Grimus

by Salman Rushdie

  —Well, there was, said Elfrida obstinately.

  —My darling, said Gribb irritably, how can you claim that everything ceased to be for an instant, and at the same time say that it was so? The term being relates to existence; non-being cannot exist, and therefore that moment cannot have been.

  He looked smugly satisfied with his argument. Flapping Eagle decided to let it slide; Gribb was not a man with whom discussion was possible. Elfrida, too, appeared to accept his rationale, but was probably a little rattled.

  Irina sent her grey gaze towards Flapping Eagle as she said: —Forgive me, everyone; I’m just going into the garden for a moment; I forgot something there this afternoon and I don’t want the mist and dew to get at it.

  She left, A moment later, Flapping Eagle asked to be directed to the lavatory. Count Cherkassov showed him the way and left him there. Flapping Eagle noted with approval that it would be possible for him to climb through the window and thus join Irina in the garden without attracting any attention. He bolted the door behind him.

  He cast a brief gaze at the mirror hanging on the wall and said aloud to his image: —Now that you’re in, you’d better go and make your peace with Virgil Jones. You’ve been forgetting your old friends.

  Then, impossibly, behind his own image, a movement. In the mirror, as he finished speaking, he saw the door opening. But it’s locked, he thought frantically, and turned rapidly.

  The door was still firmly shut and bolted. In confusion he looked back at the mirror. There, in the reflected image, the door was still, slowly, opening. Someone was coming in.

  He heard a voice, bitter but recognizable:

  —Hello, little brother.

  The figure of Bird-Dog came into the mirrored room. Flapping Eagle felt the cold sweat breaking out all over him.

  Bird-Dog’s spectre came a little way into the “room” and repeated:

  —Hello, little brother.

  Then it retreated back through the mirrored door and everything was sane once more. Flapping Eagle had to lean against a shelf to support himself.

  Irina Cherkassova stood by a shed at the bottom of the garden. It had no windows and the doors were padlocked. Her grey eyes were impassive as the shaken Flapping Eagle made his way towards her.

  —Mr Eagle, she said. I thought you had forgotten.

  —I was delayed, he said. My apologies, Countess.

  —Irina, she said quietly.

  —Irina, he corrected himself.

  —I wanted to explain, she said. My husband lives too much in the past; we all do, I suppose. You must not think him mad. He is quite sane. So is Elfrida, despite her obsession with purity and cleanliness and Gribb. And so, I suppose, is Gribb, despite … the rush of words dried up. Flapping Eagle felt too disturbed to press the point.

  —I hear you came to K with Virgil Jones, she said quickly. Now there is a madman, if you like. And his ex-wife, too, madam Liv. We give her food out of sympathy for her illness. We are not mad, Mr Eagle I Her voice was fierce.

  —I never believed you were, he said. It must be an awful thing to have to remake one’s life like this.

  —I knew it, she said excitedly. I knew you were a man to confide in. I shall make you my friend, Mr Eagle.

  —Flapping Eagle, he said.

  —There, she said. Irina and Flapping Eagle. Now we are friends; and now I will show you how the past hangs around my neck, and what a weight it is.

  She unlocked the shed and opened the door.

  In the gloom Flapping Eagle could make out two men, both fully-grown, playing draughts with chessmen. One of them was Mr Page; he leapt to his feet in alarm and stood between them and the other man, until he recognized Irina.

  —It’s all right, Mr Page, she said. This is Mr Page, Flapping Eagle. He helps us with our difficulty. I believe the correct medical term is allopathy: the treatment of a disease by inducing a different tendency. Mr Page, you see, loves games; he comes here to play with Alexei, in the hope of stirring something within him. A forlorn hope, I fear. My son lives here, in this shed; he prefers it to the house; so we keep him here, to avoid embarrassment. We think it best.

  Alexei Cherkassov grinned foolishly up at them, a large, strapping sixteen-year-old in appearance. The looseness of his movements and facial muscles revealed that all was not well.

  —A moron, said Irina venomously. His brain has the age of a child of four. Do you wonder I hold my husband’s stupidity against him? He has bred me an idiot for a son.

