Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

by Salman Rushdie

  Love, for so long dammed up inside Mr. Geronimo, was flooding through him now. His powerful intoxication with Dunia herself had started it, probably doomed from the start, being a thing of echoes, each seeing in the other their true love’s avatar … but that already seemed a long time ago, she had retreated from him into queenliness and war. Love itself had remained in him, he felt it splashing around in his insides, a great tidal sea of it ebbing and flowing through his heart, and here was Alexandra Bliss Fariña ready to dive into those waters, let us drown in love together, my love, and yes, he thought, maybe one last great love was permitted him, and here she was, ready for him, and yes, why not, he would take the plunge as well. He was so tired in her bed that there was little in the way of lovemaking, one night in four or five was about his speed these days anyway, but she was full of understanding. He was her warrior to be loved and waited for and she would take what little of him she could get and wait for the rest.

  And outside her bedroom door when he set off again on his travels stood Oliver Oldcastle, not angry Oliver of old but new, grateful, obsequious Oldcastle, as dewy-eyed as any spaniel, cap in hand, a sickly yellow-toothed smile affixed to his usually lugubrious face as if tied on with a piece of string. Is there anything I can do for you sir, anything you need, just say the word. I’m not much of a fighter but if it comes down to it I’m your man.

  These fawning obeisances got Mr. Geronimo’s goat. I think I liked it better in the old days, he told the estate manager, when you were threatening to kill me.

  In the cradle of life, between the Tigris and Euphrates, where once the land of Nod, which is to say Wandering, stood to the east of Eden, it was Omar the Ayyar who showed Dunia, his queen, the first signs of the rifts appearing in the body of the four-headed monster which had set out to rule the earth. In those days she was moving around the world like a bright shadow resembling a blurred light in the corner of the eye, and with her, inseparably, was her favorite spy, both of them searching high and low for the four Grand Ifrits. Those boys have got better at hiding out than when we were fooling around in the old days, she told Omar. Back then I could see through their cloaking devices without even trying. But maybe in those days they secretly wanted to be found.

  If relatively little has come down to us about the master spy of Qâf, Omar the Ayyar, it is very probably because of the residual prejudice among the jinn towards male homosexuality, cross-dressing, and suchlike practices. The jinnias, or jiniri, of Peristan evidently had no objection to lesbian activity, and indeed during the period of the sex strike there was a dramatic spike in such behavior, but among the male jinn the old bigotries were widespread. Omar’s well-known professional exploits, his intelligence-gathering in the guise of a harem eunuch or in women’s clothing, had won him a great reputation as a spy, but they also made him an outsider among his own kind. He himself would say that he had always been an outsider anyway. His dress was deliberately flamboyant, with brocade shawls flung over his shoulders with meticulous abandon, and many outrageous hats; his manner was decadent and brittle, and he set himself up as an aesthete and dandy and affected not to give a damn what any of his peers thought. He gathered kindred spirits around him in the intelligence service of Qâf, which had the unintended consequence of making many people in Fairyland profoundly distrust this team of brilliant butterflies who were also the most effective snoops in the upper world. However, Dunia had always trusted him totally. In the final conflict against the Grand Ifrits she came to feel like an outsider too, setting out to avenge the father whom she had never managed to please by murdering members of her own race. Omar the Ayyar accompanied her every day as she hunted down the dark quartet, and she came to feel that they were kindred spirits in many ways. Her fondness for the human race, her love of one man and their descendants, set her apart from her people too. She was aware that she did not possess the personal characteristics which had made her father so widely loved and admired. She was direct, truthful and forceful, whereas her father had been oblique, distracted and charming. Her insistence on the sex strike made things worse. She could foresee a moment in the not-too-distant future at which the ladies of Peristan would lose sympathy for her, and shrug their collective shoulders at her war against the Grand Ifrits. What was the lower world to them anyway? And why was she so hot and bothered about it? This was a war she could lose if it went on much longer. It was essential to find the four dark jinn before very long. She was running out of time.

