The Palace of Dreams

ii. SELECTION

It was a Tuesday afternoon.

The offices would be stopping work in an hour. Mark-Alem looked up from his papers and rubbed his eyes. He’d started this job a week ago, but he still hadn’t got used to so much reading. His right-hand neighbor fidgeted about on his chair, but went on reading. From the whole length of the long table came the regular rustle of turned pages. All the clerks had their eyes glued to their files.

It was November. The files were getting thicker and thicker. The flow of dreams tended to increase at this time of year. That was one of the main things Mark-Alem had noticed during his first week. People would go on having dreams and sending them in for ever and ever, but they varied in number from season to season. And this was one of the busy periods. Tens of thousands of dreams were arriving from all over the Empire, and would go on doing so at the same rate until the end of the year. The files would swell as the weather grew colder. Then, after the New Year, things would slacken off until spring.

Mark-Alem gave another surreptitious glance at his right-hand neighbor, then shot a look at the one on the left. Were they really reading or merely pretending? He leaned his head on his hand and looked down at the page in front of him, but instead of letters he seemed to see only spidery scrawls against a background of gray. No, he couldn’t go on reading. Many of the others poring over their files were probably only shamming. It really was an awful job.

As he sat with his brow propped on his palm, he remembered what the older hands in Selection had been telling him that week about the ebb and flow of dreams, and the way their numbers varied according to time of year, rainfall, temperature, atmospheric pressure, and humidity. The veterans of the department were experts on this sort of thing. They knew all about the influence of snow, wind, and lightning on the quantity of dreams, not to mention the effect of earthquakes, comets, and eclipses of the moon. Some people in the department were probably real adepts in the analysis of dreams, genuine scientists who could detect strange hidden significances in visions that to the ordinary eye seemed like meaningless mental doodlings. And in no other department in the Tabir Sarrail could you find old campaigners like those in Selection, able to foretell the size of the crop of dreams as easily as ordinary graybeards could predict bad weather from their rheumatics.

Suddenly Mark-Alem thought of the man he’d met on his first day. Where was he? For several days Mark-Alem had looked for him among the crowd of clerks in the coffee break, but he’d never seen him anywhere. Perhaps he’s not well, he thought. Or he might have been sent on an assignment to some distant province. He might be one of the Tabir’s inspectors, who spent most of their time away on official missions; or he might be just an ordinary messenger.

Mark-Alem imagined the thousands of Tabir Sarrail offices scattered all over the vast country—the makeshift buildings, sometimes mere shacks, housing them and their even more modest staff. This usually consisted of two or three hard-worked, ill-paid clerks ready to bow to the ground before the meanest courier from the Tabir when he came to collect the dreams, stammering and stuttering and crawling to him just because he represented the Center. In some remote areas the inhabitants of subprefectures would set out before dawn and trudge through the rain and mud to relate their dreams in these dismal little offices. They’d bellow from outside, not bothering to knock at the door: “Are you open yet, Hadji?”

Most of them couldn’t read or write, so they came very early in the day so as not to forget their dreams, not even stopping for a drink at a nearby tavern. Each one would tell his story to a drowsy-eyed copyist who cursed both the dream and the dreamer. “God grant us better luck this time!” some would say when they’d finished. There was a time-honored legend about some poor wretch who lived in a forgotten byway and whose dream saved the State from a terrible calamity. As a reward the Sovereign summoned him to the capital, received him in his palace, told him to take his choice among the royal treasures, and even offered him one of his nieces in marriage. And so on. “God grant…” the yokels would repeat as they set off through the mud again, most of them probably heading for the tavern. The copyist would watch them go sardonically, and before they disappeared around the bend in the road, he would mark their dreams “Useless.”

Despite strict instructions that they should judge dreams completely impartially and without prejudice, this was how the clerks carried out the first selection. The local inhabitants were an open book to them. Even before a new arrival crossed the threshold of their office they knew whether he was a hellraiser, a drunk, a layabout, or suffered from an ulcer. This attitude had often caused problems, and a few years before it had been decided that the first sifting should no longer be entrusted to the local offices. But the ensuing flood of dreams converging on central Selection was so great the decision had to be revoked, and the first sifting continued to be done locally for want of a better solution.

Naturally the dreamers themselves knew nothing of all this. Every so often they would come to the door and ask, “Well, Hadji, any answer about my dream?”

“No, not yet,” replied Hadji. “Patience, Abdul Kader! The Empire’s a big place, and even though they work day and night the central office can’t keep up with all the dreams they’re sent.”

“Yes, of course. You’re right,” the other would answer, gazing at the horizon in the direction where he imagined the Center to be. “How can we know anything about affairs of State?” And he’d clump off in his clogs to the pothouse.

Mark-Alem had learned all this the morning before from an inspector at the Tabir with whom he’d had coffee. The inspector was just back from a distant Asian province and was about to set out again for the European part of the Empire. What he said took Mark-Alem aback. Could everything really begin in so humble a manner? But the inspector, as if sensing his disappointment, hastened to explain that it wasn’t like that everywhere. Some local sections were in solid buildings in imposing cities in Asia and Europe, and those who brought their dreams there were not poor yokels but distinguished people loaded down with honors and titles and university degrees—people of wit, intelligence, and ambition. The inspector expatiated for a while on this point, and Mark-Alem’s image of the Tabir Sarrail gradually regained its former luster. The inspector was just launching into an account of some other episodes in his travels when the bell interrupted him; and now Mark-Alem was trying to imagine the rest for himself. He thought of the peoples who lived on the left side of the Empire and of those who lived on the right; of those who had many dreams and those who had few; of those who were quite ready to tell their dreams and those, like the Albanians, who were very reserved about them (Mark-Alem set great store by his Albanian origins and automatically registered anything that concerned Albania). He thought of the dreams dreamed by peoples in a state of revolt, by peoples who’d been the victims of cruel massacres, by peoples who suffered from periods of insomnia. The latter were a source of special anxiety to the State, since after a latent period a sudden resurgence was to be expected. So special measures were taken in advance to deal with it.

