Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

The future was being born and he was being asked to be its midwife. Instead of the weakness of Paris, the effete house of cards of old Europe, he would build the iron-and-steel skyscraper of the next big thing. “I don’t need time,” he said, “Count me in.” He felt as if he had received, and accepted, a proposal of marriage from an unexpected but infinitely desirable suitor, and knew that France, the bride chosen for him by parentage and blood, France with whom a marriage had been arranged on the day of his birth, might never forgive him for leaving her at the altar. Certainly Charles de Gaulle would not. That night, huddled with Peggy Rhodes beneath the covers of his bed on the slightly sloping floor of the Porchester Terrace basement flat, he made a marriage proposal of his own. “Will you marry me, Ratty?” To which she replied, “Ooh. Ooh. Ooh. Ooh, yes, Moley, I will.”

He met Neave once again, in the early 1980s, by which time Max Ophuls had rejoined the secret world while the former intelligence officer had become a member of Parliament and a close confidant of Prime Minister Thatcher. They had a drink on the terrace of the Palace of Westminster and talked about old times. Soon after their talk Airey Neave was blown to pieces by an IRA “tilt-bomb” while driving out of the House of Commons car park. There was no end to treachery. Survive one plot and the next one would get you. The cycle of violence had not been broken. Perhaps it was endemic to the human race, a manifestation of the life cycle. Perhaps violence showed us what we meant, or, at least, perhaps it was simply what we did.

In April 1944, Max Ophuls’s newly-wed wife the Grey Rat was parachuted into the Auvergne. Her mission was to locate bands of maquis and lead them to the ammunition and arms that were being dropped by the RAF every other day. Then she was to help organize them for the armed uprising that was to coincide with the Normandy landings. As part of this process of preparation she led a Resistance raid against the Gestapo headquarters in Montluçon and also attacked a German gun factory. Then it was the sixth of June, it was D-Day, H-Hour, M-Minute, and she stayed on the ground to fight alongside the MUR, whose longed-for time had finally come. When Maximilian Ophuls left for the Bretton Woods conference at the end of June, he had no way of knowing if the Rat was alive or dead. As he had feared, the FFL had been instructed by its leader to treat him as a pariah, an almost-traitor. His disloyalty would never be forgiven. No information would reach him from that quarter. In the end it was Mrs. Shanti Dickens who came through, by telephone. “Sir! Sir! Mr. Max, hisn’it? Yes, sir! Wery good! Letter, Mr. Max, from Mrs. Max! I hopen it, sir? Yes, sir! Hokay! Mrs. Max is bein’ fine, sir! She is lovin’ you, sir! Hurray! She is askin’ sir, where the fuck you gone? Hokay? Wery good, sir! Hurray!”

On August 26, the day after the liberation of Paris, de Gaulle marched down the Champs-Élysées with representatives of the Free French movement as well as members of the Resistance. One Englishwoman marched with the French that day. And on August 27, Mrs. Max, Margaret Rhodes, the Grey Rat, flew to New York and the Ophulses began their American married life.

Nearly twenty-one years later, on the night before she left with her husband for New Delhi, Mrs. Margaret Rhodes Ophuls dreamed that after the long barren decades she would finally become pregnant and have a child in India. The baby was beautiful and furry with a long, curling tail but she was unable to love it and when she put it to her breast it bit her nipple painfully. It was a girl baby and even though her friends were horrified to see her cradling a black rattess she didn’t care. She had once been a rat herself but she had turned into a human being eventually, hadn’t she, these days she washed her hair and wore smart clothes and hardly ever twitched her nose or crawled through garbage or did anything rodentlike at all, and no doubt it would be the same with her baby girl, her Ratetta. And she was a mother now and so if she simply behaved as if she did love Ratetta then the love would probably begin to flow, there was just some sort of temporary blockage. Some mothers had trouble lactating, didn’t they, the milk didn’t want to come down, and she was having the same kind of trouble with love. After all she was in her middle forties and the baby had come to her late in life so a few unusual problems were to be expected. It was nothing serious. Ratetta, sweet Ratetta, she sang in her dream, who could be better than you?

She didn’t tell her husband about the vision. By this time she and Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls pretty much led separate lives. However, a public façade was maintained. Max’s memoir had made their wartime love story public property, had it not, and the book had remained on the bestseller lists for two and a half years, so how could they not continue to be the thing that had given them their shot at immortality? For they were, and had been for two decades, “Ratty and Moley,” the golden couple whose New York kiss at the mighty battle’s end had become for a generation an image, the iconic image of love conquering all, of the slaying of monsters and the blessings of fate, of the triumph of virtue over evil and the victory of the best in human nature over the worst. “If we tried to break up-ha! Hoho!-we’d probably-wouldn’t we?-be lynched,” she once said to him, concealing heartbreak beneath staccato stoicism. “Lucky, really, that I don’t-heh-heh-heh!-actually believe in bally divorce. ”

So the fiction of undying romance was kept up, impeccably by her, extremely peccably by him. She kept tabs, however. She was a wealthy woman nowadays. Since the deaths of her parents she had come into possession of impressive tranches of prime Hampshire farmland as well as substantial port wineries on the Douro. This gave her the wherewithal to finance her investigations, on the rare occasions that her old contacts in the shadow world came up empty-handed. Consequently she knew the name of every woman her husband had seduced, every adoring college postgrad, every assistant willing to be researched, every wanton uptown society beauty and downtown party slut, all the personal two-way simultaneous translators at his international conferences, every East End summer whore he’d fucked in their South Fork home perched on the forested heights left behind by retreating glaciers, the uplands of the terminal moraine. In most cases she had also acquired their home addresses and unlisted telephone numbers. She had never contacted any of these women but she told herself she liked to have the information, that she preferred to know. This was a self-deceiving lie. The women’s names twisted in her like knives, their street addresses, apartment numbers, zip codes and phone numbers burned holes in her memory like little phosphorus bombs.

Yet she found it difficult to blame only Max. As the war retreated into the past so had her erotic urges. Her interest in such matters, always perfunctory and intermittent, seemed to wither on the vine. “Let the poor man get it elsewhere if he has to,” she told herself grimly, “as long as he doesn’t rub my bally nose in it. Then I can get on with my reading and gardening and not be bothered with all that sticky palaver.” In this way she blinded herself to her real feelings so effectively that when misery assailed her, as it periodically did, causing her to burst into hot tears without warning and to suffer from inexplicable attacks of the shakes, she couldn’t work out what she was so damned unhappy about. On the plane to India with the great man by her side she allowed herself to think, “Dash it, it is a pretty terrific love story, ours. Not conventional, I grant you; but then, what is conventional when you really look at it? Lift the lid of any life and there’s strangeness, bubbling away; behind every quiet domestic front door lurk the idiosyncratic and the weird. Normality, that’s the myth. Human beings aren’t normal. We’re an odd lot, that’s the honest truth: off-kilter, rum. But we get by. Look, here we are, Max and I, flying high, and still holding hands after twenty years. Not so shabby, really. Not too bad at all.” Then she closed her eyes and there was the vision again, the midnight rat standing up on its hind legs, begging for love, calling her mother in its high Ratetta voice. In India, she decided, she was going to have a great deal to do with orphans. Yes: the motherless children of India would discover that they had a good friend in her. Maybe that was the meaning of the dream.