Don't Count on It

A NOTE ON THE NUMBER OF THE 1001 NIGHTS

       This latest Friday-piece was written after my fiction currently in progress was firmly under way -- a book called The Tidewater Tales: A Novel -- and just before I decided to spend a year's Fridays reviewing and assembling these pieces.

       Scheherazade again, examined intimately indeed. It seems a fit note to end the book upon.

       I delivered this as a lecture on a warm evening in June 1983 on an outdoor basketball court at the American School in Tangier, Morocco -- the city which inspired Rimsky-Korsakov to write his Scheherazade Suite and Matisse to paint his odalisques -- while over us hung the new crescent moon which signaled the end of the holy month of Ramadan. There was even a bright planet in the moon's embrace: the very sign of Islam. At one point I was obliged to pause in my reading while from the lighted minarets of nearby mosques the muezzins cried the faithful to evening prayer. It was a moving and a cautionary moment: Here as elsewhere, I have checked my amateur scholarship with experts where I could, but I am no Arabist. On the other hand, my long infatuation with Scheherazade has little to do with the egregious Western "orientalism" deplored by Edward Said and other Arabists: It is simply one storyteller's professional (in this instance, all but inexhaustible) interest in another. I may well, some future Friday at Langford Creek, come back to her yet again -- but I don't count on it.

       After centuries, we still haven't settled on an English name for the thing. Its Arabic title, Kitab Alf Laylah Wah Laylah, means literally The Thousand-Night-One-Night Book. Usually it's Englished into The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, or just The Thousand and One Nights. About as often it's called The Arabian Nights' Entertainment; popularly it has always been The Arabian Nights.

       What's more, few of us have actually read it, in anything like its entirety, though the image of Scheherazade, spinning out tales for 1001 nights to amuse the king and save her life, is surely among the top ten or a dozen on anybody's great-literary-image list. The Arabian Nights, among other reasons because it belongs to Islamic rather than to Western literature, is not to be found on American high school and college reading lists. Unless we have sought it out on our own, we are likely to know it if at all from a children's version, radically expurgated as well as heroically abridged, and probably illustrated by N. C. Wyeth. Most moderately cultured Americans are more familiar with Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade Suite and Marc Chagall's illustrations than with the actual text that inspired them. All, however, have heard of Aladdin and of Ali Baba (both of whose stories, by the way, are rejected by Richard Burton as latecomers and excluded from his authoritative ten-volume 1885 version of the Nights); all remember that the nights numbered 1001; and nearly all remember that telling those stories over all those nights was a life-or-death matter for Scheherazade, though fewer recall just why.

       Not much has been written in English about this wonderful book, either, and so I propose to review the framing-situation of the Nights in some detail and make a few general remarks upon the work as a whole before addressing the particular question why there are 1001 nights' entertainment -- rather than, say, 101, 999, or 2002 -- and speculating a bit upon Scheherazade's narrative-sexual strategy as it is implied (but never made explicit) in the text.

       According to Burton's famous Terminal Essay (X:93), the frame-story of the Nights is "purely Persian, perfunctorily Arabised," and in its present form dates from about the thirteenth century, though its archetypes are older (the tales themselves are from all over the oriental map and date from as early as the eighth century -- the beast fables -- to as late as the sixteenth -- Ali Baba, Aladdin, & Co.). It is a much more elaborately developed frame-story than the frames of the Divine Comedy, the Decameron, or the Canterbury Tales. It is also, like many of the stories Scheherazade herself tells, at once funny and terrifying, fantastic and realistic, delicate and scabrous -- Goethe, like the rest of us, was particularly taken by this mixture of qualities in the Nights, which he registers in a journal entry on the tale "How Abu Hasan Farted," Night 410 -- and the mainspring of this frame-story is frankly sexual.

       Once upon a time there were two kings, brothers, each of whom thought himself happily married. One day the younger brother, Shah Zaman of Samarkand, inadvertently discovers that his wife is having a vigorous affair with a filthy kitchen-slave. Shocked, the young king kills the lovers in flagrante delicto, deputizes his vizier to administer the kingdom, and takes psychological refuge in the court of his older brother, Shahryar, King of "the Islands of India and China."

       Shahryar recognizes that Shah Zaman is traumatized, but cannot induce him to say what his trouble is. Presently, by another accident, Shah Zaman discovers that Shahryar's wife is cuckolding her husband even more massively and revoltingly than his own wife cuckolded him -- with a gibbering, slavering, hideous giant of a blackamoor named Sa'ad al-din Saood, who swings down from the trees like an ape at her signal and humps her ferociously in the palace courtyard while all her maidservants and mamelukes go to it as well. This spectacle cheers the young king right up; he tells his own misfortune now to Shahryar -- who swears ominously by Allah that if his wife ever did that to him, he'd kill a thousand women in revenge, despite the fact that "that way madness lies." Shah Zaman obligingly arranges for Shahryar to witness what he himself has just witnessed (it happens every time the king leaves the palace), and Shahryar, interestingly, is too shocked at first to take any revenge at all. Like Shah Zaman, he turns the affairs of government over to his grand vizier, and the brothers withdraw together to wander the world in chaste and appalled incognito.

       Thus might their story have ended, but for a grimly funny sexual adventure just a few days later in which they are the unwilling participants. In effect, a young woman rapes them both, under threat of death if they don't service her, in order to revenge herself upon an evil Ifrit who keeps her under septuple lock and key -- seven chests within chests, each padlocked -- for his exclusive sexual pleasure. She adds the brothers' seal-rings to those of 570 other men with whom she has cuckolded her terrible captor (the Ifrit, who stole her from her betrothed on her bridal eve, habitually falls asleep after unlocking the seven chests and raping his prisoner; though she dare not flee, she obliges any passing male to mount her, on pain of waking the demon up). The episode demonstrates to the brothers that their wives were no exceptions to the general rule: a rule which they interpret misogynistically, in the spirit of John Donne's "Go and catch a falling star,"* but which may certainly be interpreted otherwise. Each resolves to go back to his kingdom, resume direction of the government, take a virgin to bed every night, and have her executed in the morning, before she can cuckold him.