When his informant had spoken of whole peoples suffering from insomnia, Mark-Alem had looked at him in astonishment.

“I know it may strike you as strange,” said the other, “but it has to be understood relatively. A people is deemed to be suffering from insomnia when its total amount of sleep descends appreciably below the norm. And where is anyone in a better position to assess this difference than in the Tabir Sarrail?”

“Of course,” agreed Mark-Alem. He remembered his own recent sleepless nights, though he quickly told himself the sleeplessness of a whole nation must be very different from that of an individual.

He started glancing covertly again to right and left. All the other members of staff seemed to be deep in their papers, as spellbound as if the files, instead of consisting merely of written pages, were braziers giving off intoxicating fumes. Perhaps I’ll gradually succumb to that fascination too, thought Mark-Alem morosely, and end up forgetting all about the world and the human race.

In the past week, in accordance with his boss’s directive, he’d spent half a day with an elderly clerk in each of the rooms belonging to Selection, so as to familiarize himself with every aspect of the work and acquire some experience. Then, two days ago, when he’d finished his tour of all the operations, he’d come back to the desk that was allocated to him on the day he was first appointed.

His peregrinations from one room to another had given Mark-Alem a general view of the way the Selection department worked. After the first scrutiny in the Lentil Room, the dreams rejected as valueless were done up in big bundles and sent to Archives, while those that were retained were divided into groups according to the subjects they were related to. The groups were: security of the Empire and of the Sovereign (plots, acts of treachery, rebellions); domestic politics (first and foremost the unity of the Empire); foreign politics (alliances and wars); law and order (extortion, injustice, corruption); signs of a Master-Dream; and miscellaneous.

The sorting of dreams into divisions and subdivisions was no easy matter. There had been long discussions as to whether the task should be entrusted to Selection or to Interpretation. It would have gone to Interpretation if that section hadn’t been so overworked already. Finally a compromise solution was found: Selection was to classify the dreams, but only in a tentative and preliminary way. So each file was headed not “Dreams concerned with such and such a subject” but “Dreams possibly concerning such and such a subject.” Furthermore, while Selection bore the entire responsibility for dividing dreams into those that were useless and those that were of interest, it had no responsibility at all concerning any further classification. Which meant that Selection dealt essentially with basic sorting. Sorting was the raison d’être of Selection, and interpretation the raison d’être of the Tabir Sarrail as a whole.

“So now you understand that we’re the ones who control all the incoming material,” said the head of his section to Mark-Alem, the day he came back to his original desk. “At first you probably thought that because the work in Selection is primarily sorting, and because we appointed you to this section right away, it was the least important operation in the Tabir. But I imagine you see now that it’s the basis of everything that’s done here. So we never assign beginners to this section, and we only made an exception for you because you suit us.”

“You suit us…” Mark-Alem had pondered the phrase again and again to try to puzzle out what it meant. But it remained as enigmatic and impenetrable as ever, like a wall so smooth and hard you couldn’t get any purchase to climb over it.

He rubbed his eyes again and tried to get on with his reading. But he couldn’t. The characters looked all red now, as if reflecting fire or blood.

He’d put aside forty or so dreams that he judged to be devoid of interest. Most of them seemed to have their origin in everyday worries, while others looked as if they were hoaxes. But he wasn’t quite sure; he’d better read them again. As a matter of fact he’d already read each of them two or three times; but he still didn’t trust his own judgment. The head of the section had told him that when in doubt about a dream he should put a big question mark against it and pass it on to the next sorter. But he’d already done this quite often. In fact, he’d rejected hardly any dreams as useless, and if he didn’t keep back the present batch his boss might think he was afraid to take risks and unloaded everything on his colleagues. But he was supposed to be a sorter, employed to make choices, not to shift the responsibility off onto others. What would happen if all the sorters shirked like that and sent almost all the dreams on to Interpretation? Interpretation would eventually refuse to take them, and probably complain to Administration. And Administration would inquire into what had gone wrong.

“A fine mess I’m in,” sighed Mark-Alem. “But what the hell!”

And hastily, as if he were afraid he might change his mind, he scribbled “Useless,” followed by his initials, at the top of four or five pages. As he was doing the same with the pages that came after, he felt a kind of vengeful joy directed against all the unknown wretches with their stomachaches and their piles who’d been tormenting him for the whole of the past couple of days with their stupid dreams—which they probably hadn’t even dreamed at all, but only heard about from other people.

“Idiots, asses, impostors,” he muttered as he wrote the fatal formula.

But his hand moved ever more slowly, until finally it just hung poised over the paper.

Hold on a bit, he told himself. What’s the point of losing your temper?

And in less than a minute his rage had been replaced by doubt again.

