Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

by Salman Rushdie

  Now, confronted by Ella risen from the dead, he had to let go of that last scrap of hope, of what he had thought of as sanity, for here was Ella revealing herself as Dunia, princess of the jinn, who had adopted his wife’s appearance to please him, or so she said; but perhaps it was to deceive him, to seduce and destroy him as the sirens destroyed mariners, or as Circe did, or some other fictional enchantress. Here was Elladunia, Duniella, in his beautiful wife’s beautiful voice telling him wonder tales of the existence of the jinn, bright and dark, fairies and Ifrits, and of Fairyland, where the sex was incredible, and of metamorphs and whisperers; and of the breaking of the seals, the opening of the slits in reality; the first wormhole in Queens (there were more now, all over the place), the coming of the dark jinn and the consequences of their arrival. He was a skeptical and godless man and this kind of story unleashed a churning in his stomach and a sort of babbling in his brain. I’m losing my mind, he told himself. He no longer knew what to think, nor how to think it.

  “The fairy world is real,” she said soothingly, listening to his inner confusion, “but it does not follow that God exists. On that subject I am as skeptical as you.”

  She was still in the room, going nowhere, floating in the air just as he was, allowing him to touch her. He touched her first to see if he could touch her, because there was a part of his brain that believed his hand would pass right through. She was wearing a black tank top he actually remembered, a black tank over cargo pants like a photographer in a combat zone, her hair pulled back in a high ponytail, and there were her lean muscular bare arms, olive-skinned. People had often asked Ella if she was Lebanese. His fingertips touched her arms and felt warm skin, familiar to his touch, Ella’s skin. She moved towards him and then it was impossible for him to resist her. He became aware that there were tears streaming down his face. He held her and she allowed herself to be held. His hands cradled her face, and suddenly, unbearably, it felt wrong. Her chin: an unexpected lengthening. You’re not her, he said, whoever or whatever you are, you’re not her. She listened beneath his words and made an alteration. Try again, she said. Yes, he said, his palm curved tenderly under her jaw. Yes, that feels good.

  At the beginning of all love there is a private treaty each of the lovers makes with himself or herself, an agreement to set aside what is wrong with the other for the sake of what is right. Love is spring after winter. It comes to heal life’s wounds, inflicted by the unloving cold. When that warmth is born in the heart the imperfections of the beloved are as nothing, less than nothing, and the secret treaty with oneself is easy to sign. The voice of doubt is stilled. Later, when love fades, the secret treaty looks like folly, but if so, it’s a necessary folly, born of lovers’ belief in beauty, which is to say, in the possibility of the impossible thing, true love.

  This man in his sixties, detached from the earth from which he had made his living, torn away by a lightning bolt from the only woman he had ever loved, and this princess of the otherworld, nursing in her bosom the memory of a centuries-old loss, across an ocean, far away, were both in pain, the unique anguish born of lost or broken love. Here, in a darkened basement bedroom in a house called The Bagdad, they agreed with themselves and with each other to renew two loves destroyed long ago by Death. She took on the clothing of his beloved wife’s body, and he chose not to notice that Dunia’s voice was not Ella’s, that her manner was not his wife’s, and that the shared memories that unite a loving couple were largely missing from her thoughts. She was a magnificent listener and had set herself the task of being the woman he wanted her to be, but, in the first place, listening takes time and care and, in the second place, a jinnia princess wants to be loved for herself, and so the desire to be loved as Dunia fought with her attempt to impersonate a dead woman and made the simulacrum less perfect than it might have been. And as for Geronimo Manezes, yes, she admired his strong, lean, old man’s physique, but the man she had loved had been all mind.

  “What do you know,” she finally asked him, “about philosophy?”

