Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

Like most people from his part of the country, the young Max Ophuls had been raised to distrust Paris. His parents, Anya Ophuls and Max senior, owned an apartment at 8, avenue du Bois, but they rarely used the place, except when business necessitated the unwelcome journey west, and they invariably returned home as soon as possible with their eyebrows lifted high in fastidious disdain. Max junior himself had spent some years in Paris after graduating from the University of Strasbourg with brilliant degrees in economics and international relations, and had almost been seduced. In Paris he added the law to his accomplishments, established a reputation as a dandy and a ladykiller, affected spats and carried a cane, and demonstrated an astonishing technical skill as a spare-time painter, making Dalís and Magrittes of such subtle brilliance that they fooled the art dealer Julien Levy when he visited Max’s studio apartment after a long drunken night at the Coupole. “Why are you wasting your time with law and money when you should dedicate your life to being a forger?” Levy shrieked when the deception was revealed. He was the lover of Frida Kahlo and exhibitor of the magic realist Tchelitchew, and in those days he was also in a permanent rage because his plan to build a Surrealist pavilion in the shape of a giant eye in the middle of the New York World’s Fair had just been turned down. “These aren’t forgeries,” Max Ophuls said, “because there are no originals.” Levy was silenced and examined the pictures more closely. “There’s only one thing wrong with them,” he said. “I’ll bring the artists over to sign them one of these days, and then they will be complete.” Max Ophuls was flattered, but he knew that art was not the world for him. He was right about this; about his future membership in the world of forgers, however, he was incorrect. History, which was his true métier, the real profession to which he would devote his life, would for a time value his skills as a faker above his talents in other fields.

Paris wasn’t his place, either. Soon after the Levy visit he stunningly declined the offer of a partnership in one of the city’s most illustrious legal practices and announced that he was going home to work with his father. This was a refusal as preposterous as the original offer, his astounded Parisian friends said, startled into agreeing with his envious enemies: he was far too young to have been offered so great an honor in the first place, and in the second place he was evidently too stupid or-much worse-too provincial to accept it. He returned to Strasbourg, where he divided his time between working as a junior professor of economics at the university-the vice-chancellor, the great astronomer André-Louis Danjon, was “mightily impressed” with him, and called him “one of the coming fellows, the Next People”-and helping his ailing, consumptive father with the family printing business. Within a year the catastrophe of Europe brought that age of the world to an end.

Decades had passed since those times, but Paris lingered in the ambassador’s Americanized memory as a series of flickering images. It was present in the way he held a cigarette, or in the slow drift of smoke reflected in a gilded mirror. Paris was his own fist hammering on a café table to emphasize a political or philosophical point. It was a glass of cognac beside his morning coffee and tepid brioche. That innocent-uninnocent city was a prostitute, was a gigolo, was sophisticated infidelity in the guilty-unguilty afternoons. It was too beautiful, flaunting its beauty as if begging to be scarred. It was a certain precise mixture of tenderness and violence, love and pain. Everyone in the world has two fatherlands, his own and Paris, a Parisian filmmaker told him back then. But he didn’t trust it. It seemed… he struggled for the right word… weak. The weakness of Paris was the weakness of France, which would make possible the dark metamorphosis that was beginning, the trumping of subtlety by crudity, the shriveled victory of wretchedness over joy.

It was not only Paris that changed, obviously. His beloved Strasbourg metamorphosed too, from river jewel into cheap Rhinestone. It turned into tasteless black bread and too many rutabagas and the disappearances of friends. Also the sneer of conquest above the collar of a gray uniform, the living death of collaboration in the eyes of the beautiful showgirls, the stinking gutter finales of the dead. It became rapid capitulation and slow resistance. Strasbourg, like Paris, shape-shifted and was no longer itself. It was the first paradise he lost. But in his heart he blamed the capital, blamed it for its arrogant weakness, for presenting itself to the world-to him-as a vision of high civilization which it did not have the force to defend. The fall of Strasbourg was a chapter in its back-and-forth frontier history. The fall of Paris was Paris’s fault.

When Boonyi Noman danced for him in the Dachigam hunting lodge in Kashmir he thought of those feathered dead-eyed showgirls wreathed in Nazi cigar smoke, flaunting their gartered thighs. The clothes were different but he recognized the same hard hunger in her stare, the readiness of the survivor to suspend moral judgment in the presence of imagined opportunity. But I’m not a Nazi, he thought. I’m the American ambassador, the guy in the white hat. I’m for God’s sake one of the Jews who lived. She swung her hips for him and he thought, And I’m also a married man. She swung her hips again and he ceased to think.

He was a Frenchman with a German name. His family’s printing presses operated under the name Art & Aventure, a name they had borrowed, in French translation, from Jean Gensfleisch of Mayence, the fifteenth-century genius whose own Strasbourg workshop had been called Kunst und Aventur when, in 1440, he invented the printing press and became known to the world as Gutenberg. Max Ophuls’s parents were wealthy, cultured, conservative, cosmopolitan; Max was raised speaking High German as easily as French, and believing that the great writers and thinkers of Germany belonged to him as naturally as the poets and philosophers of France. “In civilization there are no borderlines,” Max senior taught him. But when barbarism came to Europe, that erased borderlines as well. The future Ambassador Ophuls was twenty-nine years old when Strasbourg was evacuated. The exodus began on September 1, 1939; one hundred and twenty thousand Strasbourgeois became refugees in the Dordogne and the Indre. The Ophuls family did not leave, although their household staff disappeared overnight without giving notice, silently fleeing the exterminating angel, just as the Kashmiri palace servitors would abandon the royal Dassehra banquet in the Shalimar gardens eight years later. The workers at the printing presses also began to desert their posts.

The university was moving to Clermont-Ferrand in the Zone Sud, outside the area of German occupation, and vice-chancellor Danjon urged his budding young economics genius to accompany them. But Max the younger would not leave unless he could get his parents to a place of safety as well. He tried hard to persuade them to join the evacuation. Wiry, graceful, their white hair cropped short, their hands the hands of pianists, not printers, their bodies leaning intently forward to listen to their son’s absurd proposition, Max senior and his wife, Anya, looked more like identical twins than a married couple. Life had made them into each other’s mirrors. Their personalities, too, had shaded into each other, creating a single, two-headed self, and so complete was their unanimity in all matters, both great and small, that it was no longer necessary for either to ask the other what they wished to eat or drink, or what their opinion might be on any subject of concern. At present they were seated side by side on carved wooden chairs in a six-hundred-year-old restaurant near the Place Kléber-an absolutely charming and historical spot-feasting heartily on choucroute au Riesling and caramelized lamb shoulder in a beer and pine honey sauce, and gazing on their brilliant son, their onliest golden child, with a mixture of profound love and gentle, but genuine, contempt. “Max junior isn’t eating,” Max senior mused with an air of wonderment, and Anya replied, “The poor boy has lost his appetite on account of the political situation.” Their son urged them to be serious and they immediately put on their gravest expressions with every appearance (and none of the substance) of obedience. Max took a deep breath and launched into his prepared speech. The situation was desperate, he said. It was only a matter of time before the German army attacked France and if the border country should go the way of Poland the family’s German name would not protect them. Theirs was a well-known Jewish household in a strongly Jewish neighborhood; the risk of informers was real and had to be faced up to. Max senior and Anya should go away to their good friends the Sauerweins’ place near Cro-Magnon. He himself would go to Clermont-Ferrand and teach. They would have to lock and seal the Strasbourg house and the printing works and simply hope for the best. Was that agreed?