* "And swear / No where / Lives a woman true and fair," etc.

       Of Shah Zaman we hear no more until the end of the story, ten volumes later, by when, presumably -- the text gives no numbers, but internal evidence permits certain estimates, as shall be seen -- he will have deflowered and decapitated some 2002 Samarkandian virgins. As for Shahryar, he first executes his wife and her twenty wanton maidservants, half of whom were those male mamelukes in harem drag. It is not stated whether he gets the blackamoor Sa'ad al-Din Saood down out of the trees. He then commands his vizier to procure for his pleasure a fresh virgin every night and to decapitate her in the morning.

       In this wise he continues, the text tells us, "for the space of three years," thus more than making good, we may note in passing, his casual earlier oath. Here too the text gives no specific number, nor does it remind us explicitly of that vow to Allah; but it is tempting to round down the body count from approximately 1062 -- three Islamic yearsworth of victims -- to the aforethreatened thousand. Whether or not "that way madness lies," the result is political and social chaos in the Islands of India and China: The whole populace prays to Allah to destroy Shahryar and his regime; by the three years' or thousand-plus nights' end, so many parents have fled the country with their daughters that there remains in the city, we are specifically told, "not. . . one young person. . . fit for carnal copulation."

       Except, notably, the daughters of the vizier himself, and here the plot thickens. The younger daughter, Dunyazade (Burton spells her name Dunyázád: in Persian, "World-freer"), is safely not yet nubile, though she will be by the end of the story. The elder, however, Scheherazade (Burton: Shahrázád = "City-freer"), is nubile, beautiful, extraordinarily accomplished in all the polite and liberal arts and massively so in some (she has collected "a thousand books of histories," we're told, and she knows "the works of the poets. . . by heart"); she is also, as her name implies,* resolved to deliver the city from the slaughter of its women and the king from his own madness -- Scheherazade uses that term herself. Shahryar, we learn, has deliberately spared this eminently eligible young woman out of respect for his chief counselor; on the other hand, that counselor must produce the virgin-du-soir on pain of his own life, and after three years he is out of virgins.

* In Burton's Persian, at least. Another expert tells me that the names translate into "World-born" and "City-born."

       At this critical moment, Scheherazade volunteers herself. She has a stratagem, she says, which she won't disclose to her father, to end the carnage. There is just a hint that if it fails she is prepared, in Burton's footnoted phrase, "to 'Judith' the King." ("These learned and clever young ladies," Burton's straightfaced note adds, "are very dangerous in the East.") The vizier attempts to dissuade his daughter by telling her a story: the cautionary Tale of the Bull and the Ass, the only "second level" tale in the Nights besides the ones which Scheherazade will tell to the king. It is clear to us that the young woman comes by her particular stratagem honestly -- she's her father's daughter -- but here as elsewhere the nameless authors of the Nights leave the connection implicit, the foreshadowing unremarked.

       The vizier's story doesn't work ("I shall never desist, O my father, nor shall this tale change my purpose"): an ill omen in itself, one would think, but the fact goes unnoticed. And to her plea for self-sacrifice, Scheherazade now adds a canny threat: If her father says no, she'll go straight to Shahryar and report that she wants to go to bed with him, but his vizier won't allow it.

       It is an offer that her father can't refuse; nor can Shahryar, though he is astounded when his "most faithful of Counsellors" now tells him the whole story of Scheherazade's mad resolve. Is the vizier aware of what must happen tomorrow morning? He is; can't do a thing with the willful girl. One senses a moment of real male sympathy between the king and his prime minister (Scheherazade seems conveniently to have no mother to complicate the emotional situation). One may imagine also that the king is given pause: Here is a role for which none of Scheherazade's one thousand predecessors can be supposed to have volunteered. Be that as may, when he has satisfied himself that both the young woman and her father understand the consequences of her proposal, Shahryar "rejoices greatly" and orders the show to go on.

       Here is the place to notice, though Burton doesn't notice it, that the thousand and one nights of Scheherazade's upcoming liaison have been foreshadowed by the thousand-odd nights of Shahryar's deadly policy, and those in turn by his earlier vow by Allah to take his revenge on "a thousand women" if his wife ever cuckolded him. They are even foreshadowed by Scheherazade's "thousand books of histories." Perhaps such symmetries go without noticing. But we notice also that the vizier's daughter, unsurprisingly, has been fully aware of the plight of her country, of her sister virgins, and of her father; that she is insightful or sympathetic enough to diagnose the king's misogyny as a madness that he must and can -- perhaps that by now he even wishes? -- to be freed from; that she is shrewd enough to exploit others' vulnerabilities to her ends, as in her dealings with her father. She has had three years to formulate and prepare her strategy; she will surely have been aware, and may suppose the king aware, that a number of factors, none explicitly stated, make the moment propitious for action and reduce somewhat her nonetheless terrifying personal risk.

       Consider: The vizier has told Shahryar "all about his dispute with his daughter from first to last." Will that account not also have included the information that except for her there remains in the city not a young person fit for carnal copulation, partly because Shahryar has exhausted the supply and partly because his subjects are "voting with their feet"? Won't all parties then have been exquisitely aware that when Shahryar has deflowered and killed this last one, the game is over in any case? That should he nevertheless do so, he will most certainly have lost the loyalty of his "wisest of Counsellors," whether or not he puts the vizier to death for nonprocurement of what can no longer be procured, and that that final atrocity might well be the last straw for an already outraged populace? Finally, and most directly to our purpose, won't the king, the diplomatist, and the diplomatist's daughter all have recognized that (if we round down that "space of three years" as aforeproposed from 1062 to 1000 nights) this critical day, when no nubile virgins remain except the most eligible one of all, coincides with the day when Shahryar's rash original vow will have been fulfilled? Despite all his dire face-saving protestations to the contrary, if Scheherazade is Shahryar's 1001st sacrificial virgin (not to say his 1063rd), he should be free to rescind without loss of face a policy that there is every political reason to rescind in any case -- particularly if its absolute and public rescindment be preceded by a tacit moratorium. . . of a certain duration.

