expectation of morning when the tailor made his approach to the royal palace. In the busy streets trestle tables were juddered and clacked into readiness, and a procession of vans spilled forth the goods that would festoon their surfaces: sparkling brassware, colourful fabrics, beeping alarm clocks, and novelties for tourists. People were everywhere. Men smoked and talked by the side of the road, waiting to see how the day would progress, village women found patches of ground to arrange displays of woven bedspreads and wicker baskets, and boys hawked newspapers full of morning conversation.
As he drove through the unfamiliar streets the tailor felt elated by the crowds. ‘What wonders can be achieved here!’ he thought to himself. ‘Everywhere there are great buildings housing unheard-of forms of human pursuit, new things being made and bought and sold, and people from all over the world, each with their own chosen destination. Even the poor know they are treading on a grander stage: they look far into the future and walk with purpose. What clothes might I have made had I spent my life here!’
The road leading to the royal residence was generous and pristine, with lines of trees and fountains converging in the distance on the domed palace that already quivered in the heat of the morning. The tailor stared at the big cars with diplomatic license plates, marvelled at the number of people that worked just to keep this street beautiful and clean. He arrived at the palace.
At the entrance, two guards signalled to him to stop. Their uniforms were tight-fitting, made of fabrics the tailor had never seen, and packed with a fascinating array of weapons and communications devices. ‘What is your purpose?’ The tailor explained.
‘Do you have any paperwork? A purchase order from the palace?’ ‘No.’ The tailor hesitated. ‘It wasn’t like that, you see–’ ‘Every delivery must have a signed purchase order from the appropriate department. Go away and obtain the necessary documentation.’ The tailor explained his story again. ‘Please inform Prince Ibrahim that I am here. He is expecting me. My name is Mustafa the tailor. He has ordered a silk robe from me.’
‘Please leave at once and do not come peddling to the king’s palace.’ ‘Will you speak to the prince? He will remember me…’ But the guards would listen no more. The tailor had no option but to get back in his van and drive away.
He camped in the van and came every day to the palace to wait outside the gates. The guards proving intransigent, he scanned the windows for signs of the prince’s presence, looked in every arriving car for any of the faces that had come to his shop that day, tried to imagine how he would get a message into the palace. All to no avail.
Where could he go? He owed more money than he had seen in his whole life, and it was unlikely that anyone except the prince would buy such an extravagant, outmoded robe. All he could do was to wait until someone vindicated his story.
He ate less every day in order to save his last remaining coins, and he became dirty and unkempt. By day he sat and tracked every coming and going with eyes that grew hollow with waiting. By night he had nightmares in which the prince and his band of laughing noblemen walked right by him as he lay oblivious with sleep.
The van became an expense he could not support. He drove into the desert to hide the robe, which he wrapped carefully in paper, placed in an old trunk, and buried in a spot by some trees. And he sent the vehicle back.
He became a fixture by the palace gates. The guards knew him and tolerated his presence as a deluded, but harmless, fool. Passers-by threw him coins, and some stopped to listen to his story of when the royal prince had once come to visit him and how he would one day come again. He became used to every indignity of his life happening in the full view of tourists and officials.
At night when the streets were free he wandered the skein of the city. His face shadowed by a blanket, he trudged under spasmodic street lights, and gazed into shadowy shop windows where mannequins stood like ghosts in their urban chic. Everything seemed to be one enormous backstage, long abandoned by players and lights, where dusty costumes and angular stage sets lay scattered amid a dim and eerie silence. There danced in his head the memory of a search, a saviour, but it too was like the plot of a play whose applause had long ago become silence.
Years passed. He knew not how many.
One night, as he walked past a cheap restaurant where taxi drivers and other workers of the night sat under a fluorescent glow shot through with the black orbits of flies, he saw that there were some unaccustomed guests eating there. A crowd of men sat eating and drinking and laughing with beautiful women, all of them in clothes not from this part of town. And with a shock that roused him from years of wearied semi-consciousness, he realized that one of them was Prince Ibrahim.
‘Your Highness!’ cried the tailor, rushing into the restaurant and flinging himself to the floor. Everyone looked up at the bedraggled newcomer, and bodyguards immediately seized him to throw him out. But the prince interjected, looking round at his friends and laughing, ‘Wait! Let us see what this fellow wants!’
Everyone fell silent and looked at the tailor as he stood in the centre of the room, fluorescent lights catching the wispy hair on the top of his head.
‘Your Highness, many years ago you came to my tailor’s shop in a small town far from here and ordered a silk robe with your royal insignia of the stag and crescent moon. I spent four months making the finest robe for you, but when I came to your palace no one believed my story or allowed me to make my delivery. I wrote you letters and waited for you day and night, but all to no avail. I have spent all the years since then living in the gutter and waiting for the day I would find you again. And now I appeal to your mercy: please help me.’
Everyone looked at Ibrahim. ‘Is he speaking the truth?’ one of the men asked.
The prince looked irately at the tailor, saying nothing. Another man spoke up.
‘I was with you that day, Prince. The tailor’s story is true. Do you not remember?’
The prince did not look at him. Slowly he said: ‘Of course I remember.’
He continued to stare at the insignificant figure in the centre of the room. ‘But this is not the man. He is an impostor. The tailor I saw that day never brought what I ordered. Get this cheat out of here.’
And the bodyguards threw the tailor into the street.
But the prince’s companion, whose name was Suleiman, felt sorry for him. As the party of men and women heated up behind steamed-up windows and its separate elements began to coalesce, he sneaked out to catch up with him.
‘Sir! Stop!’ The tailor turned round, and Suleiman ran up to meet him.
‘Allow me to present myself. My name is Suleiman, and I was present when the prince came to your shop several years ago. I feel partially responsible that you are in this situation. Tell me your story.’
Standing in the dark of the street, the tailor told him everything. Suleiman was much moved. Overhead, the night sky glistened with stars like sequins.
‘Listen Mustafa, I would like to buy this robe from you myself. I know it will be an exquisite object, and I feel unhappy at the idea that you will continue to suffer as you are now. Take my car, fetch the robe, bring it to my house, and I will pay you for it.’
In the splendid steel surrounds of a black Mercedes the tailor flew along the smooth tarmac of the national highway as it cut into the rippling desert and its lanes reduced from six to four, to two. He watched the prudently designed cars of the national automobile company flash past each other in 180-degree rectitude, and, fighting off the drowsiness of the heat and the hypnotic landscape in order to concentrate on the road, he looked out for the lone group of trees under which he had deposited the trunk.
When at last the Mercedes came to rest at the spot, he was surprised to see that there was a crowd of people there. It looked as if some sort of major construction was going on. Muddy jeeps were parked around the area, and under the blinding glare of the sun a team of men painstakingly measured out the land with poles and ropes while local people stood around and watched. Terror wrung the tailor’s organs as he approached one of the spectators to ask what was happening.