Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (25 page)

As carefully as a sapper defusing a bomb, Omar the Ayyar peeled away the outer skin of the box, and poof! the onion skin dematerialized, and at once a story began, released from its wafer-thin layer of cornered space: a murmur rising to become a mellifluous female voice, one of the many voices the Chinese box contained and made available for the use of the messenger. This voice, husky, low, soothing, made Mr. Geronimo think of Blue Yasmeen, and of The Bagdad-without-an-
h
where she lived, the home from which he had been evicted. A wave of melancholy washed over him and then receded. The story flung its hook at him, which lodged in his lobeless ear, and caught his attention.

“That morning after the general election, O illustrious King, a certain Mr. Airagaira of the distant city of B. was awoken like everyone else by loud sirens followed by a megaphone announcement from a flag-waving white van. Everything was about to change, the megaphone cried, because it was what the people had demanded. The people were sick of corruption and mismanagement and above all sick of the family that had had a stranglehold on power for so long that they had become like the relatives everyone hates and can’t wait until they leave the room. Now the family was gone, the megaphone said, and the country could finally grow up without the detested National Relatives. Like everyone else, the megaphone said, he was to stop working immediately at his present job, a job which as a matter of fact he enjoyed—he was an editor of books for young adults, at a prominent publishing company in the city—and report for duty at one of the new assignment stations that had been set up overnight, where he would be informed of his new employment, and become a part of the new grand national enterprise, the construction of the machine of the future.

“He got dressed quickly and went downstairs to explain to the officer with the megaphone that he possessed neither the necessary engineering skills nor mechanical aptitude for such a task, being a person
from arts side not science side,
and besides, he was content to allow things to remain as they were, he had made his choices, and selected career satisfaction over the accumulation of wealth. As a confirmed bachelor of a certain age, he had more than enough for his needs, and the work was valuable: the challenging, entertaining, and shaping of young minds. The megaphone officer shrugged indifferently. ‘What’s that to me?’ he said in a curt, discourteous manner. ‘You’ll do as the new nation requests unless you want to be thought of as an antinational element. That is an element for which there is no longer any place in our periodic table. It is, as the French say, though I do not speak French, believing it to be alien to our traditions and therefore unimportant to know,
hors de classification.
The trucks will be here soon. If you insist on making your objection, take it up with the transportation officer.’

“His colleagues in the publishing company said of Mr. Airagaira, not always in complimentary tones, that he possessed an innocence that exceeded the knowing cynicism of most children, and therefore failed to grasp the disappointed bitterness of a world that had lost its innocence long ago. Gentle, bespectacled, confused, he waited for the promised trucks. If René Magritte had painted Stan Laurel in shades of light brown the result might have resembled Mr. Airagaira, grinning his vague, goofy grin at the gathering crowd, and blinking myopically at the herders corralling them, men with orange marks on their foreheads and long sticks in their hands. The convoy of trucks duly arrived, curving down the old seaside promenade like ink blots dripping down an old painting, and when Mr. Airagaira finally found himself face to face with the transportation officer, a burly thick-haired young man plainly proud of his muscly arms and barrel chest, he was sure that the misunderstanding would soon be cleared up. He began to speak but the transportation officer interrupted him and asked for his name. He gave it and the officer consulted a sheaf of documents attached to a clipboard in his hands. ‘Here it is,’ he said, showing a paper to Mr. Airagaira. ‘Your employers have let you go.’ Mr. Airagaira shook his head. ‘That’s impossible,’ he explained reasonably. ‘In the first place, I’m valued at the office, and in the second place, even if this were true, I would have first received oral and then written warnings and finally a letter of dismissal. That is the proper way of doing things and that procedure has not been followed, plus, I repeat, I have every reason to believe I am well regarded at work, and in line, not for dismissal, but for promotion.’ The transportation officer pointed to a signature at the bottom of the sheet. ‘Recognize that?’ Mr. Airagaira was shocked to note that he did recognize his boss’s unmistakable hand. ‘Then that’s an end to it,’ the transportation officer said. ‘If you’ve been fired, you must have done something very wrong. You can play the innocent, but your guilt is written on your face, and this signature which you have verified is the proof. Get in the truck.’

