MASUDI, YUSEF
(Mid 17th century to September 25, 1689)--Famous lute player and one of the writers of this book.
Masudi came from an Anatolian family. It is said that he was taught to play by a woman who was left-handed and inverted the strings on her instrument. There is no doubt that the fingering used by Anatolian minstrels in the 17th and 18th centuries was originally his. Legend has it that he possessed the gift of being able to judge an instrument before even hearing it. The presence of an un-tuned lute in the house would upset him so much it made him nauseated. He would string and tune his instrument by the stars. He knew that with time the player's left hand would forget its job, but the right hand never. However, he abandoned music at a very early age, and a tale about this has been preserved:
Three nights running he dreamed that a different member of is family was dying. First it was his father, then his wife, and then his brother. Finally, on the forth night, he dreamed that his second wife had dies, she with the dappled eyes that changed color in the cold like flowers. Before she shut them, her eyes looked like two yellow grapes whose seeds showed through. She lay with a candle in her navel and her hair tied around her chin to keep her from smiling. He woke up and never dreamed a dream for the rest o his life. He was appalled. He did not have a second wife at all. He went to a dervish and asked him what to think of such a dream. The dervish opened the Book and read out the following words:
"Oh, my beloved son! Speak not of your dream to you brothers! They will hatch a plot against you!"
Dissatisfied with this answer, Masudi asked his one and only wife what she thought the dream meant, and she replied:
"Do not mention your dream to anyone! Your dream will be carried out against the person you tell, not against you."
Masudi then decided to seek out the dream hunters, somebody who might know about such matters firsthand. He was told that dream hunters had become scarce, even more so than before, and that he was more likely to find one if he headed east rather than west, because they all traced their origins and skills from the Khazar tribe that once used to live on the fringe of the Caucasus, where the grass grows black.
Masudi took his lute and followed the seashore, heading east. He thought, Better to trick a man before he wishes you good morning; afterward is too late. And so he hurriedly embarked on his hunt of the dream hunters. One night, he was awakened from his sleep. Standing before him was an old man whose beard was tipped with gray, like the back of a hedgehog. The stranger inquired whether in his dreams, Masudi had any chance seen a woman with dappled eyes, the color of white wine.
"They change color like flowers in the cold!" explained the unknown visitor. Yes, Masudi said, he had seen her.
"And what happened?"
"She died?"
"How do you know?"
"She died in my dream, before my eyes, as my second wife. She lay with a candle in her navel and her face tied up with her hair."
Upon hearing these words, the old man sobbed and said in a broken voice, "Died! I've been following her from Basra. Her apparition keeps moving from dream to dream and I've been trailing her for three years, tracking those who dream of her."
And then Masudi realized that standing before him was the man he was looking for. "You've traveled that far for a woman--are you a dream hunter?"
"Me a dream hunter?" asked the old man in surprise. "What kind of a question is that? Why, you are the dream hunter. I'm just an ordinary admirer of your art. Characters who roam from dream to dream can only die in the dreams of a born dream hunter. You, the dream hunters, are graves, not us. She traveled thousands of miles to die in your dream. But now you will dream no more. Now all you can do is go on your own hunt. But not for a woman with wine-colored eyes. She is dead for you and everyone else. You have to go in pursuit of new prey."
And so it was from the old man that Masudi received his first insurrection in his new vocation and learned all there was to about dream hunters. "with access to good written and oral sources," cautioned the old man, "one can become proficient in the is skill. It is like that Sufi who performed tauba, repented, and found his makkam, following all the rules. Anybody can do that much. But only somebody born to it can really succeed in this job, somebody whom God helps to achieve heavenly enlightenment--khal. The dream hunters were the Khazars, but they have long since disappeared. Only their art has been preserved, and, in part, their dictionary telling of that art. They could track all those who appeared in people's dreams and hunt them like wild game from person to person, even in the dreams of animals or demons."
"How is that done?" asked Masudi.
"Surely you have noticed that before falling asleep that double-edged realm between consciousness and dreams, man adjusts his relationship to the gravitation of the earth? His thoughts break free from the pull of the earth in proportion with which the earth's gravitation acts on his body. It is then that the screen between thoughts and the world becomes porous, letting man's thought sift free, like sieves that have three different thick nesses. In that brief instant when the chill most easily slips into the human body, man's thoughts brim over and can be read with little difficulty. People who observe someone dropping to sleep will be able, without even practice, to catch what he is thinking at the moment and to whom it refers. And if, through painstaking practice, you master this art of observing man's soul at the moment when it opens, you will be able to follow that moment of opening ever longer and ever deeper in the dream, and to hunt in it as in the water of open eyes. This is the making of a dream hunter.