       I like to imagine that all these unmentioned but perfectly reasonable things are so, and that this coincidence of numbers is among the reasons for Scheherazade's waiting till just now to put into action the stratagem for which she has long since prepared herself. It is surely also one of at least three reasons why the success of the critical initial phase of that stratagem (not being killed on the first morning after) is followed by a second phase (the consolidation of her position) lasting exactly 1000 rather than more or fewer nights, before the third phase (rescindment of the vow and formal marriage to the king) ends her storytelling and our story.

       The second of those three reasons -- and the only one noticed by the indefatigable but unpredictable Burton in the Terminal Essay to his edition of the Nights (X:75) -- is a matter of cultural numerology. "Amongst the Arabs," he says, "as amongst the wild Irish, there is a divinity. . . in odd numbers" and bad luck in even ones; ". . . the number Thousand and One," in particular, "is a favourite in the East. . ." He cites e.g., the Cistern of the Thousand and One Columns at Constantinople, the "mille et unum mausolea" of the Dervishes near Iconium, and the seventeenth-century Dervish Book of a Thousand and One Days, which echoes the Nights as it in turn echoes the earlier Hazar Afsanah, a book of tales told over a thousand nights from which our Kitab Alf Laylah Wah Laylah derives. In some such instances, as when Edward Lear's owl and pussycat sail away for a year and a day, or when somebody writes the book of 101 Uses for a Dead Cat, the number means no more than "plenty and then some"; but Burton also cites a curious Hindu practice of determining hundreds by affixing the required figure to the end -- for 100 writing 101; for 1000, 1001, etc. -- since "the number of cyphers not followed by a significant number is indefinite. . ." On this view (Burton says the Hindu practice is to be found "throughout Asia where Indian influence extends"), the number 1001 means not only a lot and then some; it means specifically 1000. He does not report how the Hindus write the number 1001 when they mean a thousand plus one.

       In any case, 1001 -- not "plenty" or 1000 or 1002 or any other number -- is the number of formulaically subtitled nights in Burton's translation, which he justifies at some length as faithful to the consensus of the manuscript versions. Some of those nights are but two or three pages long and contain as little as one one-hundredth of whatever story is in progress; some are many times that length and contain more than one complete sub-subtale or sub-sub-subtale as well as an installment of the subtale in progress. But when at last we read in Volume X the formula "Now when it was the Thousand and First Night," the number that Scheherazade and Shahryar (and Dunyazade and we) have spent together is -- count 'em -- exactly that.

       And for this fact I believe there to be yet a third circumstance, or set of circumstances, beyond cultural numerology and the formal symmetry -- not to mention the dramatical foreshadowing and strategical opportunity, which we shall return to -- of there being just as many nights of narrative creation as there were nights of programmatic defloration-murder and of threatened victims in Shahryar's idle vengeful vow.

       Some aspects of this third factor are incontrovertibly given in the denouement of the frame-story; indeed they are its denouement. Others are the merest enchanted speculation on my part. I shall make clear which is which after digressing to review, again in some detail, how the sexual-narrative formula of the Nights develops from the crucial First Night -- on the eve of which we left our principals (all but the vizier) each eager in his/her own way to get on with it -- into the routine which is then sustained for just under 36 lunar months, or about two years nine months by the Gregorian calendar (two years ten months by the Islamic).

      On that first night, after giving Dunyazade certain careful instructions, Scheherazade presents herself to Shahryar. They go to bed; he "fails to toying with her" and prepares to mount. She weeps; he asks what ails her; she says she can't bear to be parted from her little sister on this last night of her life. The king sends for Dunyazade at once and seats her at the foot of the bed; then he "[rises] and [does] away with his bride's maidenhead" -- the term "bride" is of course euphemistic -- and the three fall asleep. At midnight, per plan, Scheherazade wakes Dunyazade, who by prearrangement complains of sleeplessness and asks her sister for a story to while away the hours till dawn. The text takes no note of what an odd request this is to make of one about to die; perhaps Dunyazade has not been told. In any case, Scheherazade cheerfully declares her readiness and asks the king's permission; he grants it, happening to be "sleepless and restless" himself. Is it the politically delicate prospect of ordering his chief counselor to kill his own daughter, we wonder, that spoils his sleep? Or the unnerving equanimity with which this pearl of the city, for no apparent reason, has volunteered herself to die and now confronts that imminent prospect? Is the king, instead of counting sheep, perhaps counting nights and realizing that Night 1 with Scheherazade is Night 1001 of his vow? We are not told.

       Scheherazade begins her first story: In all editions, it is The Tale of the Trader and the Genie. What she tells, in fact, on this first night, is half of her first story, to be continued, and half of the first of three subtales which will be framed by that first story: subtales narrated in turn by the characters in it. At the first sign of dawn she falls silent in mid-sentence, leaving not one but two plots suspended as a kind of narrative insurance. (Both plots, by the way, have to do with innocent victims under imperious and imminent threat of death, the first of whom, like Scheherazade herself, is playing for time by telling his would-be executioner a story! We are reminded for the 1001st time that "self-reflexivity" is as old as the narrative imagination.) Dunyazade now dutifully praises the tale thus far, as she has been instructed to do; Scheherazade shrugs off the praise with what will become a refrain of authorial self-deprecation -- "What is this [compared] to what I could tell thee on the coming night, were I to live and the King would spare me?" -- and Shahryar makes the fateful remark to himself which will become his dreadful, hope-giving refrain: "By Allah, I will not slay her, until I shall have heard the rest of her story." We have speculated already what motives, beyond his pleasure in the young woman and her stories, might lie behind Shahryar's new vow: As day dawns, it may well be dawning ever more clearly upon him that Scheherazade's indirect plea for a stay of execution is his opportunity not only to save face but to save his political ass as well. We are not told; we are not told. What we are told is that the two now sleep in mutual embrace -- the emphasis is mine, but the phrase is the text's -- until day is fully dawned. The king, having said nothing to Scheherazade, rises and goes forth to hold court. The vizier approaches with a shroud under his arm, expecting to be commanded to lead his daughter to the chopping block. Again the king says nothing -- an exquisite saving of face indeed! -- but proceeds with the day's Business. The vizier "wonder[s] thereat with exceeding wonder," and no wonder.