When you came right down to it, this job was by no means easy, and these unknown wretches could even get you into trouble. The staff of every department trembled at the mere thought of Investigation being called in. Mark-Alem had been told about one occasion when some out-of-the-way event had occurred and a dreamer wrote in to the Tabir Sarrail to claim he’d foreseen it in a dream. In such cases a dream was traced by means of the registration number that had been assigned to it in Reception, then taken out of the Archives and checked, and if the complaint was well-founded, a search was instituted to find the people responsible for overlooking or disregarding the warning. The guilty parties might be interpreters, but they might equally well be sorters who’d rejected the dream as useless—an even more heinous fault, since there was more excuse for an interpreter who misread a sign than for a sorter who missed it altogether.

To hell with all of it! thought Mark-Alem, surprising himself with this spark of rebelliousness. What does it matter, anyway!

He wrote “Useless” on another page, then hesitated again over the next. Automatically, not knowing what to do with the piece of paper still in front of him, he began to reread it: A piece of wasteland by a bridge; the sort of vacant lot where people throw rubbish. Among all the trash and dust and bits of broken lavatory, a curious musical instrument playing all by itself, except for a bull that seems to be maddened by the sound and is standing by the bridge and bellowing…

Must be an artist, thought Mark-Alem. Some embittered out-of-work musician.

And he started to write “Useless” on the page. But hardly had he begun when his eye was caught by some earlier lines which he’d skipped before, and which recorded the name of the dreamer, his profession, and the date when he’d had the dream. Strangely enough he wasn’t a musician—he was a street trader who had a market stall in the capital. Lord! said Mark-Alem to himself, unable to take his eyes off this information. A beastly greengrocer, crawling out of his hovel just to make life difficult for you!… What’s more, he lived in the capital, so it would be easier for him to make a complaint if the situation arose. Mark-Alem carefully erased what he’d just written and put the page among the dreams that he’d classified as of possible interest. “Think yourself lucky, idiot!” he murmured, casting a last glance at the page as at someone he’d done an undeserved favor. He dipped his pen in the ink, and without even rereading them, marked a few more pages as “Useless.” His anger had now evaporated and he went on more calmly. He still had eight dreams to deal with out of those he’d at first sight dismissed as worthless. He studied them soberly one after the other and, with the exception of one that he put among the “Of interest” pile, left all the rest where they were. You didn’t need to be an expert to guess that they all originated in family squabbles, constipation, or enforced chastity.

Would these office hours never end? His eyes were beginning to smart again, but he got out a few more as-yet- unexamined pages from the file and spread them in front of him. Pretending to read them, he thought, was even more tiring than really doing so. He selected the pages with the least writing on them, and read one of them without bothering to look at the name of the dreamer: A black cat with a moon in its teeth was running along pursued by a mob of people, leaving a trail of blood from the wounded moon in its wake….

Yes, this dream was worth looking into. Mark-Alem read it again before including it among the dreams that were of interest. This really was a serious dream which it would be a pleasure to analyze. It made him think that the work of the interpreters, difficult though it might be, must be very interesting, especially when they had to deal with such examples as this. Even he, despite his weariness, felt the beginnings of an inclination to interpret it. Not that it was very difficult. Given that the moon was a symbol of the State and of religion, the black cat must represent some force that was hostile to them. A dream like this, thought Mark-Alem, might easily be proclaimed a Master-Dream. He looked at the dreamer’s address. He lived in a town on the European borders of the Empire. That was where all the best dreams came from, he noticed. When he’d reread it a third time, it struck him as even more attractive and meaningful than before. Of particular interest was the crowd, which would no doubt catch the black cat and get the moon out of its clutches. Yes, this dream would certainly be recognized one day as a Master-Dream, he thought. As he contemplated the sheet of ordinary paper it was written on, he smiled as someone might smile on an unassuming young girl he knew was destined to become a princess.

Mark-Alem now felt strangely relieved. He thought for a moment of reading another two or three pages, then decided not to. He didn’t want to blunt the edge of his satisfaction. He turned and looked at the great windows, beyond which dusk was now falling. He wouldn’t examine any more dreams today. He’d just wait for the bell to ring, announcing the end of the working day. Although the daylight was now fading fast, the heads of all the other clerks were still bent over their files. It was clear they’d never look up before the bell rang even if the room was swallowed up in eternal night.

In the end the bell did ring. Mark-Alem hastily collected his papers. There was a din as every drawer in the room was opened and every file stowed away. Mark-Alem locked the drawer in his own desk. Although he was among the first to leave the room, it took him a good quarter of an hour to get right out of the building.

It was cold out in the street. The staff poured out of the doorways in groups, then dispersed in different directions. As they did every evening, a crowd of onlookers watched from the pavement opposite as the people who worked in the Palace of Dreams emerged. Out of all the great State institutions, not excluding the Palace of the Sheikh-ul-Islam and the offices of the Grand Vizier, the Tabir Sarrail was the only one that aroused public curiosity. So much so that almost no day went by without hundreds of people gathering to stand and wait for the staff to go home. Silently, with their collars turned up against the cold, they observed the mysterious officials who were entrusted with the State’s most mysterious work. They gazed at them intently, as if trying to read in their faces the dreams it was their task to decipher. The crowd didn’t go away until the heavy doors of the great Palace had creaked shut.