“Mr. Airagaira allowed himself one sentence of dissent. ‘I would never have believed,’ he said, ‘that such a thing could happen, here in my own beloved hometown of B.’

“ ‘The name of the city has been changed,’ the transportation officer said. ‘It will now be known once again by its ancient name, which the gods gave it long ago: Deliverance.’

“Illustrious King: Mr. Airagaira had never heard that name, and knew nothing about the gods’ involvement in naming the city in ancient times, when the city had not even existed, it being one of the newer cities of the country, not an ancient metropolis like D. to the north but a modern conurbation, but he made no further protest, and along with everyone else climbed meekly into one of the trucks and was driven away to the new factories in the north where the machine of the future was being constructed. In the weeks and months that followed his bewilderment grew. At his new workplace, among the forbidding resonances of the turbines and the staccato sizzle of the drills, in between the silent enigma of the conveyor belts upon which nuts, bolts, elbow joints and cogs moved smoothly past quality control points towards unknown destinations, he saw to his surprise that workers even less skilled than himself had been drafted into the great work, that small children were gluing together contraptions of wood and paper and these too were somehow being incorporated into the immensity of the whole, that cooks were making patties which were being stuck to the sides of the machine the way cow dung was used in the villages on the walls of mud houses. What kind of machine was this, Mr. Airagaira asked himself, that the entire nation was required to build? Seamen had to insert their ships into the machine and tillermen their plows; as he was moved from place to place along the gigantic construction site of the machine he saw hoteliers building their hotels into the machine and there were motion picture cameras in there and textile looms, but there were no clients in the hotels or film in the cameras or cloth on the looms. The mystery grew as the machine expanded, whole neighborhoods were demolished to make room for the machine, until it began to seem to Airagaira Sahib that the machine and the country had become synonymous, because there was no longer room in the country for anything except the machine.

“In those days food and water rationing had been imposed, hospitals ran out of medication and stores out of things to sell, the machine was everything and everywhere and everyone went to their appointed workstations and did the work they were allotted, screwing, drilling, riveting, hammering, and went home at night too exhausted to speak. The birthrate began to drop because sex was too much of an effort, and that was presented as a national benefit by the radio and television and megaphones. Mr. Airagaira noticed that the managers of the construction program, the orderers and pointers and herders, all seemed to be viciously angry all the time, and intolerant too, particularly of people like himself, people who had previously gone about their lives quietly and been happy for others to do the same. Such people were deemed to be simultaneously weak and dangerous, simultaneously useless and subversive, in need of a heavy disciplinary hand, which, make no mistake, the megaphones said, would be used wherever and whenever necessary, and how strange, Mr. Airagaira thought, that those who were on top in this new dispensation were angrier than those who were underneath.

“One day, O illustrious King, Mr. Airagaira saw a terrible sight. There were men and women carrying building materials in metal pans on their heads, which was normal, but something was wrong with the shape of these women and men, they looked—he groped for the word—squashed, as though something far heavier than the building materials they carried were weighing down on them, as if gravity itself had increased in their vicinity and they were literally being crushed into the earth. Was that even possible, he asked his neighbors on the quality control belt to which he had been assigned, could it be that they were being tortured, and everyone he asked said no with their mouths but yes with their eyes, no, what a suggestion, our country’s free, said their tongues, while their eyes said don’t be a fool, it’s frightening to utter such thoughts aloud. The next day the squashed people had gone and the pans of construction materials were being borne by new carriers, and if Mr. Airagaira saw something a little compressed about these persons too he kept his mouth shut about it and only his eyes spoke to his fellow workers, whose eyes spoke silently back. But keeping your mouth shut when there’s something you need to spit out is bad for the digestion, and Mr. Airagaira went home feeling nauseous and close to throwing up explosively in the transportation truck, which would have been, to use one of the new words of those days, inadvisable.

