Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

He said, “But in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche writes of ecstatic states, of singing and dancing, of how someone becomes a work of art in themselves, rather than just an observer. It’s all there, before Freud. No wonder Freud refused to read him properly. He knew the threat, the danger.”

Henry and Miriam stayed at the sex party until the early morning, talking, drinking, looking at bodies. I asked him whether he suffered from jealousy, or whether defying jealousy was the point of it.

“Neither,” said Henry. “When I see her with another man, I think of him as being devoted to her pleasures.”

“Are you sure it’s something you both wanted?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “We both wanted it. We want it again.”

I had observed and listened to Ajita for long enough. I needed to confront her with my suspicions. But when I saw her after the factory incident, it was clear she had a lot on her mind.

“The strike is getting worse,” she told me. “Every day those people are trying harder to destroy us. I don’t think they’re going to stop. Dad is determined to defy them. But one side will have to give way.”

She wasn’t reading, studying or eating as much pizza as she used to. I told her if she wasn’t careful, she’d never catch up with her work. I began to take her to the library; I’d sit with her, watching her eyes move across a page and helping her make notes, but she couldn’t connect with philosophy in that state of mind. She’d fling notes across the table to me and burst out talking, and we’d have to go to a pub.

“I am scared, Jamal. The Commies have got a lot of determination, and all the time my family is losing money.” I may have been on the other side, but she was my girlfriend. What could I say? “If it continues like this, we’ll go bankrupt and will have to stay with relatives in India. The whole family will be ruined and shamed.”

Ajita’s mother was still away. She rang and heard about the strike but had no intention of returning. She wanted the children to join her in India when they finished their studies for the summer, leaving the father to deal with the strike. This was bothering me. I didn’t want Ajita to go away. I wanted us to be together all the time. Six weeks was an eternity.

Sometimes I glimpsed extreme anxiety on Ajita’s face. We had been making love frequently in library toilets, cupboards or her car or house, but it rarely happened now unless I insisted. She was elsewhere. We had talked about marrying-somehow, sometime-but the relationship had developed a slow puncture.

Because I was incapable of working out, and certainly of asking her about, the kind of infidelity she’d been involved in, I conceived the brilliant idea of telling her I’d been unfaithful. Almost as soon as it had occurred to me that Ajita was unfaithful, I had indeed been unfaithful myself, thinking a little equality would cure me of feeling betrayed. My concerns would be hers.

A week before, I had visited my former lover, Sheridan, to pick up a painting she had given me. We had gone to bed (as we often used to) in the afternoon. She was a thirty-five-year-old divorced book illustrator, whose children were at school. When they came home, we’d get up and make their tea. Mostly I’d been in love with the idea of her as a pedagogical older woman, and she did take me to her club to play pool, where she introduced me to some prodigious and raddled drinkers, as well as Slim Gaillard, by whom I was much impressed.

There can’t have been many people alive with two pages devoted to them in On the Road, Kerouac describing how, in San Francisco, Slim free-associated-“Great-all-oroonie, oroonirooni”-while almost imperceptibly stroking his bongos with his fingertips for two hours, as Dean Moriarty yelled “Go!” and “Yes!” from the back. Slim was still handsome and graceful, with a true gentleman’s courtesy. Sheridan and I had dinner with him, but it was the ladies he liked-this was a man who’d known Little Richard and dated Ava Gardner, Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth.

But Ajita, when I told her about the brief return to Sheridan, seemed hardly concerned about my infidelity. If jealousy was the vindaloo of love, I’d imagined her tongue burning, and such a fire forcing her to spill her truth. But there was no noticeable heat. I could only suppose she had done the same as me. What I wanted were the details, to know where we both stood.

Wildly I was questioning her, asking her where she’d gained the experience she seemed to have. Who else was she doing it with? Was it still going on?

“Well, you know,” she said. “I’ve had other boyfriends, just as you’ve had other girlfriends. I know you don’t really want to hear about it. It will upset you, Jamal,” she said, stroking my face.

“I know,” I said. “But I’m upset anyway. Is it true that we’ve both been unfaithful recently?”

“In a way,” she said.

“Only in a way?”

“Yes,” she said.

“That’s confirmation, then,” I said. “So now I know. At last some truth! Thank God! Ajita, I guess that’s evens.”

“Not really.”

“What d’you mean?”

She said nothing.

Why didn’t she desire only me? What sort of infidelity had it been? How could she be with someone else when I was with her most of the time? When not with me, she was with her numerous girlfriends or family. How had it happened?

The more she wouldn’t tell me about it, the more I fretted. I had never felt this kind of vicious, penetrating unhappiness before. Certainly such cruelty had never been deliberately inflicted on me. I didn’t expect it from the woman I had fallen in love with. What sort of self-protection was possible? When Valentin and Wolf told me how much weight I’d lost or how tired I looked, I admitted I was having trouble with Ajita, saying, “I think she’s going with someone else.”

They liked her; they didn’t believe it, shrugging off my complaints as ordinary boy-girl stuff. They seemed to think I had been studying hard; and I had, indeed, begun to read a lot. But I wasn’t able to concentrate on my work. Why didn’t Ajita see how badly I was taking this? Where was her love for me?

When I begged her to tell me what was going on, she hardly paid any attention. She looked distracted. She certainly didn’t look as though she’d been caught out in some unnecessary betrayal.

I persisted with my questions as this dismal secret increased in size and pressure in my mind. But she wouldn’t tell me anything.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “Please understand that. I love you and will marry you, when you ask me properly. But there’s so much else going on at the moment, you know that.”

It was a nothing which had become a big something between us. As this hurt was developing, and Ajita and I had less to say to one another, my criminal career took an upturn. Wolf had introduced me to cocaine, and when I took it, talking and talking for the first time in my life, I fell into conversations which I shouldn’t have had.

Valentin and Wolf had always been planning “coups,” as they called them. But whether they kept me out of them, or didn’t tell me, or whether, as I suspected, they just didn’t happen, I never saw a “result.” One time, though, Wolf did turn up with a pink Cadillac, which he’d obtained in exchange for something or other. After a few embarrassing turns around the narrow West Kensington streets, it was “disappeared.” Another time they obtained some money from a woman whose husband was about to be sentenced, having convinced her they’d pay off the judge. When they absconded with the money, she vowed to pursue them.

I was aware that Valentin was trying to pull a coup at the casino-Wolf would go in there and Valentin would ensure he won at blackjack-but it seemed like a lot of talk. Mostly they discussed what they’d do with the money when they had it, which part of the South of France they’d live in; maybe they’d get a boat, but which sort? They even talked of how they’d decorate their apartments and how the day would be spent reading papers, eating, swimming, having sex and fraternising with other criminals. Once, when I was sarcastic about their ability as crooks (“very, very small time,” I called them), Wolf asked me whether, if I thought I was so smart, I had any better ideas. I said I had.