The scenes of The Blind Owl

P001.L01–P006.L01 · room (house outside the city) · narrator

The narrator speaks of wounds that eat the soul in solitude, soothed only for a time by wine and opium. He resolves to write only for his shadow, bent on the wall before the lamp, which seems to swallow what he writes.

For the illustration The narrator writing by lamplight while his huge bent shadow leans over the page from the wall.

P007.L01–P011.L03 · room (house outside the city) · narrator

He recalls a woman or angel who flashed through his life like a shooting star and vanished two months and four days ago. Since then he has withdrawn into his room, wine, opium and painting pen-case covers.

For the illustration A shooting star crossing a dark sky above a lone room where a man paints pen cases.

P014.L01–P015.L11 · room (house outside the city) · narrator; the uncle (hunchbacked old man)

On Sizdah Bedar, while the city picnics outside, a hunchbacked man claiming to be his uncle enters and squats in the corner, a distorted mirror of the narrator. Looking for something to offer him, the narrator finds on a high shelf a flask of old wine made at his birth.

For the illustration A hunched old man in yellow cloak and Indian turban squatting in the corner while the narrator, lamp in hand, searches a dark closet.

P020.L01–P023.L03 · room (house outside the city) · narrator

He jumps down trembling with terror and pleasure, and when he returns the uncle is gone, leaving the door ajar like a dead person's mouth. He feels he has always known the girl, but the old man's laugh has torn the bond between them.

For the illustration An empty room at dusk with a smoking lamp and a door left gaping open.

Echoes scene 4

P024.L01–P024.L11 · back closet of his room · narrator

After two days of fear he goes to return the flask and finds no opening at all in the wall. He beats the wall with his fists by lamplight, but it has become a single mass of lead.

For the illustration A man on a stool pounding with his fists on a blank, dark wall by lamplight.

Echoes scene 5

P025.L01–P028.L19 · the waste ground around his house · narrator; a dog

For two months and four days he circles the house every sunset like a decapitated chicken, seeking the cypress, the stream and the girl. He finds only refuse, hot sand, a horse's rib bone and a dog nosing in rubbish, and concludes she belongs to no earthly world.

For the illustration A lone figure kneeling in moonlight among rubbish heaps, a dog sniffing at a horse's rib bone.

Echoes scene 5

P032.L01–P036.L04 · room (house outside the city) · narrator; the girl

Silent before her, he sees the whole painful story of his life in her immense wet eyes and feels the earth tremble. Her eyelids slowly close; she lies biting the nail of her left forefinger, and he feels no bond with her at all.

For the illustration Close on the girl's face on the bed, enormous black eyes half closing, a finger at her lips.

Echoes scene 5

P037.L01–P038.L06 · room (house outside the city) · narrator; the girl

Thinking she may be hungry, he again takes down the inherited flask from the high shelf. He pours a cup of wine between her clenched teeth as she sleeps like an exhausted child, and feels calm for the first time in his life.

For the illustration The narrator bending over the sleeping girl, tipping a cup of wine to her lips.

Echoes scene 4

P043.L01–P044.L06 · room (house outside the city) · narrator; the dead girl

In the frozen night he feels joined to all nature and able to grasp the symbols of old paintings. He longs, as a mere pen-case painter, to draw her closed eyes and keep them.

For the illustration The room dissolving into threads that connect the narrator to stars, plants and shadows.

P044.L07–P047.L03 · room (house outside the city) · narrator; the dead girl

He puts out the smoking lamp, sets two candles above her head and draws her face again and again. Until nearly morning he tears up every attempt.

For the illustration Two candles over a dead woman's head; the painter at her bedside, torn sheets around him.

Echoes scene 3

P050.L01–P051.L04 · room (house outside the city) · narrator

Possessing her eyes on paper, he no longer needs her body and hides the drawing in his tin money box in the back closet. Night withdraws, stars fade and a rooster crows far away.

For the illustration A drawing being laid in a tin box as pale dawn enters the window.

P067.L01–P068.L05 · the enclosure; the road at dusk · narrator

His clothes are torn and caked with blood, wasp-flies circle him and worms cling to him; rubbing the stain only spreads it over his body. He follows the hearse's wheel tracks until darkness erases them.

