Duru Gungor is a professor of English in London, Ontario, with an academic background in comparative literature. Her recent short stories appeared in Spadina Literary Review, The /tƐmz/ Review, and Fudoki Magazine (UK); her haiku in The Wild Word (Berlin); and her occasional artwork in BlankSpace.
“This story reimagines a Persian variant of the fairytales falling under the category of ‘Animal (Monster) as Bridegroom’ in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index used in folklore studies. I read it only once as a child, but it remained permanently etched in my mind. It also seems to be growing with me; with every passing decade, I seem to detect new subtleties, new layers of meaning in it. I’ll have to keep going until the fortieth layer, I guess.”
You can’t read a fairytale on a day of sunshine and deep blue skies. If today is such a day, stop now and come back later. Welcome back. You see, sunlight and fairytales are antithetical because the very purpose of a fairytale is to shine a darkness on things. Everything, and especially your understanding, must be enveloped in a murky gloom that smudges the contours; things must be allowed to blend and bleed into one another, they ought to be and not be what you take them to be. So, a dark interior of sorts, check, and a crackling fire, check? If not, stop now, light a candle at least, and come back. Welcome back. And now you are reminded of something we’ve been collectively forgetting for a while: that our very first magical acquaintance, our devil and guardian, is fire. These aren’t pretty words. Light any fire, and if you can’t see how it’s a living creature, a presence and personality, stop now, and don’t bother to come back.
Welcome back. Now that we’re settled in the dark, with a small, gentle fire for companion, we can hear this story out. I chanced upon it as a child, in a book that didn’t belong to me, in a house we were just visiting for the evening, and both of our gracious hosts, my dear aunt and uncle, are now dead and buried, but since these details are irrelevant, I might’ve as well found it as an adult, in a musty small-town bookstore with a bespectacled and desiccated owner, creaking floors, and all kinds of odd volumes sleeping—many clearly for eternity—under a thick layer of dust. Of course, this is where I found it, in a collection with an outdated, offensive title (think oriental tales) yet rendered in rich, florid prose; and the best part is, I see several notes on the margins, a fine hand in dark blue ink, perhaps belonging to the last person who had this book among their possessions before they ceased to exist and the surviving family scattered said possessions to the four winds in a fury of efficiency. Of course! Now it makes total sense: it’s the selfsame book from my childhood, we just happened to be reunited some forty years later on another continent, and by the way, those are my notes on the margins, which I’d left with a muted sort of thrill, imagining the sort of person who would be tracing their fingers over my wind-swept letters years after I’m gone. We’re all set now, no more interruptions, pinky promise.
Once upon a time, there was a girl, a true princess in spirit and flesh, already bearing the grace and dignity of a future sovereign of peoples. Then there was another girl who, though equally excellent in every other sense, was perhaps a bit too tall. Then there was another girl of flaming hair, and then another praised for her erudition and impossibly translucent earlobes. [swiping left or right? asks the note in the margin.] Another girl was known for her dancing skills, another was a great storyteller, and another who could swallow fires and mid-sized daggers. Many others followed, with delicate bones; eyes of onyx, emerald or sapphire; warrior maidens; homemakers; lovers of politics, sciences or human misery; lovers of lovers; girls followed by girls, a girl a night. That’s seven girls a week, twenty-eight gone already in a month, three hundred and thirty-six girls in a single year. The number would rise to six hundred and seventy-two girls in two years, and one thousand, six hundred and eighty if the weddings went on for five. The first one must’ve felt like madness, but once the courtiers learned to sleep through the screaming, and the servants figured out the best methods to remove the blood stains from the priceless drapery, as early as girl five or six, it all became a matter of routine. [mass complicity in madness is madness, says the note, having a high-flown moment there.] We could say it lasted for five years as it sounds like a nice, rounded lump of time, but truly, it might’ve gone on much longer than that; even a smallish, nondescript kingdom can yield far, far more than one thousand, six hundred and eighty daughters. And what happened to them all, that caused bits of their nails and scalps, with some silken strands of hair still attached, to be scraped off the marble floors, and the walls, and the vaulted ceiling of the nuptial chamber the morning after the ceremony, was the prince.
