Welcome to the Happy World!’ said an old lady smiling across a turnstile, and issued us with tickets.

  A chill gust of wind hurried us past a row of stalls selling incense sticks and small squares of gold leaf, into a courtyard where a fallen Chinese lantern was bowling about in a muddy puddle, between a little temple and a huge barnlike building of concrete. The first heavy drops of rain struck at our backs. ‘Into the dancehall!’ said Persimmon, and ran up the steps towards the great double doors, which blew open at that moment, and immediately crashed shut behind us. The dance-hall was racked by distorted music; it coughed and cleared itself like a throat. Through the darkness and mucous noises a man reeled towards the door. As he lurched between us he thrust a little booklet of tickets into my hand and shouted, ‘Enjoy yourself with those!’

  ‘Dance tickets‚’ said Persimmon. ‘You’re supposed to buy them from the old dame in the pajama trousers over there.’

  We advanced into the gaunt hall, and sat down at one of the little iron tables round the dance-floor. The doors had opened again, and jammed. Rain was already leaping and roaring on the steps outside. At the far end of the room was an empty bandstand, and a flight of steps up to a balcony. A few bulbs burned feebly among the roof-girders, where the loudspeakers howled and shuddered. Apart from some silent beer-drinkers and a few couples dancing, the only people there were half a dozen girls sitting in a dark recess under the staircase. A ragged boy brought us small cups of bitter black tea, and the fat old woman in floppy cotton trousers moved towards us sluggishly. ‘Since you have tickets, you must dance,’ said Persimmon. ‘Tell her which girl you’ve set your heart on.’

  I pointed at one of the girls in the obscure depths of the hall; the old woman bent down with a grunt to sight along my arm, her chin resting on my shoulder for a moment, and then trudged wearily across the dance-floor. We watched her in the distance pointing back at us. The girl appeared to argue with her for a minute before walking towards us.

  As she came, the tormented loudspeakers fell silent, the doors slammed shut and the damp draught ceased. She approached through a profound stillness. ‘Observe the complicity of the inanimate!’ whispered Persimmon in my ear. But the cracked music started again and the doors flew open as she stood before us. She hugged her bare shoulders, and smiled equally upon us all. I placed a chair for her so that I was between her and the other two.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’ I asked; her answer was too quiet to be heard above the music, and I waved to the tea-boy, who brought us four more cups of tea, leaving the three empty cups on the table. Midgley, stirring his tea in a spiral movement from bottom to top, was discussing the girl in whispers with Persimmon: ‘To a certain degree …’ I heard him say, as he switched his eyes towards other girls at random in a comparative way. Not knowing what to say to the girl, I gestured towards the dance-floor. She picked up my booklet of tickets, tore one out and placed it under her saucer; then she slipped her little finger through my watch-strap and led me onto the dance-floor. As we began to dance she looked up at me for the first time; there was a question in her eyes to which I had no answer. I glanced around at the people sitting at the tables, embarrassed because I danced badly and there were so few couples on the floor; however nobody was looking at us except Midgley. The evening had already fallen quiet outside; the girl had put aside her question and was dancing, her mind far away, to a music that had changed, softened, as if its waves now reached us only after perhaps a year’s passage through the air of a scented country.

  We walked back to our table hand in hand; we felt suddenly happy. ‘You make a lovely couple‚’ said Persimmon. As we sat down I said to Midgley, ‘Two hundred and thirty-six steps exactly.’

  Later we danced again, and Persimmon led the fat lady in cotton trousers onto the floor; the girls at the dark end of the hall came forward to admire the ponderous graces of yesteryear. Then he persuaded them to come and sit with us; some of the morose onlookers were moved to join us, and it seemed that a party was being formed, wordless, but with tentative laughter, when Persimmon smashed his cigarette into dust and fumes in his saucer and jumped up. ‘It’s getting later and later! If we are to smoke opium, we must go immediately.’

  ‘I won’t come‚’ said Midgley. ‘I have to go home and make some notes.’

  ‘I’ll catch you up in a moment‚’ I said. They went out, deep in conversation.

  ‘Will you come again?’ whispered the girl.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Remember to ask for me.’

  ‘What’s your name then?’

  ‘Nit. My name is Nit.’

  ‘Nit?’

  ‘Remember Nit. Ask for Nit. Please; will you remember?’

  *

  ‘How on earth did she get such a name?’ I said to Persimmon as we descended the covered stairway. It was quite dark now; the beggars had gone, leaving their mats rolled up and tied with string to the wooden posts.

  ‘No doubt its an abbreviation of something suitably exotic‚’ answered Persimmon, ‘or perhaps an American sailor gave it to her. I see you were hoping for one of those names that make Chinese novels read like a perfumery. A pretty girl, anyway; you must have good eyesight. You will find that after a day or two in your pocket her name will be quite amenable to the palm of the hand. Don’t trouble to tell me if I prophesy correctly.’

