Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

His parents smiled at their son the lawyer and his skillfully marshaled arguments-and these were identical smiles, cocked up to the left a little, smiles affording no glimpses of aging teeth. They put down their utensils in unison and clasped their pianist’s hands in their laps. Max senior gave a little glance at Anya and Anya gave a little glance back, offering each other the right of first reply. “Son,” Max senior finally began, pursing his lips, “one never knows the answers to the questions of life until one is asked.” Max was familiar with his father’s circumlocutory philosophizing and waited for the point to arrive. “You know what he means, Maxi,” his mother took over. “Until you have back pain you don’t know your tolerance for back pain. How you’re going to tolerate not being so young anymore, you won’t know until you grow old. And until danger comes a person doesn’t know for sure how a person’s going to think about danger.” Max senior picked up a breadstick and bit it in half; it broke with a loud crack. “So now this question of peril has been posed,” he said, pointing the remaining half of the stick at his son and narrowing his eyes, “and so now I know my answer.”

Anya Ophuls drew herself up in a rare show of disunity. “It’s my answer also, Maximilian,” she corrected her husband mildly. “I think this slipped your mind a moment.” Max senior frowned. “Sure, sure,” he said. “Her answer as well, I know her answer as well as I know my own, and my mind, excuse me, nothing slips it. My mind, excuse me, is a fist of steel.” Max junior thought it was time to press a little. “And what is that answer?” he asked as delicately as possible, and his father with a loud short laugh forgot his irritation and smacked his palms together as hard as he could. “I discover that I am a stubborn bastard!” he cried, coughing hard. “I discover bloody-mindedness in myself, and mulishness to boot. I will not be chased from my home and my business! I will not go to Sauerwein’s and be made to look at his trembling old man’s paintings and eat quenelles of pike. I will stay in my house and run my factory and face the enemy down. Who do they think they are dealing with here? Some common inky-fingered ragamuffin from the streets? Maybe I’m on my last legs, young fellow, but I stand for something in this town.” His wife tugged at the sleeve of his coat. “Oh, yes,” he added, sinking faintly back into his seat and dabbing a napkin at his brow. “And your mother. She’s a stubborn bastard too.” Then came a series of coughs and expectorations into a silk kerchief that declared the subject closed.

“In that case, I won’t raise this with you again,” said Max junior, admitting defeat. “On one condition. If the day arrives when I have to come to you and say, today it’s time to run, on that day I want you to run without any argument, knowing that I will never say such a thing to you unless it is the simple truth.” His mother beamed with unqualified pride. “See how he drives a hard bargain, Maximilian, isn’t that so,” she cried. “He leaves us no honorable choice except to agree.”

Professor Max Ophuls informed vice-chancellor Danjon that family responsibilities obliged him to remain in Strasbourg. “What a waste,” Danjon replied. “If you should choose to stay alive before they kill you, come and see us. Although it is possible that we will not be spared, either. I fear that this will be an L=0 eclipse.” In the 1920s André Danjon had devised a scale of luminosity, the so-called Danjon scale, to describe the relative darkness of the moon during a lunar eclipse. L=0 meant total blackness, a complete absence of the reflected earthshine that could give the eclipsed moon a residual color ranging from a deep grey to a bright copper-red or even orange. “If I’m right,” Danjon told Max, “you and I are simply choosing to die in different towns during the general blackout.”

From that day forward each of the three Ophulses kept a small bag packed in a closet, but otherwise went about their work. In the absence of domestic help, most of the Belle Époque mansion was dust-sheeted and closed up. They ate meals together in the kitchen, moved extra desks into Max senior’s library to construct a three-person office, kept their own bedrooms clean and dusted, and maintained one small living room in which to receive their dwindling list of guests. As for Art & Aventure, two of the famous firm’s three Strasbourg presses were closed down at once. The third, on the quai Mullenheim, a smaller art-book facility-both letterpress and photogravure-where for many generations volumes dedicated to the finest artists in Europe had been produced to the highest standards in the world, was the scene of the Ophulses’ last stand. At first all three of them went in every day and manned the machines. However, contracts were being canceled constantly, so that soon enough the parents were obliged angrily to “retire,” and Max junior went to the print shop alone. Every call from a grand publisher from the capital deepened Max’s scorn for the weakness of Paris. He remembered his mother shouting into the telephone, “What do you mean, this is no time for art? If not now, when?”-and then staring fire-eyed at the silent receiver in her hand as if it were a traitor. “He hangs up,” she said to the room at large. “After twenty years’ business, without so much as good-bye.” The death of courtesy appeared to distress her more than the collapse of the family business. Her coughing husband moved at once to comfort her. “Take a look on the shelves,” he said. “You see that army of volumes? That army will outlast whatever iron men come clanking across our lives.”

When Max junior, hiding behind a burned-out truck just over a year later, saw the treasures of Art & Aventure’s backlist being tossed onto a bonfire outside the burning synagogue, his father’s words came back to him. If he had been able to discuss the burning books with Max senior the old man would probably have shrugged and quoted Bulgakov. Manuscripts don’t burn. Well, maybe they do and maybe they don’t, thought orphaned Max in the incandescent night; but people, of course, will blaze away nicely, given a decent chance.

Strasbourg had become a ghost town, its streets ragged with absences. It was still charming, naturally, with its medieval half-timberings, its covered bridges, its pleasing aspects and riverside parks. As he prowled the largely deserted alleys of the Petite France district, the future Ambassador Ophuls told himself, “It’s as if everyone went away for August, and any day now it will be time for la rentrée and the place will be bustling again.” But in order to believe that one had to ignore the broken windows, the evidence of looting, the feral dogs in the streets, many of them abandoned pets driven insane by abandonment. One had to ignore the ruination of one’s own life. There were traditional, time-honored ways of doing this, and during the course of that year in which his family lost everything Max Ophuls did not ignore tradition. He frequented the few brothels and drinking dives that were still in business; they welcomed him in, glad of the trade, and offered him their best goods at bargain prices. The melancholy strain that had been lying dormant in his personality revealed itself in those months, inducing periods of Churchillian depression during which he considered ending his life more than once, and was only prevented from doing so by the knowledge that he would profoundly disgust his parents. As the year 1940 moved forward, a year in which all the news was bad, he walked the city streets and squares, alleys and embankments at high speed, hour after hour, with his head down, his hands jammed deep into the pockets of a double-breasted serge greatcoat, and a dark blue beret pulled low over his frowning brow. If he moved fast enough, like an American comic-book superhero, like the Flash, like a Jewish Superman, maybe he could create the illusion that the people of Strasbourg were still there. If he moved fast enough maybe he could save the world. If he moved fast enough maybe he could break through into another universe in which everything wasn’t so full of shit. If he moved fast enough maybe he could outpace his own anger and fear. If he moved fast enough maybe he could stop feeling like a helpless fool.