Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (26 page)

“Whatever the cause, there was general agreement on two points: firstly, that the father did not strike the son in return, but retreated to his bedroom in shame, and secondly, that from that moment on his words, always few and far between except during the nocturnal torrents of cursing, dried up altogether and he simply ceased to speak. As the distance between his tongue and the words it used to utter grew greater, he seemed to calm down. The drinking stopped, or at least diminished to manageable levels. As Quiet John he turned into his best self, people said, gentle and generous and honorable and kind, so that it became obvious that language itself had been his problem, language had poisoned him and damaged his intrinsically noble humanity, and that, having given up words the way some people gave up cigarettes or masturbation, he could at last be what he should have been: a good man.

“His neighbors, noticing the change in him, began to experiment with wordlessness themselves, and sure enough the less they spoke, the more cheerful and better natured they became. The idea that language was an infection from which the human race needed to recover, that speech was the source of all dissension, wrongdoing and character decay, that it was not as many had often declared the bedrock of liberty but rather the seedbed of violence, spread rapidly through the cottages of I. and soon children were being dissuaded from singing playground songs and old-timers discouraged from reminiscing about antique exploits while sitting on their accustomed benches under the tree in the main square. A division appeared and deepened in the formerly harmonious hamlet, fostered, according to the newly silent, by the new young village schoolteacher, Yvonne, who posted signs everywhere warning that speechlessness, not speech, was the real disease. ‘You may think it’s a choice,’ she wrote, ‘but soon you won’t be able to talk even if you want to, while we talkers actually can choose to converse or to keep our mouths shut.’ At first people were angry with the schoolteacher, a pretty, chatty woman with an annoying habit of cocking her head to the left when she talked, and these militants wanted the school shut down, but then they discovered she was right. They could no longer make any sort of sound, even if they wanted to, even if they wanted to warn a loved one to avoid an oncoming truck. Now the village’s anger turned away from Yvonne the teacher and focused instead on Quiet John, whose decision had foisted upon the community a muteness they could no longer escape. Dumbly, inarticulately, the villagers gathered outside the blacksmith’s forge, and only their fear of his immense physical strength and hot horseshoes held them back,”

—and here Omar the Ayyar interjected, Why, this is just like the story of the composer Casterbridge and the preacher Yusuf Ifrit, each accusing the other of being the pestilence, so maybe this is a new kind of sickness, a sickness that prevents human beings from knowing when they are sick and when they are in good health,

—but the jinnia princess had found her own story hidden within these other stories. She was thinking about her stricken father, about their own troubled story, more troubled than the story of the blacksmith and his wife or the composer and the preacher, and by accident her thoughts spilled out of her mouth, He never loved me, she said, I always worshipped my father but I knew I wasn’t the son he wanted. My inclination was towards philosophy, and if I had had my way I would have built myself a library life, happily lost in the labyrinth of language and ideas, but he needed a warrior, so I became one for him: the Lightning Princess, whose defenses shielded Qâf from the dark. The dark jinn didn’t scare me. When we were young I played with all those guys, Zumurrud and Zabardast and Shining Ruby and Ra’im back in the days before he started drinking blood. In the back alleys of Fairyland we played kabaddi and seven tiles and not one of them was ever a match for me because I was busy becoming superboygirl, the daughter whose father wanted a son. At mealtimes the disappointment burned in his eyes and curdled the milk. When I told him I was studying the art of the thunderbolt he grunted, making it clear he would have preferred a swordsman to a witch. When I learned to wield a sword he complained that in his old age he needed a statesman by his side to negotiate the complex politics of Peristan. When I became a scholar of the law of the jinn he said, If only I had a son to hunt with me. In the end his disappointment in me became my disillusion with him and we were no longer close. But still, though I never admitted it, he was the only person in either of the Two Worlds I wanted to please. For a time I left him and in the other world I launched the dynasty that became my fate. After that, when I returned to Qâf and the doors between the worlds were sealed and the human centuries passed, he moved even further away from me, and his feelings went beyond disapproval and arrived at distrust, You don’t know who your people are anymore, he said, and here in Peristan you long only for the world you have lost, where your human children are. Those words,
human children,
were heavy with his distaste, and the longer I bore the weight of his criticism, the more ardently I hoped to be rejoined to that earthly family, which Ibn Rushd had named the Duniazát.