Mark-Alem began to hurry. The streetlamps weren’t lighted yet, but they would be by the time he reached the street where he lived. Ever since he’d started working in the Tabir Sarrail, darkness had made him feel apprehensive.

The streets were full of pedestrians, and every so often carriages dashed by with drawn curtains. Mark-Alem thought they must be taking beautiful courtesans to secret rendezvous, and heaved a sigh.

When he got to his own street the lamps had indeed been lighted. It was a quiet residential street; half of the houses were surrounded by heavy wrought-iron railings. The chestnut sellers were getting ready to go home. Some had already packed away their chestnuts, paper cones, and coal, and looked as though they were waiting for their braziers and the wire sieves on top to cool down. The policeman on duty saluted Mark-Alem respectfully. A neighbor, Betch Bey, a former army officer, came out of the corner café, dead drunk, with a couple of friends. He whispered something to the others when he saw Mark-Alem, who as he passed them sensed their eyes resting on him with a mixture of curiosity and fear. He walked on faster. He could see from a distance that the lights were on in the ground floor and second floor of the house. There must be visitors, he thought, but couldn’t repress a shudder. As he got nearer he could see a carriage drawn up outside the gate with the letter Q for Quprili carved on both doors. But instead of reassuring him, this only added to his uneasiness.

Loke, the old servant, came and opened the gate for him.

“What’s going on?” he said, nodding toward the lighted windows upstairs.

“Your uncles have come to see you.”

“Has anything happened?”

“No. They’re just visiting.”

Mark-Alem sighed with relief.

What’s the matter with me? he wondered as he went through the courtyard to the front door. Often, coming home very late, he’d felt worried when he saw lights in the windows, but he’d never been as troubled as this evening. It must be my new job, he thought.

“Two friends of yours came and asked for you this afternoon,” said Loke, who was following behind. “They said to tell you to meet them tomorrow or the day after at the klab or klob or whatever you call it—”

“Club.”

“That’s it! The club!”

“If they come back, tell them I’m busy and can’t go.”

“All right,” said Loke.

There was a pleasant smell of cooking in the hall. Mark-Alem paused for a moment outside the drawing room, without quite knowing why. Finally he opened the door and went in. The great room, with its floor covered with rugs, was full of the familiar scents of a wood fire. Two of his three maternal uncles were there—the eldest, who had his wife with him, and the youngest—also two of his cousins, both deputy ministers. Mark-Alem greeted them all in turn.

“You look tired,” said the older of the two uncles.

Mark-Alem shrugged, as if to say: “I can’t help it—it’s the work.…” He guessed at once that they’d come to talk about him and his new job. He looked at his mother, who was sitting with her legs drawn up beside her near one of the big copper braziers. She gave him a faint smile, and at once his anxiety vanished. He sat down at one end of a divan and hoped he’d soon stop being the center of attention. He didn’t have to wait very long.

The older uncle took up a story he’d apparently been telling before Mark-Alem came in. He was the governor of one of the remotest regions in the Empire, and every time he came to the capital on business he brought back a lot of extremely rough stories which always seemed exactly the same to Mark-Alem as those he’d told the last time. His wife, a sickly-looking woman with a sullen expression, listened intently to all her husband said, occasionally glancing at the others as if to say, “You see the sort of place we have to live in!” She never stopped complaining about the climate there and about how hard her husband had to work; beneath all this you could detect a muted but permanent resentment against her brother-in-law, the middle one of the three uncles—the Vizier, as everyone called him now. He wasn’t present this evening. As foreign minister he was the highest-ranking member of the whole Quprili family, and the governor’s wife bore him a secret grudge for not doing enough to get his brother recalled to the capital.

The youngest uncle listened to the eldest with an absent smile. While Mark-Alem saw the older of the two men as a bronze figure corroded by the coarseness and fanaticism of provincial life, his liking for the younger increased daily. He had fair hair, and with his light-colored eyes, reddish mustache, and half-German, half-Albanian name, Kurt, he was regarded as the wild rose of the Quprili tribe. Unlike his brothers he had never stuck to any important job. He’d always gone in for strange occupations as brief as they were odd: At one time he’d devote himself to oceanography, at another to architecture, and lately it had been music. He was a confirmed bachelor, went riding with the Austrian consul’s son, and was said to carry on a sentimental correspondence with several mysterious ladies. In short, he led a life that was as pleasant as it was frivolous, the absolute opposite of the lives led by his brothers. Mark-Alem might have thought of imitating him, but he knew he was incapable of it. Now, listening quite serenely to his uncles, he thought of the carriage that had brought them here, drawn up outside his house. Every time he saw the vehicle it filled him with a kind of fearful joy, because it had always been the bearer of news, whether good or bad.

The Palace—as among themselves all the family called the residence of the most eminent of the Quprilis—was equipped with several carriages, all identical. But for Mark-Alem they had all merged into one: the carriage, sometimes of good and sometimes of evil omen, with Q carved on its doors, which might convey either rainbows or thunderclouds from the main to the other family residences. On several occasions it had been suggested that the Q should be replaced by a K—in accordance with the official Ottoman spelling of their patronymic: Köprülü—but the family always refused, and continued to spell its name in the Albanian fashion.

“So you’re working in the Tabir Sarrail?” said the elder of the two uncles, having at last finished speechifying. “You finally made up your mind?”

“We all decided together,” said Mark-Alem’s mother.

“You did the right thing,” said the uncle. “It’s an honorable position, an important job. My best wishes for your success!?

