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

Sometimes he arrived too late and a riser, already too far gone, was dying of hypothermia or breathing difficulties in the thin cold air of an Andean sky, or a crushee had been crushed in a Mayfair art gallery, his bones broken and compacted, his body a burst concertina leaking blood through flattened clothes, his hat atop the whole sorry mess, looking like an installation. But often, accelerating down the wormholes, he showed up in time, he raised the fallen, lowered the risen. In some places the disease had spread rapidly, there were great crowds of the terrified floating above the lampposts, and he brought them all softly down with a wave of his hand; and then, oh! the gratitude, bordering on adoration. He understood. He had been there himself. Proximity to calamity released the human capacity for love. The expression on the face of Alexandra Bliss Fariña after he restored the glory of La Incoerenza and brought her and Oliver Oldcastle back down to earth: every man alive would wish to be looked at in that way by a beautiful woman.

Even if standing next to that woman was her hairy estate manager, wearing exactly the same adoring look.

The lifelong pessimism of the Lady Philosopher had been wholly dissipated by Mr. Geronimo’s small miracle, burned off by his local magic like clouds by the heat of the sun. This new Alexandra looked at Geronimo Manezes as a sort of savior, capable of rescuing not only herself and her estate but the whole incoherent earth as well. It was to her bed that he retired at the end of these long strange days — What was a “day” anymore? he asked himself; the wormhole journeys across space and time zones, the staccato arrivals and departures a hundred and more times a day, disconnected him from any real sense of the continuity of life, and when exhaustion claimed him, the bone-weariness of the rootless, he came to her. These were stolen moments, oases in the desert of the war, and each of them made promises to the other of longer moments in the future, dream-moments in dream-places which were their dreams of peace. Will we win? she asked him, curled into his arm, his hand cradling her head. We will win, won’t we?

Yes, he told her. We will win, because the alternative is to lose, and that is unthinkable. We will win.

He slept poorly now, overtired, feeling his years, and in the half-sleeping nights he wondered about that promise. Dunia was gone, he didn’t know where, but he knew why: she was hunting the biggest game of all, the four great enemies she had made it her business to destroy. Messages and instructions from her poured daily and nightly into the newly opened jinn area of his brain. She was still running the operation, no question about that, but she was a hidden general, moving too far and too fast to be seen personally by her troops. And could “we” really win, he wondered, were there enough of us, or were there in reality more people seduced by the darkness of the jinn, was “victory” what people actually wanted, or did the word seem triumphalist and wrong, did people prefer the idea of making an accommodation with the new masters, and would the dark jinn’s overthrow feel like freedom or just the ascent of a new superpower, the Lightning Queen come to rule them instead of the Giant and the Sorcerer. These bubbling thoughts sapped his strength but the woman lying beside him gave it back. Yes, “we” would win. “We” owed it to our loved ones not to love. We owed it to the idea of love itself which might die if the dark jinn ruled the world.

Love, for so long dammed up inside Mr. Geronimo, was flooding through him now. His powerful intoxication with Dunia herself had started it, probably doomed from the start, being a thing of echoes, each seeing in the other their true love’s avatar … but that already seemed a long time ago, she had retreated from him into queenliness and war. Love itself had remained in him, he felt it splashing around in his insides, a great tidal sea of it ebbing and flowing through his heart, and here was Alexandra Bliss Fariña ready to dive into those waters, let us drown in love together, my love, and yes, he thought, maybe one last great love was permitted him, and here she was, ready for him, and yes, why not, he would take the plunge as well. He was so tired in her bed that there was little in the way of lovemaking, one night in four or five was about his speed these days anyway, but she was full of understanding. He was her warrior to be loved and waited for and she would take what little of him she could get and wait for the rest.

And outside her bedroom door when he set off again on his travels stood Oliver Oldcastle, not angry Oliver of old but new, grateful, obsequious Oldcastle, as dewy-eyed as any spaniel, cap in hand, a sickly yellow-toothed smile affixed to his usually lugubrious face as if tied on with a piece of string. Is there anything I can do for you sir, anything you need, just say the word. I’m not much of a fighter but if it comes down to it I’m your man.

These fawning obeisances got Mr. Geronimo’s goat. I think I liked it better in the old days, he told the estate manager, when you were threatening to kill me.

In the cradle of life, between the Tigris and Euphrates, where once the land of Nod, which is to say Wandering, stood to the east of Eden, it was Omar the Ayyar who showed Dunia, his queen, the first signs of the rifts appearing in the body of the four-headed monster which had set out to rule the earth. In those days she was moving around the world like a bright shadow resembling a blurred light in the corner of the eye, and with her, inseparably, was her favorite spy, both of them searching high and low for the four Grand Ifrits. Those boys have got better at hiding out than when we were fooling around in the old days, she told Omar. Back then I could see through their cloaking devices without even trying. But maybe in those days they secretly wanted to be found.

If relatively little has come down to us about the master spy of Qâf, Omar the Ayyar, it is very probably because of the residual prejudice among the jinn towards male homosexuality, cross-dressing, and suchlike practices. The jinnias, or jiniri, of Peristan evidently had no objection to lesbian activity, and indeed during the period of the sex strike there was a dramatic spike in such behavior, but among the male jinn the old bigotries were widespread. Omar’s well-known professional exploits, his intelligence-gathering in the guise of a harem eunuch or in women’s clothing, had won him a great reputation as a spy, but they also made him an outsider among his own kind. He himself would say that he had always been an outsider anyway. His dress was deliberately flamboyant, with brocade shawls flung over his shoulders with meticulous abandon, and many outrageous hats; his manner was decadent and brittle, and he set himself up as an aesthete and dandy and affected not to give a damn what any of his peers thought. He gathered kindred spirits around him in the intelligence service of Qâf, which had the unintended consequence of making many people in Fairyland profoundly distrust this team of brilliant butterflies who were also the most effective snoops in the upper world. However, Dunia had always trusted him totally. In the final conflict against the Grand Ifrits she came to feel like an outsider too, setting out to avenge the father whom she had never managed to please by murdering members of her own race. Omar the Ayyar accompanied her every day as she hunted down the dark quartet, and she came to feel that they were kindred spirits in many ways. Her fondness for the human race, her love of one man and their descendants, set her apart from her people too. She was aware that she did not possess the personal characteristics which had made her father so widely loved and admired. She was direct, truthful and forceful, whereas her father had been oblique, distracted and charming. Her insistence on the sex strike made things worse. She could foresee a moment in the not-too-distant future at which the ladies of Peristan would lose sympathy for her, and shrug their collective shoulders at her war against the Grand Ifrits. What was the lower world to them anyway? And why was she so hot and bothered about it? This was a war she could lose if it went on much longer. It was essential to find the four dark jinn before very long. She was running out of time.