Salman Rushdie - Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Mr. Geronimo arriving at the French windows noted the estate manager Oliver Oldcastle positioned behind Alexandra’s left shoulder. If he had been a hawk, thought Mr. Geronimo, he would have perched upon that shoulder, ready to attack his mistress’s foes and rip their hearts out of their chests. Mistress and servant they stood together, surveying the ruin of La Incoerenza, Oliver Oldcastle looking like Marx observing the fall of Communism, Alexandra her customary enigmatic self in spite of the drying tears on her cheeks. “I can’t complain,” she said, addressing neither Mr. Geronimo nor Manager Oldcastle, rebuking herself as if she were her own governess. “People have lost their homes and have nothing to eat and nowhere to sleep. All I have lost is a garden.” Mr. Geronimo the gardener understood that he was being put in his place. But Alexandra was looking at his boots now. “It’s a miracle,” she said. “Look, Oldcastle, a real miracle. Mr. Geronimo has taken leave of solid ground and moved upwards into, let us say, more speculative territory.”

Mr. Geronimo wanted to protest that his levitation was neither his doing nor his choice, to make it plain that he would be happy to subside to the ground again and get his boots dirty. But Alexandra had a glitter in her eye. “Were you struck by lightning?” she asked. “Yes, that’s it. Lightning hit you during the hurricane and you lived, but it wiped your memory clean, so you don’t remember being hit. And now you’re filled with an unspeakably large electric charge and that’s why you’ve lifted off the surface of the earth.” This silenced Mr. Geronimo, who considered it gravely. Yes, perhaps. Though in the absence of any evidence it was no more than a supposition. He found it difficult to know what to say but there was nothing he needed to say. “Here’s another miracle,” Alexandra said, and her voice was different now, no longer imperious but confidential. “For most of my life I have set aside the possibility of love, and then, just now, I realized that it was waiting for me right here, at home, outside my French windows, stamping its boots towards the mud, but untouched by that evil filth.” Then she turned and vanished into the shadows of the house.

He feared a trap. Appointments of this sort were not on his schedule anymore, never had been, really. Manager Oldcastle jerked his head, ordering him to follow the lady of the house. So Mr. Geronimo understood that he had his orders and moved indoors, not knowing where the lady of the house had gone. But he followed the trail of her discarded clothing and found her easily enough.

His night with Alexandra Bliss Fariña began strangely. Whatever force was preventing him from touching the ground was also at work in her bed, and when she lay beneath him his body hovered above hers, just a fraction of an inch above, but there was a definite separation that made things awkward. He tried placing his hands beneath her buttocks and lifting her towards him but that was uncomfortable for them both. They solved the problem soon enough; if he was beneath her then things worked well enough, even if his back didn’t quite touch the bed. His condition seemed to arouse her, and that in turn excited him, but the moment their lovemaking was over she appeared to lose interest and swiftly fell asleep, leaving him to stare at the ceiling in the dark. And when he got out of bed to dress and leave, the gap between his feet and the floor was distinctly greater. After his night with the mistress of La Incoerenza he had lifted almost a full inch off the ground.

He left her bedchamber to find Oldcastle outside with murder in his eyes. “Don’t imagine you’re the first,” the manager told Mr. Geronimo. “Don’t imagine that at your ridiculous age you are the only love she has ever found waiting right outside her window. You pathetic old fungus. You sickening parasite. You growth, you blunted thorn, you bad seed. Get out and don’t come back.” Mr. Geronimo understood at once that Oliver Oldcastle had been driven mad by unrequited love. “My wife is buried on that hill,” he said firmly, “and I will visit her grave whenever I choose. You will have to kill me to stop me, unless I kill you first.”

“Your marriage ended last night in milady’s bedchamber,” retorted Oliver Oldcastle. “And as to which of us kills the other, that bloomin’ remains to be seen.”

There had been fires, and buildings our ancestors had had known all their lives stood charred among them, staring into the pitiless brightness through the hollow sockets of their blackened eyes, like the undead on TV. As our ancestors emerged from their places of safety and lurched through the orphaned streets, the storm began to feel like their fault. There were preachers on television calling it God’s punishment for their licentious ways. But that was not the point. It did feel, at least to some of them, that something they had made had escaped their grasp and, freed, had raged around them for days. When the earth, air and water calmed down they feared that force’s return. But for a time they were busy with repair work, with feeding the hungry and caring for the old and weeping for the fallen trees, and there was no time to think about the future. Wise voices calmed our ancestors, telling them not to think of the weather as a metaphor. It was neither a warning nor a curse. It was just the weather. This was the soothing information they wanted. They accepted it. So most of them were looking in the wrong direction and did not notice the moment when the strangenesses arrived to turn everything upside down.

One hundred and one days after the great storm, it seems that Ibn Rushd lying forgotten in his family tomb in Córdoba somehow began to communicate with his equally deceased opponent, Ghazali, in a humble grave on the edge of the town of Tus, in the province of Khorasan; initially in the most cordial of terms, afterwards less jovially. We accept that this statement, difficult as it is to verify, may be met with some scepticism. Their bodies had decayed long ago, so that the notion of lying forgotten contains a kind of untruth, and the further notion of some sort of sentient intelligences remaining in the locations of their interments is patently absurd. Yet in considering that strange era, the era of the two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights which is the subject of the present account, we are forced to concede that the world had become absurd, and that the laws which had long been accepted as the governing principles of reality had collapsed, leaving our ancestors perplexed and unable to fathom what the new laws might be. It is in the context of the time of the strangenesses that the dialogue between the dead philosophers should be understood.

Ibn Rushd in the darkness of the tomb heard a familiar female voice whisper in his ear. Speak. With a sweet nostalgia seasoned with bitter guilt he remembered Dunia, the stick-thin mother of his bastards. She was tiny, and it occurred to him that he had never seen her eat. She suffered from regular headaches because, he told her, of her dislike of water. She liked red wine but had no head for it and after two glasses became a different person, giggling, gesticulating, talking without stopping, interrupting others, and, always, wanting to dance. She climbed on the kitchen table and when he declined to join her she stamped out a pouting solo piece containing equal parts of petulance and release. She clung to him at night as if she would drown in the bed if he let her go. She had loved him without holding anything back and he had left her, had walked out of their home without looking back. And now in the dank blackness of his crumbling tomb she had returned to haunt him in the grave.