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

Geronimo Manezes also told her Blue Yasmeen’s fable about the pessimism of the Unyaza. “At this point, and in my present condition,” he said, surprising himself by finding a version of one of Alexandra Fariña’s mottoes issuing from his lips, “to say nothing of the state of the planet in general, it is difficult not to have a tragic view of life.” It wasn’t a bad answer, Dunia thought. It was the answer of a thinking man. She could work with that. “I understand,” she replied, “but that attitude comes from the days before you met a fairy princess.”

Time stopped. Mr. Geronimo was in a highly charged, enchanted place which was both his basement room and that room transformed into a jinni’s smoke-scented love-lair, a place where no clock ticked, no second hand moved, no digital number changed. He could not have said if minutes passed during the timeless time of their lovemaking, or weeks, or months. Already, ever since his detachment from the earth, he had been obliged to set aside most of what he believed he knew about the nature of things. Now he was coming loose from the few fragments of his old beliefs that still remained. Here after a long interval was a woman’s body which was and was not his wife’s. It had been so long that his sense memory of Ella’s flesh had weakened and though he was ashamed to admit it his more recent recollections of Alexandra Fariña were jumbled up with what he remembered about making love to his wife. And now this entirely new feeling was supplanting it, was becoming what he agreed with himself to think of as the feeling of Ella Elfenbein moving beneath him like a sweet warm tide, he, who had never believed in reincarnation or any such mumbo jumbo, was helpless, in the grip of the fairy princess’s enchantments, and plunged into the sea of love, where everything was true if you said so, everything was true if the enchantress whispered it in his ear, and he could even accept in his confusion that his wife had been a fairy princess all along, that even during Ella’s lifetime, my first lifetime, the jinnia whispered, and this is my second, yes, even in her first lifetime she had been a jinnia in disguise, so that the fairy princess was neither a counterfeit nor an imitation, it had always been her, even though he had not known it until now, and if this was delirium, he was okay with that, it was a delirium he chose and wanted, because all of us want love, eternal love, love returning beyond death to be reborn, love to nourish and enfold us until we die.

In that darkened room, no news reached them of the mayhem being wrought on the city outside. The city was screaming with fear but they could not hear it, boats were refusing to venture onto the water of the harbor, people were afraid to come out of their homes and go to work, and the panic was showing up in the money, stocks were crashing, banks were shuttered, supermarket shelves were empty and deliveries of fresh produce were not being made, the paralysis of terror held the city in its grip and catastrophe was in the air. But in the darkness of the narrow bedroom in the basement of The Bagdad the television was off and the crackle of the calamity could not be heard.

There was only the act of love, and lovemaking had a surprise in store for them both. “Your body smells of smoke,” she said. “And look at you. When you’re aroused you become blurred, smudged, there’s smoke at the edges of you, didn’t your human lovers ever tell you that?” No, he lied, remembering Ella telling him exactly that, but concealing the memory, correctly intuiting that Dunia would not like to know the truth. No, he said, they did not. This pleased her, as he had suspected it would. “That’s because you never made love to a jinnia before,” she told him. “It’s a different level of arousal.” Yes, he said, it was. But she was thinking, with mounting excitement, that it was his jinn self revealing itself, the jinn self that had come to him, down the centuries, from her. This was the sulfurous smokiness of the jinn when they made love. And if she could release the jinn with him then many things became possible. “Geronimo, Geronimo,” she murmured in his smoky ear, “it looks like you are a fairy too.”

Something unexpected happened to Dunia in their lovemaking: she enjoyed it, not as much as the bodiless sex of Fairyland, that ecstatic union of smoke and fire, but there was (as she had hoped there might be) a definite — no, a strong! — sensation of pleasure. This showed her not only that she was becoming more human but that her new lover might contain more of the jinn than she first suspected. So it was that their mimic love, their love born of the memory of others, their post-love that came after, became true, authentic, a thing in and of itself, in which she almost stopped thinking about the dead philosopher, and his dead wife whose copy she had allowed herself to be was slowly replaced in his fantasy by the unknown magical creature who had come to him so improbably in his hour of need. The time might even come, she allowed herself to think, when she could show herself to him as she truly was — neither the sixteen-year-old waif who had materialized at Ibn Rushd’s door, nor this replicant of a lost love, but her royal self in all its glory. In the grip of that unexpected hope she began to tell Geronimo Manezes things she had never told Ibn Rushd.

“Around the borders of Fairyland,” she said, “there stands the circular mountain of Qâf, where, according to legend, a bird-god once lived, the Simurgh, a relative of the Rukh of Sindbad. But that’s just a story. We, the jinn and jiniri, we who are not legend, know that bird, but it does not rule over us. There is, however, a ruler on Qâf Mountain, not a thing of beak, feather and claw but a great fairy emperor, Shahpal son of Shahrukh, and his daughter, most powerful of the jinnias, Aasmaan Peri, which is to say, “Skyfairy,” known as the Lightning Princess. Shahpal is the Simurgh King and that bird sits on his shoulder and serves him.

“Between the emperor and the Grand Ifrits there is no affection. Mount Qâf is the most desirable location in all of Fairyland and the Ifrits would dearly love to possess it but the thunderbolt magic of the emperor’s daughter, a great jinnia sorceress, is equal to that of Zabardast and Zumurrud Shah, and it maintains a wall of sheet lightning that surrounds Qâf and protects the circular mountain against their greed. However, they are always on the lookout for an opportunity, fomenting trouble among the devs, or lesser spirits who populate the lower slopes of Qâf, trying to persuade them to rebel against their rulers. At this moment there is a hiatus in the endless struggle between the emperor and the Ifrits, which, to tell the truth, has been in a condition of stalemate for many millennia, because the storms, earthquakes and other phenomena that broke the long-closed seals between Peristan and the world of men have permitted the Ifrits to make their mischief here, which has the attraction for them of a novelty, or at least a thing long denied. They haven’t been able to do this for a long time, and they believe there is no magic on earth capable of resisting them, and, being bullies, they like the idea of destroying an overmatched opponent. So while they think of conquest my father and I get a little respite.”

“You?” Mr. Geronimo asked. “It’s you, the princess of Qâf?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” she said. “The battle beginning here on earth is a mirror of the battle that has been going on in Fairyland for all time.”

Now that she had learned the trick of pleasure, she was indefatigable in its pursuit. One of the reasons she preferred an “older” human lover, she murmured to Geronimo Manezes, was that they found it easier to control themselves. With young men it was over in a flash. He told her he was glad that age had a few advantages. She wasn’t listening. She was discovering the joys of climax. And for the most part he was lost in a sweet confusion, hardly knowing to which of three women, two human, one not, he was making love, and as a result neither of them noticed at first what was happening to him, until at a certain moment when he was beneath and she above he felt something unexpected, something almost forgotten, under his head and back.