Grimus - By Salman Rushdie Page 0,83

reaction had been a savage delight. —Now we’ll see, he said. Now perhaps we can stop lying.

One-Track Peckenpaw gave him an uninterested glance. So Gribb was dead. So what? Peckenpaw could do without Gribb. A man did what a man had to do to stay alive. A man believed what a man had to believe to survive. One Gribb wasn’t going to change that.

The uninterested glance turned to alarm as the Two-Time Kid clutched his head suddenly and fell against the bar. His expression was one of total disbelief.

Self-deception operates at different levels, and Hunter was certainly unaware of the extent to which he had come to depend on his posture. He had become the Two-Time Kid, and an elegant, cynical disenchantment with K was a part of that role. Beneath it, he was just as afraid, just as unwilling to admit the reality of Grimus and his Effect, as Gribb or Aleksandr Cherkassov. The Dimensions took him unawares and gripped him with their fever only because his self-deception ran even deeper than the rest; he had convinced himself that it did not exist, that his mind was not closed to the implications of Grimus. The storm the Inner Dimensions unleashed upon him, scalding his nerve-centres, burning out the synapses of a brain which could not accommodate the new realities invading it, proved otherwise.

Peckenpaw saw him fall forwards, saw his head strike the floor; and no amount of shouting and shaking did any good. Hunter’s end was the quickest of all.

One-Track Peckenpaw was beside himself, in the grip of some great emotion. He would not let Hunter be dead. He would not.

—Come on, little bastard, he cajoled. Come on, you little two-timer, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. He shook the body like a limp rag.

—It’s no use, said Flann O’Toole, with unnatural gentleness. Leave him, One-Track, it’s no use. He put a hand on the giant bear’s shoulder.

Peckenpaw rose, taking Hunter’s body into his arms.

—Someone’s to blame, he said to the room at large. Someone’s paying for this, soon.

He carried the body to the door, then spoke to the room again.

—I’m taking him home now. The Two-Time Kid. He died with his boots on.

There were no coffins. Ignatius Gribb, Norbert Page and the Two-Time Kid had been wrapped in rough woollen blankets from the stores. Count Aleksandr Cherkassov had been swaddled in a sheet embroidered with his coat-of-arms. Each body was carried in a simple hammock, strung between two poles, a pall-bearer at each corner. Most of K followed the Chief Mourners in a tearful crocodile. The chief mourners were Elfrida, accompanied by Flapping Eagle, Irina Cherkassova and One-Track Peckenpaw.

Count Aleksandr Cherkassov had become titular head of K by default. Even Flann Napoleon O’Toole preferred to limit his empire to the alcoholic environment of the Elbaroom. But titular head he was, and now that he was dead, his duties passed naturally and without question to his son.

Leading the procession, smiling with the happiness of a child learning a new game, was Count Alexei Aleksandrovich Cherkassov.

The funeral service was short and simple, eschewing any pretence at religiosity. The chief mourners said a few words, earth was scattered, and that was that. Alexei Cherkassov, a fool at the head of the blind, stood smiling silently in the light mist, an epitaph incarnate.

—My husband, said Elfrida Gribb, was a man more sinned against than sinning. He was the salt of the earth, the flower of his generation, the rock on which we stood. He was a good man and a loving husband.

It was appropriate that the author of the All-Purpose Quotable Philosophy should be commemorated by a string of clichés. Elfrida moved away from the head of the grave to grasp Flapping Eagle’s arms. Irina Cherkassova glared.

One-Track Peckenpaw loomed hugely over the grave of Two-Time Hunter, a tragic goliath mourning the loss of his david. He could not have formed words to express what he felt, but he had become aware that amid the gibes and insults the two of them had habitually hurled at each other had been an important bond, the mutual need of opposites.

He said: —The Two-Time Kid was one of the best.

Irina Cherkassova had two speeches to make. She stood in the stillness with her chin tilted up behind her veil, the very archetype of bereaved pride. She spoke briefly of the loyalty and selflessness of Norbert Page, and Alexei Cherkassov clapped his hands as she spoke his name. Then, moving to her husband’s grave, she said:

—It would