Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

Quichotte understood that the commotion in the control room was caused by fear. The last moments were at hand.

“How does the door open?” he asked.

“Like a door,” Evel Cent said. “You turn the doorknob, and pull.”

“And you’re sure the connection is safe?”

“The connection is stable. On the other side, nothing is certain.”

“You go first,” Quichotte said.

“I’m not ready to go,” Evel Cent said. “I have to supervise the evacuation of my staff, and perhaps of some of the people outside. It’s my responsibility.”

“You go first,” Quichotte repeated, and there was a gun in his hand.

“Finally,” said the gun. “I thought you’d never ask.”

“You can’t be serious,” Evel Cent said.

“I’m very serious,” said Quichotte. “Before I bring Miss Salma to the gate, I need to see what happens.”

When the door was open they saw the gray fog.

“Very well,” said Evel Cent; and he turned; and lowered his head; and charged into the next world like a bull. And was gone.

WHAT VANISHES WHEN EVERYTHING vanishes: not only everything, but the memory of everything. Not only can everything no longer remember itself, no longer remember how it was when it still was everything, before it became nothing, but there is nobody else to remember either, and so everything not only ceases to exist but becomes a thing that never was; it is as if everything that was, was not, and moreover there is nobody left to tell the story, not the whole grand story of everything, not even the last sad story of how everything became nothing, because there is no storyteller, no hand to write or eye to read, so that the book of how everything became nothing cannot be written, just as we cannot write the stories of our own deaths, which is our tragedy, to be stories whose endings can never be known, not even to ourselves, because we are no longer there to know them.

Let us think of it this way. Here at the heart of a canyon of light an old man and the woman he loves stand in front of an open door. Who knows what lies beyond it? But on this side of the door, there’s hope. There may after all be a life after death. He grasps her hand. She squeezes his hand. A long quest comes to an end. Here they stand in the Valley of Annihilation, with the power to disappear into the universe. And just possibly into something new.

Quichotte, a sane man, understands that it won’t happen. But on this side of the door, it’s possible, for a few last moments, to set that knowledge aside, and believe.

“Come on,” he said to Salma. “Let’s go through.”

ON THE AUTHOR’S DESK, and on the mantelpiece in his office, stood thirteen modestly sized objects, carefully arranged, which made the room feel like home: a polished “found art” Chinese stone whose patterning resembled a landscape of wooded hills in the mist, a Buddha-like Gandharan head, an upraised wooden Cambodian hand with a symbol of peace in the center of its palm, two starlike crystals, one large, the other small, a Victorian locket inside which he had placed photographs of his parents, three other photographs depicting a childhood in a distant tropical city, a brass Edwardian English cigar cutter made to look like a sharp-toothed dragon, an Indian “Cheeta Brand” matchbox bearing the image of a prowling cheetah, a miniature marble hoopoe bird, and a Chinese fan. Without these objects around him, he couldn’t work. He picked up at least one of them once a day. And there was one more, too precious to display, which he kept in a drawer: a little silver ingot, an inch high, on which was engraved the map of unpartitioned India. This was his greatest talisman, his open-sesame, his magic lamp. He had caressed it this very day, before writing his final page.

Often at the end of a working day the Author would fall asleep at his desk, his forehead resting on the wood, bowed down before the computer screen as if performing some ancient rite of worship. So it was that, on this day of the ending, he was in a half-sleeping, half-waking state when he thought he saw a tiny door open at the very bottom of a corner of his room, less than half of half of half of a millimeter high, and through that door a bright light flowed, an intense pinpoint of light, as if it might be from a mousehole behind which a studious undersized mouse sat reading by a lamp; or, as it might also be, the light of another reality, another Earth, bleeding into his. And then a creature tumbled through the opening. He knew at once who and what it was. It was impossible but he knew. And now he also had an explanation for the fog. It was a question of scale. This world so gigantic compared to that. That other world, which he now understood to be the one he himself had made, was a miniature universe, perhaps captured under a glass dome—a snow globe without snow—which had begun to crack, so that its minuscule inhabitants had become desperate to escape. And here they were, bursting into his office, but tragically finding its air too thick for their tiny eyes to see through, their tiny lungs to breathe. He saw the first minute creature enter, gasp, and faint, its hope turning to despair in this new continuum inhabited by what to it were super-colossi, giant mastodons, able to crush it under their thumbs. The microscopic man, the creature of the Author’s imagination, had brilliantly done the impossible and joined the two worlds, had crossed over from the world of Fancy into the Author’s real world, but in this one he was unassimilable, helpless, puny, gasping for air, not finding it, choking, and so lost.

Stop! cried the Author, knowing what would happen next, the thing he could not stop, for he had already written it; it had already happened, so it could not be prevented from happening. His heart pounded, feeling as if it might burst from his chest. Everything was coming to an end.

The end cannot be changed after it has ended; not the end of the universe, not the death of an Author, nor the end of two precious, even if very small, human lives.

There they stood in the gateway, on the threshold of an impossible dream: Miss Salma R and her Quichotte.

For Eliza

This novel owes some obvious debts: to Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman) and to Jules Massenet’s opera Don Quichotte; to Katherine MacLean’s story “Pictures Don’t Lie,” Arthur C. Clarke’s story “The Nine Billion Names of God,” Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros (translated from the French by Derek Prouse) , and, for the nickname of the Trampoline, to Paul Simon’s song “Graceland.” For the sequence of seven Valleys, I’m indebted to Farid-ud-Din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds. My thanks, too, to Francesco Clemente, for cleaning up the cricket’s Italian (any faults that remain in it are my own); to Andrew Wylie, Jacqueline Ko, Emma Herman, Tracy Bohan, and Jennifer Bernstein at the Wylie Agency; and, for her invaluable editorial guidance, Susan Kamil at Random House New York, as well as Louise Dennys at Knopf Canada and Bea Hemming at Jonathan Cape in London. Thanks, finally, to those friends and family members who served as helpful early readers, to Rachel Eliza Griffiths for her photographs and much else, and to my former assistant Dana Czapnik, now happily launched on her own literary career.

FICTION