  Why was she so bothered about it indeed? There was an answer to that question, a reply she carried with her everywhere, and which she had never given, not even to Omar the Ayyar, the supreme gatherer and keeper of secrets, and it was this: she knew she was partly responsible for what was happening. In the long centuries of calm during which the slits between the world had silted up and the upper and lower worlds lost contact with each other and went about their separate business, there were many in the valleys and lakes of Fairyland who thought that was just fine, the lower world was messy and full of argument, while in their fragrant gardens they knew something very like eternal bliss. In the mountain kingdom of Qâf things looked a little different. For one thing, the Grand Ifrits had their eyes on the kingdom, and it was necessary to remain vigilant and keep defenses high. And for another, the (then) Lightning Princess missed the earth, and her many widely dispersed heirs upon it. During the time of separation she often dreamed about reuniting the Duniazát, releasing their powers and building a better world with their help. So she had searched the worlds between the worlds, the layers between the layers, looking for the ruined gateways, trying to reopen them. She had been an archaeologist of the buried past, excavating the lost, broken, clogged pathways, always hoping to find a way through. And yes, she knew that other, darker forces in Fairyland were engaged in the same work, and she could not deny that she was aware of the risks to the lower world if the roads were reopened, but still she tried, as any mother would, to be reunited with her scattered brood, which was all she had left of the man she once loved. In the world below, the searches of the jinn for the way through to their lost playground manifested themselves, or so we now believe, as storms. The heavens themselves cracked under the jinn’s yearning fists. And yes, in the end they opened and what followed, followed.

  Well, so it was. Unlike most of her kind Dunia was capable of human responses: responsibility, guilt, remorse. Like all of her kind she was able to fold unwanted thoughts into deep cloudy places within herself where, most of the time, they lay forgotten, like fogged images, like vague curls of smoke. She had tried to hide Ibn Rushd in that way and failed. And then he came back to her in the form of Geronimo Manezes and for a moment she felt again that old lost human emotion: love. Oh, how like her beloved he was! The face, that adored face. The genes descending the centuries to burst out of his skin. She could have loved him if she had allowed herself to do so, and yes, there was a soft spot in her for him even now, she could not deny it, even as he was in the arms of his Lady Philosopher whom she could cheerfully have fried alive with one flick of her lethal wrist. But she would not. Because Mr. Geronimo was only an illusion of the past after all, and now that illusory love had been replaced in her breast by genuine hatred.

  It was time to find her erstwhile playmates and destroy them. Where were they? How were they to be found?

  Look on the ground, not in the skies, Omar the Ayyar told her. They will be perceived by their effects.

  And there in the cradle of life, poised at the summit of the ruin of the Great Ziggurat of Ur, the “house whose foundation created terror,” they saw the enchanted armies turning upon each other as if the Sumerians and Akkadians of old, so long symbiotically integrated into a single plural culture, had lost their minds and begun to slaughter their neighbors in the streets. Black flags were borne into battle against other black flags. There was much shouting down there about religion, about unbelievers or heretics or unclean godless ones, and it did seem as if the religious shouting enabled the warriors to p
ut extra venom into the downswings of their swords, but Omar saw what was really happening, he understood that the Grand Ifrit Shining Ruby had left his unwanted South American redoubt and come to confront Zumurrud the Great on territory earmarked for Zumurrud’s desert Foundation. Shining Ruby, the Possessor of Souls: his bewitched army marched in lockstep against the mercenary regiments Zumurrud had bought with jewels, drugs and whores. And it was Shining Ruby’s possessed men who prevailed. The sheer savagery of their assault terrified the Zumurrud mercenaries, who had not been given nearly enough jewels to make these crazy white-eyed trance-killers from hell worth standing up to. The mercenaries dropped their weapons and ran away, leaving the field of battle to Shining Ruby’s men. Where is Zumurrud? Dunia asked Omar. Is he even here? That lazy bastard is probably asleep on a mountain somewhere while his creatures take a beating. Overconfidence always was his problem.

  Then a wormhole appeared in the sky, boiling with smoke at its edges, and out came Shining Ruby in triumph riding a flying urn. To hell with those Latino latitudes, he cried. The cradle of civilization is mine. I will plant my standard in the Garden of Eden itself and all men will fear my name.

  Stay out of this, Dunia told Omar the Ayyar. You’re not the fighting type.

