Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“Cheer up. It doesn’t mean I’ll die tomorrow,” Sister said. “There’s treatment. In some cases the treatment keeps people going for the length of their natural lives. My view is, why shouldn’t one of those people be me?”

The judge had come in, unnoticed by either of the women. He walked over to Daughter and took the paper from her hand.

“If you die now, Jack,” he said to his wife, “that will be the most unforgivable thing of all.”

Sister was calm now, back in charge of herself. She opened a bottle of the good Bordeaux. “This thing is supposed to be a disease of white people,” Sister said with a glass in her hand. “Or people who have been exposed to Agent Orange or other unpleasant chemicals. Or, it’s hereditary, but that’s not the case in my case. It’s as if it accidentally climbed into the wrong body, but it’s here in my blood, no question of that, and the bone marrow too, as you see. The white count is high. A malfunction in the DNA of the cells that make the blood. Malfunctioning DNA! It’s like discovering you’re a Friday car. The workers who made me wanted to knock off for the weekend and did a hurried, botched job. But I’ve been so damn healthy all my life. People have complimented me on my good health. And I got used to replying, ‘Your good health is the thing you have until the day your doctor tells you you don’t have it anymore.’ And so here we are.”

“There’s a doctor in America,” Daughter said, looking up from her phone. “Indian doctor. Brown person. He’s the top man. Even the stages of the illness are named after him. Here’s the hospital where he works. I can call for an appointment.”

“London is fine,” Sister said. “The same care is available here. No need to go flying off across an ocean.”

“Make the call,” the judge said. He looked older all of a sudden, Daughter thought. The news had knocked some of the life out of him. Maybe they would both be gone soon, maybe this thing would kill them both. Maybe it would be a repeat of Ma and Pa, the grandparents she had never met. Ma died and Pa couldn’t bear to live another day.

And after that the next person for whom the hand reached up would be herself.

“If you two will excuse me,” Sister said, “there’s an email I have to send.” At her desk, she took a deep breath and wrote to Brother. 2. P-KB4.

This time the reply came quickly. 2….PxP. The pawn sacrifice was accepted, as she had thought it would be. The sadness fell away from her and she smiled.

Do you remember? she wrote.

Allgaier-Kieseritzky Gambit, he replied. You always liked it. But I’ll tell you something about chess. It’s not like riding a bicycle. It doesn’t all come flooding back.

Let’s see how much you’ve forgotten, she wrote. 3. N-KB3.

…P-KN4. How am I doing?

4. P-KR4.

4….P-N5.

5 N-K5.

And here, he wrote, is where my head starts hurting. Can we try something else?

What would you like to try?

“Hello.”

“Hello, Brother.”

Time, that lethal chamber of horrors whose walls close slowly in upon the luckless inhabitant until they crush the life out of him, pressed in on Quichotte as he stood gazing up at his half sister’s apartment building. He felt a tightness clutching at his chest, a band of pain like a message from the Reaper. How poetic it would be, he thought, if he were to fall down dead on her very doorstep, offering up his life itself on the altar of her temple, by way of making amends. The Gould Industries building (Brother wrote, housing the Trampoline in the apartment of his fantasies), one hundred years old and formerly a printing house and steel wool manufactory, stood at the corner of Greenwich and Beach with the arrogance of its double affluence, the history of past industrial successes within its walls yoked to the two-thousand-dollars-per-square-foot eminence of its desirable present. The Human Trampoline owned five thousand of those square feet, with high ceilings and exposed beams, high up at the penthouse level. A liveried doorman stood at that portal, eyeing Quichotte and Sancho suspiciously. Quichotte less than warm in his worn suit and Sancho in distressed denim and the coat that needed dry-cleaning made an unimpressive pair. They faced one another in a motionless standoff, Quichotte and the doorman, the traveler’s dilapidated pride offering a silent repudiation of the uniformed flunky’s sneer. Then there was a commotion in the lobby, and in a flurry of flying fabric and waving arms a woman with wild black hair—still black, defying the years!—burst out of the building and spread her arms in welcome. It was the Trampoline. She was tall, could perhaps even be called gangling, with a long, bony face, and if it wasn’t for the hair and the expensive hoop earrings it would have been like looking in a mirror, thought Quichotte.

She took him by the shoulders and leaned in for a kiss. Then she asked him what Sancho thought was an odd question: “What do you remember?”

Quichotte seemed bemused all of a sudden. “I remember some of it,” he said, defensively. “I remember climbing with our father among the rocks at Scandal Point to look for little crabs in the rock pools. And the sleeping berths in the Frontier Mail to Delhi, me on the top, he below. And the metal tub with the big ice block in it he bought to keep us cool on the train. I remember the little wooden Ferris wheel, just four seats, he hired for my birthdays. The charrakh-choo. ” His face was full of sadness. He put a hand up to his head as if to soothe an ache. “You weren’t there for any of that. You came later. You don’t know any of this.”

“So you don’t remember,” she told him. “About us.”

“I remember long ago better,” he said. “Back then, before everything, before he remarried, before you. More recently…it’s patchy.”

“And you,” the Trampoline said, looking hard at Sancho. “You’re quite a mystery. I need to hear all about you.”

Sancho was surprised by the presence, in the Trampoline’s penthouse, of much religious imagery. There were two bronze guardians at her front door, greenish centaurlike demigods the size of bull terriers, with human heads and animal bodies that had both leonine paws and cloven bull-like hoofs. Inside the door was a six-foot-high wooden figure, lionlike, its face almost demonic. This was a yali, a threshold god. Once it had stood at the door of a palace on the Malabar Coast, and courtiers entering or leaving, or embarking upon some new enterprise, or princes going to war, would ask for its blessings. There was a modern painting of the Buddha, sleeping, covered by a white sheet, beneath a black tree set against a red ground. This was the tree of enlightenment, and it usefully came with a blue electrical cord attached to it, with a plug at the end. The cord was not plugged in. Enlightenment had evidently not yet occurred.

She answered the question Sancho hadn’t worked out how to ask. “No,” she said, “I’m not religious, but I find these works to be beautiful and powerful and moving. Also, the women we work with, the poor women we are lifting up, whom we are enabling to lift themselves up, all of these women believe in something, and sometimes I think their lives are richer than mine because of that.”