It is I, she cried, who have spent long ages laboring on the construction of a machine without a purpose, or a purpose so farfetched, like glory, that the attempt to achieve it is self-defeating, and the machine is my life and the purpose which no machine could ever fulfill was the glory of capturing my father’s love. It is I, not a blacksmith or a teacher or a philosopher, who have failed to learn the difference between sickness and health, between pestilence and cure. In my unhappiness I persuaded myself that my father’s disdain for his daughter was the natural state of affairs, the healthy state, and my female nature was the plague. But here we are at the truth, and it is he who is sick and I who am well. What is the poison in his body? Maybe it’s himself.

She was sobbing by this time, and Geronimo the gardener was holding her, offering what puny human comfort he could to his nonhuman lover, caught up himself in profound existential confusion. What did it mean that he had ascended into the air and then softly descended as he had, beyond his own volition—that the earth had rejected him and then as mysteriously accepted him again—and that he found himself here in a world that had no meaning for him, meaning being a thing human beings constructed out of familiarity, out of what scraps they possessed of the known, like a jigsaw puzzle with many pieces missing. Meaning was the frame human beings placed around the chaos of being to give it shape; and here he was in a world no frame could contain, clinging to a supernatural stranger who had for a time posed as his departed wife, holding to her as desperately as she, now, held to him, drawn to him because he looked like a long-dead philosopher, each hoping that an alien surrogate could, by embracing them, allow them to believe that the world was good, this world or that world or simply the world in which two living things held one another and said the magic words.

I love you, said Mr. Geronimo.

I love you too, the Lightning Princess replied,

—and inside her distress about her father who was impossible to please, the king wearing the Simurgh Crown who was so invested in his kingship that his daughter had to call him Your Majesty, the king who had forgotten how to love, lay the memories of her own first loves, or at least of the first boys who loved her, and who were not, at that time, the feared dark jinn and her father’s deadly foes. In those days Zabardast had the sweet seriousness of the child magician, pulling with the gravest of faces the most improbable rabbits—insane chimera-rabbits and gryphon-rabbits that had never existed in nature—out of one of his wide selection of absurd fools’ caps. Zabardast with his nonstop patter, his jokes, his easy grin, was the one she liked best. Zumurrud Shah, always Zabardast’s muscle-bound opposite, tongue-tied, mumbling, made permanently bad-tempered by his own inarticulacy, was the more beautiful of the two, no doubt about that, a gorgeous dumb giant possessed of a sort of surly innocence, if that was the sort of thing you liked.

They were both crazy about her, of course, which was less of a problem in the jinn world than it would have been on earth, because of the jinn’s contempt for monogamy, but they competed for her favors just the same, Zumurrud brought her giant jewels from the giants’ jewelry hoards (he came from the wealthiest of the jinn dynasties, the builders of the palaces and aqueducts, the gazebos and terraced gardens that made Peristan what it was), while Zabardast the technician of magic, the artist of the occult, was also clownish by temperament and made her laugh, and she couldn’t remember, she probably had sex with them both, but if she did it didn’t leave much of an impression, and she began to turn her attention from these inadequate Fairyland suitors to the more tragic figures of men. When she abandoned them and broke the triangle of their infatuations, leaving them to their own devices, both Zumurrud and Zabardast began to change. Zabardast slowly became a darker, colder personality. He had loved her the most, she supposed, and so felt her loss most keenly. Something vengeful crept into his nature, to her surprise, something bitter and thwarted. Zumurrud, by contrast, moved on, away from love and towards manly things. As his beard grew longer he grew less interested in women and jewels and became obsessed with power. He became the leader and Zabardast the follower, though Zabardast continued to be the deeper thinker, in part because it would have been hard to be shallower. And so they remained friends until, during the War of the Worlds, they fell out once again.

