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

“One day, O illustrious King, Mr. Airagaira saw a terrible sight. There were men and women carrying building materials in metal pans on their heads, which was normal, but something was wrong with the shape of these women and men, they looked — he groped for the word — squashed, as though something far heavier than the building materials they carried were weighing down on them, as if gravity itself had increased in their vicinity and they were literally being crushed into the earth. Was that even possible, he asked his neighbors on the quality control belt to which he had been assigned, could it be that they were being tortured, and everyone he asked said no with their mouths but yes with their eyes, no, what a suggestion, our country’s free, said their tongues, while their eyes said don’t be a fool, it’s frightening to utter such thoughts aloud. The next day the squashed people had gone and the pans of construction materials were being borne by new carriers, and if Mr. Airagaira saw something a little compressed about these persons too he kept his mouth shut about it and only his eyes spoke to his fellow workers, whose eyes spoke silently back. But keeping your mouth shut when there’s something you need to spit out is bad for the digestion, and Mr. Airagaira went home feeling nauseous and close to throwing up explosively in the transportation truck, which would have been, to use one of the new words of those days, inadvisable.

“That night Mr. Airagaira must have been visited, or even possessed, by a jinni, because the next morning on the production line he seemed like a different person, and there seemed to be a kind of electricity crackling around his ears. Instead of going to his workstation he marched right up to one of the construction management team, the senior-most orderer in sight, and said in a loud voice that made many of his fellow workers pay attention, ‘Excuse me, sir, but I have an important question for you concerning the machine.’

“ ‘No questions,’ said the orderer. ‘Go about your appointed tasks.’

“ ‘The question is this,’ Airagaira Sahib continued, having abandoned his gentle, confused, myopic voice for these new, stentorian, even megaphonic tones. ‘What does the machine of the future produce?’

“Many people were listening now. An assenting murmur rose from their ranks, Yes, what does it produce. The orderer narrowed his eyes and a group of herders closed in on Mr. Airagaira. ‘That is obvious,’ the orderer answered. ‘It produces the future.’

“ ‘The future is not a product,’ shouted Mr. Airagaira. ‘Rather, it is a mystery. What does the machine actually make?’

“The herders were close enough to seize Mr. Airagaira now, but a crowd of workers was gathering, and it was plain the herders were not sure how best to proceed. They looked for guidance to the orderer.

“ ‘What does it make?’ the orderer screamed. ‘It makes glory! Glory is the product. Glory, honor and pride. Glory is the future, but you have shown that there is no place in that future for you. Take this terrorist away. I will not allow him to infect this sector with his diseased mind. Such a mind is a bearer of the plague.’

“The crowd was unhappy as the herders made a grab for Mr. Airagaira but then people began to scream, because the electricity that had been crackling around the ears of the former publisher of books for young adults was seen flowing down his neck and arms, all the way to his fingertips, and then bolts of high-voltage electricity poured out of his hands, killing the orderer instantly, sending the herders running for cover, and striking the machine of the future with a violence that caused a sizable sector of the colossal behemoth to buckle and explode.”

The box began to move in the princess’s hands. A layer of the rectangular onion skin peeled away and vanished into smoke just as the first layer had, and another voice, this one a fine baritone, began to speak. “This mention of a plague,” said the Chinese box, “reminds me of another story which you may be interested to hear.” But before the tale could progress very far Dunia gave a start and a little cry. She let go of the box and lifted her hands up to cover her ears. Omar cried out also and his hands flew also to his ears and it was Mr. Geronimo who caught the box before it hit the ground and stared at the two Peristanis with concern.

“What was that?” Dunia said. But Geronimo Manezes had heard nothing. “A sound like a whistle,” she told him. “The jinn can hear higher frequencies than dogs and obviously human beings. But it was only a noise.”

“A noise may contain a hidden curse,” Omar said. “The box should be closed, Princess. It may be poisonous to you and me as well as your father.”

“No,” she said, her expression unwontedly grim. “Continue. If I don’t understand the curse I won’t find the counter-curse and the king will die.”

Mr. Geronimo set the box down on a small table of walnut inlaid with an ivory chessboard and it resumed its storytelling. “It was a time of plagues,” said the box in its new male voice, “and in the village of I. a man named John was being held responsible for the spread of a disease of silence. Quiet John, a short man with powerful forearms, worked as a blacksmith in I., as picturesque a country hamlet as you could wish to see lost in an idyll of green fields, rolling hills, dry stone walls, thatched roofs and nosy neighbors. After his marriage to the local schoolteacher, a girl more learned and refined of manner than her husband, it became well known that once he had had a few drinks at night he shouted at his wife, using the ugliest words anyone in the village had ever heard and so increasing his wife’s vocabulary as well as her misery. This went on for many years. By day he was a diligent worker in his forge of fire and smoke, and a good companion to his wife and friends, but in the darkness the monster within came out. Then one night when his son Jack was sixteen years old and grown taller than his father, the boy stood up to John and commanded him to be silent. Some in the village said that the boy made a fist and struck his father in the face, because the man had a swollen cheek for some days after that, but others put the swelling down to toothache.

“Whatever the cause, there was general agreement on two points: firstly, that the father did not strike the son in return, but retreated to his bedroom in shame, and secondly, that from that moment on his words, always few and far between except during the nocturnal torrents of cursing, dried up altogether and he simply ceased to speak. As the distance between his tongue and the words it used to utter grew greater, he seemed to calm down. The drinking stopped, or at least diminished to manageable levels. As Quiet John he turned into his best self, people said, gentle and generous and honorable and kind, so that it became obvious that language itself had been his problem, language had poisoned him and damaged his intrinsically noble humanity, and that, having given up words the way some people gave up cigarettes or masturbation, he could at last be what he should have been: a good man.

“His neighbors, noticing the change in him, began to experiment with wordlessness themselves, and sure enough the less they spoke, the more cheerful and better natured they became. The idea that language was an infection from which the human race needed to recover, that speech was the source of all dissension, wrongdoing and character decay, that it was not as many had often declared the bedrock of liberty but rather the seedbed of violence, spread rapidly through the cottages of I. and soon children were being dissuaded from singing playground songs and old-timers discouraged from reminiscing about antique exploits while sitting on their accustomed benches under the tree in the main square. A division appeared and deepened in the formerly harmonious hamlet, fostered, according to the newly silent, by the new young village schoolteacher, Yvonne, who posted signs everywhere warning that speechlessness, not speech, was the real disease. ‘You may think it’s a choice,’ she wrote, ‘but soon you won’t be able to talk even if you want to, while we talkers actually can choose to converse or to keep our mouths shut.’ At first people were angry with the schoolteacher, a pretty, chatty woman with an annoying habit of cocking her head to the left when she talked, and these militants wanted the school shut down, but then they discovered she was right. They could no longer make any sort of sound, even if they wanted to, even if they wanted to warn a loved one to avoid an oncoming truck. Now the village’s anger turned away from Yvonne the teacher and focused instead on Quiet John, whose decision had foisted upon the community a muteness they could no longer escape. Dumbly, inarticulately, the villagers gathered outside the blacksmith’s forge, and only their fear of his immense physical strength and hot horseshoes held them back,”