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

As carefully as a sapper defusing a bomb, Omar the Ayyar peeled away the outer skin of the box, and poof! the onion skin dematerialized, and at once a story began, released from its wafer-thin layer of cornered space: a murmur rising to become a mellifluous female voice, one of the many voices the Chinese box contained and made available for the use of the messenger. This voice, husky, low, soothing, made Mr. Geronimo think of Blue Yasmeen, and of The Bagdad-without-an- h where she lived, the home from which he had been evicted. A wave of melancholy washed over him and then receded. The story flung its hook at him, which lodged in his lobeless ear, and caught his attention.

“That morning after the general election, O illustrious King, a certain Mr. Airagaira of the distant city of B. was awoken like everyone else by loud sirens followed by a megaphone announcement from a flag-waving white van. Everything was about to change, the megaphone cried, because it was what the people had demanded. The people were sick of corruption and mismanagement and above all sick of the family that had had a stranglehold on power for so long that they had become like the relatives everyone hates and can’t wait until they leave the room. Now the family was gone, the megaphone said, and the country could finally grow up without the detested National Relatives. Like everyone else, the megaphone said, he was to stop working immediately at his present job, a job which as a matter of fact he enjoyed — he was an editor of books for young adults, at a prominent publishing company in the city — and report for duty at one of the new assignment stations that had been set up overnight, where he would be informed of his new employment, and become a part of the new grand national enterprise, the construction of the machine of the future.

“He got dressed quickly and went downstairs to explain to the officer with the megaphone that he possessed neither the necessary engineering skills nor mechanical aptitude for such a task, being a person from arts side not science side, and besides, he was content to allow things to remain as they were, he had made his choices, and selected career satisfaction over the accumulation of wealth. As a confirmed bachelor of a certain age, he had more than enough for his needs, and the work was valuable: the challenging, entertaining, and shaping of young minds. The megaphone officer shrugged indifferently. ‘What’s that to me?’ he said in a curt, discourteous manner. ‘You’ll do as the new nation requests unless you want to be thought of as an antinational element. That is an element for which there is no longer any place in our periodic table. It is, as the French say, though I do not speak French, believing it to be alien to our traditions and therefore unimportant to know, hors de classification. The trucks will be here soon. If you insist on making your objection, take it up with the transportation officer.’

“His colleagues in the publishing company said of Mr. Airagaira, not always in complimentary tones, that he possessed an innocence that exceeded the knowing cynicism of most children, and therefore failed to grasp the disappointed bitterness of a world that had lost its innocence long ago. Gentle, bespectacled, confused, he waited for the promised trucks. If René Magritte had painted Stan Laurel in shades of light brown the result might have resembled Mr. Airagaira, grinning his vague, goofy grin at the gathering crowd, and blinking myopically at the herders corralling them, men with orange marks on their foreheads and long sticks in their hands. The convoy of trucks duly arrived, curving down the old seaside promenade like ink blots dripping down an old painting, and when Mr. Airagaira finally found himself face to face with the transportation officer, a burly thick-haired young man plainly proud of his muscly arms and barrel chest, he was sure that the misunderstanding would soon be cleared up. He began to speak but the transportation officer interrupted him and asked for his name. He gave it and the officer consulted a sheaf of documents attached to a clipboard in his hands. ‘Here it is,’ he said, showing a paper to Mr. Airagaira. ‘Your employers have let you go.’ Mr. Airagaira shook his head. ‘That’s impossible,’ he explained reasonably. ‘In the first place, I’m valued at the office, and in the second place, even if this were true, I would have first received oral and then written warnings and finally a letter of dismissal. That is the proper way of doing things and that procedure has not been followed, plus, I repeat, I have every reason to believe I am well regarded at work, and in line, not for dismissal, but for promotion.’ The transportation officer pointed to a signature at the bottom of the sheet. ‘Recognize that?’ Mr. Airagaira was shocked to note that he did recognize his boss’s unmistakable hand. ‘Then that’s an end to it,’ the transportation officer said. ‘If you’ve been fired, you must have done something very wrong. You can play the innocent, but your guilt is written on your face, and this signature which you have verified is the proof. Get in the truck.’

“Mr. Airagaira allowed himself one sentence of dissent. ‘I would never have believed,’ he said, ‘that such a thing could happen, here in my own beloved hometown of B.’

“ ‘The name of the city has been changed,’ the transportation officer said. ‘It will now be known once again by its ancient name, which the gods gave it long ago: Deliverance.’

“Illustrious King: Mr. Airagaira had never heard that name, and knew nothing about the gods’ involvement in naming the city in ancient times, when the city had not even existed, it being one of the newer cities of the country, not an ancient metropolis like D. to the north but a modern conurbation, but he made no further protest, and along with everyone else climbed meekly into one of the trucks and was driven away to the new factories in the north where the machine of the future was being constructed. In the weeks and months that followed his bewilderment grew. At his new workplace, among the forbidding resonances of the turbines and the staccato sizzle of the drills, in between the silent enigma of the conveyor belts upon which nuts, bolts, elbow joints and cogs moved smoothly past quality control points towards unknown destinations, he saw to his surprise that workers even less skilled than himself had been drafted into the great work, that small children were gluing together contraptions of wood and paper and these too were somehow being incorporated into the immensity of the whole, that cooks were making patties which were being stuck to the sides of the machine the way cow dung was used in the villages on the walls of mud houses. What kind of machine was this, Mr. Airagaira asked himself, that the entire nation was required to build? Seamen had to insert their ships into the machine and tillermen their plows; as he was moved from place to place along the gigantic construction site of the machine he saw hoteliers building their hotels into the machine and there were motion picture cameras in there and textile looms, but there were no clients in the hotels or film in the cameras or cloth on the looms. The mystery grew as the machine expanded, whole neighborhoods were demolished to make room for the machine, until it began to seem to Airagaira Sahib that the machine and the country had become synonymous, because there was no longer room in the country for anything except the machine.

“In those days food and water rationing had been imposed, hospitals ran out of medication and stores out of things to sell, the machine was everything and everywhere and everyone went to their appointed workstations and did the work they were allotted, screwing, drilling, riveting, hammering, and went home at night too exhausted to speak. The birthrate began to drop because sex was too much of an effort, and that was presented as a national benefit by the radio and television and megaphones. Mr. Airagaira noticed that the managers of the construction program, the orderers and pointers and herders, all seemed to be viciously angry all the time, and intolerant too, particularly of people like himself, people who had previously gone about their lives quietly and been happy for others to do the same. Such people were deemed to be simultaneously weak and dangerous, simultaneously useless and subversive, in need of a heavy disciplinary hand, which, make no mistake, the megaphones said, would be used wherever and whenever necessary, and how strange, Mr. Airagaira thought, that those who were on top in this new dispensation were angrier than those who were underneath.