  ‘I’m not quite sure she is the girl I pointed at, but …’ I almost lost Persimmon as he turned suddenly at a little archway, and pushed through a crowd of half-naked youths lounging in the mouth of a dark alley. ‘Down here!’ he called. I stepped over sleeping children, and almost slipped in mud. On a pile of rags an old woman sat, holding a bowl to her lips and hooking rice into her mouth with one finger. Persimmon was rapping at a door in a windowless wall. ‘You look peculiar,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Did you see that man with the forked thumb?’

  Persimmon turned on me with a snarl. ‘For opening bottles, do you suppose? What is your mind full of? Girls, freaks, the quaint decorative surface! You must go deeper! Prepare yourself. And wear a serious inwardly-gazing smile, if you please; these people do not like to be looked at.’

  The door opened a bit, and a head appeared so low down I didn’t see it immediately. Persimmon hustled me past the little doorkeeper who was like a bent, rusty key, twisting his neck to look up at us sideways. We too had to duck our heads; we were standing at the top of a short flight of stone steps, close under the ceiling of an enormous room. At first I couldn’t read the dark maze below; I felt warmth and stillness. Lines hung with clothes stretched across the room, and on the ceiling their shadows, thrown by oil-lamps burning in a layer of dusk on the floor, stirred like dim memories of the gleaming brown bodies lying motionless below. The room was divided by low partitions into hundreds of almost enclosed spaces. Each of these compartments had a broad bench on either side, bearing two or three people; most of them were asleep, their pale foot-soles regarding the lamps on the floor between the benches, but here and there were open eyes like black jewels, that did not move as we crossed their vision. In the depth of this scented labyrinth there sat among the fleshless sleepers a great soft pyramidal being with blood-rimmed eyes screwed deeply into his slowly pulsating face. Persimmon introduced me in a whisper; the swing of a sleeve made room for us on the bench; tea was brought.

  ‘Talk with me for a few moments before you smoke. My life is lonely, I sleep l
ittle. In the night, after the doors are locked and the last pipe is dead, I walk round and study the faces of my guests. They look older when asleep, but whether happier or wiser I do not know. I cannot enter their dreams; they bring back no souvenirs; any memories they smuggle out are buried later. Maybe they eat well there; certainly they will sacrifice food to buy from me. If they have friends or lovers there, here they are solitaries. They lie apart; in all this valley of sleepers not one head on another’s shoulder, not a hand touches casually another’s foot. For most men, I suppose, sleep is merely the soil in which their days grow. One is accustomed to think of the roots of a tree as the support and sustainer of the trunk, so purposeful, so fulfilled in the midst of its airy and fantastic creation of foliage and flower and fruit. One might, however, conceive of the seasonal and aeonal cycles of the crown, its breathing of sunshine, as a servant process, dedicated to an end: the roots’ stubborn, blind, inching exploration of earth. Look around you; here is my head-down forest. I, their forester, loiter above ground, wondering.’

  ‘You fatten on lop and top, however,’ said Persimmon in a conversational tone. Our host closed his eyes, and smoked his cigar thin as a straw. To break the silence I said, ‘I know somebody who has invented a camera for photographing dreams.’

  ‘Tell him that he has been anticipated, by Daguerre.’

  Persimmon stirred restlessly; ‘Slack wisdom! However, my young friend is anxious to see for himself what lies under the forest floor.’ Ignoring our host’s sigh, he snapped his fingers to a figure standing in the shadows, who came forward with the apparatus of opium. The pipe, a thick wooden cylinder with an octagonal acorn-cup growing from one side, was placed in my hands. Persimmon, the expert, opened a little pill-box of brown grease, and picked up a blob of it on the end of a bamboo splinter. He rounded it against a wafer of bone, held it over the lamp till it sputtered, and put it into the cup of my pipe. ‘Come on now, lie down on the bench and hold it over the lamp. Rest your head on that block. Suck! You’re letting all the smoke dribble out of the corner of your mouth. Suck, before it’s all gone!’

  ‘I can’t swallow it – it’s so heavy and sweet. It rolls round my mouth like mercury!’

  ‘Try another lot; you wasted that.’

  ‘But do I want to kipper my brains like this?’

  ‘Of course you do. A well-fumigated subconscious will procure you sanative sleep before tomorrow’s journey.’

  ‘Why, where am I going tomorrow?’

  ‘To visit my friend the sage on the mountain-tops, near the religious ruins. The train leaves at nine; meanwhile all your worries about waking up in time are already asleep in my watch-case. Come on now, deep breaths. Ten deep breaths make one pipe, then a cup of tea, and then I will join you in another pipe.’

  As we smoked, Persimmon talked. The cyclic ritual of the pipes stirred a slow eddy in the passage of time. My eye found a mouse asleep on the narrow top of a partition opposite our bench. Perhaps it was carved out of wood. Was it the torpid air swaying above the lamp that made it seem to stir and settle? I tried to follow Persimmon’s sentences, which wound away from me into the darkness: ‘… to entrap one of the most ancient chimeras of science; he holds that since dream transformations are fully reversible, the dream, thermodynamically considered, is the perfect machine. If so, he claims, all that stands between him and a certain possibility too absurd to bear contemplation – the frictionless time-rewinder – is the dreaminess of dreams, their drift and waver … I prefer another line of thought.’