“Thank you. Insh’Allah!” said Mark-Alem’s mother.

The two cousins now joined in the conversation. As he listened to them, Mark-Alem remembered the endless discussions the question of his job had given rise to before the Tabir was finally chosen. Any outsider hearing them would have been incredulous. How could there be such earnest arguments over a job for a Quprili, the illustrious family that had given the Empire not only five prime ministers but also countless ministers, admirals, and generals, two of whom had led campaigns in Hungary, another in Poland, while yet another had invaded Austria. Even today, despite its relative eclipse, the Quprili family was still one of the pillars of the Empire, the first to have launched the idea of its reconstruction in the form of the U.O.S. (the United Ottoman States), and the only family that had an entry to itself in the Larousse encyclopedia. It was included there under the letter K. The entry read: KÖPRÜLÜ: great Albanian family which provided the Ottoman Empire with five Grand Viziers between 1666 and 1710. It was on this family’s door, moreover, that the highest functionaries of the State knocked timidly when they sought protection, advancement, or clemency….

But incredible as the business of Mark-Alem’s job might seem to others, in the eyes of those who knew something about the family’s history, it was a different matter. For nearly four hundred years the Quprilis had seemed fated equally to glory and to misfortune. If its chronicles included great dignitaries, secretaries of state, governors, and prime ministers, they also told how just as many members of the family had been imprisoned or decapitated or had simply vanished. “We Quprilis,” as Kurt, the youngest of the three uncles, would say half jestingly, “we’re like people living at the foot of Vesuvius. Just as they are covered with ashes when the volcano erupts, so are we every so often struck down by the Sovereign in whose shadow we live. And just as the others resume their ordinary lives afterward, cultivating the soil that is as fertile as it is dangerous, so we, despite the blows the Sovereign rains on us, go on living in his shade and serving him faithfully.”

Ever since he was a child, Mark-Alem could remember the servants coming and going in the house in the middle of the night; the whispering in the corridors; terrified aunts knocking at the gate. He remembered whole days full of bad news and waiting and anxiety, until calm was restored and people wept placidly over the doomed prisoner in his cell, and life resumed its former course, awaiting a new spell of grandeur or fresh misfortune. For as they said in the Quprili family, either their men were appointed to highest office or else they fell into disgrace. No half measures for them.

“It’s a good thing you at least aren’t a Quprili by name,” Mark-Alem’s mother would say sometimes, not really convinced even herself. He was her only child, and after her husband’s death her only care had been to protect her son from the less desirable aspect of the Quprili destiny. This preoccupation had made her more intelligent, more authoritative, and, astonishingly, more beautiful. For a long time, deep down inside, she had made up her mind that Mark-Alem should not go into government service. But by the time he’d grown up and finished his studies, this decision seemed untenable. The Quprili family brooked no idlers, and he had to be found a job somehow—one that offered the most possibilities for making a career and the least for ending up in prison.

In lengthy family discussions they had considered diplomacy, the army, the court, banking and administration. They’d weighed the pros and cons of all of them, the chances of promotion and dismissal. One possibility would be ruled out because it seemed unsuitable or dangerous; another would be rejected for similar reasons; a third might appear different at first, and quite safe, but on closer examination it would turn out to be more risky than its predecessors. So the discussion would go back to the first suggestion, previously set aside with “Oh, God, anything but that!”—and so on and so forth, until Mark-Alem’s mother, exasperated by all the chopping and changing, finally said: “Let him do what he likes—you can’t escape what is written!”

At that point, just as they were going to let Mark-Alem choose for himself, his second uncle, the Vizier, who so far had not taken part in the discussion, finally gave his opinion. At first blush what he suggested seemed so preposterous that it provoked smiles, but it wasn’t long before the smiles faded and every face took on an expression of stupefaction. The Palace of Dreams? How? Why? Then the idea gradually came to seem quite natural. After all, why not? What was wrong with working in the Tabir Sarrail? Not only was there nothing wrong, but it was in fact a much better job than most of the others, which were strewn with pitfalls. But was there really no danger in this case? Yes, of course there were risks, but they were of dream dangers in a world of dreams—the very world the Ancients used to wish to be transported to when they were in trouble and cried, “Oh, God, let it be only a dream!”

So that was how it came about. Little by little the minister’s idea took root in the mind of Mark-Alem’s mother. How was it they hadn’t thought of it before? she wondered. The Tabir now seemed the only institution capable of ensuring her son’s happiness. It offered unlimited opportunities for making a career, but in her eyes its main advantage lay in its vagueness and impenetrability. Reality split in two there and led swiftly to unreality; and the resulting mistiness seemed to her likely to offer her son the best possible refuge when storms broke.

The others came around to her opinion. What’s more, they thought, if the Vizier had initiated the idea there must be something in it. The Tabir Sarrail had recently been playing a more important role in matters of State. The Quprilis, naturally inclined to regard old and traditional institutions with some irony, had rather underestimated the Palace of Dreams. It was said that some years earlier they had managed to curtail its power, though not to have it closed down altogether. But at present the Sovereign had restored it in all its former authority.

Mark-Alem had learned all this gradually, in the course of the long family debates about the kind of employment that would be best for him. Naturally, the fact that the Quprilis somewhat underestimated the Tabir didn’t mean they didn’t have agents there. If they’d been so heedless as to ignore the place completely, they’d long ago have ceased to be what they were. Nevertheless, absorbed as they appeared to be in other state mechanisms, and confident that they would again succeed in neutralizing what they jokingly called among themselves “that woolly institution,” they had ceased to pay it much attention. Now, however, they seemed to be trying to make up for this negligence.

