Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

And he also wrote, “Entering the Resistance was, for me, a kind of flying… One took leave of one’s name, one’s past, one’s future, one lifted oneself away from one’s life and existed only in the continuum of the work, borne aloft by necessity and fatalism. Yes, a sort of soaring feeling possessed me at times, tempered by the perpetual knowledge that one could crash or be shot down at any moment, without warning, and die in the dirt like a dog.”

It was only after his safe arrival in London that Max Ophuls understood how privileged he had been to be given access to the so-called Pat Line, the escape system based in Marseille, created by Captain Ian Garrow and controlled, after Garrow’s betrayal and capture, by the pseudonymous “Commander Pat O’Leary,” a Belgian doctor whose real name was Albert-Marie Guérisse. This line, operated by the DF Section of the British Special Operations Executive, was primarily set up and maintained for the rescue of British airmen and intelligence personnel marooned behind enemy lines, and in spite of the constant dangers of treachery and capture it had a spectacular record, smuggling over six hundred fighters back to safety. However, in the light of the growing tensions between Général de Gaulle and both Churchill and Roosevelt, it was most unusual for the services of the Line to be made available to a nonmilitary individual just because de Gaulle wanted him to join the Forces Françaises Libres at their Carlton Gardens headquarters. The reason for so exceptional an arrangement was the recent arrival at the FFL HQ of the wife of the général’s new aide-de-camp, Mme. François Charles-Roux, née Fanny Zarifi, whose namesake and aunt Fanny Vlasto Rodocanachi and her husband Dr. George Rodocanachi had allowed their Marseille apartment to be used as the Pat Line’s headquarters and local safe house. Max Ophuls, traveling down bumpy minor roads in the back of a produce truck under a mountain of beets, knew nothing of such arcana. He was wondering whether the rat-run would fail because the bumping and banging and the weight of the beet sacks broke his goddamn back. The one thing that never crossed his mind was that he was about to meet the extraordinary woman who would become his only wife.

Her name was the Grey Rat. Her real name was Margaret “Peggy” Rhodes but when she was introduced to Max in George and Fanny Rodocanachi’s sitting room by her fellow Englishwoman Elisabeth Haden-Guest, it was her celebrated nickname that was used-a name the Germans had given her on account of her elusiveness. “Niccolò the master forger,” Haden-Guest said playfully, “meet the rat the ratcatchers can’t catch.” Max Ophuls was astonished by the air of relaxation and enjoyment, even of hilarity, that prevailed in the Rodocanachis’ embattled apartment, and quickly saw that the orchestrator of the evening’s good time was the Grey Rat herself. That the Rat was beautiful was obvious enough, even though she did her best to hide it. Her shock of fair hair looked like it hadn’t been washed for a month and stuck out behind her head like a bottle brush. She wore a loose-fitting man’s checked shirt which hadn’t seen an iron in days and which she buttoned all the way up to the neck. The cuffs, too, were buttoned. Below the shirt were baggy corduroy pants and canvas shoes. She looked like a vagrant, Max thought, a buttoned-up hobo who had somehow strayed into the secret passages of the war. And yet her eyes were immense dark lakes and her body, furtively perceptible under all that camouflage, was long and lean. Above all she possessed so much exuberant energy that the room seemed too small to hold her.

“You are lucky you are going with her,” Fanny Rodocanachi told Max. “When the fighting starts she’s like five men.” The Grey Rat roared with laughter. “God, Fanny darling, you really know how to recommend a girl to a fellow,” she guffawed. “What do you say, Niccolò? Are you ready to crawl through the Spanish border thornbushes all alone with a girl who has killed a man with her bare hands?”

She was twenty-four years old, almost ten years younger than Max, and had already been married once, to a Marseillais businessman named Maurice Liota, who was tortured and killed by the Gestapo a year after their wedding for refusing to reveal her whereabouts, and whom she described to Max Ophuls before, during and after their own marriage as “the love of my life.” She had escaped capture on skis, and by driving a car so fast and skillfully that the airplane chasing her couldn’t stop her. Once she jumped from a moving train. Once in Toulouse she was detained in prison but she impersonated an innocent Provençal housewife so convincingly that after four days the Germans set her free and never knew that they had actually had the Grey Rat in their hands. “I hate war,” she said to Max at that first meeting in the Marseille safe apartment, “but here it is, eh? So I’m not bally well planning to wave my hanky at the departing men and then stay home and knit them balaclavas.”

The run was successful: terrifying, with close shaves so bizarre as to feel almost fictional, but they made it. Barcelona, Madrid, London. In the eyes of the passeurs on both sides of the border, beneath their studied neutrality of expression, Max sometimes thought he detected a strange combination of resentment and contempt. You’re going and we can’t alternated with You’re running and we’re not. He was too distracted to mind; because by the time they arrived at RAF Northolt in a British military aircraft, Maximilian Ophuls had fallen in love. Northolt was wrapped as always in the icy wind of the London winter; nor did it avoid the cliché of sleety rain. François Charles-Roux had been sent to meet hobbling Max, and a nameless intelligence officer was waiting for the Grey Rat. The two refugees stood bundled up on the tarmac in the frozen drizzle and the Grey Rat tried to say good-bye, but before they went their separate ways Max asked if he could see her again. This reduced her to confusion, and unleashed an astonishing routine of foot shuffling and deep blushing and hand-wringing and small sharp manic laughs punctuating bursts of staccato speech. “Ha! Ha! Well, I’ve absolutely no idea! Why you’d ever want to! But, ahem! Aha! If that is you’re really, I mean! Serious, you know? One doesn’t wish to! Hahaha! Impose! Not that it would be a bally imposition I suppose? Eh, eh, haha? Since you’re doing the asking in the first place! Since you’re, ah, kindly enough, oh blow I’m so pathetic at this! Oh, help, mother, all right.” Then, moving toward him to peck him awkwardly on the cheek, she stepped hard on his foot.

Their first date, at the Lyons Corner House in Piccadilly, was a catastrophe. Margaret was a mess, red-eyed, runny-nosed and unable to restrain her tears. The Pat Line had been betrayed. A man they had trusted, Paul Cole, whose real name was Sergeant Harold Cole, and who used the alias of Delobel, turned out to be a fraudster and double agent and pointed the finger at everyone in the Marseille group. Fanny Vlasto and Elisabeth Haden-Guest escaped, but “Pat O’Leary”-Guérisse-was seized by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau. Astonishingly, he would survive torture and live to see a better day and to grow old in the new Europe which he had done so much to free. Dr. George Rodocanachi was not so fortunate. He died in Buchenwald a few months after his capture. “I’m going back in, you know,” the Grey Rat said, blowing her nose fiercely. “I’m going back in just as soon as I can force them to let me.” Max wanted to beg her to stay, but remained silent, and held her hands instead. Three months later she was allowed to return. The tide of the war had turned, and Maximilian Ophuls’s life had changed direction, too, flowing powerfully toward this beautiful, gawky, fearless, sexually unawakened woman-and, in addition, away from France and toward America, because of the unexpected but powerful dislike, bordering on hostility, shown toward him by Général Charles de Gaulle.