  —Ma-ma, said Alexei Cherkassov, happily, and sucked his thumb.

  Flapping Eagle followed Irina out of the shed. She locked the door, sealing her skeleton once more into its cupboard. —Mr Page has a key to the door on the far side, she said. He comes when he can. She leant against the shed, as though exhausted. Then she jerked herself erect, setting her jaw.

  —Now I am going to tell you something else, Flapping Eagle, new friend, she said, grey eyes boring into him.

  —Touch my stomach, she ordered; and when he hesitated she grasped his hand roughly and placed it there. —Do you feel anything? she asked.

  —No, he said. It is a stomach.

  —Well then, she said angrily, feel my breasts. He shook his head, uncomprehending. Was she drunk? Was this a seduction attempt?

  —Feel my breasts, she repeated, dragging his hand upwards. —Well? she demanded. Again he shook his head.

  —Why should you, after all, she sighed. I always think it must be glaringly obvious. This is what I mean, Flapping Eagle: soon after drinking the elixir of life I found I was three months pregnant. The elixir, as you know, arrests all growth and physical development. So that, all these centuries later, I am still with child. Still. Can you understand, Flapping Eagle, how that feels? What it is to have a second life stagnant within one’s womb, perhaps a genius, perhaps a second idiot, perhaps a monster, as frozen within me as the lovers on the grecian urn? What it does to a woman to be with child, heavy-breasted with the juices of maternity for so many eternities? Do you understand that?

  —Yes, said Flapping Eagle. I can understand. But there are ways….

  —You don’t understand at all, she cried. It is a life. A living thing. Innocent. Sacred. It was because I thought life was sacred that I drank the elixir. One cannot take life.

  —Perhaps you are not the man you look, she added, catching her breath. He would have…. She bit off her words once again, said: We must go in, and was gone. Flapping Eagle lingered a moment before returning to the window at the side of the house.

  Irina’s unfinished sentences worried him. So, slightly, did the effortlessness with which he had been accepted. After the initial hostility of the Elbaroom, he had not expected it: Cherkassov and Ignatius seemed to be positively anxious to admit him to their company. He shrugged inwardly; perhaps it was enough that he was accepted. No doubt the rest would be made clear in time. Even Bird-Dog…

  In the presence of the two pale ladies, his worries evaporated. He sat drinking the wine of K, desultory conversation idling between Cherkassov and Gribb, half-listening, half-dreaming, as the two of them circled the room in a hypnotic, aimless promenade. The white witches weaving their spell, binding him in silken cords. They made K real for him, despite Gribb’s theorizing, despite Moonshy, and, yes, despite Virgil. Acceptance may have come from Cherkassov, but the attraction, the first holds of K upon him sprang from these two women, circling, circling, moths to his candle. The green gaze and the grey, blurring together as they drifted. Pure Elfrida, tarnished Irina, tired Eagle. A spell was being woven which none of them understood, which they would all understand too late, as the pale sorceresses circled and smiled.

  —I fear I feel a little faint, said Elfrida Gribb. I think we shall have to take our leave. She looked at Irina with a glance not quite affectionate; but Irina was all solicitude as she saw the trio to the door.

  Elfrida found herself disapproving of the length of time the Countess allowed her hand to rest in Flapping Eagle’s, and of
the expression (gratitude? remorse?) in her eyes—and then hastily corrected herself.

  It was of no importance to her. She loved her husband. He loved her. The Cherkassov marriage was well known to be a hollow thing, maintained only by their joint abhorrence of scandal. What did it matter what Irina Cherkassova thought of Flapping Eagle, or he of her?

  She was in an unusually bad temper as they walked home.

  Flapping Eagle felt almost as debilitated by his second night in K as he had by the first.

  Small insects, the creatures of the night, fluttered at their faces. The stage was set.