  He told her about the Lady Philosopher and her Nietzschean, Schopenhauerian pessimism. When he mentioned that the name of Alexandra Bliss Fariña’s home was La Incoerenza, Dunia drew in her breath sharply, thinking of the battle of the books that had taken place long ago between Ghazali and Ibn Rushd, The Incoherence of the Philosophers versus The Incoherence of the Incoherence. Here was a third incoherence. Dunia saw, in coincidence, the hidden hand of kismet, which was also karma. Destiny was in that name. In names are concealed our fates.

  Geronimo Manezes also told her Blue Yasmeen’s fable about the pessimism of the Unyaza. “At this point, and in my present condition,” he said, surprising himself by finding a version of one of Alexandra Fariña’s mottoes issuing from his lips, “to say nothing of the state of the planet in general, it is difficult not to have a tragic view of life.” It wasn’t a bad answer, Dunia thought. It was the answer of a thinking man. She could work with that. “I understand,” she replied, “but that attitude comes from the days before you met a fairy princess.”

  Time stopped. Mr. Geronimo was in a highly charged, enchanted place which was both his basement room and that room transformed into a jinni’s smoke-scented love-lair, a place where no clock ticked, no second hand moved, no digital number changed. He could not have said if minutes passed during the timeless time of their lovemaking, or weeks, or months. Already, ever since his detachment from the earth, he had been obliged to set aside most of what he believed he knew about the nature of things. Now he was coming loose from the few fragments of his old beliefs that still remained. Here after a long interval was a woman’s body which was and was not his wife’s. It had been so long that his sense memory of Ella’s flesh had weakened and though he was ashamed to admit it his more recent recollections of Alexandra Fariña were jumbled up with what he remembered about making love to his wife. And now this entirely new feeling was supplanting it, was becoming what he agreed with himself to think of as the feeling of Ella Elfenbein moving beneath him like a sweet warm tide, he, who had never believed in reincarnation or any such mumbo jumbo, was helpless, in the grip of the fairy princess’s enchantments, and plunged into the sea of love, where everything was true if you said so, everything was true if the enchantress whispered it in his ear, and he could even accept in his confusion that his wife had been a fairy princess all along, that even during Ella’s lifetime, my first lifetime, the jinnia whispered, and this is my second, yes, even in her first lifetime she had been a jinnia in disguise, so that the fairy princess was neither a counterfeit nor an imitation, it had always been her, even though he had not known it until now, and if this was delirium, he was okay with that, it was a delirium he chose and wanted, because all of us want love, eternal love, love returning beyond death to be reborn, love to nourish and enfold us until we die.

  In that darkened room, no news reached them of the mayhem being wrought on the city outside. The city was screaming with fear but they could not hear it, boats were refusing to venture onto the water of the harbor, people were afraid to come out of their homes and go to work, and the panic was showing up in the money, stocks were crashing, banks were shuttered, supermarket shelves were empty and deliveries of fresh produce were not being made, the paralysis of terror held the city in its grip and catastrophe was in the air. But in the darkness of the narrow bedroom in the basement of The Bagdad the television was off and the crackle of the calamity could not be heard.

  There was only the act of love, and lovemaking had a surprise in store for them both. “Your body smells of smoke,” she said. “And look at you. When you’re aroused you become blurred, smudged, there’s smoke at the edges of you, didn’t your human lovers ever tell you that?” No, he lied, remembering Ella telling him exactly that, but concealing the memory, correctly intuiting that Dunia would not like to know the truth. No, he said, they did not. This pleased her, as he had suspected it would. “That’s because you never made love to a jinnia before,” she told him. “It�
��s a different level of arousal.” Yes, he said, it was. But she was thinking, with mounting excitement, that it was his jinn self revealing itself, the jinn self that had come to him, down the centuries, from her. This was the sulfurous smokiness of the jinn when they made love. And if she could release the jinn with him then many things became possible. “Geronimo, Geronimo,” she murmured in his smoky ear, “it looks like you are a fairy too.”

