Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

When the blindfold was removed Brother found himself in a low, anonymous structure surrounded by thickly wooded hills. The contemporary architecture was confusing. He’d have expected a shingled wooden house, characteristic of the region. This concrete-and-glass edifice belonged nowhere, so it could be anywhere. In this respect the house was like him, Brother thought. He belonged nowhere too. The Japanese-American gentleman led him into a comfortably furnished living room, with settees and armchairs upholstered in floral patterns. There was a pool table and a dartboard, backgammon and chess. He couldn’t see a swimming pool but thought there might be one around the back. This didn’t feel like a jail, Brother told the blue-suited agent. “Of course not,” was the reply. “We are here to make friends.”

A door opened and Son entered the room. When he saw his father sitting there he stiffened. “They grabbed you too,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“No,” Brother said, “I’m here of my own free will.”

“Sure you are,” Son said. “I see you already met Mr. Trip Mizoguchi. He’s a great believer in free will.”

“Trip here tells me his name is Lance Makioka,” Brother said.

At this the Japanese-American gentleman intervened. “To put this matter at rest,” he said, “here is my Langley ID. As you see, the name printed there is not a workname. It is my personal name. Agent Kyle Kagemusha.”

“And this is another gesture designed to encourage trust,” Brother said.

“Exactly.”

“Whatever,” said Son.

“I leave you two gentlemen to talk things over,” the recently renamed Agent Kyle Kagemusha said. “I’m sure you have a lot of catching up to do. Welcome to Anthill, Quix 97. We look forward to having you on board.”

“WHY ARE YOU EVEN HERE?” Son said. “You don’t know who I am. You never knew.”

“You’re right,” Brother replied. “We’re not much of a family, are we? But there’s a thing you don’t know about parenthood. It’s mostly about showing up.”

“It’s crazy that you’re here,” Son said. “You’re in so deep, so way over your head you don’t even know how deep.”

“We both are,” Brother said.

Agent Kagemusha had been right. At first the words didn’t come, but soon enough they came in a great hot gush, like steam from a broken pipe. One of the things Son wanted to attack his father about was belonging to the great Indian diaspora. Son had gone to India to discover authenticity. Only Indians from India had any claim to being authentic. The diaspora was full of phony Indians, people who had been uprooted so long that their souls were dying of thirst, people who didn’t know what language to speak or what gods to worship, people who pathetically bought Indian art so they could hang their identity on their walls (did the lad even know, when he said this, that he was echoing Brother’s gibe about his stepfather?). People, he went on, who flew to India for two weeks over New Year’s and went to a few weddings and ate sweetmeats and danced in the neon night and felt that they had refilled their India tanks and could go back to being fakers for the other fifty weeks. He had learned the Indian term 420, which had nothing to do with smoking weed, but which meant “fraudulent” or “fraud.” Charsobeece, he said, his Hindi accent imperfect but aggressive. “You’re all charsobeeces. And, by the way, nobody likes your books.”

“If the system cannot be changed it must be destroyed,” Brother said.

On the second day, Son collapsed abruptly and wept, suddenly a very young man again, all his masks stripped away. He allowed his father to embrace him. “We were so close to doing it,” he said. “This close.”

Brother began to talk to him about Anthill, about fighting the real enemy and serving the greater good. It didn’t take long. A few days. He was a good kid. Yes, quixotic. He got the message quickly. And he didn’t want to go to jail.

When Brother said goodbye to Son, he knew it might be a long time before they met again. That was okay now. They were good. As he left he decided to ask one last question. “Oh, by the way: ‘Marcel DuChamp’?”

Son grinned. “I guess it was my way of saying, I love you, Dad.”

He turned to go, his heart full. Son called after him. “Oh, Dad?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t tell Mom.”

Then again the blindfold in the Escalade. On the ride back to the city Agent Kagemusha offered some final thoughts. “I want to thank you for your service,” he said. “And I also want to be frank with you. You know a great deal now, some would say too much. But we’re the good guys. We don’t arrange for people to be hit by trucks. So, we’ll be watching you. We’re in your phone, your computer, every call, every keystroke. Don’t even try to hide from us. We would take that unkindly. We are grateful for your help, and now we need you to be silent. Don’t disappoint us by talking. We hate disappointments.”

“Careless talk costs lives,” Brother said. “And it’s good to know you’re the good guys.”

“There you go,” said Agent Kagemusha. “Smart man.”

When the blindfold was removed he was outside his building again. “One last word,” he said. “I’m kind of a classic movie buff.”

“Yes, sir. I like to see old films myself.”

“So, Kagemusha. I saw that film. It means ‘shadow warrior.’ ”

Nothing from the agent, but the darkened windows of the Escalade began to rise.

“Thanks,” Brother said, “for the gesture designed to create trust.”

The restaurant beneath Sister’s Notting Hill duplex was called Sancho in honor of Ignatius Sancho, “the extraordinary Negro,” born on a slave ship in (approximately) 1729, a runaway slave who was then freed in England, a Sancho who worked for English milords but wasn’t looking to go wandering in the service of any knight: composer, playwright, polemicist, prolific writer of essay-letters to the newspapers, author of Theory of Music, greengrocer, the first person of African origin to vote in a British election, and along with Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano one of the earliest black British chroniclers of and campaigners against slavery, painted by Gainsborough, admired by Laurence Sterne, and not someone who would have been a regular consumer of the jerk chicken, ackee and saltfish, and Red Stripe lager on offer in the Jamaican-themed eatery that now bore his name (although he might have tasted African callaloo). Nor, in all probability, Sister thought, would he have approved of the pounding dance music that had begun to issue from the cellar below the restaurant, whose owners had lately decided to go for more of a club-scene vibe and to hell with all sleeping neighborhood children. After that there were drunks making out and fighting in the street until three in the morning. It was hard to imagine Ignatius Sancho as a disco devotee. This, after all, was a man who had sided with the British against the American Revolution. This was a conservative man.

The neighborhood association asked for Sister’s help. She agreed to lead the discussion, sought meetings with the restaurant’s owners, and received only platitudes in return. She offered compromise proposals, suggesting acceptable decibel levels and shorter nightclub hours. She spoke to the local council and asked it to intervene to set in place and then to police proper regulations. She pointed out that Sancho was licensed as a restaurant, not a nightclub, and was therefore in breach of its legal obligations. Only when all these avenues had been explored without satisfaction having been received did she agree, with extreme reluctance, that the restaurant and its parent company should be sued.