  XXXIX

  THE GRIBBS’ DONKEY, perhaps the most obedient, least mulish donkey that ever was, jogged demurely along the Cobble-way with a divided Flapping Eagle upon its back. He had spent most of the day exploring his new home, and his mind was filled with a struggle between his desire to get to the bottom of the contradictions and anomalies he had already found, and his desire to stay, uncomplaining, in the bosom of his new circle of friends. The two were, it seemed, mutually exclusive. To accept his own recent experience and Virgil Jones’ explanation of it was to put himself outside the ethos of K, which denied Grimus and his effect; to accept the authorized Gospel according to Gribb was to deny the evidence of his own senses, or else to view Virgil Jones as both mad and evil; Flapping Eagle could not quite do that, nor understand how, if he did, he could explain his inner voyage. Perhaps a drug? But then, how to explain the vision of Bird-Dog? Had Cherkassov laced the wine with something more narcotic? The battle raged and fluctuated within him; he felt as ignorant, as stupid as his uncomplaining donkey, and wished his horizons were as narrow.

  —How do you refute the Grimus myth? he had asked Gribb.

  —Tchah, had been the reply. I have no time for creation myths. I must impress upon you that this preoccupation with simplistic explanations of origins—which is all creation myths are—is a very counterproductive business.

  —Perhaps you could tell me, asked Flapping Eagle, as politely as he could, how you and Mrs Gribb—and for that matter the rest of the townspeople—came to Calf Island?

  Gribb said: —At times, Mr Eagle, you show a degree of perversity … as I just said, origins, beginnings, are valueless. Valueless. Study how we live, by all means. But leave, for goodness’ sake, this womb-obsession of yours, this inquiry into birth. Surely maturity is of greater interest than birth? Please excuse me now: I must collate a few more clichés before lunch.

  The donkey jogged along the Cobble-way.

  More puzzles came into Flapping Eagle’s bursting head.

  There had been no unit of currency on the Axona Plateau; but that had been a society born and bred to communal living. It was extraordinary that so motley a collection as the K-dwellers, so separate from each other, should find it possible to accept a similar form of commune with such apparent ease. Could a man like Flann O’Toole, aggressive, competitive, ever agree with the notion that he was worth no more and no less than any other member of the community? And, though the Cherkassovs had acquired a nominal pre-eminence, the concept was surely alien to them as well. To dispense with rewards, to distribute the produce of K’s fertile farmland according to need rather than rank or status or wealth … it must have been hard to swallow. Talking to a farmer here, a butcher there (and often struck by the incongruity of man and job), Flapping Eagle gathered that Jocasta’s whores were unpaid; so was Peckenpaw the ex-trapper, now the village blacksmith. They did their work and in return were free to use the services of any other resident, and to collect generous rations of food from Quartermaster Moonshy. The town provided services, the farms provided food, and the two were freely given and taken. In a sense it was Utopian; but how on earth had it become workable? The Cherkassovs were still aristocrats, Gribb was still Gribb. Only in the matter of social organization did K display this out-of-place fellow-feeling; for the rest it was a place divided into small groups, even of isolated individuals, with few of the festivities and group activities usually associated with tightly-knit communities. And no crime. Flapping Eagle could not help feeling that such a system, for such people, could only work in the presence of some overwhelmingly powerful enemy force, some thing they all feared so much that differences were sunk in the common search for a means of survival. Which led back to Virgil Jones’ explanations—and to Grimus. The whine was still there when he thought about it, there in the corners of his head. He had argued himself into thinking that the absence of Dimension-fever in K could be taken as a final disproof of Virgil’s theories; but the alternative was even more probable. Obsessionalism, “single-mindedness”, the process of turning human beings into the petrified, Simplified Men of K, was a defence against the Effect, Virgil had said: —concentrate on the forms of things, the material business of living, and on “prime interests”, and the inner and outer universes would be blocked out. It all fitted: that was why Gribb and the rest resolutely refused to discuss origins—to do so would be to admit the presence of the enemy which they had driven from their minds. That was why Cherkassov had treated Gribb with that mixture of respect and insult: Gribb, as perpetrator of the Grimus-denying school of thought, had to be respected; but since all of K knew it to be a convenient sham, the respect was only external; probably they despised him for his pomposity. Flapping Eagle wondered how Elfrida felt. Probably she simply adored him for his cleverness.