  Something unexpected happened to Dunia in their lovemaking: she enjoyed it, not as much as the bodiless sex of Fairyland, that ecstatic union of smoke and fire, but there was (as she had hoped there might be) a definite—no, a strong!—sensation of pleasure. This showed her not only that she was becoming more human but that her new lover might contain more of the jinn than she first suspected. So it was that their mimic love, their love born of the memory of others, their post-love that came after, became true, authentic, a thing in and of itself, in which she almost stopped thinking about the dead philosopher, and his dead wife whose copy she had allowed herself to be was slowly replaced in his fantasy by the unknown magical creature who had come to him so improbably in his hour of need. The time might even come, she allowed herself to think, when she could show herself to him as she truly was—neither the sixteen-year-old waif who had materialized at Ibn Rushd’s door, nor this replicant of a lost love, but her royal self in all its glory. In the grip of that unexpected hope she began to tell Geronimo Manezes things she had never told Ibn Rushd.

  “Around the borders of Fairyland,” she said, “there stands the circular mountain of Qâf, where, according to legend, a bird-god once lived, the Simurgh, a relative of the Rukh of Sindbad. But that’s just a story. We, the jinn and jiniri, we who are not legend, know that bird, but it does not rule over us. There is, however, a ruler on Qâf Mountain, not a thing of beak, feather and claw but a great fairy emperor, Shahpal son of Shahrukh, and his daughter, most powerful of the jinnias, Aasmaan Peri, which is to say, “Skyfairy,” known as the Lightning Princess. Shahpal is the Simurgh King and that bird sits on his shoulder and serves him.

  “Between the emperor and the Grand Ifrits there is no affection. Mount Qâf is the most desirable location in all of Fairyland and the Ifrits would dearly love to possess it but the thunderbolt magic of the emperor’s daughter, a great jinnia sorceress, is equal to that of Zabardast and Zumurrud Shah, and it maintains a wall of sheet lightning that surrounds Qâf and protects the circular mountain against their greed. However, they are always on the lookout for an opportunity, fomenting trouble among the devs, or lesser spirits who populate the lower slopes of Qâf, trying to persuade them to rebel against their rulers. At this moment there is a hiatus in the endless struggle between the emperor and the Ifrits, which, to tell the truth, has been in a condition of stalemate for many millennia, because the storms, earthquakes and other phenomena that broke the long-closed seals between Peristan and the world of men have permitted the Ifrits to make their mischief here, which has the attraction for them of a novelty, or at least a thing long denied. They haven’t been able to do this for a long time, and they believe there is no magic on earth capable of resisting them, and, being bullies, they like the idea of destroying an overmatched opponent. So while they think of conquest my father and I get a little respite.”

  “You?” Mr. Geronimo asked. “It’s you, the princess of Qâf?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” she said. “The battle beginning here on earth is a mirror of the battle that has been going on in Fairyland for all time.”

  Now that she had learned the trick of pleasure, she was indefatigable in its pursuit. One of the reasons she preferred an “older” human lover, she murmured to Geronimo Manezes, was that they found it easier to control themselves. With young men it was over in a flash. He told her he was glad that age had a few advantages. She wasn’t listening. She was discovering the joys of climax. And for the most part he was lost in a sweet confusion, hardly knowing to which of three women, two human, one not, he was making love, and as a result neither of them noticed at first what was happening to him, until at a certain moment when he was beneath and she above he felt something unexpected, something almost forgotten, under his head and back.

  Pillows. Sheets.

  The bed took his weight, the pocketed springs of the mattress sighing a little beneath him like a second lover, and then he felt her weight come down on him too, as the law of gravity reasserted itself. When he understood what had happened he began to weep, though he was not a man who found it easy to cry. She came off him and held him but he was unable to stay lying down. He climbed out of bed, gingerly, still half in disbelief, and allowed his feet to move towards the bedroom floor. When they touched it he cried out. Then stood, almost falling at first. His legs were weak, the muscles softened by lack of use. She stood beside him and he put an arm around her shoulder. Then he steadied, and released her, and was standing by himself. The room, the world, fell back into its familiar and long-lost shape. He felt the weights of things, of his body, his emotions, his hopes. “It seems I must believe you,” he marveled, “and that you are who you say you are, and Fairyland exists, and you are its most powerful sorceress, for you have broken the curse that was laid upon me and rejoined me to the earth.”