"These confessors of dreamers, as the Khazars used to call them, carefully noted down their observations of dreams, the way the observers of the skies do in some places, or like those who read fate in the sun and the stars. Everything connected with this art, along with biographies of the most prominent hunters and the captured prey, was collected on the orders of the Khazar Princess Ateh, the protectoress of the dream hunters, in the form of the Khazar encyclopedia or dictionary. The dream hunters passed on this Khazar dictionary from one generation to the next, and each had to add to it. It was toward this end that many centuries ago they founded a school in Basra, the 'fraternity of the pure' of 'friends of fidelity'; this sect, which did not disclose its names, issued the Calendar of Philosophers and The Khazar Encyclopedia. But Caliph Mostandji burned these books along with those of the school's Islamic branch and the writings of Avicenna. And so the original version of The Khazar Dictionary, founded by Princess Ateh, has not been preserved. The text of the dictionary that I obtained is only an Arabic translation, and it is all I can give you. You may take it, but you must learn all the entries, because, if you do not know the dictionary of your art well enough, you may loose the most important game of your hunt. But beware--in dream hunting the words of the Khazar dictionary are like the lion's tracks in the sand to the ordinary hunter."
So spoke the old man to Masudi, and along with the dictionary gave him the following advice:
"Anyone can strum at the lute, but only the happy few endowed by the heavens can become dream hunters. Leave your instrument! The lute was invented by a Jew; Lamko was his name, Forget it and go for the hunt! If your prey doesn't die in somebody else's dream, as one did in mine, it will lead you to your goal!"
"But what is the purpose of hunting dreams?" asked Masudi.
"The goal of dream hunters is to understand that every awakening is just one step in the many releases from dreaming. He who understands that his day is merely another person's night, that his two eyes are another person's one, will search for the real day, which enables true awakening from one's own reality, just as one awakens from a dream, and this leads to a condition where man is even more wakeful than when conscious. Then he will finally see that he has one eye as opposed to those with two, and is blind compared with those who are awake."
And then the old man confided to Masudi the tale of Adam Ruhani.
Then, following the Arabic letters, The Khazar Dictionary formed a chain of biographies of Khazar and other figures, especially those who had taken part in the Khazar tribe's conversion to Islam. The central figure, the dervish and sage who had carried out the conversion, was called Farabi Ibn Kora, and the dictionary discussed him at length. However, in other places there were gaping holes. The Khazar kaghan who had summoned to his court the three priests--the Arab, the Jew, and the Christian--wanted a dream interpreted for him. But not all of these participants in the Khazar polemic were equally familiar to Islamic sources on the Khazar question or to the Arabic translator of The Khazar Dictionary. One could not help noticing that Islamic sources did not mention by name the Christian and Hebrew dream hunters and participants in this debate, and information about them was in any case scarcer than was that about the Arab representative, Ibn Kora, who had argued in favor of Islam. While studying The Khazar Dictionary (and that did not take long), Masudi wondered who those other two were. Did any of the Christians perhaps know of their dream reader and representative of the Greek faith in the quadripartite talks at the Khazar court? Had his name been preserved? Did any of the Jewish rabbis know something about the other participant, about their own representative in the debate? Had no Greek or Jew informed himself about the Christian or Hebrew sage in the debate, as Masudi and those before him had done about the Islamic representative? These foreigner's arguments, Masudi observed and then wrote down, did not appear to be as forceful and exhaustive as Farabi Ibn Kora's. Was that because Ibn Kora's arguments really were more persuasive and comprehensive than theirs, or were theirs stronger than his in Hebrew and Christian books about the Khazars, assuming such exist? Perhaps they ignore us as we ignore them? Perhaps the only way to compile a Khazar encyclopedia or dictionary on the Khazar question would be to assemble all three stories about the dream hunters and thus obtain one truth? Then The Khazar Dictionary could alphabetize certain entries with names and biographies of the Christian and Jewish participants in the Khazar polemic, and this could include information about other chroniclers of the polemic, those from the Jewish and Greek sides. Because how is Adam Ruhani to be created if his body parts are missing?
Contemplating these possibilities, Masudi shivered. He was afraid of open cupboards and chests with his clothes sticking out, and he would shut them every time he sat down with his dictionary. He began searching for Hebrew and Greek manuscripts relating to Khazars: the words "Holy Book" could be read in the folds of his turban, but he ran after infidels and bribed Greeks and Jews on the way, learning their language like looking glasses that gave a different reflection of the world. And he learned to look at his reflection in these looking glasses. His Khazar file grew, and he intended one day to add to it the lives of the prey he hunted, a report on his part of the job, his small contribution to the huge body of Adam Ruhani. But, being a true hunter, he did not know what kind of game it would be.
