Excerpt of Shalimar The Clown by Salman Rushdie
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She also kept the strangeness of her seeing under control, the sudden otherness
of vision that came and went. When her pale eyes changed the things she saw, her
tough mind changed them back. She did not care to dwell on her turbulence, never
spoke about her childhood, and told people she did not remember her dreams.
On her twenty-fourth birthday the ambassador came to her door. She looked down
from her fourth-floor balcony when he buzzed and saw him waiting in the heat of
the day wearing his absurd silk suit like a French sugar daddy. Holding flowers,
yet. "People will think you're my lover," India shouted down to Max, "my
cradle-snatching Valentine." She loved the ambassador when he was embarrassed,
the pained furrow of his brow, the right shoulder hunching up against his ear,
the hand raised as if to ward off a blow. She saw him fracture into rainbow
colors through the prism of her love. She watched him recede into the past as he
stood below her on the sidewalk, each successive moment of him passing before
her eyes and being lost forever, surviving only in outer space in the form of
escaping light-rays. This is what loss was, what death was: an escape into the
luminous wave-forms, into the ineffable speed of the light-years and the
parsecs, the eternally receding distances of the cosmos. At the rim of the known
universe an unimaginable creature would someday put its eye to a telescope and
see Max Ophuls approaching, wearing a silk suit and carrying birthday roses,
forever borne forward on tidal waves of light. Moment by moment he was leaving
her, becoming an ambassador to such unthinkably distant elsewheres. She closed
her eyes and opened them again. No, he was not billions of miles away amid the
wheeling galaxies. He was here, correct and present, on the street where she
lived.
He had recovered his poise. A woman in running clothes rounded the corner from
Oakwood and cantered toward him, appraising him, making the easy judgments of
the times, judgments about sex and money. He was one of the architects of the
postwar world, of its international structures, its agreed economic and
diplomatic conventions. His tennis game was strong even now, at his advanced
age. The inside-out forehand, his surprise weapon. That wiry frame in long white
trousers, carrying not much more than five percent body fat, could still cover
the court. He reminded people of the old champion Jean Borotra: those few
old-timers who remembered Borotra. He stared with undisguised European pleasure
at the jogger's American breasts in their sports bra. As she passed him he
offered her a single rose from the enormous birthday bouquet. She took the
flower; and then, appalled by his charm, by the erotic proximity of his snappy
crackle of power, and by herself, accelerated anxiously away. Fifteen–love.
From the balconies of the apartment building the old Central and East European
ladies were also staring at Max, admiringly, with the open lust of toothless
age. His arrival was the high point of their month. They were out en masse
today. Usually they gathered together in small street-corner clumps or sat in
twos and threes by the courtyard swimming pool chewing the fat, sporting
inadvisable beachwear without shame. Usually they slept a lot and when not
sleeping complained. They had buried the husbands with whom they had spent forty
or even fifty years of unregarded life. Stooped, leaning, expressionless, the
old women lamented the mysterious destinies that had stranded them here, halfway
across the world from their points of origin. They spoke in strange tongues that
might have been Georgian, Croatian, Uzbek. Their husbands had failed them by
dying. They were pillars that had fallen, they had asked to be relied upon and
had brought their wives away from everything that was familiar into this
shadowless lotus-land full of the obscenely young, this California whose body
was its temple and whose ignorance was its bliss, and then proved themselves
unreliable by keeling over on the golf course or face down in a bowl of noodle
soup, thus revealing to their widows at this late stage in their lives the
untrustworthiness of existence in general and of husbands in particular. In the
evenings the widows sang childhood songs from the Baltic, from the Balkans, from
the vast Mongolian plains.
Excerpted from Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie Copyright © 2005 by Salman Rushdie. Excerpted
by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights
reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without
permission in writing from the publisher.