“That night Mr. Airagaira must have been visited, or even possessed, by a jinni, because the next morning on the production line he seemed like a different person, and there seemed to be a kind of electricity crackling around his ears. Instead of going to his workstation he marched right up to one of the construction management team, the senior-most orderer in sight, and said in a loud voice that made many of his fellow workers pay attention, ‘Excuse me, sir, but I have an important question for you concerning the machine.’

“ ‘No questions,’ said the orderer. ‘Go about your appointed tasks.’

“ ‘The question is this,’ Airagaira Sahib continued, having abandoned his gentle, confused, myopic voice for these new, stentorian, even megaphonic tones. ‘What does the machine of the future produce?’

“Many people were listening now. An assenting murmur rose from their ranks,
Yes, what does it produce.
The orderer narrowed his eyes and a group of herders closed in on Mr. Airagaira. ‘That is obvious,’ the orderer answered. ‘It produces the future.’

“ ‘The future is not a product,’ shouted Mr. Airagaira. ‘Rather, it is a mystery. What does the machine actually make?’

“The herders were close enough to seize Mr. Airagaira now, but a crowd of workers was gathering, and it was plain the herders were not sure how best to proceed. They looked for guidance to the orderer.

“ ‘What does it make?’ the orderer screamed. ‘It makes glory! Glory is the product. Glory, honor and pride. Glory is the future, but you have shown that there is no place in that future for you. Take this terrorist away. I will not allow him to infect this sector with his diseased mind. Such a mind is a bearer of the plague.’

“The crowd was unhappy as the herders made a grab for Mr. Airagaira but then people began to scream, because the electricity that had been crackling around the ears of the former publisher of books for young adults was seen flowing down his neck and arms, all the way to his fingertips, and then bolts of high-voltage electricity poured out of his hands, killing the orderer instantly, sending the herders running for cover, and striking the machine of the future with a violence that caused a sizable sector of the colossal behemoth to buckle and explode.”

The box began to move in the princess’s hands. A layer of the rectangular onion skin peeled away and vanished into smoke just as the first layer had, and another voice, this one a fine baritone, began to speak. “This mention of a plague,” said the Chinese box, “reminds me of another story which you may be interested to hear.” But before the tale could progress very far Dunia gave a start and a little cry. She let go of the box and lifted her hands up to cover her ears. Omar cried out also and his hands flew also to his ears and it was Mr. Geronimo who caught the box before it hit the ground and stared at the two Peristanis with concern.

“What was that?” Dunia said. But Geronimo Manezes had heard nothing. “A sound like a whistle,” she told him. “The jinn can hear higher frequencies than dogs and obviously human beings. But it was only a noise.”

“A noise may contain a hidden curse,” Omar said. “The box should be closed, Princess. It may be poisonous to you and me as well as your father.”

“No,” she said, her expression unwontedly grim. “Continue. If I don’t understand the curse I won’t find the counter-curse and the king will die.”

Mr. Geronimo set the box down on a small table of walnut inlaid with an ivory chessboard and it resumed its storytelling. “It was a time of plagues,” said the box in its new male voice, “and in the village of I. a man named John was being held responsible for the spread of a disease of silence. Quiet John, a short man with powerful forearms, worked as a blacksmith in I., as picturesque a country hamlet as you could wish to see lost in an idyll of green fields, rolling hills, dry stone walls, thatched roofs and nosy neighbors. After his marriage to the local schoolteacher, a girl more learned and refined of manner than her husband, it became well known that once he had had a few drinks at night he shouted at his wife, using the ugliest words anyone in the village had ever heard and so increasing his wife’s vocabulary as well as her misery. This went on for many years. By day he was a diligent worker in his forge of fire and smoke, and a good companion to his wife and friends, but in the darkness the monster within came out. Then one night when his son Jack was sixteen years old and grown taller than his father, the boy stood up to John and commanded him to be silent. Some in the village said that the boy made a fist and struck his father in the face, because the man had a swollen cheek for some days after that, but others put the swelling down to toothache.