       At day's end Shahryar returns to his bedchamber and to a no doubt secretly jubilant Scheherazade. When the time comes, Dunyazade, in her role of primer of the pump, in effect says On with the story, and in a burst of narrative virtuosity Scheherazade completes the first and tells entirely the second and third of the subtales framed by her first main story (she has arranged these subtales, I ought to add, in an order of increasing marvelousness, and has made very sure that the trader, the genie, and all hands in the main tale acknowledge and applaud that increase). The main tale itself, however, she leaves strategically suspended as before, virtually guaranteeing the king's consent when Dunyazade repeats her praise and Scheherazade her deprecation of what she has produced thus far by comparison to what she's capable of producing. Again they lie in mutual embrace till full daylight; the king goes forth; the vizier comes forward; nothing is acknowledged; Business is done -- and the formula is established for the 999 nights to follow.

       That formula, as made clear on the third night, is this: Each evening the king retires and "has his will of the vizier's daughter"; Dunyazade then asks her sister to continue the unfinished story-in-progress; Scheherazade does so, always addressing it to the king. (Some commentators assume the storytelling to take place immediately after the sex. Burton argues, on the evidence of the detailed first night and the ritual of Scheherazade's ceasing when she "perceives the dawn of the day," that it's done after their postcoital sleep, anytime between midnight and the crack of dawn.) Whenever she actually completes one of her primary stories, as she does on this third night, she immediately begins another. This first time she says, "And yet this tale is not more wondrous than the fisherman's story," and waits for the king to ask, "What is the fisherman's story?" Later, more confident of his permission, she'll simply say "And there is also the story of" etc. -- and launch forthwith into the next main tale without even indenting for a new paragraph. Always she interrupts it in mid-plot, not infrequently in mid-sentence, when she perceives the first light of dawn.

       Once established, the formula becomes increasingly perfunctory in all the manuscript versions (in many translations it is dropped altogether, as is even the numbering of the nights): Only occasionally now will Dunyazade's praise be repeated, Scheherazade's deprecation of her oeuvre to date, the king's silent vow, the mutual embrace, the king's going forth, the vizier's approach with shroud, the king's return at evening, the sex, the sleep, the request. There is however one startling anomaly, unnoticed by Burton: About five months along, on Night 145, Scheherazade winds up The Tale of King Omar bin al-Nu'uman and His Sons, the longest story in the Nights (it has taken her exactly 100 nights to tell it) -- and, mirabile dictu, she does not begin a new one! Instead, the king says to her, in Burton's English, "I desire that thou tell me somewhat about birds," and having so said, promptly falls asleep. Instead of applauding the long tale just done, little Dunyazade declares to her sister that she's never seen the man cheerful before this night; she even dares to hope, aloud, that his good humor bodes well for the outcome between them. It is a deviation from the formula without precedent or succedent, until the last night of all, which however it certainly foreshadows, from an extraordinarily long remove. On Night 146, Scheherazade comes up with the requested bird-story (which happens to be the oldest story in the Nights), and the abbreviated formula is resumed.

       Abbreviated or not, we are to understand that the ritual is essentially maintained right through a thousand nights. Indeed, at the end of Night 1000 it is repeated in its entirety, by way of preparation for the denouement, and Burton is at pains to footnotice that in thus fully reprising it he is following the originals: The king still vows not to slay Scheherazade until he has heard the end of her story; even the vizier, like a figure out of Kafka now, still presents himself on that thousandth morning-after, shroud under arm, waiting for his dread instructions; once again the king says nothing to him, but proceeds as always to "bid and forbid between man and man"; then on this last of the nights he "return[s] to his Harim* and, according to his custom, [goes] in to his wife Scheherazade." After the sex, Dunyazade asks as always for the continuation of the story-in-progress; as always Scheherazade asks Shahryar's permission; as always, he grants it; and she winds up the tale of Ma'aruf the Cobbler and his wife Fatimah the Turd (Burton's word is Dung, but that was 1885), a story which she has been spinning out for the past eleven nights. It is an exemplary tale of a cobbler's shrewish and deceitful wife who fully deserves to be killed and is, thus permitting her injured spouse, by this time a king, to marry guess whom, his vizier's excellent young daughter. . .

* The Arabic word means "forbidden" and refers simply to the women's quarters, off-limits to outsiders, not necessarily to a collection of wives and concubines.

       It is also the end of a truly staggering narrative production. Burton himself declares that there are "upwards of 400 stories" in the several manuscript versions of the Nights. In his own ten-volume edition, which (not counting the seven volumes of Supplemental Nights which Burton published later) is shorter than the less reliable of the manuscript versions, Scheherazade tells by my count 169 primary tales; she moves to the second degree of narrative involvement on no fewer than nineteen occasions, to tell 87 tales within the primary tales, and to the third degree on four occasions, to tell eleven tales-within-tales-within-tales -- 267 complete stories in all, which by the way include about 10,000 lines of verse, by Burton's estimate (I:xv). To appreciate the scale of this accomplishment, one might remember that the Homeric bards are supposed to have required a mere four evenings to sing the Odyssey. And the fabled Brihat Katha, or Great Tale -- which the god Siva once told his consort Parvati in return for an especially good copulation, and which reputedly came to 700,000 distichs, and of which Somadeva's huge eleventh-century Sanskrit Katha Sarit Sagara, or Oceans of Streams of Story, is but a radical abridgement -- if recited at Homeric pace, would require by my calculation a mere 509 evenings, it being no more than 64 times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. Scheherazade -- indefatigable, inexhaustible Scheherazade -- has doubled the performance of the god of destruction and creation himself.