  Elfrida, Irina: there were the two most powerful weights in favour of K. No town which contained them could be easily dismissed. And perhaps two days was too short a time in which to decide to break his vow to himself. Yes, perhaps.

  But while he was reassuring himself, the face of Bird-Dog crept back into his head and refused to leave. It was not easy to be an ostrich, even in a town full of them.

  The donkey paused, by habit, outside Moonshy’s Stores. P. S. Moonshy had struck Flapping Eagle as a man worth talking to, if only because he had questioned the sovereignty of Gribb’s ideas. But when they sat in the spartan back room of the Stores, which was Moonshy’s retreat, he became less certain. Yellowing posters clung to the walls, screaming defiance at long-gone tyrannies. The clenched fist of solidarity was much in evidence. Moonshy differed from the rest only in choice of obsession. He was Opposition Man. That was what gave him the strength to question the shaky edifice on which rested the sanity of K. He questioned, but he was a part of it; so that when Flapping Eagle raised the crucial question of origins—and Grimus—he received only a stony stare and the official doctrine.

  —These things, pah! said Moonshy. They do not matter. I spit upon them. What is of importance is Cherkassov’s privileges, is Gribb’s indolent scribblings, which the deprived workers are obliged to support, is the sinecure given to the woman Liv in consideration of her mental state. She is not deranged, nor is she talented. She is a passenger. These things are important.

  —But you continue to work within the system?

  —The time is not yet ripe, declaimed Moonshy. When the workers become politicized, the time will come.

  His accents betrayed his words. He was secure in his attitudes, as he would never have to carry them to their logical conclusion. Flapping Eagle made an excuse and left, feeling disappointed.

  Evening was drawing on when Flapping Eagle saw Bird-Dog again. And this was no hallucination, nothing which could be explained away as a trick of the eyesight. It was her, his sibling and mother-substitute, Bird-Dog herself, large as life and just as plain.

  Nothing was out of the ordinary in K; Mr Stone was busy at his counting, the cloud hung over the mountain-top, the mist hung over the plain. Flapping Eagle dismounted from his donkey to one side of the House of the Rising Son. He wanted to see Virgil again. Leaving the donkey tethered there, off the Cobble-way, he walked round to the front door. There was a woman leaning against it, her face in shadow. He called to her: —Is Virgil Jones in?

  The woman moved into the street. —Come, little brother, she said. Come catch me. And she was off, running as fast as ever sh
e did, around the brothel, away from the parked donkey. The surprise rooted Flapping Eagle to the spot for a vital moment and then he was after her. But she turned each corner as he turned the previous one, holding her lead easily, calling: —Next time, little brother. May be next time. He raced round the back of the house after her and then returned to the side where his donkey stood bellowing—but Bird-Dog was nowhere.

  The donkey was bellowing because the Two-Time Kid, Anthony St Clair Peyrefitte Hunter, was in the process of sodomizing it, and even for a docile donkey, there are limits.

  Fighting back anger and nausea, Flapping Eagle asked: —Did you see her?

  —Who? asked Hunter conversationally. The donkey bellowed louder.

  A woman leaned out of a window of the House.

  —Get away from here, she shouted. Hooligans!

  —For pity’s sake stop that, shouted Flapping Eagle, hauling Hunter off the tethered donkey.

  —All right, said Hunter mildly, it’s disgustingly unpleasant anyway.

  —Then why…

  —Ill try anything twice, said Hunter as if by rote, dusting himself down fastidiously. Last time the beast kicked me. Broke my leg, damn nearly. At least I shan’t have to do it again.

  Flapping Eagle forced his thoughts away from this lunacy. Bird-Dog had disappeared again; but, more importantly, she had appeared again. Where did she come from? Was it some kind of taunt? It was as though she—or someone—was reluctant to allow him to settle in K. He felt a surge of contrariness. If that was so, perhaps he just would.

  Hunter had gone now, but more explicably, through the mist towards the Elbaroom. Flapping Eagle patted his poor, confused donkey. —Poor donkey, he said, and mounted. Enough had happened this evening; he didn’t feel up to his intended confrontation with Virgil Jones. In a way, he felt as sodomized by events as his unfortunate steed.