For this prince, the shahzad, though born to ordinary royal parents, was a venomous dragon. [no explanations, take it as it is, says the note.]
The shah and his consort nonetheless loved and nurtured their son as well as they knew how to and raised him like a true prince. Once a young man, the shahzad declared that he wanted to marry. The shah ordered his vizier to bring the shahzad a lovely bride, all lily and dew, but the morning after their union she was found stone dead, killed by the shahzad, the dragon. This happened over and over again, as we established above. The terror of the shahzad spread near and far, and the people of that kingdom began to hide in any hole they could find their few daughters still left alive. So much so that the vizier, now unable to fulfill the command of the king of kings, was about to part with his own cherished head.
That’s when the vizier’s only daughter came forth and announced her wish to become the shahzad’s new bride, on condition that she be made a magnificent wedding dress of forty layered robes. [Forty is circled, and scribbled over it are the words, magic number—babies, nuptials, baklava, etc.] The dress was instantly made, and the maiden slowly stepped into the nuptial chamber like the moon with a train of billowing clouds and gossamer mists, bearing the weight of forty layers of luxurious fabric hanging from her fragile frame like nothing.
The shahzad waited for his new bride by a roaring fire. He found her quiet, pearlescent face beautiful, but everything else was hidden under, you’ll imagine, a quite inordinately puffy dress.
“Are you not too warm?” he asked, trying to sound casual. “Why do you not take off some of those robes?”
“I promise to take one layer off, Your Highness, and cast it into this noble fire, if you do the same first.”
“Can you not see?” the prince scoffed. “I am a dragon. I stand naked.”
“Not quite,” the girl responded serene, “You wear your armour, your horns, layers upon layers of scales and thorns. You are a dragon.” [description that doesn’t describe, says the note.]
“Can you not understand? That would hurt me!” protested the shahzad.
“And what am I here for, Your Highness?”
This latest bride has a point, thought the shahzad. He easily stripped one layer off his dragon’s armour and cast it into the fire, which spat and crackled to devour this unexpected meal. The girl too removed her topmost layer of robes and threw it into the fireplace. She firmly held the shahzad’s glistening gaze and took half a step in his direction. The second layer was harder to strip off, the third much harder, the tenth an outrage, the twenty-fifth a sea of agony. But at each layer the girl found just the right thing to say or do, goading him on. [seasoned seductress, notes my friend.] This did not keep the shahzad from turning into a pure beast held in leash solely by his own delightful anticipations of bloodshed by the time he reached the thirty-ninth layer.
“Just one more layer, Highness,” she sweetly smiled at him, “I will then be at your mercy.”
His voice choked in the softest growl, the shahzad responded, “I will pick my teeth with your clavicles,” and with that he tore off the fortieth layer of skin from his dragon’s body.
What was left of him then was a human man, drained, out of breath, shivering with a cold sweat. The girl took off her last robe and flung it over the shahzad’s back as they held each other naked, he quite a bit stunned, she quiet once again. She came to be the shahzad’s only bride.
Patience, we’re not far now, almost there, but we ought to think about the girl a bit, and I swear, I will dissect only to resurrect. I am no killer of butterflies. Truly, think about it. What is weird about the girl? That’s it. What’s weird is that she knows stuff. Like, everything. And that, wrapped in an enormous darkness, is the beating heart of this tale—and of all other fairytales about crafty maidens and youths who suddenly pop out of nowhere, with all the right answers. Some are of noble blood, others are dirt-poor commoners, but either way, they all silently possess knowledge of a whole other kind. The vizier’s daughter surely must’ve had access to excellent education (or not), but knowing how to cure the prince? And she alone, in the whole kingdom? Where could that come from?
The point is, she sees into things. She not only knows how to cure him, but also that they are meant for each other. She takes him for herself. So, don’t you see? She’s a witch. All these bright, sprightly maidens and lads in fairy tales—slayers of giants, red-cloaked masters of the many tongues of animals, weaving webs of enchantment into beans, shoes and roses—they’re all witches, people who know. The tales only name the evil ones as such. The good ones are allowed to walk among us, concealed with the greatest courtesy, or caution.
[she did let all those girls die first, says the note in the ample space left on the page, “first” underlined.]