Zumurrud, Zabardast and Aasmaan Peri the Lightning Princess: how long had their dalliance lasted? The jinn are poor judges of duration. In the jinn world time does not so much pass as remain. It is human beings who are the prisoners of clocks, their time being painfully short. Human beings are cloud-shadows, moving rapidly, gone with the wind, which was why Zabardast and Zumurrud were filled with disbelief when Dunia first took the name Dunia and adopted, along with the name, a human lover, and not a young one either: the philosopher Ibn Rushd. They approached her together, one last time, for her own sake. “If it’s intellect that excites you,” said Zabardast, “then I must remind you that in all of Peristan there is no greater scholar of the arts of sorcery than I.” “Is sorcery a branch of ethics?” she replied. “Are magic tricks related to reason?” “Right and wrong, and an interest in the rational, are human afflictions, like fleas on dogs,” said Zabardast. “The jinn act as they choose and do not bother with the banalities of good and evil. And the universe is irrational, as every jinn knows.” She turned her back on him then and forever and the bitterness which had been growing within him possessed him like a flood. “Your human, your philosopher, your wise fool,” Zumurrud scoffed. “You realize that he will die very soon, whereas I will live, if not forever, then for the next best length of time.” “You say that as if it’s a good thing,” she answered him. “But a year of Ibn Rushd is worth more to me than an eternity of you.”

After that they were her enemies, and, because of the humiliation of being rejected in favor of a human being who, like a mayfly, lived for a day and was then snuffed out forever, they had new reasons for hating the human race,

—and while she was remembering her youth, Mr. Geronimo found his way within the story of her youthful flirtations into the memory of his one true love, Ella Elfenbein his beautiful chatterbox, kind to all comers, proud of her body, and more in love with her father Bento than with him, he sometimes thought. She called Bento Elfenbein five times an hour every day until his last day, and in every call she used the words
I love you
as a way of saying hello and goodbye to him. After Bento died and not until then she started doing the same when she called Geronimo,
you’re my everything,
she said, then and not until then. It was ridiculous to be jealous of a daughter’s love for her brilliant, rakish, slightly crooked father with his joker’s smile like a happy fiend constantly finding a way to outsmart the Batman, but sometimes I couldn’t help it, Mr. Geronimo admitted to himself, even now he couldn’t help it, she even found a way to die just as Bento had died, she found her way to a lightning bolt just like his.

And what am I doing now, he asked himself, I’m holding in my arms a supernatural creature who is the fairy queen of the thunderbolt, the possessor and incarnation of the power that murdered my beloved, and I’m murmuring words of love into her ear, as if I’m allowing myself to love what killed my wife, to whisper
I love you
as hello and goodbye into the queen of what destroyed Ella, and what does that say about me, what does that mean, who am I. Her ear by the way as lacking in lobe as my own. An ancient creature out of fantasy who says she’s my distant ancestor, get a grip, he told himself, you’re lost in illusion, your feet may be back on the ground but now your head’s far, far up in the clouds. But even as he admonished himself he felt Ella fading, felt her slipping towards nothingness, while the warm body in his arms became more solidly real, even if he knew it was made of smoke.

He realized that he did not feel well. His heart pounded in his chest and the rarefied air of Mount Qâf made him light-headed; he was nursing what felt like an altitude headache. His thoughts turned to his lost trade, which felt more and more like a lost self, and to La Incoerenza, so beautiful until the storm came, he remembered the digging, the weeding, the planting of seeds, the trimming of hedgerows, the battle against the groundhogs who ate the rhododendrons, the victory over the tree parasites, the building of the labyrinth, stone on stone, the thick sweat on his brow, the happy ache in his muscles, the days of good work in sun and rain and frost, summer and winter, heat on heat, snow on snow, the thousand acres and one acre, the drowned river, the hill where his wife lay under the rippling grass. He wanted to turn back the clock to that time of innocence, before thunderbolts and strangenesses broke the world, and he understood that what ailed him was homesickness.