Although they had their own representatives in the Tabir—and scores of them, at that—you couldn’t, said the Vizier to his sister, rely on them as surely as you could on people of noble blood. He was obviously nervous, and she got the impression that he was more anxious about this matter than he cared to admit. He must have more in mind than he’d revealed to her.

This particular interview had taken place two days before Mark-Alem presented himself at the Tabir Sarrail. But ever since the Vizier first made the suggestion, Mark-Alem’s name had always been linked with that of the Palace of Dreams. They were still being joined together now, and that was why the present conversation was getting on his nerves. He hoped they’d change the subject when they sat down to dinner. Luckily they did so even before. The theme was still the Tabir Sarrail, but not in relation to him. Mark-Alem began to take more interest.

“Anyhow, it’s true to say the Tabir Sarrail has now recovered all its old authority,” said the elder of the uncles.

“For my part,” observed Kurt, “even though I am a Quprili, I’ve never thought it could easily be undermined. It’s not only one of the oldest State institutions—in my opinion it’s also, despite its charming name, one of the most formidable.”

“It’s not the only one that’s formidable,” objected one of the cousins.

Kurt smiled.

“Yes, but in the other ones the terror’s obvious. The fear they inspire can be seen for miles, like a cloud of black smoke. But with the Tabir Sarrail it’s quite different.”

“And why, in your opinion, is the Palace of Dreams so formidable?” asked Mark-Alem’s mother.

“It isn’t so in the way you may suppose,” said Kurt, with a covert glance at his nephew. “I was thinking of something else. If you ask me, of all the mechanisms of State, the Palace of Dreams is the most remote from human will. Do you see what I mean? It’s the most impersonal, the blindest, the most deadly, and so the most autocratic.”

“Even so, I reckon it too can be kept more or less under control,” said the other cousin.

He was bald, with dim eyes that reflected his intelligence in a very peculiar way; they seemed simultaneously to reveal and to be consumed by it.

“In my opinion,” Kurt went on, “it’s the only organization in the State where the darker side of its subjects’ consciousness enters into direct contact with the State itself.”

He looked around at everyone present, as if to assess the effect of his words.

“The masses don’t rule, of course,” he continued, “but they do possess a mechanism through which they influence all the State’s affairs, including its crimes. And that mechanism is the Tabir Sarrail.”

“Do you mean to say,” asked the cousin, “that the masses are to a certain extent responsible for everything that happens, and so should to a certain extent feel guilty about it?”

“Yes,” said Kurt. Then, more firmly: “In a way, yes.” The other smiled, but as his eyes were half closed you could see only a bit of his smile, like a shaft of light from under a door.

“All the same,” he said, “I think it’s the most absurd institution in the whole Empire.”

“In a logical world it would be absurd,” said Kurt. “But in the world as it is it’s quite normal!”

The cousin laughed heartily, but gradually stifled his mirth when he saw the governor’s face darken.

“Yet it’s rumored everywhere that things are more complicated than that,” said the other cousin. “Nothing is ever as clear as it seems. For example, who can say nowadays what the Oracle of Delphi was really like? All its records have been lost—or rather destroyed. And it wasn’t as easy as all that to get Mark-Alem taken on….”

Mark-Alem’s mother was listening attentively to all this, trying to catch every word.

“1 think you’d better change the subject,” said the governor.

It wasn’t as easy as all that to get me taken on…. Mark-Alem thought to himself. And gradually there came back to him scenes from his first morning at the Tabir, when he’d been so lost and bewildered, together with glimpses of the tedious hours he’d spent today, working in Selection. I suppose he thinks I shot straight to the top of the tree! he laughed bitterly to himself.

“Come, let’s talk about something else!” said the elder of the two uncles again.

At this point Loke came and announced that dinner was served, and everyone got up and went into the dining room.

At table the governor’s wife started talking about the customs in her husband’s province, but Kurt, none too politely, interrupted her.

“I’ve invited some rhapsodists to come here from Albania,” he said.

“What!” cried two or three voices.

They obviously meant “Where on earth did you get that idea? What bee have you got in your bonnet now?”

“I was talking to the Austrian ambassador yesterday,” Kurt continued, “and do you know what he said? He said, ‘You Quprilis are the only great family left in Europe, probably in the world, who are the subject of an epic.’”

“Ah,” said the elder of the uncles, “now I see!” “According to him the epic devoted to us is in the same class as the Nibelungenlied, and he said, ‘If a hundredth of what is sung about you in the Balkans were still sung today about a French or German family, they’d shout it from the housetops as their highest claim to fame. Whereas you Quprilis scarcely deign to notice it.’ That’s what he said.”

“I see,” repeated the other uncle. “But there’s one thing I don’t understand. You mentioned Albanian rhapsodists, didn’t you? If you’re talking about the epic we all know, what have Albanian rhapsodists got to do with it?”