The months of Rabbi-ul-aker came around, and in it the third jum'a, and for the rest of time Masudi saw into other people's dreams. He spent the night at an inn, next to a man whose face was invisible but who could be heard softly singing a song. At first Masudi was perplexed, but his hearing was swifter than his mind. He was a feminine key with a hole in its shaft, looking for a masculine lock with a bolt in its keyhole. And he had found it. The man laying next to him was not singing at all; somebody inside him was singing, somebody the man in the shadows was dreaming about. . . . It was so quiet in the inn that the hair of the dreamer could be heard splitting somewhere in the dark next to Masudi. And then, imperceptibly, as if passing through a looking glass, Masudi stepped into a spacious dream, floored with sand, exposed to the rain and the wind, full of wild dogs and thirsty camels. He realized immediately that he was in danger of being mutilated and attacked from behind. All the same, he stepped into the sand, which rose and fell in flows and ebbs, following the breathing of the dreamer. In one corner of the dream sat a man carving a lute out of a piece of wood that for years had been flouting in a stream, it's roots turned toward the mouth of the river. Now it was dry. Masudi deduced that the man was making the instrument they way they used to three hundred years ago, before this method had been abandoned. So the dream was older than the dreamer. Every so often the man in the dream would interrupt his work to take a bite of pilaf, and each bite moved him at least a hundred steps away from Masudi. As the man receded, a view opened up into the bottom of the dream, where there was a little light giving off an unbearable stench. Behind the light was a kind of graveyard where two men were burying a horse. One was the man who had been singing. But now Masudi did not just hear the song; he suddenly found himself looking at the singer. A young man, half of whose mustache was gray, appeared in the dream of the man lying next to him. Masudi knew that Serbian dogs bite first and bark later, that Walachian dogs bite without making a sound, and that Turkish dogs bark and then bite. The man in the dream belonged to none of these three species. He remembered the song; on the morrow the most important thing would be to catch the next dreamer visited by this young man with a half-gray mustache. Masudi knew how. He assembled several lute players and singers, like a crew of herdsmen, and taught them to sing and play as he instructed them. He wore different colored rings, each color corresponding to a note on the ten-note scale he used. He would show the singers one of his fingers, depending on the color of the ring, and it would call forth the voice it sought, just as every animal chooses its own kind of food; then they sang unerringly, although they had never heard the song before. They sang in public places--in front of wells, in city squares and by fountains--and the song became a human bait for passers-by who carried Masudi's hunted prey inside them at night. They would stop as though the sun were sending them moon-rays and listen as though bewitched.
As he tracked his prey from place to place along the shores of the Black Sea, Masudi began recognizing those who dreamed the dream he was looking for. Curious changes occurred when the number of people visited in their dreams by the young man with the half-gray mustache grew; in speech, verbs assumed more importance than nouns, and the later were omitted wherever possible. Occasionally people dreamed of the young man in groups. Some Armenian merchants saw him in a dream, under gallows erected on an ox cart. He was passing through a lovely town built of stone, and the hangman picked at the young man's beard. Then some soldiers saw him burying horses in a beautiful horse graveyard overlooking the sea; they saw him with a woman, whose face was unidentifiable in the dream except for small patches the size of silver coins. where the young man with the half-gray mustache had left the trace of a kiss on her cheeks. . . . And then suddenly the prey he was hunting for would disappear from sight, its trail lost. Masudi did the only thing he could do--he put down in his Khazar Dictionary everything he had observed the last time, and now these writings, old an new, traveled with him, alphabetized in a green feedbag that got heavier and heavier. And still he had the feeling that many dreams being dreamed in his immediate proximity were simply slipping by, that he was not catching them all and dividing them up among the dreamers. The number of dreams was bigger than the number of dreamers. Finally Masudi turned his attention to his camel. Gazing into the animal's dream, he saw this young man with the callused forehead and strange two-toned mustache like an affliction on his face. Up above was one of the constellations that never bathe in the sea. He stood by the window, reading a book tossed between his feet on the floor. The title of the book was Liber Corsi, but Masudi did not know what the words meant as he gazed through closed eyes into the dream of the camel. This was the moment when the hunt brought him to the one-time Khazar border. Black grass grew in the fields.