       Let us say, rather, all but indefatigable; all but inexhaustible. For now, the tale of Ma'aruf the Cobbler done, she makes obeisance to the king and for the first time asks, not for his permission to begin another story, but for a favor in return for those 1001 nights of past narrative production. Shahryar immediately grants her anything she might ask. Burton notes that some French recensions of the story have the king add ungratefully at this point, ". . . inasmuch as your last several stories in particular have bored me to death." Apparently this cynical reading is not without basis in some of the manuscripts; Burton rejects it, however, and so do I, as insulting to my favorite storyteller and inconsistent both with Shahryar's subsequent lavish praise of her narrative talent and with his freedom to kill her anytime he gets bored.

       At least his apparent freedom: for now we learn for the first time that stories are not the only thing Scheherazade has produced in these 1001 nights. She calls out to the nurses and eunuchs "Bring me my children!" and they fetch forth three sons whom she has borne to her imperious auditor: "one walking," the text specifies, "one crawling, and one suckling." It is on their behalf that she pleads now for her life: to be exempt forever from his decree of execution, without (it is implied but not stated) having to earn each day's reprieve with another night of narrative output. The king grants her wish: not on those grounds, but out of respect for her moral character, for her family, and, it is presently made clear, for her stories, which, after the double marriage of himself to her and of his brother Shah Zaman to her sister Dunyazade, he orders transcribed into thirty volumes, which are to include the story of himself and Scheherazade.

       I shall return to this last detail, the implications of his imprimatur, after reflecting upon the surprise revelation of these three children and their bearing on the number of the Nights. The unknown authors of the Kitab Alf Laylah Wah Laylah are not interested in the middle of their frametale. Indeed, it has no middle: only the ingenious and elaborate headpiece, the climactic and ceremonious tailpiece, and the formulaic transitions from night to night in between. Scheherazade's three pregnancies and deliveries, and any menstruations before, between, and after them, are not mentioned, nor as we have seen is any gradual softening of Shahryar's attitude, except for that anomalous and momentary lapse on Night 145. Though the coital motif is not explicitly reprised night by night, the conceit itself requires us to presume that the pair (the trio) have at least slept together every night of the 1001 -- this despite strict Moslem injunctions against e.g., coition during menstruation, which Burton declares many Islamites to believe responsible for leprosy and elephantiasis (VIII:24)

       Very well, then: We are obliged to infer that there must have been nights of narrative without sex -- at least without sex between the king and Scheherazade (and we may safely exempt little Dunyazade, inasmuch as she was non-nubile on Night 1 and is still virginal on her and Shah Zaman's wedding day). We have seen what a canny strategist Scheherazade is: Without asking of this marvelous story an inappropriate degree of verisimilitude, I believe we may presume that, its mainspring being sexual, Scheherazade would not likely for example have volunteered herself to Shahryar while she was in mid-menstruation, or on the verge of menstruation. To do so would have been suicidal. It seems reasonable further to imagine that she'd want to conceive by the king as early in the game as possible, both to insure her sexual availability for at least some months in that critical first stage of her strategy and to bind herself to him with a child-in-progress: There is no mention, either in headpiece or tailpiece, of Shahryar's having children by his unfaithful first wife or by other members of his harem, if there are any. Human biology being rather less various across the centuries and cultures than some other things, I have set to work with my pocket calculator, a standard manual of gynecology, obstetrics, and pediatrics, and a few assumptions and constraints (notably the phrase "one walking, one crawling, and one suckling"); I have come up with some results and speculations which, if they do not further illuminate the number of the Nights, may at very least shed some light upon the great ground-symbol of Scheherazade the storyteller.

       I have presumed already that Scheherazade will have timed her ultimatum to her father for a period between periods, so to speak. If, as seems reasonable, she plans to get herself pregnant as fast as possible before menstruation puts her dangerously out of action, she will have scheduled her liaison with Shahryar to begin not long after her last virginal menses, both to preclude an inconvenient and counterstrategic menstruation on, say, the second or third night, and to guarantee her fertility early on in their connection. Her ultimatum takes her father by surprise, but his plight will not have taken her by surprise: Just as she's been boning up in her library for the task ahead, I see Scheherazade cannily monitoring the moon and her menstrual cycle with an eye to the most opportune "window," as the NASA people say. It cannot be too much emphasized that this young woman is smart: When she tells the tale of the slave-girl Tawaddud, for example -- a beautiful and sexy polymath who confounds all the sultan's experts with her mastery of syntax, poetry, jurisprudence, exegesis, philosophy, music, religious law, mathematics, scripture and scriptural commentary, geometry, geodesy, Medicine, logic, rhetoric, composition, dancing, and the rules of sex -- Scheherazade gives us the complete 27-night oral examination (Nights 436-462); and all that Tawaddud knows is only part of what Scheherazade knows.

       To get down to it, between no fewer than seven and no more than thirteen days before Night 1, she will have begun her final maiden menses, and will have put them tidily by from one to seven days before her ultimatum. She can then expect to ovulate somewhere from one to four nights into this first sexual affair of hers, though ovulation could possibly occur later: by Rhythm Method calculations, anywhere from Night 1 to Night 10, if she began her last menses on Night Minus 7. (I use the phrase "expect to ovulate" as a manner of speaking: The people of The Arabian Nights do not speak of sperm and ova as such, but they are rich in folk wisdom about fertility and barrenness. A number of Scheherazade's stories are concerned with the subject.)