  Here once again we must overcome our long-standing cultural distaste for acts of extreme violence and set down an account of one of the very rare murders within the tribe of the jinn, and, to our knowledge, the first ever carried out by a jinnia queen. Rising in wrath from the ziggurat and ascending into the sky on a carpet of sheet lightning, fully revealed in all her terrible majesty, Dunia certainly took Shining Ruby by surprise, shattering his urn with a thunderbolt and sending him tumbling to earth. But it takes more than a bad fall to kill a Grand Ifrit and he rose, puffing a little but otherwise unharmed, to face her. She flew at him releasing spears of lightning and forced him to shed his human form and stand on the earth as a pillar of fire and then she wrapped him in herself, becoming thick, choking, airless smoke, denying the fire the air it needed, strangling him in great nooses of smoke, suffocating him in smoke, pitting the essence of her femaleness against his deepest male nature, squeezing him in smoke, and letting him flail and thrash and sputter and flicker; and so die. When he was gone and she took human form again nothing remained of him, not even a little pile of ash. Until that fight to the death she had not been sure of her strength, but after it she knew. There were three remaining Grand Ifrits and now they had more reason than she to be afraid of the coming fight.

  After the death of Shining Ruby his army was released from his spells of possession and the soldiers stood in confusion, blinking and scratching their heads, not knowing where they were or why. The mercenaries had dispersed and not even those who witnessed the sudden perplexity of their foes retained any appetite for the fray and so the battle ended in comic absurdity. The jinn world, however, was not amused, and Dunia’s deed was greeted with outrage. News of the event spread almost instantaneously via the jinn’s internal communications network and horror spread through Fairyland. For several days Dunia didn’t care. It was often true in wartime that the civilians at home were faint of heart and images of death and destruction made them long for peace. News and gossip focused on such images and undermined the necessary work being done by those on the front lines. She scorned to face her critics. She had a war to fight.

  She sent Omar the Ayyar back to Peristan to find out what he could, and when he returned he said, I think you had better come. So in a bother of frustration she left the lower world and returned to the peaceful gardens on the other side. When she arrived she understood that by killing a Grand Ifrit she had exhausted the sympathy of her people, and not even the memory of her lost father was enough to win it back. Shining Ruby, long, slender, prancing, a harlequin playboy of a jinni, a fair-faced fellow with a wealth of personal charm in spite of his long, serrated tongue, had been well liked by the ladies of Peristan, and his murder snapped their antiwar solidarity and brought the sex boycott to an end. Most of the male jinn were at war, of course, which did nothing to improve the love-hungry ladies’ mood. But one of the great ones had returned and there was a great commotion at the palace of the baths because he had come there to disport himself with whichever and however many of the ladies of Fairyland were of a mind to join him at play. The cries of delight emanating from the great bathhouse told Dunia what she needed to know. A metamorph was present, and pleasing the ladies in many different guises, a dragon, a unicorn, even a big cat. The sexual organ of the lion—and of many other large cats—is bedecked with spines that face backwards, so when it is withdrawn it rakes the walls of the lioness’s vagina in a way that may or not be pleasurable. In the palace of the baths there were sex-starved jinnia ladies who were ready to try anything, even that. It was hard to know if the screams that ensued expressed pain or pleasure or some interesting combination of the two. Dunia didn’t care. The size of the crowd and the excitement of the women told her that the metamorphic entity inside must be a major talent. One of the Grand Ifrits had come home to visit. Ra’im Blood-Drinker, she said to herself, saggy-ass Ra’im who is so difficult to kiss, your lustful appetite has brought you within my grasp.

  The fictional Greek god Proteus was a powerful metamorphic deity of the sea, as fluid in his transformations as water itself. Blood-Drinker was fond of transforming himself into sea-monsters and it is possible that he and Proteus were one and the same, that Proteus was the name the ancient Greeks gave him during their time. Dunia slipped into the grand bath hall of Peristan and there in the enormous bottomless saltwater pool was the Ifrit prince, now a long slippery eel, now a nameless spiky bug-eyed monster of the deep ocean trenches, and around him were the ladies of Fairyland squealing with anticipatory joy. Dunia had to move swiftly. As she plunged below the surface of the water to grab Ra’im Blood-Drinker by his sex—because whatever fantastic sea-beast he was impersonating at that moment, he would make sure he retained the equipment he needed to make love to the ladies of Fairyland—she spoke to him in the unvoiced private language of the jinn. I never did like fucking fish, she said, but fish-man, your time has come.

