Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

He was flying toward a deathbed now—or somewhere very close to a deathbed—hoping there would be time for a final scene of reconciliation. Sister was in the angel’s fist and he didn’t seem inclined to let her go. At the end of most lives, he reminded himself, death did not arrive as a crime, but as the great mystery, which everyone had to solve alone.

Mysteries were the perfect analogue of human life as well as human death. Human beings were mysteries to others and to themselves as well. Some chance occurrence jolted them from their sleep and they began to act in ways of which they would not have believed themselves capable. We know nothing about ourselves or our neighbors, he thought. The nice lady next door turns out to be an ax murderer, giving her mother forty whacks. The silent, smiling, bearded gentleman upstairs is revealed as a terrorist when he drives a truck into innocent people in the town center. Death offers us clarification, it shines a harsh shadowless light on life, and then we see.

The death of Don Quixote felt like the extinction in all of us of a special kind of beautiful foolishness, an innocent grandeur, a thing for which the world had no place, but which one might call humanity. The marginal man, the man laughably out of touch and doggedly out of step and also unarguably out of mind, revealed in his last moment as the one to care most about and mourn most deeply for. Remember this. Have this above all in mind.

He raised his window blind to look out at the no-longer-dangerous sky. There were black dots dancing in his field of vision. He suffered from floaters, had done so for a long time, but they seemed to be getting worse. Sometimes a group of floaters seemed to come together near the corner of his eye and then it looked as if the universe itself might be fraying. As if empty spaces had appeared in the fabric of what-there-was.

He pulled the window blind down again. We are lost wanderers, he thought. We have eaten the cattle of the sun god, and incurred the wrath of Olympus. He closed his eyes. Sister was waiting in London. That was what mattered right now. Death, and Quichotte, and everything else, could wait. A fourth vodka, however, would be a good idea.

(EARLIER.)

“Hello.”

“Hello, Brother.”

“This is a good idea, right? To have these getting-to-know-you talks before we meet in real life? It’s been a long—”

“Yes, it’s a good idea.”

“We can do it on Skype or FaceTime or WhatsApp video if you prefer. Or Signal if for any reason you want the conversations encrypted.”

“No.”

“No, not encrypted?”

“No, not Skype or FaceTime or WhatsApp video or Signal.”

“Why not? Just a question.”

“I don’t want to have to dress up for you. When I’m ready I can send you a recent photograph. I’m not ready yet.”

He didn’t tell her about Googling her. “You don’t have to dress up.”

“The phone is fine.”

“Do you want to see a photograph of me?”

“Not today.” That meant she had already Googled him.

“Okay. So who goes first? If you’d—”

“You go first.”

“I hoped you wouldn’t say that.”

“You go first.”

“Then I’ll begin by making my apology.”

“As is only right and proper.”

The first thing he had to do was to get over the accent. She had lived in Britain forever, he got that, so it was natural she would sound British, but did she have to talk like the fucking queen? Ay’m so heppy to heah from you. The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain. In Hahtf’d Heref’d and Hempshah, hurricanes hahdly evah heppen. Rule Britennia, Britennia rules the waves. Ez is only raight and proppah. Half Lizzie Two, half My Fair Lady. That was some white shit.

There was, however, something else about her voice on the phone, something which even the plummy vowels could not disguise: a small shakiness, a trembling, which (or so it seemed to Brother) she was making a powerful effort of will to disguise.

“Are you all right?” he asked her.

“Don’t change the subject.”

So he made the apology. He thought of Quichotte rising formally to his feet to speak, then falling to his knees and touching the Trampoline’s dress at the hemline. That last kind of self-abasement wasn’t Brother’s style, but if they had been video conferencing he might have stood. He tried to speak with something like his character’s formality, to be wholehearted and undefended in his remorse. When he finished he realized his heartbeat had accelerated and he was breathing heavily, an old man who had overexerted himself. He had to start thinking seriously about what he ate, and about getting fit, he told himself, not for the first time. Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, had died after going to the gym as everyone in California was obliged to do by the state’s unwritten laws, to worship at the altar of one’s body all the world’s gods of health, whose names were only known to those who, being vegan and gluten-free, were pure enough to receive the information: Fufluns the Etruscan deity of plants, wellness, and happiness, Aegle the Greek goddess of the healthy glow, Maximón the Mayan hero god of health, Haoma from Persia, and Panacea the goddess of the universal cure. Ever since Brother read about Adams’s death he had started saying, half joking, half defensively, that exercise was to be avoided because it killed people. Don’t panic. Have some fries with that.

But now, after doing nothing more strenuous than telling his sister on the phone that he was sorry for his past misdeeds, he was stressed out and gasping for breath. The death angel hovered and then set him free. (Later, when the angel released the plane in which he was crossing the ocean, he thought, that’s two lives used up, and I’m not a cat.)

His jumbled thoughts about death and Equinox filled the gap between the conclusion of his apology and the beginning of Sister’s response, which came after a lengthy pause. When she spoke her words were as measured as a legal deposition. “Remorse and forgiveness are obviously related,” she said, “but it’s not a cause-and-effect relationship. The connection between them is the act. It is for the actor to decide whether or not he feels regret and remorse for the act, whether or not he is willing and ready to apologize in the hope of making amends. It is for the person acted upon to decide whether or not she feels able to set the act aside and move on, which is to say, to forgive. The decision of the person acted upon is not contingent upon the decision of the actor. One may genuinely feel remorse and make a genuine apology, and still not be forgiven, if the person acted upon is not ready to forgive. Alternatively, one may not feel ready to apologize, and still be forgiven, if the forgiver is ready to let bygones be bygones. You have apologized. That was and is your decision. I accept that it is a genuine apology. Now it is for me to decide whether or not I can forgive what you did. Or maybe I have already decided that. Or perhaps I never will.”

“I’m glad there’s at least one lawyer in the family,” Brother replied. “Pa and Ma would have been so proud.”

Those were their first moves. The purpose of the opening in the game of chess, Brother thought, was to establish command of the center and to give your pieces the greatest possible positional advantage. He had begun with a sacrifice, the unreserved apology, but it wasn’t immediately clear if he had improved his position as a result. In the conversations that followed they circled one another, Brother reluctant to abase himself further, Sister playing a cautious game, defensive and slow. They ventured into childhood memories, not very successfully. The past, the peacefully dead mother, the suicide father with the empty bottle of pills by his bedside, Sister’s affair with Sad-Faced Older Painter, the slap, all of that felt like treacherous territory, in which one or both could easily make false moves and lose ground that would be hard to recapture. Their few forays into old times led to strained exchanges.