       I'm going to presume further that Scheherazade did indeed conceive successfully upon this first post-virginal ovulation. Just as in Greek mythology "the embrace of a god is never fruitless," so there is ample precedent in Arab storytelling for the idea that powerful or favored men get their women pregnant on the night they deflower them: One need look no farther than Scheherazade's Tale of Núr al-Dín Alí (Nights 20-24), in which two brothers, sons of the vizier, both impregnate their brides on their joint wedding night and become fathers on the same day exactly nine months thereafter. If conception occurred between Nights 1 and 10, our storyteller will have guessed the fact by Nights 14 to 21, when she will have skipped her next menses; she will know it pretty certainly by Nights 42-49, when she will have missed two straight periods and begun to show the other early signs of pregnancy. By Night 145, the night of that startling lapse from the formula, Scheherazade will have been plumply half through the second trimester of her first Pregnancy: I think I know why the king dozes off cheerfully, and I feel as relieved as little Dunyazade at the way things are working out between them.

       Now, assuming the average normal human gestation of 266 days plus or minus two weeks, Scheherazade will have delivered her #1 son no earlier than Night 253 (if she conceived on Night 1 and delivered a fortnight early) and no later than Night 290 (if she conceived on Night 10 and delivered a fortnight late). Her median EDC, as the obstetricians call it (Estimated Date of Confinement), would be about Night 271: i.e., 266 days after Night 5. Considerations of storytelling lead me to prefer conception on Night 1 and confinement on Night 267, right on the button.

       Thereafter, The Merck Manual reports, it would be possible though gynecologically inadvisable for her to conceive #2 as early as fourteen days after delivering #1: i.e., on Night 281 if she delivered #1 on Night 267. She would thereby postpone menstruating in the king's company for another nine months. But surely she has by now passed successfully the critical test of narration without copulation, in the period immediately prior to, during, and after her first childbirth. What's more, if she conceives #2 on Night 281 and delivers him exactly 266 days later (Night 547), the boy will be fifteen months old on Night 1001: very late indeed to be "crawling," as the text specifies (the average healthy baby, Dr. Spock reports, begins to walk between twelve and fifteen months of age). And she could conceivably conceive #3 as early as fourteen days after delivering #2 and deliver him 266 days thereafter (Night 827); but then by Night 1001, while he'd still be nursing, at just under six months he'd very possibly be crawling as well (the average crawler is six to twelve months old) while his two older brothers walked.

       The phrase "one walking, one crawling, and one suckling," together with the presumption of even minimal consideration on Shahryar's part for the welfare of his chief source of sexual and narrative entertainment, suggests that the king permitted Scheherazade a more reasonable interval between her pregnancies -- though it cannot in the best of cases have been as long as the "several months" recommended by modern gynecologists for complete recovery from uterine wear and tear. Further reflection (and a bit of exercise with the calculator) suggests that if on Night 1001 Child #1 is walking (i.e., is at least a year old; but given the existence of two younger brothers he must be at least eighteen months old), and Child #2 is crawling (i.e., is between six and twelve months old; but given the existence of one younger brother he's more likely between ten and twelve months old), and Child #3 is suckling but not yet crawling (i.e., is comfortably under six months old), then the three pregnancies were indeed spaced about equally through the period. It suggests further that if -- as Child #1's age and Scheherazade's likely strategy argue -- her first conception occurred within the first ten nights and her third sometime between nights 552 and 735 (any earlier and #3 would likely be crawling; any later and he'll have been premature) -- then these intervals between her three pregnancies and/or following the third of them will have been long enough virtually to guarantee her having menstruated at least once, and most likely more than once, by Night 1001: If she is not reimpregnated at her first postpartum ovulation, declares the Merck, a woman normally resumes menstruation six to eight weeks after childbirth.*

* Nursing may delay this resumption. But those nurses summoned by the king's favorite on Night 1001 may be presumed to have been wet nurses.

       So what? you ask. I'll tell you so what, after adding one final presumption: that Scheherazade is not pregnant again, or in any case does not know that she is, on Night 1001. If she were, she'd surely add that circumstance to her plea for her life: one walking, one crawling, one suckling, and one in the oven. Let us proceed.

       From these several considerations and constraints, plus the Arab storyteller's fondness for formal regularity and symmetry, a sensible pattern suggests itself: Scheherazade first conceives at that first ovulation; she ovulates and menstruates once after each of her successful deliveries; and she is reimpregnated promptly upon her next ovulation following each of those menstruations -- at least following the first and second. Assuming a perfectly average fourteen days between the onset of menses and ovulation (and another fourteen, where applicable, between ovulation and the next onset of menses) and perfectly average 266-day pregnancies, and assuming further that her first conception occurred on Night 1, we can generate a large number of feasible schedules for Scheherazade's gynecological-obstetrical events, depending on the interval we allow between deliveries and the resumption of menses. I shall consider here only three of those schedules, and then choose my favorite.

       The low limit of that normal interval (six weeks, or 42 days) gives the following result:

       The children are in their proper age brackets: The walker is four days past two years old, the crawler thirteen months and seventeen days (just a touch tardy, but you know how it is with Middle Children), the suckler three months. But the "end-game" -- while it has a remarkable feature about it that I'll come back to -- is finally uninteresting: Whether Scheherazade is 34 days pregnant with her fourth child or twenty days past her fourth menses, Night 1001 is, except for its portentous number, a night like any other. And the point of these investigations is to ask of Night 1001 what the Jews ask of the first night of Passover: How is this night different from all other nights?