For the illustration A man in bloodied clothes rubbing at a stain while two golden flies circle him at sunset.

P074.L01–P074.L10 · the road back in darkness · narrator; the old hearse driver

Lying in the coffin space, he feels the jar weigh on his chest like a dead body while stars look down like eyes in clotted blood. Crooked trees seem to hold hands and he feels he has spent his whole life carried in a coffin by a faceless hunchback.

For the illustration Night road: twisted trees joining branches, the hearse passing faintly glowing geometric houses.

Echoes scene 19

P077.L01–P079.L05 · room (house outside the city) · narrator

Two pairs of the buried woman's eyes now stare at him, unbearable. Yet he takes comfort in an ancient painter of Ray who burned in the same black eyes thousands of years before.

For the illustration A ghostly ancient painter at work in ruined mud-brick Ray, mirroring the narrator.

Echoes scene 25

P080.L01–P082.L07 · room (house outside the city) · narrator

He sets the drawing beside the jar, lights his brazier and smokes all his remaining opium. His life runs backward into childhood, he hangs from a hook in a dark well, falls endlessly and wakes in a small room.

For the illustration A man before a glowing brazier and the two portraits, his body dissolving into smoke and a falling shaft of darkness.

Echoes scene 25

P083.L01–P084.L06 · a small room in ancient Ray (his room in Part 2) · narrator

He wakes in a world more familiar than his former life, a tallow lamp on the shelf, his cloak and scarf spotted with blood. Expecting the police chief, with poisoned wine waiting on the shelf, he draws the lamp toward him and begins to write.

For the illustration Twilight in a small room: a bloody-handed man drawing a tallow lamp toward a sheet of paper.

Echoes scene 1

P085.L01–P093.L07 · room (house outside the city) · narrator; his shadow

He will press his life like grapes and drip its bitter wine into the dry throat of his bent shadow. Yesterday a sick young man, today he is a white-haired hunchback with a harelip, unsure whether he sits in Nishapur, Balkh or Benares.

For the illustration A bunch of grapes squeezed above the open mouth of a shadow on the wall.

Echoes scene 1

P094.L01–P096.L02 · room (house outside the city) · narrator

His whitewashed room is like a tomb, with a cradle nail in the wall and stale smells seeping from behind a loose board. Two small windows open on the courtyard and the alley of Ray, and a mirror shows him his face.

For the illustration Cross-section of a cramped tomb-like room with a nail, a mirror and two tiny windows onto a sprawling city.

P100.L01–P101.L06 · the family house; India · narrator; Naneh-Joon; his wife; the aunt; father and uncle

Only his nurse Naneh-Joon and his harlot wife, his milk-sister raised by his aunt, remain to him. Naneh-Joon tells him his father and uncle were identical twins who traded goods from Ray, pen-case covers among them, in India.

For the illustration Two identical young merchants with bales of cloth and pen cases setting out for India.

P101.L07–P101.L19 · Lingam temple, Benares · the father; the Bogam-dasi (mother); musicians

In Benares his father falls for a temple dancing girl with slanting eyes, joined brows and a red forehead mark. Bewitched by her dance and scent, he adopts her religion, and she is expelled from the temple when pregnant.

For the illustration A temple dancer in a silk sari, bangles at wrists and ankles, dancing before a Lingam to turbaned musicians.

Echoes scene 5

P105.L01–P107.L05 · Ray; an imagined square in India · the narrator as infant; father/uncle; the aunt; the Bogam-dasi

The surviving brother brings the infant to Ray and leaves him with his aunt, along with a flask of purple wine dissolved with cobra venom. He imagines his mother still dancing like a snake in an Indian square before a white-haired hunchback.

For the illustration A flask of purple wine handed over at parting; inset, a dancer encircled by a crowd by torchlight.

Echoes scene 4, 11

P109.L01–P110.L10 · the marriage chamber · narrator; his wife

Forced to marry the non-virgin girl, he is refused on the wedding night and sleeps on the floor for two months and four days while a pigeon-blood handkerchief fools the household. One night he tries to force her; she leaves, and he sleeps happily in her warm bed.