Now more and more people were admitting the young man with the Liber Corsi into their dreams for the night. Masudi realized that sometimes the same dream, with the same people in it, was dreamed by entire generations or classes of society, but he also realized that some dreams slowly become twisted and disappear, that they were more frequent in the past than in his lifetime. These common dreams were obviously aging. Yet here at the border his hunt was turning into something new. Long ago he had had noticed that the young man with the half gray mustache would lend a fistful of silver to everyone whose dream he visited. And he gave it under very favorable terms, with an annual one-percent interest rate. In the remote spot of Asia Minor the loan was sometimes akin to a promissory note, because it was believed that dreamer must be honest with one another in the presence of the one about whom they were dreaming, for he holds all the account books in his hand. In other words, there was something akin to an accurately kept double accounting system, which covered and pooled capital from the conscious and the unconscious, based on the tacit agreement of the participants in the transaction. . . .
In a small town that for Masudi had no name, he entered the tent of a Persian who was performing at a Thursdaysite. The crowd, packed so tightly that not even an egg could drop to the ground, was ringed around a pile of rugs, on which braziers were placed; a naked little girl was brought before the spectators. Moaning softly, she held a chaffinch in each hand, then opened her left hand and, the instant the bird made to fly off, caught it with lightning speed. She suffered from an unusual disease: her left hand was faster than her right. She claimed her left hand was so fast that it would die before she did: "I'll never be buried with my left hand! I can already see it lying without me in a small grave, without a marker or a name, like a ship without a rudder. . . ."
The Persian then asked everyone to dream about the little girl that evening so that she might recover, and he described in detail what he wanted them to dream. The crowd dispersed; Masudi was the first to leave, feeling as though he has a bone in his tongue, just as he had written in his Khazar Notebook, dipping his pen in scalding hot Abyssinian coffee. There was nothing for him here. The Persian obviously had a notebook of his own. He was a dream hunter too. Adam Ruhani could obviously be served in various ways. Was Masudi's the right one?
And then came the month of Jemaz-ul-ewel, and the second jum'a in it. A new town, stark and hot, shrouded in the mist of a river, stood in the sand. The mist concealed it from sight, but in the water under the mist each of its minarets could be seen impaled on the rapids. A deep, three-day-old silence hung over the shore behind the mist, and in this silence, the town, and the thirsty water aroused in Masudi a masculine urge. He was starving for feminine bread that day. One of the rustlers he had sent into town to sing reported he had found something. This time, the dreamer was a woman.
"Follow the main street until you smell ginger. That's how you'll recognize her house: she uses ginger in her cooking."
Masudi walked down to the houses and stopped at the smell of ginger. A woman was sitting by the fire, her kettle of broth babbling like bursting boils. Children were standing in line with their plates and dogs, waiting. She ladled out the broth to the children and animals, and Masudi knew she was portioning out dreams from the kettle. Her lips changed color, and her bottom lip was the shape of an up-side-down bench. She way lying on the remains of a half-eaten fish, like desert dogs on the bones of its prey, when Masudi went up to her, and she offered him a ladleful, but he shook his head with a smile. "I cannot dream anymore," he said, and she left the kettle.
She looked like a heron dreaming it was a woman. Masudi lay down on the ground next to her, his nails numb, his gaze crippled and broken. They were alone now; they could hear the hornets sharpening their stingers on the dry bark of the tree. He wanted to kiss the woman, but suddenly her face completely changed, as though a different cheek were receiving his kiss. When he asked her what was wrong, she simply said: "Oh, those are just days. Pay no mind; they flit across my face ten times faster than across yours, or your camel's. But your efforts to penetrate my cloak are in vain. It's not hiding what you're looking for. There are souls without bodies, called 'dybbuks' by the Jews and 'cabalas' by the Christians, but there are also bodies without a sex. Souls are sexless whereas bodies are not. The only sexless bodies are those that have been divested of their sex by demons. That's what happened to me. A devil by the name of Ibn Hadderash took away my sex, but spared my life. In short, Cohen is my only lover now."
"Who is Cohen?" Masudi asked.
"The Jew I dream about and you pursue. The young man with a mustache that is one-half gray. He has a body imprisoned in three souls; I have a soul imprisoned in flesh, and I can share it with no-one but him, when he enters my dream. He's a good lover--I can't complain. Anyway, he's the only one who still remembers me; nobody visits my dreams any more except him. . . ."
So for the first time, Masudi met somebody who knew the name of his prey. Cohen was the young man's name.
"How do you know?" Masudi asked, just to be sure.
"I heard it. Somebody called out to him and he answered to that name."
"In your dream?"
"In my dream. That was the night he set out for Constantinople. But take heed: the Constantinople of our thoughts is always one hundred pepper fields west of the real Constantinople."
