Ismail Kadarе - The Palace of Dreams

The other man smiled.

“More or less, if that’s how you like to put it.”

He took another swig at his cup, though there was no coffee left in it now.

“But you mustn’t suppose even they are at the top,” he went on. “There are others again above them.”

Mark-Alem looked at him hard to see if he was serious.

“And who are they?”

“The Master-Dream officers.”

“What?”

“The Master-Dream officers. The section that deals with the Arch-Dream, as they’ve taken to calling it lately.”

“And what’s that?”

The other lowered his voice.

“We probably oughtn’t to be talking about that sort of thing,” he said. “But after all, you have just become a member of staff. And these are really only organizational matters—I don’t suppose there’s anything secret about them.”

“Probably not,” said Mark-Alem.

He couldn’t wait to find out more.

“Do go on,” he said encouragingly. “I do belong here, in a way. My mother belongs to the Quprili family.”

“The Quprili family!”

Mark-Alem wasn’t surprised by his interlocutor’s astonishment. He was used to meeting with this reaction whenever anyone found out about his origins.

“As soon as you said you’d gone straight into Selection, I guessed you must belong to a family close to the State. But I must admit I didn’t imagine those dizzy heights.”

“Quprili was my mother’s maiden name,” said Mark-Alem. “My own name’s different.”

“That makes no odds. It’s the same thing for all intents and purposes.”

Mark-Alem looked at him.

“Tell me some more about the Master-Dream.”

His companion drew a deep breath. Then, as if sensing his voice wasn’t going to be loud enough to need all that air, he exhaled some of it again before he spoke.

“As perhaps you know, every Friday a traditional ceremony is held, ancient but discreet, in which one dream, selected as the most important of all the thousands we’ve received and analyzed during the previous week, is presented to the Sultan. That’s the Master-or Arch-Dream.”

“I have heard of it, but only vaguely, as a kind of legend. ”

“Well, it’s not a legend—it’s a fact. And it gives work to hundreds of people in the Master-Dream department.”

He looked at Mark-Alem for some time before going on.

“And—would you believe it?—a dream like that, with its significant omens, is sometimes more useful to the Sovereign than a whole army of soldiers or all his diplomats put together.”

Mark-Alem listened openmouthed.

“So now do you see why the position of the Master-Dream officers is so superior to ours?”

What a gigantic mechanism, thought Mark-Alem. Yes, the Tabir Sarrail really was unimaginably vast.

“You never see any of them about,” the other went on. “They even have their coffee and salep in a place of their own.

“A place of their own…” Mark-Alem echoed.

His new friend had just opened his mouth to supply more information when the sound of a bell, the same one as had announced the coffee break, put a sudden stop to everything that was going on around them.

Mark-Alem had neither time nor need to ask what it meant. Even before the ringing had stopped, everyone started to rush for the exits. Those who hadn’t finished the drinks in front of them emptied their cups and glasses in one gulp. Others, who’d only just been served with beverages still too hot to drink, just abandoned them and made off like the rest. Mark-Alem’s companion had fallen silent just as suddenly, then nodded curtly and turned away. Mark-Alem would have tried to detain him and ask him one last question, but as he was about to do so he was jostled first to the left and then to the right, and so lost sight of him.

As he let himself be swept out along with the crowd, he realized he’d forgotten to ask his new acquaintance his name. If only I knew what section he works in, he sighed. Then he consoled himself with the thought that they might meet again at the next day’s coffee break and be able to have another chat.

The crowd was thinning by now, and Mark-Alem tried to find one of the faces he’d seen before in the Selection department. In vain. He had to ask the way back there twice. When he arrived he crept in quietly, trying not to be noticed. The last chairs were still being scraped into place. Nearly all the clerks were ensconced at their long tables again. Mark-Alem tiptoed to his desk, drew out his chair, and sat down. He did nothing for a few moments, then bent over his file and started to read: Three white foxes on the minaret of the local mosque… then suddenly he looked up. He felt as if someone were hailing him from a long way away, sending out some strange, faint, doleful signal like a call for help or a sob. What is it? he wondered. The question soon absorbed him absolutely. Without knowing why, he looked at the high windows. It was the first time he’d done so. Beyond the windowpanes the rain, so familiar but now so distant, mingled as it fell with delicate flakes of snow. The flakes eddied wildly in the morning light, now distant too—so far away it seemed to belong to another life, another world from which perhaps that ultimate signal had been sent out to him.

With a vague sense of guilt he looked away and bent over his file. But before he started reading again he heaved a deep sigh: Oh, God!

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.