For the illustration A man curled on the floor across a dark room from a trembling bride.

Echoes scene 8

P111.L01–P113.L05 · the house; the streets of Ray · narrator; his wife; her lovers; Naneh-Joon

He courts and brings to her the lovers she prefers: tripe seller, jurist, chief constable, well digger, philosopher. Humiliated and degraded, he becomes a moving corpse while neighbours pity his wife for her mad husband.

For the illustration A line of rough men at a door, the narrator bowing them in.

P114.L01–P115.L06 · room (house outside the city) · narrator; the family physician; Naneh-Joon

Wasting with butcher-red cheeks, he welcomes the dust of death in his eyes. The turbaned physician with a beard three fistfuls long takes his pulse and prescribes donkey's milk and absurd decoctions.

For the illustration A long-bearded physician in a white turban taking the pulse of a flushed, gaunt man in bed.

P116.L01–P118.L06 · room (house outside the city) · narrator; Naneh-Joon

At his bedside Naneh-Joon tells how his wife bit her left fingernail even in the cradle, the large cradle they shared. Her stories carry him back to childhood and convince him life itself is a foolish tale.

For the illustration An old nurse at a bedside; behind her, a ghostly double cradle with two infants.

Echoes scene 10

P119.L01–P121.L07 · room (house outside the city) · narrator; his wife (unseen)

Near dawn, coughing like the packhorses and feeling himself a child in the cradle, he senses someone beside him and a cool hand on his burning forehead. The nurse later says his wife cradled his head and rocked him like a child.

For the illustration Total darkness pierced only by a pale hand resting on a feverish brow.

Echoes scene 31

P122.L01–P128.L02 · room (house outside the city) · narrator

Bedridden for two years and four months, he explores an inner world of half-dreams and feels himself decomposing alive. He explains why he calls his wife 'harlot' and resolves, like a mangy dog, to go off and lose himself.

For the illustration A man in bed whose limbs seem to drift apart amid floating images.

P129.L01–P132.L06 · lanes of Ray; city gate; sun-scorched plain · narrator; the rabble

At dawn he slips out with two cookies, passes the greedy rabble and walks deserted lanes of cube, prism and cone houses out through the gate. The plain's smell revives his childhood, but his former self is a stranger to him.

For the illustration A lone figure walking between blank geometric houses under a blazing sun.

Echoes scene 19

P139.L05–P141.L10 · moonlit streets of geometric houses; his room · narrator; Naneh-Joon

Walking home at dusk past white geometric houses, he sees his shadow cast in moonlight without a head, an omen of death within the year. Home, his nose bleeds, he faints, and in bed he murmurs, 'Death... where are you?'

For the illustration A man before a pale wall where his moonlit shadow has no head.

Echoes scene 44

P142.L01–P142.L06 · Mohammadiyeh square · narrator; the old junk dealer; drunken police; mother-in-law; the executioner

He dreams the old junk dealer hanging on a tall gallows while drunken police drink below. His mother-in-law drags him through the crowd to the red-clad executioner, saying 'Hang this one too.'

For the illustration A gallows in a crowded square with the junk dealer hanging, a woman pointing out the narrator to an executioner in red.

Echoes scene 32

P143.L01–P145.L07 · room (house outside the city) · narrator; Naneh-Joon

Sleepless, his hand strikes the water jar on the shelf and it shatters. Dawn brings the nurse with bread and cheese, her face elongated as in a distorting mirror, and her hookah and family gossip.

For the illustration A shattered water jar on the floor and a trembling patch of reflected sunlight on the ceiling.

Echoes scene 25

P148.L01–P150.L02 · room (house outside the city) · narrator; Naneh-Joon; the household; his wife; the physician

He knocks the soup bowl from beneath and screams until the household gathers; his wife passes by, visibly pregnant. The physician prescribes opium, which lifts him on golden moth wings into a shining void.

For the illustration Household faces crowding a doorway over a spilled bowl; a pregnant woman passing behind them.