Kurt Quprili looked him straight in the eye but didn’t answer. Debate about the family epic was as ancient as the priceless antique vases, the gifts of various sovereigns, that were piously handed down from one generation of Quprilis to the next. Mark-Alem had heard his relations talking about the epic since his earliest childhood. At first he’d imagined the epos, as they called it, as a long thin animal, midway between a hydra and a snake, which lived far away in some snowy mountains, and which, like a beast of fable, carried within its body the fate of the family. But as he grew older he gradually realized what the epic really was, though still in a confused sort of way. He couldn’t quite see how it was that the Quprilis lived and lorded it in the imperial capital, while people recited an epic about them in a faraway province called Bosnia in the middle of the Balkans. Why in Bosnia and not in Albania, where the Quprilis originally came from? And above all, why was it sung not in Albanian but in Serbian? Once a year, during the month of Ramadan, some rhapsodists would come from Bosnia. They would stay with the Quprilis for several days, reciting their long epics to their own plaintive musical accompaniment. It was a custom that had lasted for hundreds of years, and recent generations of the Quprilis hadn’t dared to drop or even modify it. They would gather in the great guest hall and listen to the dronings of the Slav bards, not understanding a single word except Tchuprili, the visitors’ pronunciation of the family name. Then the rhapsodists would receive their usual reward and go home again, leaving behind them an atmosphere of emptiness and unsolved mystery, in which for several days their erstwhile hosts would heave vague sighs, like those provoked by a sudden change in the weather.

Rumor had it, however, that the Sovereign was jealous of the Quprilis because of the epic. Dozens of diwans and poems had been written in his honor by the official poets, but nowhere had anyone composed an epos about him like the one the Quprilis had inspired. It was even said that this jealousy was one reason for the thunderbolts the Sovereign regularly unleashed upon the Quprilis.

“Why don’t we just give the epic to the Sultan and avert such troubles once and for all?” little Mark-Alem had suggested one day after hearing the grown-ups repining.

“Hush!” said his mother. “An epic isn’t something you can present to someone else. It’s like a wedding ring or the family jewels—something you can’t give away even if you want to.”

“He said it was in the same class as the Nibelungenlied,” repeated Kurt pensively. “And for days I’ve been pondering the question we’ve all asked so often: Why have the Slavs composed an epic in our honor, while our compatriots the Albanians don’t mention us in their epic?”

“Nothing simpler,” said one of the cousins. “They don’t say anything about us because they expected something of us and they were disappointed.”

“So you think they ignore us out of resentment?”

“If you like.”

“I can understand it quite easily,” said the other cousin. “It’s an ancient misunderstanding between our family and the Albanians. They can’t get used to our imperial dimension, or rather they don’t think it’s of any consequence. They care little for what the Quprilis have done and continue to do for the Empire as a whole. All that matters to them is what we’ve done for the small part of the Empire that is Albania. They’ve always expected us to do something specially for them.”

He threw out his arms as if to say, “So there you have it!”

“Some people think Albania is doomed; others think it was born under a lucky star. I think the question’s more complicated than that. Albania is rather like our family—it has experienced both favor and severity at the Sultan’s hands.”

“And which of the two has counted most with them?” asked Kurt.

“Hard to say,” answered the cousin. “I remember what a Jew said to me one day: ‘When the Turks rushed at you brandishing spears and sabers, you Albanians thought they’d come to conquer you, but in fact they were bringing you a whole Empire as a present!’”

Kurt laughed.

The cousin’s dim eyes seemed to emit a last spark.

“But like all madmen’s gifts,” said the other cousin, “it brought with it violence and bloodshed.”

Kurt laughed again, more loudly this time.

“Why do you laugh?” asked his brother, the governor. “The Jew was right. The Turks have shared power with us—you know that as well as I do.”

“Of course,” said Kurt. “Those five prime ministers prove it,”

“That was only the beginning,” said the governor. “After them there were hundreds of senior officials.”

“That wasn’t what I was laughing at,” said Kurt.

“You’re a spoiled brat,” muttered the other.

A glint came into Kurt’s eye.

“The Turks,” went on the cousin, trying to attract attention again, “gave us Albanians what we lacked: the wide open spaces.”

“And wide open complications too,” said Kurt. “It’s bad enough when an individual life gets caught up in the mechanisms of power—when a whole nation is drawn in it’s a million times worse!”

“What do you mean?”

“Weren’t you just saying the Turks shared power with us? Sharing power doesn’t just mean dividing up the carpets and the gold braid. That comes afterward. Above all, sharing power means sharing crimes!”

“Kurt, it’s not right to talk like that!”

“Anyhow, it’s the Turks who helped us to reach our true stature,” said the cousin. “And we just cursed them for it.”

“Not us—them!” said the governor.

“Sorry—yes… Them. The Albanians back home in Albania.”

A tense silence followed. Loke brought in trays of cakes.

“One day they’ll win real independence, but then they’ll lose all those other possibilities,” continued the cousin. “They’ll lose the vast space in which they could fly like the wind, and be shut up in their own small territory. Their wings will be clipped, and they’ll flap clumsily from one mountain to another until they’re exhausted. Then they’ll ask themselves, ‘What did we gain by it?’ And they’ll start looking for what they’ve lost. But will they ever find it?”

The governor’s wife heaved a deep sigh. No one had touched the cakes.

“Anyhow,” said Kurt, “for the moment they don’t say anything about us.”

“One day they’ll understand us,” said the governor.

“We ought to listen to them too.”

“But you just said they don’t say anything.”

“Then we should listen to their silence,” said Kurt.

The governor guffawed.

“Still the same old eccentric!” he laughed. “As I said, life in the capital has spoiled you. It would do you good to spend a year working for the government in some distant province.

