Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

When the lawsuit began, the restaurant owners accused her of racism.

Social media had no memory. Today’s scandal was sufficient unto itself. Sister’s lifelong commitment to anti-racism was as if it had never been. Various people styled as community leaders were ready to denounce her, as if high-volume music played late at night was an inalienable aspect of Afro-Caribbean culture and any critique of it had to be driven by prejudice, as if nobody noticed or cared that the vast majority of the young nocturnal drinkers, makers-out, and fighters were affluent and white. Someone started a Facebook page protesting her elevation to a life peerage—she was a baroness now—and her rumored front-runner status for the soon-to-be-vacated post of Speaker of the upper house. The protest gathered 113,686 signatures on the first day. She began to receive hate mail and even threats. And of course, there were political consequences. The already fragile alliance of left and right which had come together to offer her the chance of elevation to the Woolsack, where Speakers of the House of Lords had been seated since the time of Edward III, wavered and broke. She was given to understand, in the British way, that a degree of embarrassment was being felt regarding the—almost certainly untrue! And so unjust!—allegations against her, and consequently some people were having second thoughts. She decided on her response more or less instantly. She called her fellow baroness and withdrew her candidacy. “Thank you for your support, Aretta, but there’s no need for anyone to be embarrassed by me. I’m not dying to sit on that sack.”

The loom of life was broken, she thought, that loom upon which we wove the fabric of our days from familiar threads. Work, friendship, health, parenthood, family, love. And yes! Community. For goodness’ sake, yes! And race, and history, and struggle, and memory. Yes to all of that. All that was at the heart of the weaving. One made the finest cloth one could with such skills as one had, accompanied by, one hoped, the humility lacked by Arachne when she challenged Athena and insulted the gods. (However, if it was true that Arachne’s tapestry, which showed how the gods had abused humans, especially Zeus with all his rapes, was superior to Athena’s, then she was all for Arachne, and vengeful Athena, spidering her opponent, didn’t come out of the story at all well.) But now, discontinuity ruled. Yesterday meant nothing and could not help you build tomorrow. Life had become a series of vanishing photographs, posted every day, gone the next. One had no story anymore. Character, narrative, history, were all dead. Only the flat caricature of the instant remained, and that was what one was judged by. To have lived long enough to witness the replacement of the depth of her chosen world’s culture by its surfaces was a sad thing.

The law came to her rescue as it always had, as she had always trusted it to do. Within the walls of that unimportant courtroom during this extremely minor case about noise abatement, certain old values still survived. There was evidence. There were facts which were not merely the assertions of rivaling bigotries. There was truth. Let me live and die here, she thought. This is my true home. She won the case easily. The restaurant’s owners were obliged to apologize in open court for violating the terms of their license to operate, and for the defamatory innuendos about Sister. Overnight the troll army vanished, and the culture without memory, which all culture had become, instantly forgot how it had slandered an innocent woman, and moved on. The street quieted down. The late-night revelers went elsewhere to disturb other people, other sleeping children. What passed these days for ordinary life resumed. She was used to the hard knocks of litigation and told herself that these bruises, too, would fade.

It was only now, when the fog of war had lifted and the armies gone away, that she saw that the genuinely injured victims of the conflict were her husband and daughter. Godfrey Simons sat on his High Court bench and the whole world passed before him and he passed judgment and then came home and put on a long dress and drank a glass of Bandol rouge and became Jack, her Jack. But that she should have been dragged through the mud in this way had filled him with a rage that would not be assuaged.

“It’s unforgivable, Jack,” he said. “We’re going back to mob rule. The lynch mob, the stockade in which people were pelted with fruit, the public burning.”

“Now, now, Jack,” she said. “You’ll be talking about witch hunts next. There was a song they were playing the night before the case. I’m sure you could hear it in your room too. I may not have heard properly but I thought it went, ‘I fought the law, and the law won.’ Is that a song? Because that’s what happened here. The law won.”

“That isn’t all that happened. What was done to you. It’s an unforgivable thing.”

Daughter, twentysomething, a rising star in the fashion industry, with a showroom slash atelier in a nearby mews and a growing clientele of shiny, thin, much-photographed beauties waiting to be dressed, was there too and concurred. “That is a song,” she said. “But there’s no excuse for what happened to you. I’ll never forgive it either.”

“Calm down, both of you,” Sister said. “I’ll live.”

She did not renew her interest in the Lords position, although there were new efforts to persuade her, accompanied by fulsome expressions of regret which she understood were insincere and calculated, as political apologies always were. The truth was she was relieved not to have to take up this new and weighty role when there were more personal things that needed her attention. “More personal things.” Hah! She had become more British than the British. This was no time for euphemism or understatement. She had to deal with the question of her health. Of whether, in short, she would be alive for very much longer, able to take up any sort of role in anything. Of, to be blunt, the possibility, bordering on probability, of death.

She had already defeated a cancer that she wasn’t supposed to survive. When she was still relatively young and, according to others, attractive, she had been diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer which had already spread to the lymph nodes. In spite of the very poor prognosis for patients in her condition, she lived. The double mastectomy wasn’t the only mutilation. Treatment had also required the removal of a part of an armpit and some of her chest wall muscles, plus very debilitating chemotherapy. Even though the cure was completely successful, according to her doctors, and she was declared to be in full remission, she had assumed that after that no man would desire her and she would live alone in a sort of remission from life as well as death; that her death sentence had been commuted to a life sentence, and loneliness would be her lot, along with the guilt, commonly experienced by cancer sufferers, of having brought the illness upon herself by the choices she had made in her life. Maybe it was the Fates’ reward for the way she had discarded Sad-Faced Older Painter and, according to some unkind tongues, helped to drive him into his grave. Then she had met Jack, and he had loved her in spite of it all. There followed the multiple miracles of love, marriage, a brilliant career, and happiness. The birth of a healthy child, Daughter, was the biggest miracle. She had supposed herself sterile as a consequence of the chemotherapy, but her womb had had other ideas.

Now, no longer young, she feared that a shadow had returned. Most mornings she woke up with a sense of impending horror. Then she told herself not to be foolish, she was symptom-free, all was well. After that she told herself, if you’re so worried, go in for a full checkup. But she had been afraid to do so. The Sancho case had felt, almost, like a welcome distraction. Now that it was over, the angels on her shoulders were whispering in her ear again. You’re fine, said the left angel. Get yourself looked at, said the right. She ignored them both and went to work, came back to her neighborhood, stopped by Daughter’s showroom to look at the beauty her girl was creating and to swap the day’s stories with her, got home and had a glass of wine with Jack in his red dress, or his green or blue dress, and told herself she was living her best life. But still she felt it: the shadow in her blood.