The woman then reached into her blouse, took out something like a fruit but resembling a small fish, and offered it to Masudi, saying, "This is a ku, do you want to taste it, or would you prefer something else?"
"I'd like you to dream of Cohen in front of me," said Masudi, to which the woman replied in surprise:
"Well, you are very modest in your requests. Too modest, considering the circumstanses, but you are obviously unaware of it. I will dream this dream especially for you, and I make you a present of it. But be careful from now on: the woman who is pursuing the person you are dreaming of with catch you."
Then she lowered her head on the dog, her fae and hands scratched from the countless looks that had grazed through her through the centuries, and inter her dream admitted Cohen, who said:
"Intentio tue grata et accepta est Creatori, sed opera tua non sunt accepta . . . ."
Masudi's peregrinations were at an end: he had received more from the woman than from anyone ever before, and, as though he had sprouted leaves, he rushed to saddle his camel and hurry back to Constantinople. His prey was waiting for him in the capital. And just as Masudi was calculating the edge he had gained in this last hunt, his own camel turned its head and spat in his eye. He whipped the camel in the face with dampened reins until it vomited the water from both its humps, but he never resolved the puzzle of its behavior that day.
The road stuck to his shoes and, remembering Cohen's words like a musical refrain, since the words themselves were incomprehensible to him, he thought how he would have to wash his shoes at the first inn he came upon: the roads lured the shoes that trod them by day until the shoes had returned all the mud they had taken away.
A Christian monk who knew no other language but Greek told Masudi that the words he remembered were Latin, and directed him to the local rabbi. The rabbi translated Cohen's sentence for Masudi:
"Your intention is good and acceptable to the Creator, but your deeds are not!"
And so Masudi realized that his wish was coming true and his was the right way. He now recognized the sentence. He had known it in Arabic long ago, for it was the same sentence that the angel had spoke to the Khazar kaghan all those hundreds of years ago. Masudi knew that Cohen was one of the two he was searching for, because Cohen was using Hebrew legend to trace the Khazars, just as Masudi was using the Islamic. Cohen was the man Masudi had prophesied when he was poring over his Khazar dictionary. The dictionary and the dreams formed a natural whole.
But just then, when Masudi was on the brink of a great discovery, when his prey had proved to be almost his twin in the quest for the Khazar stories, Masudi completely forsook his Khazar Dictionary and never returned to it again. This is how it happened.
They had stumbled upon an inn; darkness was falling in reddish flakes, and Masudi was breathing deeply on the bed. His own body looked to him like a ship riding the waves. Somebody in the next room was playing the lute. Later, Anatolian lute players would tell the legend of that night and that music. Masudi recognized the lute as an exquisite specimen. It was made from the wood of a tree that had not been felled with an ax, so the sound in the wood had not been killed. Moreover, it had been found in the high country, where the sound of water does not reach the woods. And, finally, the belly of the instrument was made not of wood but of some kind of animal matter. Masudi could tell the difference, just as wine drinkers know the difference between inebriation on white whine and red. Masudi recognized the melody the unknown musician was playing; it was an extremely rare tune, and he was surprised to hear this particular song in such an out-of-the-way place. There was an extremely difficult section of this song, and in the days he had still played the lute, Masudi had devised a special fingering for it, one that was used widely by lute players. However, the anonymous player was using another, still better fingering. Masudi could not figure out what it was, could not find the key to it. He was stunned. He waited for the section to come around again, and when it did, he finally understood. Instead of ten, the player was using eleven fingers for that section. Masudi knew now that it was the shaitan playing, because the devil uses his ten fingers and tail to play.
"Has he caught up with me, or I with him?" Masudi muttered to himself, rushing into the room next door. There he found a man with slender fingers all the same length. Snakes of gay slithered through his beard. His name was Yabir Ibn Akshany, and lying there in front of him was an instrument made out of white tortoiseshell.
"Show me!" Masudi sputtered. "Show me! What I heard is impossible!"
Yabir Ibn Akshany yawned, opening his mouth very slowly, as though giving birth to an invisible child that he formed with his mouth and tongue. "Show you what?" he retorted, bursting into laughter. "The tail? But you’re not interested in the song or the music--you abandoned that a long time ago. Now you are a reader of dreams. It is me you're interested in. You want the devil to help you. Because, as the Book says, the shaitan sees God, people don't. So what would you like to know about me? I ride an ostrich, and when I go on foot I take an escort of demons with me, little devils, one of whom is a poet, He wrote poems centuries before Allah created the first humans, Adem and Hava. His verse tells about us shaitans and the devil's seeds. But I hope you won't take them too seriously, because the words in the poems are not the real words. The real word is like an apple with a snake wrapped around the tree, its roots in earth and crest in the sky. I will tell you something else about me and about you.