  “What is more extraordinary than that,” she rejoined, “is that, although I am indeed who I say I am, not only Dunia mother of the Duniazát but also the Princess Skyfairy of Qâf Mountain, I am not responsible for what has happened here, except that in our lovemaking I helped to unleash a power in you which neither of us suspected you possessed. I didn’t bring you back down to earth. You did it by yourself. And if the jinni spirit in your body is capable of overcoming the sorcery of Zabardast, then the dark jinn have an enemy to reckon with in this world as well as the other one, and the War of the Worlds can perhaps be won instead of ending, as Zumurrud and his gang believe, in the inevitable victory of the dark jinn, and the establishment of their tyranny over all the peoples of the earth.”

  “Don’t get carried away,” he said. “I’m just a gardener. I shovel and plant and weed. I don’t go to war.”

  “You don’t have to go anywhere, my dearest,” she said. “This war is coming to you.”

  Oliver Oldcastle the estate manager of La Incoerenza heard a scream of terror coming from his mistress’s bedroom and immediately understood that what had happened to him must also have happened to her. “Now I really will kill that bastard hedge clipper,” he roared and ran barefoot to help the Lady Philosopher. His hair was loose and wild and his shirt hung out of his worn cord trousers and with his arms windmilling as he ran he was more ungainly Bluto or Obélix moving at speed than leonine latter-day Marx. He passed the boot room with its faint ineradicable odor of horseshit, galloping along old wooden floors that on another day would have delivered splinters into his pounding feet, watched by the angry tapestries of imaginary ancestors, narrowly avoiding the Sèvres porcelain vases uneasy on their alabaster tables, running with his head down like a bull, ignoring the disapproving whispers of the supercilious shelves of books, and burst into Alexandra’s private wing. At the door of her bedroom he gathered himself, smacked uselessly at his tangled hair, tugged his beard into shape, and stuffed his shirt into his trousers like a schoolboy asking for an audience with the head teacher, and “May I enter now, milady,” he cried, the volume of his voice betraying his fear. Her loud answering wail was all the invitation he needed and then they stood facing each other, mistress and servant, she in a long archaic nightdress and he in shambles, with the same horror in their eyes, which turned slowly towards the floor, and saw that not one of their four bare feet, his sprouting hair at the ankle and from each toe, hers tiny and well formed, was in contact with the floor. A good inch of air stood between them and the ground.

  “It’s a bastard disease,” Oldcastle bellowed. “That superfluous growth of a person, that fungus, that weed, came into your home bearing this blighty infection, and he has transmitted it to us.”


  “What kind of infection could possibly produce such a result?” she wept.

  “This sodding kind, milady,” cried Oldcastle, clenching his fists. “This turfing variety, pardon my French. This Dutch elm beetle you took into your private flower bed. This fatal oak killer Phytophthora. He’s left us bloomin’ diseased.”

  “He’s not answering his phone,” she said, waving her instrument uselessly in his face.

  “He’ll answer to me,” said Oliver Oldcastle monumentally. “Or I’ll landscape his ill-formed rump. I’ll horticulture his savage bastard skull. He’ll answer to me all right.”

  Separations of all sorts were being reported in those incomprehensible nights. The separation of human beings from the earth was bad enough. However, in certain parts of the world it had not begun or ended there. In the world of literature there was a noticeable separation of writers from their subjects. Scientists reported the separation of causes and effects. It became impossible to compile new editions of dictionaries on account of the separation of words and meanings. Economists noted the growing separation of the rich from the poor. The divorce courts experienced a sharp increase in business owing to a spate of marital separations. Old friendships came abruptly to an end. The separation plague spread rapidly across the world.