Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“It’s your share.”

“My share of what?”

“You know of what. Of everything.”

“My share of the cloakroom tips? My share of the piggy bank? My share of the loose change in their pockets? My half of the value of the radiogram? My—”

“Your fifty percent of the estate.”

“And what’s your share? Nine hundred and fifty percent?”

“I see. You’re accusing me.”

“Damn right I am. You offer me peanuts and tell me they’re diamonds. You give me a cheap forgery and say it’s the Mona Lisa. You send me a drizzle and say it’s a monsoon. You hand me a sack of garbage and tell me it’s half of a fortune. You’re a swindler. You’re such a greedy swindler that you don’t even bother to make your swindle look convincing. Maybe I’ll call a press conference and tell the world how the eminent Sister, the prominent human rights warrior, the champion of the underdog, the British BAME communities’ fucking female knight in fucking shining armor, the fucking brown-skin Lancelotta, the Pakis’ best friend, the honorary West Indian Indian, the go-to woman when African countries need a constitution written, the free speech heroine, the evenhanded opponent of religious fanaticism and white racism, the postcolonial Boadicea, is a two-bit crook gobbling up the family inheritance. Give me the rest of my fucking money or I’ll see you on the front page.”

Anger was her weakness. She knew it. She buried it deep, down at the roots of her being, because if she turned it loose she turned green, burst out of her shirt, and became the Incredible Hulk. It didn’t often escape. This time it did. Brother’s anger was amateur night compared to hers. He had brought a pocketknife to a gunfight. When she began to talk, when the Hulk roared out of her throat, he fell silent. She did not hold back. The threat he had made was a serious one. For her own flesh and blood to go public with such an accusation would be immensely damaging. The mud would stick and her political opponents, of which there were many, given the high-profile public cases she fought, would relish the chance to attack her. This was the age of the kangaroo court of instant opinions, in which an accusation was frequently the same thing as a guilty verdict. She couldn’t afford to go easy on him. She needed to destroy his will to go forward, to install a real ineradicable terror in his heart, strong enough to make him back down and keep his money-grubbing mouth shut forever. She spoke for eleven minutes without stopping. She could feel his fear oozing all the way down the phone connection, digital fear, Wi-Fi fear, twenty-first-century fear. Finally she told him, “Be in no doubt that I will do whatever it takes to defend my good name. Whatever it bloody well takes. ” Then she hung up.

There was no press conference. There was no further communication. And seventeen years went by, and here she was, drinking her dirty martini (up, with olives), waiting for her eminent guests, and lost, all of a sudden, in the past.

TO BE A LAWYER in a lawless time was like being a clown among the humorless: which was to say, either completely redundant or absolutely essential. It wasn’t clear to her, these days, which of the alternatives best described her. Sister was an idealist. She believed in the rule of law as one of the two foundations of a free society, along with free expression. (This was the kind of remark you didn’t make too often in white society in London for fear of sounding self-righteous, “preachy.” It was also a remark which, if made in brown or black circles, might elicit a loud series of disbelieving horse-laughs.) As a result the direction the world had taken in her lifetime was upsetting. Both the law and liberty were everywhere under attack. The thuggish deterioration of Indian society both allowed her to believe ever more fervently that she no longer wanted anything to do with that increasingly horrible country, and hurt more deeply than she cared to admit. The continuing American convulsion disgusted her, and the vulnerability of immigrants to abuse and worse was a growing part of her daily agenda here at home. On a bad (three-martini) day she came close to despair, telling herself that after all these years she was obliged to admit that she had misunderstood the country of which she was now a citizen and which she thought of as her country. She had deeply believed it to be a reasonable place, broad-minded, easygoing, and good to live in, and now she discovered that it was also—or not also, but in fact— narrow-minded, delusional, and, for people lacking the great virtue of acceptable skin color, not comfortable to live in at all. When she entered this kind of mood her husband the judge—the High Court judge Godfrey Simons—was a pillar of strength. Here he was now, coming down the stairs from the upper floor, where he had been getting ready to greet their guests. He was wearing the floor-length Vivienne Westwood gown, the pearls, and the new high heels tonight. It was a big night for his wife and he wanted to look his best for her. She applauded him softly as he descended.