"Let us look at some of the facts known to any reader of the Koran. Like other devils, I am made of fire, whereas you are made of mud. They only strength I have comes from what I poured into you and what I take out of you, because one can find in truth only as much as one puts into it. But this is by no means a small amount--there is room in truth for everything. You humans will turn into whatever you want if you reach paradise, but on earth you are imprisoned in one and the same form, the form constructed by your birth. We, on the other hand, assume whatever form we like of earth, changing it at will, but as soon as we cross the river of Khevser into heaven, we are forever condemned to be what we really are, shaitans. But, because our memory is in fire, our memory cannot entirely fade out like yours, mixed in clay. And that is the fundamental difference between me as a devil and you as a man. Allah created you using both hands, and me with only one, but my race of shaitans appeared before your human race. The important difference between me and you, therefore, is one of time. Although our sufferings go in pairs, my race came before yours to Djehenem, to hell. And after you humans, a new, third species will arrive. So your torment will forever be shorter than mine, because Allah has already heeded the coming third species, who will cry out to Him for us and for you: 'Punish the former doubly, to lessen our torment!' In other words, torment is not inexhaustible. This is the crux, this is the beginning of what cannot be found in books, and it is where I can be of help to you. Listen closely. Our death is older than you death. My shaitan race has longer experience in dying than your human race and remembers that experience better. That is why I know and can tell you more about death than anybody of your race, no matter how wise and experienced he may be. So listen now, if you have a gold ring in your ear, and take advantage of the opportunity. Because he who speaks today can do so again tomorrow, but he who listens today can do so only once, when he is spoken to." Then Akshany related to Masudi the Story of the Children's Deaths.
"That is more or less this secret of secrets, as seen from the vantage point of we shaitans, we who have somewhat more experience with death than you humans. Think about it, because you are dream hunter and, if you are careful, you will get a chance to see all this for yourself."
"What do you mean?" asked Masudi.
"The objective of your hunt, as a dream hunter scavenging a rubbish heap, is to find two people who always dream about each other. The one who sleeps always dreams about the reality of the other, who is awake. Am I right?"
"Yes."
"Now, imagine that the one who is awake dies, because there is no reality more brutal than death. The person dreaming this one's reality is actually dreaming his death, because the latter's reality at that moment is that of dying. So our dreamer can see somebody dying as if on the palm of his hand, but he himself won't die. Yet he will never wake up again, because the person who is dying will no longer be around to dream about his life and the be the silk spinner who weaves the thread of his own reality. So the one dreaming about the death of the person who is awake can no longer wake himself and tell us what he saw in his dream, or what death looks like the personal experience of one who is dying, even when he has direct insight into that experience. You, as a reader of dreams, have the power to read his dream and find there all you want to know about death, to cross-check and add to my experience and the of my species. Anybody can play music or write a dictionary. Leave that to others, because people like you, like you, who can peer into that crack between one view and the other, that crack where death rules supreme, are few and far between. Use your gift as a dream hunter to land a big catch. It is you who command; be careful, therefore, what decision you take," Yabir Ibn Akshany said, winding up hi story with the words of the Holy Book.
Outside, night had bled and day was breaking. The fountain was gurgling in front of the caravansarai. It had a phallic-shaped pipe made out of bronze with two metal eggs tufted with iron hairs, and the tip that went into the mouth was smooth. Masudi drank his fill and once again changed his vocation. He stopped writing his Khazar Dictionary and taking notes on the life of his Jewish wanderer. He would have thrown away his feedbag of papers written with his coffee-dipped pen had he not needed them as a handbook for hunting the truth about death. And so he continued to hunt his old prey with a new goal.
It was the first jum'a ertesi in the month of Safer, and Masudi's thoughts were like falling leaves: one by one they peeled off their stalk and fell; he fallowed them for a while as they floated before him, and then they sank to the bottom of their autumn forever. He paid and dismissed his minstrels and singers, sat with his eyes closed, leaning against the trunk of a palm tree, his boots burning the soles of his feet; between himself and the wind he felt only an icy, acrid sweat. He dipped a boiled egg into the sweat to salt it. The coming Sunday was for him as good as Friday, and he sensed clearly what had to be done. He knew that Cohen was going to Constantinople, so he did not have to pursue him any farther than that or hunt among the highways and byways of other people's dreams, where they peed on, raped, and trampled Masudi like cattle. A much more important and difficult question was how to find Cohen in Constantinople, the city of cities. But in the end he would not have to look for him there: somebody else would do it for him. No, he had to find the person Cohen was dreaming of. And that person--if he thought about it--could be only be one man, the man Masudi already had intuited.