Echoes scene 27

P151.L01–P154.L04 · his room; the courtyard · narrator; Naneh-Joon; her daughter-in-law

Through the window he hears the nurse say God should kill him and give him rest, then smile at him with red eyes. He recalls her breasts, her potions and omens, and finds religion useless before the fear of death.

For the illustration The nurse cleaning vegetables in the sunlit courtyard, seen from a dark window.

P155.L01–P157.L01 · his window; the alley · narrator; drunken watchmen

At nightfall he sees a dry black tree and the shuttered butcher's shop; an untimely call to prayer suggests a woman, perhaps his wife, in labor. Drunken watchmen pass singing, 'Come, let us drink the wine of Ray.'

For the illustration A star-pricked tar-black sky over a dead tree and shuttered shop as watchmen stagger by below.

P158.L01–P160.L03 · room (house outside the city) · narrator; a shadow-double

In the dark a motionless figure by the curtain stares at him, a face first seen at the Soren stream that resembles the butcher. When he lights the lamp it vanishes, and in the mirror his reflection has grown stronger than he.

For the illustration A dark room with a shapeless seated figure by a curtain, and a man before a mirror with his hand over his eyes.

Echoes scene 31, 45

P161.L01–P163.L05 · an unknown city of geometric houses; a butcher's shop; his father-in-law's door · narrator; a butcher-junk-dealer figure; the brother-in-law

He dreams of a morning-glory-wreathed city whose people stand stiffened with blood at their mouths, and every head he touches falls off. A man like the junk dealer holding a knife loses his head, and so does his brother-in-law when offered cookies.

For the illustration A street of geometric houses with frozen figures, a severed head rolling from a knife-holding man.

Echoes scene 19, 46, 31

P164.L01–P164.L08 · upstairs room by the sash window · narrator; the butcher; packhorses

Breakfasting upstairs, he sees the butcher from above as ridiculous, a man merely acting the part. The packhorses deliver carcasses again and the butcher strokes the sheep's thighs.

For the illustration High angle from a sash window down onto the butcher fondling a carcass.

Echoes scene 31

P165.L01–P165.L06 · room (house outside the city) · narrator

He takes the bone-handled knife from its box in the back closet, wipes the blade and puts it under his pillow, wanting to imitate the butcher. With death at his throat he resolves to take the harlot with him.

For the illustration A bone-handled knife slipped beneath a pillow under a sky of yellow death-laden clouds.

Echoes scene 17

P166.L01–P166.L05 · the alley outside his window · narrator; mourners; the butcher; the old junk dealer; Naneh-Joon

A coffin draped in black with a candle on top passes; shopkeepers and the butcher walk seven steps after it, but the junk dealer does not move. The nurse, frowning, prays loudly at his door.

For the illustration A black-draped coffin with a burning candle passing a window, the old peddler motionless at his cloth.

Echoes scene 19

P167.L01–P175.L04 · room (house outside the city) · narrator

His room feels like a shrinking coffin, and he broods on death, decomposition and the particles of his body mingling with the rabble. Childhood fears return in a flood, and he reflects on life's masks and the madman once chained in this room.

For the illustration Pillow feathers turning to blades and a bed becoming a gravestone in a nightmare montage.

P176.L01–P177.L03 · the bathhouse · narrator; bath attendant; other bathers

In the bathhouse his thin shadow on the sweating wall is the same as in childhood, quickly erased while others' shadows fall dark and heavy. Dressing again, he feels reborn into the world he hates.

For the illustration A thin shadow on a steamy bathhouse wall beside thick-necked bathers.

Echoes scene 1

P178.L01–P178.L05 · room (house outside the city) · narrator

The pen case beside which he writes bears the same mad painting: hunched yogi under a cypress, finger to his mouth. Opposite, a girl in black, perhaps a Bogam-dasi, dances with a morning glory across a stream.

For the illustration The writing pen case in close-up with the familiar cypress, old man, dancer and stream.

Echoes scene 3, 50

P179.L01–P180.L10 · room (house outside the city) · narrator; Naneh-Joon

Dozing by the brazier in his cloak, he realizes he sits exactly like the junk dealer and rushes to the mirror, where he urges himself to drink the poisoned wine. Turning, he finds the nurse in the doorway and bursts into laughter; she takes the brazier away.

