Grimus - By Salman Rushdie Page 0,67

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