Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

In Strasbourg there were fires burning, and helmeted goon squads in the street. Max Ophuls went carefully, on foot, pushing his bike, hiding in shadows. When he saw the flames licking at Art & Aventure the fear began pounding in him, kneading him like dough. Long before he reached home he knew what he would find, the broken door, the wanton damage, the shit on the Biedermeiers, the daubed slogans, the urine in the hall. If the house had not been torched it could only be because some Nazi high-up wanted it for himself. All the lights were on and nobody was home. He went through the rooms one by one, darkening them, returning them to the night, letting them mourn. In the library with the three desks the destruction was very great, the books scattered and torn, a mound of them burned in the middle of the rug, a great charred heap of wisdom that somebody had pissed on to put it out. Desk drawers hung open. Gashed paintings hung askew in broken frames. He had brought his parents’ false papers home with him and had made the mistake of leaving them at home when he went on the errand that had temporarily saved him. The discovery of those documents increased his parents’ peril and doomed him as well. Nobody was home but by the end of this night of looting the house would have passed into enemy hands, like the Hotel of the Pure Blood. Nazi whores would loll where once his mother lay. He should leave. He should definitely leave at once. There was nobody home but that would change. He found a bottle of cognac that had somehow been spared. It lay unbroken in a corner next to a chaise between blowing curtains. He pulled out the cork and drank. Time passed. No, it did not pass. Time stood still. Beauty passed, love passed, bloody-mindedness and mulishness passed. Time stood still with its hands up. Stubborn bastards faded away.

After the war he found out how their story had ended. He learned the numbers burned into their forearms, memorized them and never forgot. The record showed that they had been used for medical experimentation. They were old and losing their reason and good for nothing and so a use had been found for them. After lifetimes lived mainly in their now-enfeebled minds they ended up as mere bodies, bodies that reacted this way to pain, this way to greater pain, this way to the greatest pain imaginable, bodies whose response to being injected with diseases was of interest, of high scientific interest. So they were interested in learning? Very well then. They had helped the advancement of knowledge in a valuably practical way. They never made it to the gas chamber. Scholarship killed them first.

Drunk, close to physical collapse, Max Ophuls got back on his bicycle and made the twenty-kilometer wine road dash for the third time that night. When he got back to Molsheim he realized he had no idea how to find the passeur, no idea which of the many workers’ cottages on the Bugatti estate might be his, didn’t even remember his real name. The night was no longer absolute; a hint of future color softened the black. More by luck than memory he found his way back to the small stable at the estate’s edge, an interim sort of place, a way station for tired riders, and wheeled his bicycle inside and passed out on the muddy floor in one of the stalls. This was where Finkenberger found him several hours later, in broad daylight, and shook him roughly, shouting curses into the sleeper’s ear. Max came awake fast and was frightened to find a horse nuzzling at him as if to determine whether he might be edible. Next to the horse’s head was Finkenberger’s head. Finkenberger by daylight was a jockey-sized gnome with a caustic face filled with bad and probably aching teeth. “You’re one lucky fuck,” he hissed at Max. “Gauleiter Wagner, the big cunt himself, was planning to ride here today, but it seems everybody wants twenty-four-hour delays right now.” Then he read the look on Max’s face and his manner changed. “Shit,” he said. “Shit, I’m sorry. Oh, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. I shit on myself for my insensitivity, I shit on their fascist grandmothers’ graves, I wish them shit for dinner in hell for all eternity.” He sat down in the mud and put his arm around Max, who was unable to cry. Then in a flash the passeur was all business, all questions and options. The escape route to the Zone Sud had been set up again, he had done that before going to sleep, but if the big round-ups had begun the risk factor had risen, was maybe unacceptable. Yes, of course he was confident of the route, but only as confident as it was possible to be, because this would be the first time and the first time is never sure. And if the bastards were in the middle of a big operation then there could be no guarantees but of course everyone would do his best. “That sounds good,” Max said bitterly. “Sure, let’s do that.” It was at that moment that Finkenberger the passeur had the idea that would make Max Ophuls one of the great romantic heroes of the Resistance: the Flying Jew.

At the beginning of the war Ettore Bugatti, along with the well-known aeronautical engineer Louis D. de Monge, designed a plane-the so-called Model 100-to break the world speed record, which a German Messerschmitt Me209 had raised to 469.22 miles per hour on April 26, 1939. As the threat of war grew Bugatti was given a contract to build a military version of the Racer, with two guns, oxygen cylinders and self-sealing fuel tanks. The plane was built in secret on the second floor of a Parisian furniture factory, but had never had the chance to fly. As the German armies marched on Paris, Ettore Bugatti had the plane lowered to the street, loaded it onto a truck and sent it out of the city and into hiding. “The Racer,” Finkenberger whispered to Max Ophuls, grinning his snaggletoothed grin. “I know where she is. If you can fly her, take her.”

She was hidden right under the enemy’s nose, in a hay barn on the estate. She could fly at over five hundred miles an hour, or that, at any rate, was what her designers believed. She was powered by two Bugatti T50B auto-racing engines, had forward-swept wings and a revolutionary system of variable wing geometry, a system of self-adjusting split trailing edge flaps that responded to airspeed and manifold pressure and then automatically set themselves into any of six different positions: takeoff, cruise, high-speed dash, descent, landing, rollout. She was fast, fast, fast, and painted Bugatti blue. Finkenberger brought Max to the barn after darkness made it safe to move again, and the two men worked silently for an hour and a half removing the camouflage of hay and netting and revealing the Bugatti Racer in all her glory. She was still standing on the truck that had brought her out of Paris, like a greyhound in the slips. Finkenberger said he knew a stretch of straight road nearby that would serve as a runway. Max Ophuls marveled at the Racer’s streamlined bullet beauty. “She’ll reach Clermont-Ferrand all right, but don’t go crazy, okay? No need to go for the fucking speed record,” Finkenberger said. “Now look and learn.” So he was more than a horse trainer, Max realized. Finkenberger was explaining the aircraft’s unorthodox engine/power arrangement, its canted engines, its counter-rotating propellers. The cooling system, the tail-fin control system: these, too, were innovations. “Nothing like her ever built,” Finkenberger said. “One of a fucking kind.”

“Can you authorize this?” Max Ophuls asked, his voice heavy with wonder, his thoughts already rushing skywards. “Her maiden flight will be an act of resistance,” Finkenberger replied, the blue language disappearing as he revealed a previously hidden streak of emotional patriotism. “Le Patron would not wish it otherwise. Just take her, okay? Take her before they find her. She needs to escape as well.”