Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

London that winter was a cratered heart. The gashes of the Blitz were everywhere, the severed streets, the halved houses, the gaps, the lack, the lack. There weren’t many cars on the road. Yet people went about their business matter-of-factly, as if nothing had happened, as if they weren’t going to be spending the night on a tube station platform without so much as a change of clothes, as if their evacuated children’s welfare wasn’t preying on their minds. Carlton Gardens was relatively unscathed. Charles-Roux brought Max to meet the général. De Gaulle stood at a window in a wood-paneled office, in profile, like a cartoon of himself, and greeted Max without turning. “So: Danjon’s young genius,” he said. “Let me tell you this, monsieur. I do not question the judgment of my friend the vice-chancellor. Your accomplishments and talents are no doubt remarkable. However the propositions in your theses are for the most part untenable. Some sort of European association, very well. It will be necessary to forget what has happened and make friends with Germany. That, yes. Everything else you propose is barbaric rubbish which will deliver us, bound and gagged, into the power of the Americans, which is to say a new captivity following immediately upon an old one. This I shall never permit.” Max remained silent. De Gaulle also ceased to speak. After a moment Charles-Roux touched Max’s elbow and steered him from the room. As they left, de Gaulle, still positioned at the window with his hands clasped behind his back, was heard to remark, “Ah, when they know what broken bits of matchsticks I had to use to make France free!”

“You must understand that Roosevelt has been treating him like dirt,” Charles-Roux said outside the général’s door. “And Churchill also, he shows insufficient respect. There are many, even in the French diplomatic corps, who have advised against becoming too close to the FFL. Roosevelt would get rid of the général if he could. He favors, for example, Giraud.” Max had few dealings with de Gaulle after that day. He was put to work in the propaganda section, writing messages to be dropped into France, translating German texts, marking time, waiting for the evenings, and the Rat.

Porchester Terrace, Bayswater, stripped by the requirements of the weapons industry of its traditional gates and railings, like all the denuded streets of London, hid its nakedness in the winter fog. Max was living in the basement of a house owned by Fanny Rodocanachi’s brother Michel Vlasto. A large segment of the staircase had been destroyed by a phosphorus bomb and the house smelled strongly of burning. To go up and down it was necessary to hug the wall. Life everywhere had holes in it, was a book with pages ripped out, crumpled up, tossed away. “Newer min’, eh,” said Vlasto’s Indian housekeeper, Mrs. Shanti Dickens, an ample woman who affected a huge beret, baggy green overcoat and lacy boots. Mrs. Dickens was a person of such great appetite that she chewed up the language itself. “Nobody being ’urt, ’at is the mai’ thing, hisn’t it.” She pointed at a bucket of sand. “One isstanding on ewery flower. Bay-cement, ground flower, first flower, all. Case ow need.” Mrs. Dickens was able to recite from memory the crime reports in the Sunday rags. “’E chopp’ ’er up, sir, just to ’magine,” she’d say with relish. “Wery wery hawful, sir, hisn’t it. Maybe ’e is heatin’ ’er for ’is tea.”

The Rat came to visit him whenever she could, struggling through the blackout and green fog, being careful to keep her torch pointed downwards. On the evenings when she didn’t show up Max sat alone in his greatcoat by a single-bar electric heater, cursing fate. The depression that was always waiting in the corners of his brain surged into the center of the room, using cold weather and loneliness as its fuel. Treason was the currency of the times. The Americans despised the Free French because they believed the organization to be penetrated by Vichy traitors, and the British responded by infiltrating Carlton Gardens with British informers as well. George Mathieu, Paul Cole. Your friends became your assassins. If you trusted too much, too easily, you died. Yet what kind of life was possible without trust, how could there be any depth or joy in human relations without it? “This is the damage we will all carry over into the future,” Max thought. Distrust, the expectation of deceit: these were the craters in every heart.

“If we live through this, Ratty, I’ll never betray you,” he swore aloud in his lonely room. But he did, of course. He didn’t kill her but he spent his life sticking the knives of his infidelities in her heart. And then came Boonyi Kaul.

The difficult truth was that Margaret “Peggy” Rhodes was a lousy lover. Her heart wasn’t in it. She had been shaped by resistance and had no concept of the joys of yielding. Maximilian Ophuls tried carefully, and without appearing didactic, to school her, and for short periods she seemed willing to learn, but she didn’t have the patience for it, she just wanted it over with so they could talk, and snuggle, and behave in the nude exactly like fully dressed people: not as lovers, but as friends. She had always had a “low libido,” she confessed. She insisted, however, that she loved him. Holding him tightly under the tartan blankets of that basement winter, she swore that she had never been so happy, and that as a result she was newly afraid to die. She also told him she was barren. “I mean, does that make a difference? Is it all off? Because with a lot of chaps that would be it, you know? No possibility of sprogs, whole bally thing goes to the bally dogs. Ha! Aha! Hahaha!” He answered, surprising himself, that it did not matter. “Okay, jolly D,” she said. “Change the subject? You don’t mind? Fellow who met me at Northolt, remember him? MI9 johnny? Wants a word with you. I mean I’m just the messenger. No problem either way. But I could set it up.”

The meeting with the intelligence officer, whose name was Neave, took place a week later in the Metropole Hotel on Northumberland Avenue. “I was rescued by the Pat Line myself, you know,” the Englishman said by way of introduction. “So we’re graduates of the same school, so to speak.” Max Ophuls was thinking how warm it was in the Metropole, and that one might be prepared to do almost anything to be as warm as this. Would he have turned down the proposal Neave delivered that day if the deed had been done in a cold, drafty room? Was he as shallow as that? “… In short, we want you on board,” Neave was finishing. “But that does mean you have to jump ship. Big decision, I know. You probably need to think about it. Go ahead. Take five minutes. Take ten.” The moment he heard the proposition Max Ophuls knew he would not turn it down. The British, speaking with American knowledge and backing, wanted him on board. His way of thinking was just the ticket, and the world community was falling into line, even if the crusty big-nosed général wasn’t. The Germans were going to lose the war. The future was going to be built in New Hampshire over three weeks in July at a place called Bretton Woods. Delegates from, probably, forty-odd nations would assemble with their “boffins,” their “eggheads,” their “dreamers,” to shape the postwar recovery of Europe and to address the problems of unstable exchange rates and protectionist trade policies. Maximilian Ophuls was a key piece of the puzzle. There was a university chair in it for him, Columbia, most probably, and an Oxbridge fellowship. “Hands across the sea,” Neave said. “We see you as one of the main chaps. You don’t have to be affiliated to a national delegation. We need you to chair working parties, do the deep work, give us structures that will stand.”