Free The Palace of Dreams by Ismaíl Kadaré, Barbara Bray Page A

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.

INTERPRETATION

    Muck sooner than he expected, even before there was any sign of spring—and he’d thought he’d spend spring at least in Selection, and possibly even summer as well—Mark-Alem was transferred to Interpretation.
    One day, before the bell rang for the break, he was told the Director-General wanted to see him. “What about?” he asked the messenger—though, thinking he saw a sardonic smile on the man’s face, he immediately regretted it. Clearly you didn’t ask that kind of question in the Tabir Sarrail.
    As he went along the corridor he was assailed by all sorts of doubts and surmises. Could he have made some mistake in his work? Could someone have appeared from the depths of the Empire and come knocking at every door, going from office to office and vizier to vizier, claiming that his valuable dream had been thrown in the wastepaper basket? Mark-Alem tried to remember the dreams he’d rejected recently, but couldn’t recall any of them. Perhaps that wasn’t it, though. Perhaps he’d been summoned because of something else. It was nearly always like that. When you were sent for, it was almost invariably for some reason you could never have dreamed of. Was it something to do with breaking the secrecy rule? But he hadn’t seen any of his friends since he’d started working here. As he asked his way through the corridors he felt more and more strongly that he’d been in this part of the Palace before. He thought for a while this might be because all the corridors were identical, but when he finally found himself in the room with the brazier, where the square-faced man sat with his