Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

This isn’t over. I’m still here. I have to be reckoned with. I will call you to account. Blood will have blood. Sooner or later I will have to be faced.

He had no answers for her. He faded, like a dream. The sudden silence in her head was like a theft. For a moment she could not breathe, and gasped asthmatically for air. Then she cried. She thrust her face into her pillow and wept the first tears she had shed since her father’s death, wept for three hours and seventeen minutes without stopping and then fell into a deep sleep, from which she was only awakened fifteen and a quarter hours later by Olga Simeonovna, who had let herself into the apartment with her master key, accompanied by a specter from the past. Massed choruses encircled her in her dreams, but the dreams were not frightening, they were entertaining, she watched them like movies and forgot them when she awoke. India Ophuls had no need for nightmares anymore. The waking world was nightmarish enough.

The cassocked chorus of gossipy old women moved clockwise around her, keening softly, Ah, the orphaned princess, what will she do now, she’s a little crazy, we think, she may have all the money in the world but it won’t buy back what she lost, she’s just human like the rest of us, she’ll have to deal with that, she’ll have to come down to earth; we fear she’s planning to take a terrible revenge, but beware!, princess, beware!, this guy is a bad guy!, the worst!, and you’re not even in the family business, you can’t fight him, you’re Kay Corleone. Around the first circle, the chorus of the widows, she could see a second circle, moving widdershins, the flaccid unhappy torsos of sack-bellied police officers, the hard-bodied Chippendales élite had disappeared, leaving these middle-aged Tonys and Elvises behind, We’re closing in, ma’am, they chanted, a definite sighting on Ventura Boulevard, his days are numbered, uh-huh, uh-huh, a hundred percent make in a computer store on Pico, he may run ma’am but he can’t hide, reports of a vagrant in Nichols Canyon, reports of a vagrant near Woodrow Wilson, reports of a vagrant on Cielo Drive, uh-huh, uh-huh, it’s just a matter of time. And again the cassocked women raised their voices, Justice would be meaningless without injustice, they first intoned, and then, secondly, Justice is strife. War makes us what we are. Even though she was asleep she recognized Heraclitus speaking through the widows’ mouths-Heraclitus the Greek Buddha, the lost poet of broken wisdom, part philosopher, part fortune cookie, bubbling up from the days when she read such things, the days when she read, to add his two cents’ worth. Now, around the Eastern crone and the sagging policemen, she perceived a third circle, an outer circle made up of her friends, who were moving clockwise, like the old women, and singing in electronic voice-mail voices a yearning beseeching song. Come back, her friends sang in tinny harmony, baby, come back. Her friends singing the old Equals hit, Oh won’t you please! Come back. I’m on my knees! Come back. Baby come back.

Olga Simeonovna was shaking her. “Wake up,” Olga Volga said. “And don’t say you tell me no visitors, because this is different, okay? Here is good news. Here is your mother who has crossed an ocean and a continent to be beside her daughter when trouble comes. Wake up, India, please. Here your mother waits.” Was this a part of the dream, she wondered. No, she was awake, the pounding in her chest could not be dreamed. Excitedly she turned toward Olga and saw the trousered, septuagenarian woman who stood behind her and a little to one side, her hair an unkempt grey haystack under which a rat might safely hide. The sucker punch of disappointment hit India hard. She turned away and pulled the comforter over her head, ignoring Olga the abandoned parent’s frown of disapproval: Olga, for whom, in spite of all her abuse of her departed children, an embrace between a long-separated mother and daughter was a cherished fantasy. “Ha! A fine welcome, I must say,” chided Margaret Rhodes. “You may not like it, my dear, but-ahah! hah!-it’s true, your darling mother’s in town.”

Ratetta, sweet Ratetta. Peggy Rhodes had returned to England with a baby girl in her arms and a look on her face that made it impossible for anyone to ask after her husband or even to speak his discarded name. The adopted child was baptized India Rhodes and, as her mother’s work with orphanages was well known, there was little need to explain her provenance. The Rumplestiltskin truth, that she had disposed of a husband and taken his love child in his place, was so strange that nobody suspected it. She had forced Max to swear to keep the secret, to relinquish all parental rights and responsibilities, and to stay away from mother and child alike. She was cleaning up his mess, she told him, and she didn’t want him making things messy again. Hanging his head, ashamed, he did not argue. He tried to express his feelings. “Don’t apologize, for God’s sake,” she said. “D’you imagine an apology can make up for what you did?” He was silenced. For seven years he vanished from her life.

The only other people who knew the facts were Father Joseph Ambrose, whose Evangalactic Orphanage depended for its financial well-being on Peggy Rhodes’s largesse, and the pander Edgar Wood, who was tragically hit by a car in a Long Island country lane fifteen months after his return from New Delhi, and was killed outright. Peggy herself did not return to the United States. She bought a town house in Lower Belgrave Street, SW1, from a straitlaced English lady who was escaping the permissive society of late-sixties London and immigrating to Falangist Spain in search of a country with a little more discipline. In the years that followed the Grey Rat became a figure of fear in the street, snapping at noisy children playing on the pavement, complaining about the freshness of the produce at the greengrocers, calling the police when the noise from the Plumber’s Arms, the pub across the road, became too loud, knocking on her neighbors’ door to accuse them of blocking her drains by putting tampons down the toilet and refusing to accept their argument that their property did not share drainage facilities with hers.

She began to wear men’s clothing: loose corduroy pants and white linen shirts. She hacked at her wiry hair and left it to do as it pleased. In the season she went to the grouse moors and shot copious numbers of birds. She smoked heavily, drank scotch and soda, became a single-digit-handicap golfer and developed a fondness for gambling, spending many evenings at the Clermont Club in Berkeley Square playing baccarat and chemin de fer. She knew that her divorce had damaged what was womanly in her but did nothing to mend what was broken. In spite of what she had done, the lengths she’d gone to in order to acquire a child, in spite of the strangeness of her actions, she became a careless, negligent mother, whose relationship with her adopted daughter was, at best, vague, who began to believe that she had made a terrible mistake, because whenever she looked at her adopted daughter she saw her own humiliation made flesh, she imagined Max and Boonyi making love and her husband’s seed wriggling toward the ruthless, desperate egg. So India was handed over to a series of nannies (none of whom lasted long, for Peggy Rhodes had turned into an intolerant, choleric employer), and began to run wild.

By the age of seven the young girl was becoming a problem child, a savage, kickboxing playground scrapper who seemed, at times, like a creature possessed by demons, and a vicious biter, who caused at least one serious injury to a classmate at her exclusive Chelsea girls’ primary school. On two occasions she came close to being expelled for “unacceptable behavior.” The first time expulsion was threatened, however, she immediately and somewhat alarmingly changed her ways completely, adopting, for the first time, the cool, restrained, disciplined persona that would become her preferred disguise throughout her life. She became solemn, nonviolent, still, and her transformation scared her classmates into something like reverence, gave her the electric charisma of a leader. The mask slipped only once, just before her seventh birthday, when she assaulted the school bully, a sadistic eleven-year-old thug named Helena Wardle, hitting her on the back of the head with a large grey stone. Helena was known to the staff as a girl whose behavior was often brutish, and who had a habit of accusing her victims of bullying before they could accuse her, so when she ran to the school matron with a cut head, India, who claimed Helena had fallen and hurt herself accidentally, was given the benefit of the doubt, especially as her lie was verified by several of her classmates, who all disliked Helena Wardle as heartily as she did.