“God forbid!” breathed Mark-Alem’s mother.

The governor’s laughter had relieved the tension, and forks were stretched out to spear the cakes.

“I invited the Albanian rhapsodists to come because I wanted to hear the Albanian epic,” said Kurt. “The Austrian ambassador has read parts of it, and he thinks Albanian epics are much finer than the Bosnian ones.”

“Does he indeed?”

“Yes,” said Kurt. He blinked as if blinded by sunlight on snow. “They talk about hunts through the mountains; single combats; the abduction of women and girls; wedding processions to marriages full of danger; khroushks* rooted to the spot with fear lest they’ve made some mistake; horses drunk on wine; knights who’ve been treacherously blinded riding on blinded steeds through mountains holding their breath; owls foretelling woe; knockings at the gates of strange manor houses at night; a macabre challenge to a duel, issued to a dead man by a live one lurking around his grave with a pack of two hundred hounds; the moans of the dead man unable to rise from his grave to fight his enemy; men and gods quarreling, fighting, intermarrying; shrieks, battles, horrible curses; and over all, a cold sun that sheds light but never warms.”

Mark-Alem listened as if bewitched. He was filled with a strange homesickness for the distant winter snow on which he had never trod.

“That’s what it’s like, the Albanian epic from which we are absent,” said Kurt.

“If it’s anything like what you describe, no wonder we’re not in it!” observed one of the cousins. “It sounds more like a melodramatic frenzy!”

“But we are in the Slav epic,” said Kurt.

“Isn’t that enough?” asked the cousin with dull eyes. “You said yourself we’re the only family in Europe and perhaps in the world that’s celebrated in a national epic. Don’t you think that’s sufficient? Do you want us to be celebrated by two nations?”

“You ask if that isn’t enough for me,” said Kurt. “My answer is no!”

The two cousins shook their heads indulgently. His elder brother smiled too.

“You haven’t changed,” he said. “Still the same eccentric.”

“When the rhapsodists come,” said Kurt, “I invite you all to come and hear them. Among other things they’ll sing the old ‘Ballad of the Bridge with Three Arches,’ about the bridge from which our family name derives….”

Mark-Alem was listening openmouthed.

“But they’ll be singing it in the Albanian version,” Kurt went on. “I haven’t said anything about it yet to the Vizier, but I don’t think he’ll object to our putting them up. They’ll have had a long journey—not to mention the trouble of hiding their instruments. But it’s worth it….”

Kurt went on for some time, speaking with passion. He spoke again of the link between their family here and the Balkan epic there, and of the relations between government and art, the evanescent and the eternal, the flesh and the spirit….

His elder brother’s face had clouded over.

“Be that as it may,” he said, “talk about it as much as you like between these four walls, but be careful not to do so anywhere else.”

Silence fell around the table. The last clink of forks against plates only made it more tense.

To lighten the atmosphere the governor turned to Mark-Alem and said in a sprightly tone:

“We haven’t heard anything from you lately, nephew! You seem to be up to your neck in the world of dreams!”

Mark-Alem felt himself blushing again. Everyone’s attention was once more concentrated on him.

“You work in Selection, don’t you?” his uncle went on. “The Vizier was asking me about you yesterday. A person’s real career in the Palace of Dreams, he said, begins in Interpretation—that’s where the genuinely creative work is done and where people’s individual talents have a chance to shine. Do you agree?”

Mark-Alem shrugged as if to say he hadn’t chosen the section he was sent to work in. But he thought he detected a secret gleam in his uncle’s eye.

And though the governor had swiftly looked down at his plate, that strange gleam hadn’t escaped the notice of his own sister. It was with some uneasiness that she followed the discussion about the Tabir Sarrail, in which everyone except her son was now taking part.

Yes, everyone except Mark-Alem, though he now spent his days in the very heart of the Tabir… His mother’s mind worked feverishly. Had she spent all that time watching over her son only to throw him in the end into a cage of wild beasts? A place that, despite the honor of his appointment, was really only the blind, cruel, even fatal mechanism they’d all been describing?

Out of the comer of her eye she looked at his emaciated features. How was her Mark-Alem going to find his way in that chaos of dreams, those misty fragments of sleep, those nightmares from the brink of death? How had she ever come to let him enter such an inferno?

All around him the conversation about the Tabir Sarrail continued, but he felt too weary to listen. Kurt and one of the cousins were discussing whether the revival of the Palace’s influence was related to the present crisis in the Ottoman Superstate or merely the result of chance. Meanwhile the governor kept saying: “Come, come—let’s talk about something else….”

Finally the visitors rose to go and have coffee in the drawing room. They didn’t go home till quite late, around midnight. Mark-Alem went slowly up to his room on the second floor. He didn’t feel at all like sleeping, but that didn’t bother him unduly. He’d been told newcomers to the Tabir usually suffered from insomnia for the first couple of weeks. After that they were all right again.

He stretched out on the bed and lay there for some time with his eyes open. He felt quite calm. It was a painless kind of insomnia, cold and smooth. And it wasn’t the only thing about him that had changed. His whole being seemed to have undergone a transformation. The great clock at the corner of the street struck two. He told himself that at about three, or half past three at the latest, he would eventually fall asleep. But even if he did, from which file would he choose his dreams tonight?

That was his last thought before he dropped off.

* Members of the procession escorting a bride.