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

After that they were her enemies, and, because of the humiliation of being rejected in favor of a human being who, like a mayfly, lived for a day and was then snuffed out forever, they had new reasons for hating the human race,

— and while she was remembering her youth, Mr. Geronimo found his way within the story of her youthful flirtations into the memory of his one true love, Ella Elfenbein his beautiful chatterbox, kind to all comers, proud of her body, and more in love with her father Bento than with him, he sometimes thought. She called Bento Elfenbein five times an hour every day until his last day, and in every call she used the words I love you as a way of saying hello and goodbye to him. After Bento died and not until then she started doing the same when she called Geronimo, you’re my everything, she said, then and not until then. It was ridiculous to be jealous of a daughter’s love for her brilliant, rakish, slightly crooked father with his joker’s smile like a happy fiend constantly finding a way to outsmart the Batman, but sometimes I couldn’t help it, Mr. Geronimo admitted to himself, even now he couldn’t help it, she even found a way to die just as Bento had died, she found her way to a lightning bolt just like his.

And what am I doing now, he asked himself, I’m holding in my arms a supernatural creature who is the fairy queen of the thunderbolt, the possessor and incarnation of the power that murdered my beloved, and I’m murmuring words of love into her ear, as if I’m allowing myself to love what killed my wife, to whisper I love you as hello and goodbye into the queen of what destroyed Ella, and what does that say about me, what does that mean, who am I. Her ear by the way as lacking in lobe as my own. An ancient creature out of fantasy who says she’s my distant ancestor, get a grip, he told himself, you’re lost in illusion, your feet may be back on the ground but now your head’s far, far up in the clouds. But even as he admonished himself he felt Ella fading, felt her slipping towards nothingness, while the warm body in his arms became more solidly real, even if he knew it was made of smoke.

He realized that he did not feel well. His heart pounded in his chest and the rarefied air of Mount Qâf made him light-headed; he was nursing what felt like an altitude headache. His thoughts turned to his lost trade, which felt more and more like a lost self, and to La Incoerenza, so beautiful until the storm came, he remembered the digging, the weeding, the planting of seeds, the trimming of hedgerows, the battle against the groundhogs who ate the rhododendrons, the victory over the tree parasites, the building of the labyrinth, stone on stone, the thick sweat on his brow, the happy ache in his muscles, the days of good work in sun and rain and frost, summer and winter, heat on heat, snow on snow, the thousand acres and one acre, the drowned river, the hill where his wife lay under the rippling grass. He wanted to turn back the clock to that time of innocence, before thunderbolts and strangenesses broke the world, and he understood that what ailed him was homesickness.

He sickened for his home lost both in space and time. Home too was now estranged, and needed to be fixed. Blue Yasmeen and Sister Allbee, Oliver Oldcastle and the Lady Philosopher, had been left hanging in a stairwell at The Bagdad-without-an- h , in suspended animation, and that picture needed to start moving again. Two of those four he cared about and two were foes but all four deserved a cure, deserved to be unstranged, as did the city, the country and the whole world of men. This Fairyland of curved palaces defended by sheets of lightning, this fable of love-sick jinn, dying kings and magic boxes unspooling their stories in the tricky hands of spies, this was not for him. He was a denizen of the lower world and had had enough of fabulous heights.

As for us, looking back at him, seeing him as if from a great distance, held there in a motionless tableau of three figures, lost in fantasy: it is hard for us too to see him clearly there amidst the cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces. We too need him back on earth, himself and his new beloved, fairy though she be. Their love story, and this was, even if only briefly, their love story, only makes sense to us here below. There, above, it’s an airiness, as insubstantial as a dream. Their true love story, the one that has meaning for us and weight, comes wrapped up in a war. For our future places too, in that past time, had been made strange, and we know, we who come after and reflect, that we could not be who we are or lead the lives we live had these two not fallen back to earth to make things right, or as right as things can ever be, if indeed our time is right, as we say it is, if it be not simply a different kind of wrong.

And by this time the Chinese box was peeling crazily, and as each layer fell away a new voice told a new tale, none of the tales finished because the box inevitably found a new story inside each unfinished one, until it seemed that digression was the true principle of the universe, that the only real subject was the way the subject kept changing, and how could anyone live in a crazy situation in which nothing remained the same for five minutes and no narrative was ever driven through to its conclusion, there could be no meaning in such an environment, only absurdity, the unmeaningness that was the only sort of meaning anyone could hold on to. So here at one moment was the tale of the city whose people stopped believing in money, they went right on believing in God and country because those stories made sense but these scraps of paper and plastic cards were obviously valueless; and at the next moment inside that story there began (but did not end) the story of Mr. X who woke up one day and began, for no reason at all, to speak a new language that nobody understood, and the language began to change his character, he had always been a sullen fellow but the less comprehensible his words were, the more voluble he became, gesticulating and laughing, so that people liked him a lot better than they did when they had followed what he was saying; and just as that was getting interesting another layer peeled off and the story changed again,

and we, remembering, see in our minds’ eyes the tableau unfreeze, a starburst of parrots exploding from the palace balcony at the marble courtyard’s edge, the scent of white lilies on the breeze rippling the princess’s garments, and somewhere in the distance the sweet mourning of a wooden flute. We see her jerk away from Mr. Geronimo while pointing at the Chinese box unspooling on its table, and then fall to the floor with her hands over her ears and Omar the spy, too, falling, his body jerked by strong spasms, while Geronimo Manezes hears nothing, feels nothing, sees only the jinn and the jinnia in convulsions on the palace floor, and this is where, according to our histories, he showed the presence of mind on which the future hinged, our future as well as his own, snatching up the Chinese box and running with it to the balcony overlooking the slopes of Qâf and throwing the lethal object with all his strength into the high empty air.

After a moment Dunia and Omar recovered and rose from the floor. Thank you, she said to Mr. Geronimo. You saved our lives and we are in your debt.

The jinn can be formal at such moments. It is their way. Do a service for a jinni or jinnia and he or she owes you service in return. In these matters, even with lovers, the behavior of the jinn is scrupulously correct. Dunia and Omar may even have bowed to Geronimo Manezes, for that would be the correct ritualistic gesture, but on this subject the records are silent. If they had, he, being the strong silent type, would have been embarrassed by their display.