       Increasing the normal delivery-menstruation interval to its upper limit (eight weeks, or 56 days) produces the following interesting result:

       The kids are still in the right age brackets: two years four days; thirteen months three days; two months. Scheherazade, just winding up the third postpartum menstruation of her career, is ready to resume sex with the king, as indeed the frame-story tells us she does: ". . . according to his custom, [Shahryar] went in to his wife Scheherazade" (it has been yet another constraint upon these calculations not to have her menstruating at bedtime on Night 1001). If things continue according to Shahryar's custom, Scheherazade can look forward to a fourth conception on Night 1015, a fourth confinement on Night 1281, etc. almost ad infinitum, or until the king tires of her. Her plea for exemption from his deadly vow will by this schedule have been prompted by the coincidence of three factors, none mentioned in the text but two already discussed here: (1) The turning up on the tale's odometer of the magic number 1001, signifying both "plenty and then some" and the inauguration of another cycle. (2) The circumstance of that number's equalling (perhaps exceeding by one) the number of nights through which Shahryar has enforced his murderous policy. Each morning that he hasn't killed Scheherazade is symbolic penance for his having killed one of her predecessors; on the 1001st night that penance is complete. It is as opportune a moment for Scheherazade to ask for rescindment of his vow as Night 1001 of that vow was opportune for her entering his life. And (3) to clinch the matter: her having borne his third child, duly menstruated, and faithfully re-presented herself for his further sexual pleasure. It is a fortuitous coincidence indeed: Dayenu, as the Passover song declares: The first two factors alone "would have been enough"; the third adds an appropriate dimension of sexual fidelity to the resolution of a plot which begins in sexual infidelity. But to arrive at this happy coincidence we have departed from our principle of strict averages. What happens to the schedule if, along with exact average ovulation and gestation times, we apply the exact average interval (seven weeks, or 49 days) between childbirth and the resumption of menstruation? In my opinion, the result is even more interesting*:

* I have checked all three of these schedules against the content of Scheherazade's stories on the nights involved, in search of conspicuous correspondences, discrepancies, and irrelevancies. There are all three: A little jiggling here and there with Schedule Three, in particular, can produce some remarkable happy echoes -- but not remarkably more than the others, jiggled, can be made to produce. And the whole arrangement of the tales and division of the nights is too inconsistent among manuscripts to permit us to adduce as evidence anything between Night 2 and Night 1001.

       The children remain of appropriate ages: two years four days; thirteen months ten days; two and a half months. The coincidence of the number 1001 with the number of Scheherazade's predecessors and the rest remains in force. But a new element, dramatic and unprecedented in the story, presents itself: For the first time in nearly three years, Scheherazade has completed a menstrual cycle in the normal lunar month! For the first time since her maiden night with Shahryar 1000 nights ago, the king has not impregnated her upon her first ovulation after her preceding menstruation. And although any number of premenstrual symptoms may have forewarned Scheherazade of this circumstance, the king himself must be apprised of it no later than Night 1002, when he will find that by Moslem practice he cannot "go in to Scheherazade," as their whole past history will have led him to expect to do, because -- a mere 28 days since her previous menses, instead of the accustomed 329 (14 + 266 + 49) -- she's menstruating again! (Granted, the same thing might have happened e.g., in Schedule 1; but there the moment came meaninglessly on Night 981.)

       It is a delicate moment indeed. (We need not assume, by the way, that she is "a day early": If, as Burton argues and the crucial first night attests, Scheherazade does her storytelling in the hours between midnight and dawn, then the "1001st night" is actually the 1002nd morning, and our schedule is intact.) We recall another element in the formula: At first light, Scheherazade normally breaks off her story in progress and sleeps with the king "in mutual embrace till day fully breaks." If, as may be imagined, this unprecedented, abnormally normal menstrual period or some unequivocal sign of its immediate onset comes upon her as she winds up the tale of Ma'aruf the Cobbler and Fatimah the Turd, there is no time to be lost. Scheherazade must either launch at once into another story -- and it had better be a good one -- or do something as extraordinary as her menstruating twice in a row.

       Here is the place to wonder how it may be that this extraordinary thing has come to pass. Has the king become infertile? Or -- after deflowering at least 1002 virgins (his first wife, presumably, plus the murdered 1000, plus Scheherazade) -- has he become impotent, as the sexologists tell us Don Juan would likely have become? Can it be that his appetite for the pleasures of narrative has supplanted more physical appetites? Alternatively, and more alarming, can he in these latter weeks, except for this 1001st night, have turned his sexual attentions elsewhere, coming in to Scheherazade only for his pre-dawn narrative fix?

       The text will not help us: So outspoken on all matters physical regardless how delicate or indelicate, it is silent on this. In the absence of any supporting evidence, all such speculations as the above are farfetched, though any would constitute a danger which Scheherazade's new menstruation would serve to focus and perhaps bring to a head -- her head. So too, possibly more so, would a less farfetched imaginable state of affairs predicated from this hypothetical menstruation: an alternative case that much appeals to my own imagination, and which will fetch us to the moral of these impolite investigations.

       Perhaps Shahryar is as potent a potentate as ever, as fertile as ever, as faithful as ever in his sexual attentions to Scheherazade. Perhaps even -- though this is imagining much of a storybook sultan -- he has, except in the neighborhoods of her previous menses and deliveries, "gone in to" no other woman besides Scheherazade (the text mentions no other); perhaps he has come to expect that her production of children by him, like her production of stories for him, will go on forever, or at least until "the Destroyer of Delights and Severer of Societies," as the wonderful Arab formula puts it, "translates them both to the ruth of Almighty Allah, and their houses fall waste and their palaces lie in ruins." Perhaps at very least he has come in all these nights to extend his unspoken vow from "By Allah, I will not kill her until I shall have heard the end of her story" to "By Allah, I will not kill her until I have heard the end of her stories." And perhaps our Scheherazade -- this very fountain of narrative production and biological reproduction -- has gone dry.