For the illustration A flushed man addressing his reflection while an old nurse stands silent in the doorway.

Echoes scene 32

P181.L01–P182.L02 · room (house outside the city) · narrator; Naneh-Joon; (reported) his wife and the junk dealer

Before a crisis he fears everyone, the junk dealer and the butcher included. The nurse swears she saw the junk dealer enter his wife's room at night and heard her say, 'Undo your neck-scarf!', and he has seen tooth marks on her cheek.

For the illustration The nurse whispering at his bedside; behind a door, the silhouette of a scarfed hunchback.

Echoes scene 32

P183.L01–P183.L06 · the junk dealer's cloth under the arch · narrator; the old junk dealer

He went to the old man's stall and asked the price of the jar; the old man laughed through his harelip and said, 'It is not worthy of you; may you see its good.' He paid and fled in shame from the dead, rusty objects.

For the illustration Coins laid on the corner of a cloth before the laughing peddler and his wrapped jar.

Echoes scene 23, 32

P184.L01–P186.L03 · room (house outside the city) · narrator; Naneh-Joon

The nurse spreads word that his wife has lice from a filthy beggar. He half-approves her taste, seeing the old man as a demigod of misery, and still loves the woman who has never let him kiss her lips.

For the illustration The junk dealer enthroned among his rags like an icon.

Echoes scene 32

P187.L01–P188.L05 · room (house outside the city) · narrator; his wife

Amid kettledrums and fever, his wife comes in plump, made up and in a patterned tunic, her finger at her lips. He sees her suddenly as lean meat, no longer the ethereal girl of the Soren stream; he answers her mocking 'How are you?' harshly and she slams the door.

For the illustration A painted, plump woman in a doorway, finger to her mouth, looking down at a fevered man.

Echoes scene 45, 31

P189.L01–P189.L12 · room (house outside the city) · narrator; his wife

She returns; he kisses the hem of her dress and weeps at her feet, calling her real name aloud and 'harlot' in his heart. When he comes to, she is gone, and he sits motionless as soot from the lamp falls on him like black snow.

For the illustration A man prostrate at a woman's feet; then alone beneath a smoking lamp, soot settling on him.

P189.L13–P189.L30 · room (house outside the city) · narrator; Naneh-Joon

The nurse screams and drops the supper tray at his blackened face; he rubs on more soot and makes faces in the mirror, finding the reciter, the butcher and his wife within himself. He bursts into the old man's laugh, coughs bloody phlegm onto the mirror and hides behind the closet curtain.

For the illustration A soot-blackened face distorted in a mirror smeared with blood, a terrified nurse behind him.

Echoes scene 32, 31

P190.L01–P194.L04 · room (house outside the city) · narrator; drunken watchmen

Burning with desire for his wife's body, he wakes to the watchmen's song and remembers the cobra-venom wine. He dreams of sharing it with the harlot and dying together, and fixates on the butcher's knife.

For the illustration A ring of fire around a sleeper's head and a flask of purple wine on a shelf.

Echoes scene 36, 31

P196.L01–P197.L02 · room (house outside the city) · narrator; Naneh-Joon

At breakfast the nurse brings a bone-handled knife she bought among the junk dealer's wares; it is his own. She reports the stolen shirt, his wife's lost pregnancy and the bruises, and he laughs that the child must resemble the old reciter.

For the illustration A bone-handled knife lying on a breakfast tray beside bread and milk.

Echoes scene 17, 57, 70

P198.L01–P198.L19 · room (house outside the city) · narrator; the brother-in-law

The boy, his sister's image, says the physician predicted his death and asks how a person dies. He laughs the old man's laugh, the boy runs off, and he understands the butcher's pleasure in cutting flesh.

For the illustration A slant-eyed boy biting his nail in a doorway; beyond the window, sheep heads staring with dead eyes.

Echoes scene 46, 31

P199.L01–P201.L03 · room (house outside the city) · narrator

He feels himself a demigod beyond human needs. Eternity for him is hide-and-seek by the Soren stream with the harlot and hiding his head in her lap.

For the illustration A child laying his head in a girl's lap beside a stream.

Echoes scene 45