  This was what she knew about male metamorphs: they would elude you, they would turn themselves into water and slip through your fingers, unless you were quick enough to grab them by the balls and hold on tightly. Then you had to cling on until they had tried everything they could think of; and if you were still there at the end, with their balls in your fist, then they were yours.

  Easier said than done.

  This was no ordinary metamorph, but Ra’im Blood-Drinker, the Grand Ifrit. He was a shark gaping at her with his great jagged teeth and a serpent winding around her to crush her in his coils. He was seaweed binding her and a whale trying to swallow her and a great stingray that could mortally damage her with his tail. She clung to him and avoided his traps. She was a black cloud with a hand emerging from it clutching his manhood. She was dazzling in her speed, her twists, her feints. She matched his moves and surpassed them. She was invincible. His transformations multiplied and accelerated. She was equal to them all. And finally he was spent, gasping his last breaths as she rose above the water and burned it with her electric hands and he was caught: tossed, fried and done. His body lay upon the water like a shipwreck.

  Fish supper tonight, she said, and left him to sink beneath the surface.

  She came out of the palace of the baths to face a hostile crowd. There were boos and cries of Shame on you. Ah, the confusion and fear of the jinnias of Peristan faced with one of their own, the Queen of Qâf Mountain, no less, become a murderer, killer of dark princes. They had all fled the baths when the fight began, and now they saw the palace broken and damaged, its golden arches fallen, its vaulted glass roof smashed, the palace turned into a mirror of so many war-smashed structures in the lower world; and yes, they knew the ruins could be rebuilt in a trice, a magic spell would give them back the palace immaculate and unspoilt, that was not the issue. No magic could
raise Ra’im Blood-Drinker from the dead. And Shining Ruby was gone as well. Those truths were irreversible. The ladies of Fairyland turned their backs to Queen Dunia and she understood that she had lost her place in their ranks. No matter. It was time to return to the lower world and bring the war to an end.

  In the midst of the battle there had been time to do one small good deed. The foolish Signor Giacomo Donizetti of New York, former seducer of unhappily married women, afterwards victim of a wicked, though not undeserved, tit-for-tat hex that obliged him to adore all women unreservedly, and presently wretched and rudderless, was of no use to her as a fighter; but maybe she could heal him. She was the mother of all her flock, the useless ones as well as the worthwhile, and she saw the good in this stray sheep of the Duniazát, hiding beneath the lechery and cynicism, and she pitied him for the spell cast on him by this or that small-fry bad jinni. Breaking the enchantment was easy and then Giacomo was once more immune to doctors’ receptionists and bag ladies, but he remained a lost soul until she listened to his heart and whispered to him what he must do, and wherein his salvation lay. Soon after that he opened a new restaurant.

  It was an insane time to open an upscale eatery, even for somebody who had once been among the princes of the city’s nightlife. Those days were long gone and now, in wartime, people rarely ventured out to dinner, and when they did it was to grab something easy, something that required no investment of time or money on the part of either the vendor or the purchaser. Into that devastation of what had formerly been the gastronomic capital of the world came Giacomo Donizetti restored to his peacock finery with an establishment of polished wood and even more highly polished metal and glass. It shone like a new sun, and even though almost nobody went to eat there Donizetti’s extraordinary kitchen staff, pulled together from all the newly unemployed master chefs, pâtissiers and sommeliers in America, daily produced a menu as dazzling as the furnishings, so that the empty restaurant with its perfect table settings and even more immaculate waitstaff became a beacon of hope, a Statue of Liberty made not of copper but rather of food and wine. Afterwards, when peace returned to the world, it made Giacomo Donizetti’s fortune, becoming something like a symbol of the resistance, an emblem of the city’s old characteristics of defiance and optimism; but in those days people marveled at the epic folly of opening such a place: a brilliantly illuminated and opulent saloon containing the best of everything, except customers.