       Oh, not forever, of course; not yet forever. If one swallow does not a summer make, or a drunkard, one swallow the less doesn't mean that winter's here and the bar is closed. If Child #4 is not in the works this month, very likely he will be next, or the one after that. And there may be only thirty-six basic dramatic situations, as Georges Polti claims (in The 36 Dramatic Situations (1916): very close, by the way, to the number of coital positions recognized by the Kama Sutra -- thirty-nine -- and that, as Burton himself notes, to the "Quarante Façons" of French erotic tradition), but the number of interesting stories and copulations that these can generate is surely very very large, if after all not infinite. Polti calculates for example from his thirty-six situations that there are exactly 1,332 ways to be Taken by Surprise: Scheherazade could go on for another childsworth of nights yet on surprise-stories alone, even if she'd been telling no other kind at the rate of one a night since Night 1. As for biological fertility, I have no figures for well-born Moslem women of Scheherazade's time and place -- the time and place themselves are uncertain enough -- but The Merck Manual informs me that a healthy modern American woman, in the years between her menarche and her menopause, will produce about the same number of ova as Scheherazade produces stories in the combined manuscript versions of the Nights: just "upwards of 400." If we assume, as tradition permits, that precocious Scheherazade will not have been many years past puberty when she volunteered herself to the king, she has a good number of childbearing years left her beyond that 1002nd morning.

       So unless Shahryar is just looking for an excuse to be rid of her, neither Scheherazade's (speculative) first failure to conceive nor (what I'm just for a moment speculating further) her first inability to come up with the opening of her next story immediately upon the close of her last -- neither of these doubtless temporary lapses constitutes a grave present danger after all, if either of them "actually" occurs. Let us not forget that she survived Night 145, when the king fell asleep at intermission time.

       What they do constitute, however, either or both of these lapses, is a warning, a foreshadow, which no one as percipient as our Scheherazade would likely ignore; which we ourselves may do well to perpend; and which I'm happy to imagine might -- coincident with those two other, more evident special aspects of the number 1001 -- have prompted Scheherazade's petition for tenure; for exemption from the publish-or-perish ultimatum under which she has lived (and produced) for so long.

       The most fecund woman in the world will eventually reach her climacteric, if she lives so long.* The most potent man (no statistics available) will one day fail to get it up, if anybody's still interested. And the most fertile, potent narrative imagination -- out of which has come, in Shahryar's own words, a whole world of "proverbs and parables, chronicles and pleasantries, quips and jests, stories and anecdotes, dialogues and histories and elegies and other verses. . ." (X:56) -- even so fertile a narrator as Scheherazade, if she live long enough and produce long enough, must one day find herself in a case the reverse of what young John Keats feared: not that she "might cease to be / Before [her] pen hath gleaned [her] teeming brain," but that she might continue to be after her pen hath gleaned her teeming brain. More precisely, the omen of her very first failure to conceive -- a kind of biological Writer's Block -- could well serve to remind Scheherazade that on any morning after the night when her teeming brain shall finally have been gleaned, she might peremptorily cease to be.

* According to the 1981 Guinness Book of World Records, the most fecund woman in the world was the first Mrs. Feodor Vassilyev of Shuya, near Moscow. In 27 confinements, between c.1725 and 1765, Mrs. Vassilyev bore 69 children, at least 67 of whom survived infancy: sixteen sets of twins, seven sets of triplets, and four sets of quadruplets.

       I like to think that that night was not Night 1001. I like to imagine that on that night, of whose fateful number Scheherazade will certainly have been aware and no doubt the king as well, she was not even momentarily blocked; that up her sleeve, or wherever, Scheherazade still had in reserve at least the seven volumes of Burton's Supplemental Nights with which to follow the tale of Ma'aruf the Cobbler, if she wanted to. But that first repeated message of her blood, like a word to the wise, told her it was time for a change in the circumstances of her production.

       "In the morning, study," Goethe advises; "in the afternoon, work." In the morning of Scheherazade's apprenticeship, we're explicitly told, this model storyteller did indeed study, taking unto herself massively the corpus of her literary predecessors: those "thousand books of histories"; all those poets committed to heart. In the afternoon -- the 1001 "afternoons" of a night-shift worker -- she has massively worked, in that terrifying but inspiring relation that all artists work in, with an audience whom at any time they may fatally cease to entertain; for whom it is never enough to have told one good story, or a hundred and one good stories. (The audience I refer to is of course Scheherazade's deflorator, impregnator, and absolute critic, the king. The role of Dunyazade -- always applauding, praising, and begging for more from the foot of that bed -- is another story.)

       But there comes a time when this state of affairs mustn't be the case forever; when the threat of perishing if one does not publish, and publish pleasingly, no longer inspires and fertilizes but positively contraceives, detumesces, anaphrodizes. "In the evening, enjoy," Goethe's obiter dictum concludes. Enjoyment, for a woman like Scheherazade, is not likely to mean idly resting on the laurels of her past production: those three young sons and the deluxe uniform hardcover edition of her works which the king orders after the double-marriage ceremony. (Indeed, there's a wry implication here that her next massive narrative labor will have to be telling all those stories over again, to the scribes, plus the one about herself and Shahryar, unless she or Dunyazade has been writing them all down between nights. It is a bit like your interviewer's discovery -- at the end of a long, difficult, but successful interview, in which you have managed to articulate your entire Weltanschauung -- that his tape machine wasn't working. Would you mind awfully running through that again?) But enjoyment ought to mean the right to rest there if she wants to, bearing no more children, telling no more stories ever. After a certain amount and level of accomplishment -- an impressive amount and level; nay, an awe-inspiring amount and level -- removing the ax from over the narrative neck is not only a fit reward but probably the best guarantee of further good production. Not endless, mind, but further, at the producer's rate and discretion.

       For a natural like Scheherazade, that is almost certainly what "enjoying the evening" will include, if not consist of: going on with the story. We are permitted to hope that it will. But after that first second menstruation, we may not -- and Scheherazade herself must absolutely need not -- count on it.

       Enjoy your evening.

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