Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

“Your choice.”

“You still have Barbara calling him.”

“That also doesn’t help much. In fact, she tried to arouse his suspicions, on the fourth, when he’d suggested a divorce. Told him she loved him and then hung up. The only thing that saved us, apart from my fist, was that he treats her so badly that she really does, for the most part, detest him. Thank you, I know. It’s because I developed a situation already nascent. With a tip of the hat to your theories.”

The cigarette was making Jammu’s sense of the vertical swim. She’d have treated Barbara badly too if they were married.

“The tone of his pronouncements has changed,” Singh said. “His attitude in the last six days amounts to a declaration of neutrality. If I were John Holmes I’d be scared.”

“So it looks like I’m getting the message across to him.”

“Not to worry, Chief. He likes you. He thinks you’re cute.”

“Enough.”

“He moons about the house.”

“I said enough.”

“I’m sure you’re wishing we didn’t have to release the little wife. That I could check her as baggage when I fly home.”

She put out the cigarette and licked the sugar from its paper off her lips.

“But you’d like him to go all the way with you,” Singh said.

“To support the merger.”

“That’s what I meant .” He paused. “Dear Miss Singh. I think my boyfriend really digs me but he has cold feet. I’m ready to go all the way. What can I do? Dear Lovelorn. This is the moment for objective correlatives. Contrary to Baxti’s expectations, we haven’t aged him by accelerating the process of loss. His habits and orientation have become youthful and shockingly selfish, which is fortunate because yours — if you’ll pardon my saying it — is a youthful, selfish appeal. I have two ideas and a suggestion.”

“Which I wouldn’t have heard if I’d left just now.”

“The envelope, please.” Singh took a white envelope from the inner pocket of his jacket and tore it open. He scanned the abstract it contained, and read aloud: “One. Urge him to file for the election to fill the county supervisor seat vacated by Billerica.” He looked at Jammu.

“Maybe.”

“Two. He has never served as the Veiled Prophet. Have him selected.”

“Maybe. The VP organization is mainly a city affair, and that means a lot of its members aren’t happy with Probst at the moment.”

“Egon Blanders? You got him that Easton site. He should owe you favors.”

“He does.”

“Well then. Probst is still popular no matter how he stands on the merger question. He should be the Veiled Prophet this year. And the county supervisor. In the fall he ‘mused’ a lot about his ‘semi-retirement,’ which is how he referred to a five-day work week. If you were the one to bring him tidings of a larger role in the public sector…Which brings me to my suggestion. Flatter his vanity. You’ve done well with his physical vanity. But the State, which at this point is little more than a quasi-youthful chaos, needs to be solidified. My suggestion is destiny. He already half believes he’s destined to play a vital role in the history of St. Louis, he’s been told so often. He should believe additionally that he was destined to team up with you — that his family was destined to leave him to achieve this very end. And you don’t care if this turns out to be bunk on the day after the election. Do you. More important yet is the correlative, which is that the city and the county are destined to be rejoined. That the merger isn’t a violence but a necessity. It was destined to happen. The task should be easy for you, because you yourself believe in historical necessity, in your own quaint way. And the symbolism — you the city, he the county — should help reinforce the personal attraction. City of symbols, recall. So ‘go for it.’”

Jammu said nothing. She felt she’d outgrown Singh. Probst wasn’t glib, and he had a position of authority. She admired him for his hesitations, his scrupled observations, for the doors to truth he opened with his careful picking.

“How will you keep the Ripley dynamic active,” Singh said, “if Probst ends up on his side?”

“Ripley can’t back out now.”

“And Devi?”

“I still use her. But she has a bag packed. Pokorny and Norris would like to get me any way they can.”

“You’re very patient with the General.”

“You underestimate his value. His theories have kept him busy. He’s done almost nothing practical to oppose me. And he’s been a walking worst-case scenario. Having kept one step ahead of him, we’ve been two steps ahead of everyone else. The thing is, Singh, it all fits together so neatly. Gopal bagged Hutchinson for us, he publicized the inadequacy of the county police forces, he damaged West County’s popularity, he contributed to the atmosphere of fear, and he did a few things like the stadium trick. Pokorny still has a man trying to figure out where all the equipment came from and what it was for if we weren’t going to use it. It was for him. For the knowledgeable few, for the informational elite. For Norris, who will never figure out that he shouldn’t have wasted time trying to figure it out.”

Singh stood up with a grunt. “What goes on in your head, friend? You must know you always sound like this when you’ve talked to her.”

“Like what?” Jammu wanted to know. What had he heard in what she’d said? Sometimes he just made these things up.

“In ten years the two of you will be indistinguishable.”

She sat with her legs crossed and her arms crossed, in blue serge and black leather; at least she’d never be as formal as her mother. Who as a young woman had changed her name and run off with an American and had a child by him in Los Angeles, very possibly believing the same thing.

Winter came early in Kashmir, late in October when the valley sloshed humidity into the mountains to tumble back as cloud, gothic mist to intrigue in the avenues of Srinagar, in liaison with woodsmoke, in a pre-modern smog. Night began with the unseen dropping of the sun behind unseen peaks, at four o’clock. Balwan Singh entered a bungalow on the city outskirts, threw his coat on a peg, and approached the hunched and red-eyed members of the Marxist Students Reading Group, speaking before he reached them, before they could greet him.

“Classically,” he said, “the revolution proceeds at the most general level along dialectical lines between theory and praxis, praxis and theory. Lenin’s perception of his historicity became Lenin’s stewardship of the Bolshevik actions, which actions, their practical successes and failures, led to a refinement of his theory, specifically in the concepts of imperialism and the Communist state. As long as Lenin lived, this dialectic closely matched its counterpart, that of man as participant and man as percipient, as subject and as object. But the death of Lenin, the emerging imperfections of the early state, and above all the rise of Stalin created a crisis in the dialectic: praxis dictated that theory, in the short run, be its apologist.”

His comrades squatted on the floor, leaned against walls, chewing paan or smoking, like a congregation of ruminant boatmen a generation older. Most of them were sons of well-heeled Hindus, their eyes Brahmanically mournful, and they’d adhered to the Indian pattern by which youths become men early. Textbook materialism had exalted them. They filibustered in classrooms. They got themselves expelled. They laughed at jokes that were correct.

Singh, whose jokes were always correct, never laughed. He paced back and forth before them, standing at the center of an asterisk of shadows cast from his legs by the lanterns, his strut as always part professorial, part firebrand, and mainly Heinrich Heine — and he began to sense that he was not being heard. His comrades’ shoulders bucked and dipped as if they felt a draft. They did. It was a newcomer, behind them, a girl, a very young girl with a boyish body and a boy’s short hair, sitting cross-legged in slacks on the floor near the wood stove. Singh interrupted himself to ask for her name.