“You look resplendent, Jack,” she told him. “Dignified, glamorous. And the shoes!”

“Thank you, Jack,” said the judge. “Glamor and dignity is what we strive for.”

They called each other “Jack” instead of “dear” or “darling” or “honey.” It was their little private thing. They had so much in common. They had the same favorite drink, they always chose the same dishes in restaurants, and when they were asked about their preferred books they answered identically, without conferring. The Magic Mountain, Madame Bovary, Don Quixote. No English books? Oh, if you want an English writer, then there’s only one, they might reply, and then they might cry out, in unison, “Trollope!” They had the same taste in dresses too. Calling each other by the same name made perfect sense.

Outside their home the judge wore pin-striped Savile Row suits and bespoke shoes and with his full head of silver hair he looked splendidly judicial. Even at home, most of the time, he dressed conventionally—a short-sleeved polo shirt and slacks. The dresses and jewelry only came out when they entertained. He never wore a wig. He wasn’t trying to be a woman. He was simply a man who liked wearing women’s designer clothing from time to time. Everyone knew this and nobody drew attention to it. After all, it was widely rumored that Prince Charles, a great admirer of the Islamic world, received guests at Highgrove dressed like an Arab sheik. This wasn’t so different, and much more English.

The doorbell rang. “Ready, Jack?” he asked Sister.

“Ready, Jack,” she replied.

The great hall at Middle Temple—“her” Inn of Court—was the place where, in 1601, perhaps even on January 6, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare’s “playing company,” staged the first ever night of Twelfth Night before Queen Elizabeth I, Gloriana herself, and a company of VIP guests, some of whose names were echoed in the names of the play’s characters. And Shakespeare himself might have played Malvolio. Four hundred years later Sister had been present in the great hall when a prominent theater company restaged scenes from that original production as the centerpiece of a fundraising gala. She had been seated at a table with various luminaries of the West End stage and, on her right, a loud, fleshy Ukrainian sub-oligarch who claimed to love Shakespeare (“Have you seen Innokenti Smoktunovsky in Russian film Gamlet ? No? Disappointing!”), did not understand the play (“But there are not twelve nights in this story! Disappointing!”), disapproved of all the cross-dressing, making a series of transphobic remarks (“Men instead of women! Disappointing!”), and thoroughly ruined her evening. The next day she called her host, the theater company’s financial director, to thank him, a little coolly, for the invitation. “No, thank you, ” he said. “Why thank me?” “Because this morning the disappointing person you talked to all evening wrote us a check for nine hundred thousand pounds.” She had been younger then and people told her she was beautiful, though she had never been convinced of that. Anyway, this had become a favorite anecdote of hers, and here she was telling it to the gathering of grandees who had assembled to offer her a seat on the crossbenches of the House of Lords and, shortly thereafter, the job of speaker in the British upper house. She would be only the second woman to be so chosen. It was if she had ascended Everest alone and without oxygen. And at the very instant that she stood upon this pinnacle, she found herself thinking about Brother, because it suddenly occurred to her that Twelfth Night was about a brother and sister who were separated, each believing the other to be dead. And after many tangled tales they were joyfully and lovingly reunited. There was a lump in her throat as she considered her own very different situation. Her asshole brother who had never apologized for his slanderous words, never come close to apologizing. Her loser brother struggling to make a living from his fifth-rate books and fearing, no doubt, that as publishing belts were tightened in these hard times his mediocre career might grind to a halt. Her brother who treated her as if she were dead. (Most of the time, she conceded, she returned the compliment.) What did he think he was doing intruding on her big night? He was a ghost, worse than a ghost, a living phantom. Why had he chosen this of all evenings to haunt her and rain on her parade?