Sunday, July the 3rd, 2005

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Bronchitis Person's Helicopter Journey

“Hand me that gewgaw,” said the Mullah.

The Mufti snatched the gewgaw from the Ayatollah and handed it to the Mullah.

“Are you going to take the gewgaw to the Grand Vizier?” asked the Mufti.

“That I am,” said the Mullah, turning on the heel of his floppy bootee, and exiting through a rich brocade curtain.

The Ayatollah stroked his tremendous hairy beard and looked at the Mufti.

“Do you have your portable metal tapping machine on you?” he asked, and on seeing the Mufti nod, he added, “I want you to contact the Muezzin.”

“The Muezzin?” cried the Mufti, dumbfounded.

“The same,” said the Ayatollah.

Leaving the Mufti to tap a message to the Muezzin, the Ayatollah went out into the courtyard. Almost hidden behind the luxuriant mimosa, japonica, candytuft, madder, lupins and oxlip, a whirring robot version of Big Bill Broonzy was playing the blues. The Ayatollah was tolerant of music, so long as it was mournful. He sat down on a mat and ran his fingers through his hairy beard again.

Meanwhile, at the Grand Vizier's palace, the Grand Vizier was impatiently awaiting the Mullah with the gewgaw. Last week he had volunteered to undergo ideological re-education. All the talk in the palace now was of the correct application of Mao Tse-Tung thought. The Grand Vizier wanted the Mullah's gewgaw to add to his collection of baubles, the significance of which was only now beginning to dawn on him. He popped a filbert into his mouth and continued pacing up and down on his big and attractive carpet, his impatience growing.

Just as the Ayatollah was stroking his superb hairy beard for the umpteenth time, the Mufti joined him in the courtyard. The Mufti had an abnormal growth on his forehead.

“Strikingly disconcerting news,” he announced, “The Muezzin has bronchitis.”

The Ayatollah let go of his beard.

“Disconcerting indeed,” he said, “Go and switch off the Broonzy robot. I need a bit of peace and quiet to think.”

In January, the remote control device for the robot had been left out in the rain, and no one had been able to repair it, so the Mufti had to fight his way through lilac, phlox, cotoneaster, hollyhocks and erica to reach the knob on the side of the machine to switch it off. Now the only sound in the courtyard was the insistent call of a corncrake far far away.

Suddenly the Ayatollah ceased cogitating and spoke.

“Mufti,” he said, “There is a helicopter idling on the helipad. Go to it, fetch the Muezzin, then fly him to the Grand Vizier's palace. That is my clearly considered plan of how we should proceed.”

And so the scene was set for that historic meeting in the palace, when the Grand Vizier, the Mullah, the bronchial Muezzin and the Mufti sat on divans in the room of baubles, their attentions fixed upon the gewgaw. Rex Tint's mezzotint of the occasion, a work of the imagination, for of course he was not present, is one of his greatest mezzotints. It took him four years to complete it, and when it was done, he gave it as a gift to the Ayatollah, who framed it and hung it on the wall of the courtyard, where it was soon obscured by burgeoning fleabane, veronica, eglantine, hibiscus, poppies and daisies and lady's slipper and old man's beard, by saxifrage and narcissus, by orchids, by briars, by creeping jenny and viola, and it hangs there still, though the Ayatollah is long dead, and the faraway corncrake is no more.