The Palace of Dreams Page 4

  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 M
aster-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.