Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“I lifted him up whenever the women left. They always left him, that was a fact. When the gaudy patter ran out they found there wasn’t enough of a man there and they excused themselves and exited. He never found anybody to build something real with. But he seemed content in those days just to find the next temporary connection. The next unreal thing. And when they dumped him, he came around. He came to his Trampoline in search of some bounce and that was my fault, I always cheered him up, I didn’t say, you asshole, can’t you see which of us is more in need of being lifted up right now? I should have said it but I just didn’t. Lifting people up, that’s my thing. So, I didn’t complain.

“The year of my illness was also the year of the song. The one that gave me my name.

“It builds up, the resentment. It piles up like New York garbage. Then something comes along and gives it a shove and after that, get out of the way of the avalanche if you can.”

The sun sank behind the Hudson and in a moment of silence the three of them stood on the apartment’s terrace and watched it go, the light of the fire dying in the water like a dream being forgotten. The Trampoline, however, was unquenched and on fire, had forgotten nothing, and what had been pent up in her during the long years of estrangement was blazing out of her like the flame of a second sun that had no intention of setting, not until its hot work had been done.

“Betrayal blindness,” she said, and it wasn’t clear if she was addressing Quichotte or Sancho or planet Venus glinting in the darkening sky. “Victims of treachery find ways of deluding themselves that they are not being betrayed. Sexually, for example, but I assume in other areas too. Business, politics, friendship. We are good at fooling ourselves in order to preserve our trust. But it isn’t only the victims who do it. The traitors, too, convince themselves that they are not committing treason. At the very moment of their deepest betrayals they assure themselves that they are acting well, even that their deeds are in the best interest of the betrayed person, or of some higher cause. They save us from ourselves, or, like Brutus and his gang, they save Rome from Caesar. They are the innocent ones, the good guys, or, at the very least, not so bad.”

“What did he do?” Sancho asked. “Dad, I mean, not Brutus.”

The Trampoline crossed her arms and clutched at her shoulders, and breathed deeply, gathering herself, like a storm.

It was necessary, she said, by way of a preamble, to tell Sancho something about the problem of South Asian men. She presumed Sancho was not fully briefed on this topic?

No, she hadn’t thought so.

She would not bore him with statistics. But she would ask him to believe that in her field, the microfinancing of poor women to enable them to become economically self-sufficient, she could not count on the backing of the men in their lives. In her work she and her teams in the field subscribed to the so-called sixteen decisions of the Grameen Bank movement, and decision eleven, for example, “We shall not take any dowry at our sons’ weddings, nor shall we give away any dowry at our daughters’ weddings,” was not popular with the patriarchy. Sexual violence against South Asian women was present wherever and whenever women tried to establish independent lives and expand the zone of their personal freedoms.

The microcredit movement lent money without asking for any guarantees. It operated entirely on the basis of trust between the lender and the borrower. He could appreciate, could he not, that in any field where trust was as important a currency as banknotes, the issue of betrayal was a hot-button topic.

Here Sancho interrupted her to say that Quichotte had told him something about her operation; quite a lot, in fact. This information came to her as a surprise.

“He remembered that,” she said. “I didn’t think he would remember.”

“Because of the Interior Event?”

“Yes.”

“What was the Interior Event?”

“I will tell you in due course. Everything in its proper place.”

“I WROTE AN ARTICLE,” she said. “In The New York Times. About my work. It was at a time when I was feeling worn down by the battle, I admit that, and I expressed my frustration about the many ways, big and small, in which South Asian men held women back, the many obstacles of old-fashioned attitudes that had to be negotiated and overcome. The article was well received at first and was reprinted in many countries, including the South Asian countries. For a moment I was happy about the article’s reception. Then the craziness began. People—South Asian men—began to send me messages of abuse. ‘Man hater,’ ‘lesbian,’ et cetera. Death threats were also received, and descriptions of the terrible things that would be done to my body before and after I died, and promises of hellfire, and, worst of all, threats against the women who used our organization. What shocked me was that respected, senior male members of the community in this country condemned me too. Religious leaders, but also business leaders, the same ones who had previously encouraged me and supported my initiatives. There was a demand that I make a public apology to all Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Sri Lankan men, the ones living in those countries and the ones in the diaspora too. For a moment it looked as if everything I had tried to build would be destroyed overnight. As if I had beaten one life-threatening disease only to be overwhelmed by a different kind of killer sickness. The name of the sickness was a word we were all just learning.

“Blowback.

“What saved me was the date. Let’s just say, B.G., which is to say, Before Google. The world before the birth of the monster the Internet became, before the age of electronically propagated hysteria, in which words have become bombs that blow up their users, and to make any public utterance is to set off a series of such explosions. Our age, A.G., in which the mob rules, and the smartphone rules the mob. Back then the most advanced technology available was the fax machine. Old technology saved my business and my life. It was too slow to kill. The howls of outrage spread, but they spread slowly. My character was assassinated, but it was a slow assassination, which allowed time for a defense to be assembled, for resistance to be organized. And, best of all, the women we had trusted, to whom we had given money without any guarantee of its return, those women now trusted us. Trust saved me as it had saved them. The organization did not break. I did not break. Instead, the storm broke, and we survived.

“Your father, the only half of a brother I’ve got, I hoped I could trust, but he betrayed that trust. And at the time that felt like an unforgivable thing.”

“He wasn’t on your side,” Sancho said. It wasn’t really a question.

“I don’t know which half of the available brother material he got,” Trampoline said, keeping her emotions at bay. “But I think it was defective. He said I should have known. He said, what did I expect. He said, did I do it to provoke, to get attention, whatever. He said it was my own fault. Somebody sent a flayed pig’s head in the mail to me at the New York Times address, and they called me and asked if I wanted it messengered over. For all of this I was to blame.”

“I don’t remember the pig’s head,” Quichotte interjected, mournfully. “These accusations should be leveled at another person, who disappeared long ago.”

THIS WAS WHEN THE Trampoline began to tell Sancho how the end of her relationship with Quichotte was linked to a larger ending: the end of the world.

Sancho sat up when this larger subject was introduced. “Wait a minute. We were just talking about a pig’s head. How did we get from there to doomsday?”