  Why is Persimmon bending over me, calling to me, the sound of his voice reaching me only after turning and turning in the coils of fragrant smoke? ‘You are floating. Your petals are closing. You are folding up into a pellet. You are sinking. Sink! Like a stone!’

  Far above me, his other line of thought branched and budded. ‘More seriously, let us discuss the investigations he – or was it I? – made into the phenomenology of dreams, a region in which the concepts formed in waking life are like speechless foreigners

  My left eye is a quiet pool. My right eye lies among the unwinking pebbles at the bottom, looking up through a green so tender and diffuse that only with an imperceptible trembling can its invisible skin support the sailing lilies of ideas unfolding overhead.

  ‘The material continuities, in the nature of the case, being absent, on what thread is strung the dream-object’s identity? Suppose for instance an eye becomes a pool …’

  ‘No, an eye is like enough a pool; but suppose now an idea becomes a lily-pad, what is the unity underlying that becoming?’

  The pool flows calmly around the pale undersides of the lily-pads, expanding, losing its edges.

  ‘Imagine an opinion becomes a window; that’s a philosopher’s metaphor made concrete. And now the window in its wall becomes a lily leaf on the water’s surface; a geometry is preserved. The question is, do such transformations form chains that hold?’

  The windows pattern a wall that stretches out of sight, above, below, and on either side. An infinitude of Persimmons smile and bow to me from them.

  ‘… or the being we meet in dreams who is at once today’s friend and a long-dead schoolmaster; a “person”? The word falters. A language born in the world of wide-awake is a wooden tongue to the dream-teller. Our failures to describe are blessed with a paltry adequacy simply because, all failing alike, we recognize to what each other’s failures refer.’

  The windows shift and flicker like sunlight on rippled water. They shatter silently into foam and flow in sheets around me.

  ‘But perhaps we can tell our dreams because our language is not just built on the day’s stabilities; indeed how could it be? Consider the child, his growing rationality heaped and squared each day like a sandcastle, only to be licked shapeless by a tide of dreams each night …’

  Foam dances in a whorl on the seashore, A last few words, ‘Or, of course …’ and ‘Perhaps, though …’, drift down to drown in it. The bubbles are catching at my wrist. Something tender is hidden behind them.

  III

  ‘The train doesn’t actually stop there, but it slows down, so be ready to jump.’

  I waited, holding the carriage door half open, in a rush of mouldy jungle air.

  ‘Jump!’ they shouted.

  By the time I had picked myself up, the train had disappeared down a tunnel of leaves. Two brown bodies pieced themselves together from scraps of shade under a flowering bush, and came forward carrying a pole.

  ‘To the temple?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  In single file, first the shorter carrier with one end of the pole on his shoulder, then myself hugging it with arms and legs, and last the taller carrier with the other end of the pole on his shoulder, we climbed a path of leaf-mould beneath the trees. Then, first the taller carrier, next myself, and last the shorter carrier (their statures being adapted to this route), we descended to the banks of a river. On the dazzling water stood an old man in a little boat; his parasol was a leaf as long as himself, resting on the crown of his head in a broken arch. The boat drifted gently to the bank, and we jumped in. The boatman adjusted the rudder, and we immediately began to move out into the current. The two pole-men were already asleep in the bottom of the boat, piled together like cats; the old man sat motionless in the stern, under his leaf.

  Was I expected to row?

  No, the boat was swinging on a rope; far upstream the rope was attached to a ring sliding along a cable high across the river. The pole-men murmured softly to each other in their sleep, the old man sat and read his toes, the ring jerked and grumbled along the cable, the cable hummed against the sun; an effortless arc took us from one forest to another.

  Shimdi and Sonra awoke in the act of jumping ashore. Their four eyes glinting in the shade watched me pay the boatman. I lay on the ground and embraced the pole with arms and legs, like a lover; Shimdi and Sonra swung it to their shoulders, and trotted deep into the shadowy jungle. Swinging, I looked up the dark perspectives of
passing tree-trunks to lofty hollows of green and gold. Here and there the path opened out into the silent glades of a distant geological era, where grey moss muffled the boles of giant tree-ferns, and generations of cobwebs hung like vapour.

  Shimdi and Sonra stopped; the taller lifted his end of the pole high in the air, the shorter placed his end on the ground, and I slid to earth.

  We entered the temple where the masonry of a fallen tower lay locked among the tree-roots. An arcaded walk surrounded a courtyard filled with a dense thicket of bamboo, which murmured and flashed in the sunlight far above us. While the two pole-men drowsed in a shady corner, I picked my way across the uprooted flagstones of the cloister and examined, one by one, broken statues of the god, which stood or lay against the wall in the various postures of the other world: thumbs in the ears, and a foot missing; ten fingers in the mouth, and no nose; both hands cupping the paunch, and a little white flower growing in an empty eye-socket.