"Just as the fragrance of linden honey in rose-hip tea interferes with the fragrance of the tea itself," thought Masudi, "so there is something obstructing my view of how people around me are dreaming of Cohen. There is somebody else there, an intruder. . . ."
Masudi had long since decided that, besides himself and his study of Arab sources on the Khazar race, somewhere in the world there were at least two others. One of them, Cohen, studied Hebrew sources on the conversion of the Khazars, and the as-yet-unidentified third person was certainly involved with Christian sources on the same issue. Now he had to find that third person: a Greek or some Christian, a learned man interested in Khazar affairs. He would be the person Cohen himself was looking for in Constantinople. It was the third man that had to be found. And Masudi knew how he would do it. But just as he had worked it all out and was about to set off, Masudi again stumbled into somebody's dream, now hunting involuntarily. There were no people or animals around him this time. Just sand, a waterless expanse stretching out like the sky, and behind it the city of cities. But the powerful rush of water, running deep into the heart, sweet and deadly, roared through the dream, and Masudi was to remember it, because the roar spilled into all the folds of his turban, which had been wrapped to form a word from the fifth sara of the Holy Book. Masudi saw that the seasons were not the same in the world and the dream. He decided, therefore, that the palm tree he was leaning against was doing the dreaming. It was dreaming of water. Nothing else happened in the dream, just the rush of the river deftly folded, like a glaringly white turban . . . . Masudi entered Constantinople in the scorching heat at the end of the month of Shaban and went to the city's ,main marketplace to sell a scroll of The Khazar Dictionary. The only offer came from a Greek monk by the name of Theoctist Nikolsky, who took it to his master. The latter did not question the price, bought it, and asked if there was more. Masudi now knew he had found the third lexicographer he had been looking for, the one who dreamed of Cohen and would serve as his bait to catch Cohen. Because he was certainly the reason for Cohen's coming to Constantinople. The wealthy buyer of the Khazar scroll from Masudi's feedbag was a diplomat working in Constantinople for the English envoy to the Porte, and his name was Avram Brankovich. He was a Christian from Erdely, in Walachia, a highly respected and splendidly dressed man, as big as a well. Masudi offered to work for him and was taken on as a valet. Since Avram Effendi worked in his library by night and slept by day, that very first morning, Masudi seized the opportunity of peering into Brankovich's dream. In Avram Brankovich's dream, Cohen rode a horse and a camel in turn, spoke Spanish , and was nearing Constantinople. This was the first time anyone had ever dreamed of Cohen by day. Brankovich and Cohen obviously took turns dreaming of each other. And so the circle closed and the moment of decision began.
"Good!" thought Masudi. "When you tie up your camel, milk it dry, because you never known whom it will serve tomorrow!" And he started inquiring about his master's children. He learned that Avram Effendi had two sons at home in Erdely, that the younger of the two suffered from some disease of the hair and would die when the last hair on his head fell off. Avram's other son already sported a saber. His name was Grgur Brankovich, and he had already been in several battles. That was all, but it was enough for Masudi. "The rest is just a matter of time and waiting," he thought, and he began passing the time by forgetting his first love--music. He forgot not song by song, but piece by piece of these songs. First to fade from his memory were the lowest tones: the wave of oblivion rose like the tide to ever-higher sounds; then the flesh of the songs vanished and all that was left was the skeleton of their rhythm. Finally, he began forgetting his Khazar notes, word by word, and was none too sad when one of Brankovich's servants tossed his dictionary into the fire.
