Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“Do you still sing?”

“Only in the shower.”

“That’s a shame. No more Tweety Pie?”

“The cat got my tongue.”

After some early awkwardnesses of this type they stayed away from reminiscence, by unspoken mutual agreement.

Brother quickly moved beyond the chess metaphor. Chess was a war game, and he was trying to make peace. Chess ended when you killed the king, and there could be only one winner. He wasn’t trying to win. He was trying to recapture something he had lost.

They found they could talk to each other more easily about the present. Slowly at first and then with growing heat Sister told Brother about her racial equality work and her pro bono legal cases. “I’ve reached the point where I’ve had to give all that up,” she said, in one of her first admissions of vulnerability. “I don’t want to admit that the savages are winning, that the jungle is creeping in and recapturing the civilized world—the jungle where the only law is the law of the jungle—but on many days every week that’s how it feels. It feels like I have to get up every day and hit my head against a wall. After a couple of decades of doing that kind of work, I need to start taking better care of my head. Time to step away from my place at the wall, to make way for a younger head. Somebody else’s turn.”

Not all the obstacles her clients faced were racial. Some were capitalist: for example, many members of the Bangladeshi community in London were employed in restaurants, and many of their Bangladeshi employers denied them the most basic of employee rights. Other hurdles were ideological. “I’m not fucking fighting to defend women’s right to wear the veil, the hijab, the niqab, whatever,” she declaimed. “All these young women these days who describe the veil as a signifier of their identity. I tell them they are suffering from what that presently unfashionable philosopher Karl Marx would have called false consciousness. In most of the world the veil is not a free choice. Women are forced into invisibility by men. These girls in the West making their quote-unquote free choices are legitimizing the oppression of their sisters in the parts of the world where the choice is not free. That’s what I tell them, and they are very shocked. They tell me they find my remarks offensive. I tell them I feel the same way about the veil. It’s exhausting. I’ve become embittered. I just needed to stop.”

During these conversations she didn’t tell him of the other, more imperative reason why she was giving things up—her bad health news, the utterly unfair invasion by a second carcinoma, chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or CLL, of a body already ravaged by its Pyrrhic victory over breast cancer. She didn’t yet feel that that news belonged to him, that he had a right to it. Instead she talked with pride about Daughter’s achievements in the rag trade. She also spoke at some length about her husband “Jack,” the loving judge, and, in a step toward greater intimacy, described his fondness for wearing women’s gowns when entertaining at home. “What our friends understand, even though nobody else nowadays seems to, is that it has nothing to do with sexuality. It’s just a fashion preference. At least in our small charmed circle such innocence is still allowed.” He heard again a kind of exhaustion in her voice, and tried to tell himself that the cause was probably her feeling of being out of step with the conventional progressive attitudes of the time. The old left-right simplicities didn’t fit anymore, and a woman like Sister, who had identified with the left all her working life, might well feel worn down by the new rhetoric. Time for someone else to bang their head against the wall.

He didn’t entirely convince himself. Something was badly wrong with her, he could hear it in her voice every time they spoke, but he understood that she didn’t yet trust him enough to tell him what it was.

He told her a little about Quichotte: the character of the aging TV addict, the love of the unknown woman. She laughed. “I’m glad to hear you are capable of sending yourself up,” she said. He began to make the usual literary protest, he isn’t me, he’s fictional, etc., but she stopped him. “Don’t even,” she said. “It’s better if I think you’re lampooning yourself. It makes me like you a little more.”

He didn’t talk about the Trampoline, or tell Sister that he had given Quichotte’s fictional half sister the same illness and brutal surgery as Sister herself had undergone many years ago. That revelation could wait for later. Maybe a lot later. He was pretty sure it wouldn’t go down well.

(“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished,” Czesław Miłosz once said.)

They were finding their way back to each other. There was one angry exchange, Sister’s famously pyrotechnic temper getting at least this one final, spectacular outing, but even that, Brother afterwards thought, was essentially affectionate, the subject being Sister’s fury that Brother’s long silence, the years it had taken him to consider attempting a rapprochement, had robbed her of family life for all that time. His return, and his attempt to re-create the familial bond, infuriated her because of its tardiness, which she translated into uncaringness, unfeelingness, and what with her Eliza-Doolittle-meets-Elizabeth-II accent she called arseholery. “Did you ever have any comprehension, did you even possess the capacity to comprehend, what it might have felt like to imagine having an older brother by my side, that I could turn to, on whom, if need be, I could lean? No, never mind, rhetorical question, I already know the answer. Of course you can’t bloody imagine it, because you were too busy swanning around bloody New York fantasizing about bloody espionage. You know who the real James Bond was? An expert on Jamaican birds whose name Ian Fleming stole for his 007. That seems to sum you up pretty damn well. As a secret agent—correction, as somebody writing about secret agents—you make an excellent ornithologist. As a human being? Not even as good as that.”

That was just Sister clearing her throat. The aria followed, a song of accusation to rival the mighty “Abscheulicher!” in Beethoven’s Fidelio. He was a heartless monster, she told him; did he not understand— O abominable one!— that human life was short and that each day of love stolen from it was a crime against life itself? No, of course he did not understand, such understanding was beyond the ken of monsters, abominable ones, who rutted and grunted in the mud of ugliness and rose up to murder what was beautiful, or what might, with proper husbandry, become a thing of beauty. They had never been that close, she cried, but if he had shown even the slightest desire to come closer to her she would have responded a thousandfold. But instead, there was his unjust accusation of a financial crime, there was the slap, there were the ensuing years of prideful unrepentant absence, and these were unforgivable things. And in spite of that there had been times—so many times!—when she had told herself, Yes! You can do the impossible, you can forgive the unforgivable, only let him ask, let him come to my door and bow his head and say, at last, after so long, after the years of blindness which were caused by my stupidity, I recognize the wrongs I did, I feel the pain you felt at their injustice, I see the truth, and the truth is that I have been guilty of arseholery, and so, at your door, with head bowed low, this arsehole asks to be forgiven. That was all he had to say and do. And now here he was doing and saying it, but he had left it so late, he had been so stupid for so long, that her rage could not be quenched. He should hang up and go away, take his voice out of her ear, let the silence between them be resumed, for she was accustomed to that silence and it was too late for peace.—No.—That was not how she had meant to end.—He should call her again tomorrow. There was no more to be said today.