“If you will permit me?” Settimio leaned over Malory’s shoulder and found a photocopy of a document in the Complete History. The translation was dated 10 September 789. “You will find this fragment from Haroun’s private journal was written a few weeks after Gan’s rhapsody on the Yemeni houris. I trust you will find the translation instructive.”
Allahu akbar
Allahu akbar
The entry began:
I have traveled South from Baghdad to the Desert of the Ethiop,
North to the Steppes of the Khazars,
East to the Poppy Fields of the Indies,
Last night the elephant turned blue.
The night before, yellow. This is a voyage of transformation.
Malory remembered a drafty schoolroom and the story of an elephant, of Charlemagne’s elephant. It was named Abu-something and was a gift from the East, maybe even from Haroun al Rashid. Reading the memoir of Haroun, Malory also thought of Bernini’s elephant in the piazza in front of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. The night he arrived in Rome, hadn’t Bernini’s elephant also turned blue?
“If I am remembered by history,” Malory turned back to Haroun al Rashid’s tale in The Complete History of Septimania:
it may not be as the wisest of caliphs who ruled in the name of Allah the Almighty. There are many times I have been betrayed by a brother I trusted, cuckolded by a wife I adored, and surprised by an argument or a punch line that others have seen coming from a league or two away. My weakness is known throughout my empire. I am a sucker for a good story. Any beggar, any cripple, any criminal, any heretic can win himself a bowl of soup, a set of crutches, or any of a thousand and one pardons if he can spin a good yarn for Caliph Haroun al Rashid. And if I am remembered, it will be for the box I used to store these stories, as carefully transcribed as the words of Allah in the Holy Koran.
I hope I may be forgiven for seeking a solution in both an affair of state and an affair of the heart by throwing myself, for the first time I hasten to add, into the center of a tale. By climbing into my own box of stories, by stowing away on the ship sent to bring the spark of my soul, the young Jewish boy Gan, to the shores of Septimania.
I expect the reader will understand that, from the beginning, neither Gan, nor his grandfather Benyamin, nor my Vizier Ja’afar had any inkling of my plan. A box, after all, is not such a large thing to smuggle onto a ship, particularly one already laden with dozens of trunks of jewels and carpets and exotic fruits and even an elephant that I fancied might entertain the great King Charles to the west. The evening before the journey, I bade Gan a sad farewell and retired to my rooms with strict instructions not to disturb my melancholy. Gan, his grandfather Benyamin, his mother, sisters, and the entire Jewish community of Baghdad were wrapped in a shroud of dockside mourning. No one expected to see Gan return to Baghdad. Neither did anyone expect to see me return to the port, climb into the chest and restore its lid. Therefore, nobody did.
The first day at sea brought a tranquility I hadn’t known since the death of my father marked the beginning of a life ruled, in truth, by the calendar that man uses to stumble after the relentless plan of Allah. By the second day, I felt my mind float free from the second guesses and anxieties of leaving Baghdad so precipitously unprepared for my absence. By the third, I felt the tingle of fantasy — not the sensation that excites me every time I feel myself in the presence of a master storyteller, but the anticipation of the birth of my own imagination. So that by the fourth night, when I climbed out of my chest to walk in the fresh air of the deck, while all the crew, save the pilot, slept below, I was not surprised to discover that the elephant I had ordered aboard the ship as a gift to the Frankish king, my prize elephant, had turned blue.
Nor was I surprised, on subsequent nights, to feel the tears of Gan in the mist of the sea spray, to hear the song of the pilot on the bridge take the voice of the innumerable unintelligible tongues of the dreams of his sailors, or to see the elephant’s leathery coat change from blue to green and eventually red, through the seven shades of the spectrum. The tears, the moans, the trumpets of rainbow exuberance from the elephant, not only transported me from the lazy throne of a listener to the uncertain crouch of an actor, but bolstered my conviction that I had acted well. I was not, as I suspected many of Gan’s family believed, chopping down the apple tree of Eden. I was preserving that tree, preserving my friend, by transplanting, exporting, marketing, managing, grafting him onto a Frankish trunk that — from what I could tell in the tone of the letters and the weight of the presents — was at least as well-rooted and powerful as mine.
We made port on the morning of our seventh day at sea. The chest in which I lay curled as a baby in the womb was transported with adequate care, from what my senses told me, to the unventilated back stall of a Jewish butcher. I would have waited until nightfall, once again, to open the lid and free myself. But the story itself took control of my destiny.
“I thought I might find you here,” Gan said, opening the chest with less surprise in the discovery than mine in being discovered.
“You did?” I looked up at him, an unusual angle.
“It was,” Gan said, “one of two possibilities.”
At the time, I was too stiff with astonishment and inexperienced confusion to wonder about the other possibility. I had very literally thrown myself onto a ship of which I was not the captain and onto a shore of which I was not the King. I had climbed into the box a mere Caliph and climbed out a human being. Possibility, at that moment, seemed infinite.
“Quick,” I said to Gan, “find me some clothes, some disguise.” It would have been unwise, of course, to let anyone else in on the secret of the contents of my box. Even the most selfless Charlemagne would have to be a fool not to capitalize on the potential ransom of a captive Caliph. But so many of the storytellers who came searching for my favor had dressed me up in one disguise or another in order to place me more centrally in their tales, that my imagination immediately leapt to this hackneyed recourse. I looked around the stalls, but the racks of tools and pens of fodder were strangely bare of fancy dress.
“My friend and former master,” Gan said, steadying me with a hand as I climbed out of the chest. “You are already clothed. No one in this country has the slightest idea what you look like. The only disguise you need is a good story.” With the patience of a true prince, Gan told me what I had, of course, known back in Baghdad. None of the Franks expected to see the Caliph Haroun al Rashid. Therefore, none would see the Caliph Haroun al Rashid.
“I will introduce you as the Ambassador,” Gan said. “Ambassador from the Caliph of Baghdad. As the Ambassador from your own court,” Gan proceeded, and I could see the story taking on weight and flesh, “you will be welcomed into every home that welcomes me. We are, in fact, expected for dinner, upstairs in the home of the shochet Yehoshua.”
“Twenty-four hours off the boat and already you know the butcher?” I asked, although I was not unhappy at the thought of a meal after a fast of a day and a half.