But then something unforeseen happened. Like the green woodpecker that can fly backward, from head to tail, in the last jum'a of the month of Shawwal. Avram Effendi departed from Constantinople. He left his diplomatic service and, with is entire suite and servants in tow, went to war on the Danube. In the year 1689 after Isa, in Kladovo, they found lodgings in the camp of Prince Badensky, and Brankovich joined his service. Masudi did not know what to think or do, because his Jew had not gone to Kladovo but to Constantinople, and this upset Masudi's plans. He sat on the banks of the Danube spinning his turban. And then he heard the rushing roar of the river. The water ran deep beneath him, but he recognized its scream; it fit perfectly into the folds of his turban, which formed one word from the fifth sura of the Koran. It was the same water that the palm tree in the sand near Constantinople had dreamed about a few months ago, and now Masudi knew everything was all right again and that he would indeed end his journey at the Danube. For days he sat shooting dice in a trench with one of Brankovich's scribes. The scribe was losing heavily, but he would not stop playing even when Turkish cannons shelled the trenches, for he lived in the hope that he would win back what he had lost. Masudi himself had no desire to leave, because behind his back Brankovich was again dreaming of Cohen. Cohen was riding through the roar of the river rushing through Brankovich's dream, and Masudi knew that the roar came from the same Danube that could be heard when he was awake. Then the wind spattered him with mud, and he sensed it would happen. A Turkish detachment reeking of urine stormed their trench as they were shooting the dice, and while the janissaries slaughtered right and left, Masudi desperately searched their faces for the young man whose mustache was half-gray. Suddenly he saw him. He saw the same Cohen he had hunted in other people's dreams--with red hair and a tight smile beneath that half-gray mustache, advancing in small steps, a feedbag slung over his shoulder. That instant, the solders slashed the scribe to pieces, plunged their spears into the sleeping Avram Brankovich, and moved in on Masudi. Cohen rescued him. At the sight of Brankovich, Cohen collapsed on the ground, sheets of paper flying from his feedbag, strewn everywhere. Masudi knew that Cohen had fallen into the deepest sleep, from which he would never awake.
"Is the interpreter dead?" the Turkish pasha asked the troops with an almost gleeful note in his voice.
Masudi replied in Arabic, "No, he is asleep," and this prolonged Masudi's life by an extra day. His response surprised the pasha, who asked how Masudi knew that. And Masudi spoke as Yabir Ibn Akshany had spoken to him. To wit, that it was he, Masudi, who ties and loosened the reins of other people's dreams, that he had followed to this place his medium, who served as a kind of bait for the hunt, and who was now dying from a spear wound, and that he begged his own life be spared until morning so that he could follow Cohen's dream, because Cohen was now dreaming about Brankovich's death.
"Let him live until that one wakes up," said the pasha. The soldiers hoisted up Cohen's sleeping body onto Masudi's back and he went with them to the Turkish side, hauling his catch. Toted like that, Cohen did indeed dream of Brankovich, and Masudi felt as though he had two bodies to carry, not one. In his dream, you young man slung across Masudi's back saw Avram Effendi as he was when awake, because Cohen's dream was still Brankovich's wakeful reality. If ever Brankovich was awake, it was now, with a spear piercing his body: in death there is no sleep. And now came the chance Yabir Ibn Akshany had been talking about. Masudi hunted Cohen's dream while the young man dreamed of Brankovich's death, as until then he had been dreaming of Brankovich's life. And so it was, Masudi spent that day and night tracking Cohen's dreams like stars on the roof of his mouth. And, they say, he saw Brankovich's death the way Brankovich saw it himself. By morning, his eyelids had turned gray, his ears trembled, and his nails were long and smelled. He was thinking so rapidly he did not even notice the man slash his wrist with a single flourish of the sword, and his belt slipped off without even unwinding. The saber left a sinuous cut, and a terrible winding gash gaped like a mouth uttering an incomprehensible word, the scream of flesh. They say those who saw it never forgot that ghastly winding slash of the saber, and those who remembered it say they later recognized it in a book called The Finest Signatures of the Saber, written by somebody named Averkie Skila, who collected and illustrated the most famous strokes in fencing. The book, printed in Venice in 1702, gives this particular stroke the name of one of the stars in the constellation of Aries. Whether such a terrible death was worth it to Masudi, and what he confided to the pasha before dying, nobody knows. Whether he crossed the Sirat bridge, which, finer than a strand of hair and sharper than a saber, crosses hell into heaven, is known only to those who no longer speak. According to one legend, Masudi's music went to heaven and he himself when to hell, saying: "More than anything else I wish I had never sung a single song; then, like the other lowlife and scum, I would have entered paradise! Music led me astray when I was within reach of the Truth."
The Danube ripples over Masudi's grave, and the carved inscription reads: Everything I earned and learned has gone with a tap of the spoon against the teeth.
| Previous Entry | Main Index | Next Entry |
Sources: In his edition Daubmannus included some information about Masudi gleaned from 17th century manuscripts. According to these sources, Masudi thrice forgot his name and thrice changed his trade, but his memory was preserved by those whom first he had disavowed--the musicians in Anatolia. The lute schools in Izmir and Kula were the breeding grounds of legends about Masudi in the 18th century, and these legends were taught along with his famous fingering. Masudi had preserved the transcript of an Arabic version of The Khazar Dictionary, which he added to in is own hand, dipping his pen in Ethiopian coffee. He strained to speak, as if trying to urinate after having just peed.