Down the upper part of the woman’s right arm there was an eight-inch-long herringbone-pattern scar. When she saw him looking at it, she at once crossed her arms and put her left hand over the injury, not understanding that it made her more beautiful, that it perfected her beauty by adding an essential imperfection. By showing that she could be injured, that such astonishing loveliness could be broken in an instant, the cicatrice only emphasized what was there, and made one cherish it—my goodness, Solanka thought, what a word to use about a stranger!—all the more.
Extreme physical beauty draws all available light toward itself, becomes a shining beacon in an otherwise darkened world. Why would one peer into the encircling gloom when one could look at this kindly flame? Why talk, eat, sleep, work when such effulgence was on display? Why do anything but look, for the rest of one’s paltry life? Lumen de lumine. Staring into the sidereal unreality of her beauty, which wheeled in the room like a galaxy on fire, he was thinking that if he had been able to wish his ideal woman into being, if he’d had a magic lamp to rub, this would have been what he’d have wished for. And, at the same time, while he was mentally congratulating Rhinehart for breaking away at last from the many daughters of Paleface, he was also imagining himself with this dark Venus, he was allowing his own, closed heart to open, and so remembering once again what he spent much of his life trying to forget: the size of the crater within him, the hole left by his break with his recent and remote past, which, just perhaps, the love of such a woman could fill. Ancient, secret pain welled up in him, pleading to be healed.
“Yeah, sorry bout that, buddy” came Rhinehart’s tickled drawl from the far side of the universe. “She hits most people that way. Can’t help it. Doesn’t know how to switch it off. Neela, meet my celibate pal Malik. He’s given up women forever, as you can plainly see.” Jack was enjoying himself, Solanka noted. He forced himself back into the real world. “Lucky for all of us that I have,” he finally said, pushing his mouth into some sort of smile. “Otherwise, I’d have to fight you for her.” Here’s that old euphony again, he thought: Neela, Mila. Desire is coming after me, and giving me warnings in rhyme.
She worked as a producer with one of the better independents, and specialized in documentary programming for television. Right now she was planning a project that would take her back to her roots. Things back home in Lilliput-Blefuscu were not good, Neela explained. People in the West thought of it as a South Sea paradise, a place for honeymoons and other trysts, but there was trouble brewing. Relations between the Indo-Lilliputians and the indigenous, ethnic “Elbee” community—which still made up a majority of the population, but only just—were deteriorating fast. To highlight the issues, New York representatives of the opposing factions had both arranged to hold parades on the same upcoming Sunday. These manifestations would be small but fervent. The two march routes were to be widely separated, but it was still a good bet that there would be some angry clashes. Neela herself was determined to march. As she talked about the worsening political turbulence in her tiny patch of the antipodes, Professor Solanka saw the hot blood rising in her. This conflict was not a small matter for beautiful Neela. She was still connected to her origins, and Solanka almost envied her for it. Jack Rhinehart was saying, boyishly, “Great! We’ll all go! Sure we will! You’ll march for your people, Malik, right? Well, you’ll march for Neela, anyhow.” Rhinehart’s tone was light: a miscalculation. Solanka saw Neela stiffen and frown. This wasn’t to be treated as a game. “Yes,” Solanka said, looking her in the eyes. “I’ll march.”
They settled down to watch the game. More goals came: six in all for the Netherlands, a late, irrelevant consolation strike for Yugoslavia. Neela, too, was glad the Dutch had done well. She saw their black players, uncompetitively but also without false modesty, as her near equals in gorgeousness. “The Surinamese,” she said, unknowingly echoing the thoughts of the young Malik Solanka in Amsterdam all those years ago, “are the living proof of the value of mixing up the races. Look at them. Edgar Davids, Kluivert, Rijkaard in the dugout, and, in the good old days, Ruud. The great Gullit. All of them, metegues. Stir all the races together and you get the most beautiful people in the world. I want to go,” she added, to nobody in particular, “soon, to Surinam.” She sprawled across the settee, throwing one long, leather-clad leg over the arm, and dislodged the day’s Post. It fell to the floor at Solanka’s feet, and his eye was caught by the headline: CONCRETE KILLER STRIKES AGAIN. And below, in smaller type: Who Was the Man in the Panama Hat? Everything changed at once; darkness rushed in through the open window, blinding him. His little rush of excitement, good humor, and lust drained away. He felt himself trembling, and rose quickly to his feet. “I have to leave,” he said. “What, the final whistle blows and you’re out of here? Malik, friend, that just plain ain’t polite.” But Solanka only shook his head at Rhinehart and headed out through the door, fast. Behind him he heard Neela talking about the Post headline; she’d picked up the paper as he left. “Bastard. This stuff is supposed to have stopped, it’s supposed to be safe now, right,” she was saying. “But, shit, it’s never over. Here we go again.”
6
“Islam will cleanse this street of godless motherfucker bad drivers,” the taxi driver screamed at a rival motorist. “Islam will purify this whole city of Jew pimp assholes like you and your whore roadhog of a Jew wife too.” All the way up Tenth Avenue the curses continued. “Infidel fucker of your underage sister, the inferno of Allah awaits you and your unholy wreck of a motorcar as well.” “Unclean offspring of a shit-eating pig, try that again and the victorious jihad will crush your balls in its unforgiving fist.” Malik Solanka, listening in to the explosive, village-accented Urdu, was briefly distracted from his own inner turmoil by the driver’s venom. ALI MAJNU said the card. Majnu meant beloved. This particular Beloved looked twenty-five or less, a nice handsome boy, tall and skinny, with a sexy John Travolta quiff, and here he was living in New York, with a steady job; what had so comprehensively gotten his goat?
Solanka silently answered his own question. When one is too young to have accumulated the bruises of one’s own experience, one can choose to put on, like a hair shirt, the sufferings of one’s world. In this case, as the Middle East peace process staggered onward and the outgoing American president, hungry for a breakthrough to buff up his tarnished legacy, was urging Barak and Arafat to a Camp David summit conference, Tenth Avenue was perhaps being blamed for the continued sufferings of Palestine. Beloved Ali was Indian or Pakistani, but, no doubt out of some misguided collectivist spirit of paranoiac pan-Islamic solidarity, he blamed all New York road users for the tribulations of the Muslim world. In between curses, he spoke to his mother’s brother on the radio—“Yes, Uncle. Yes, carefully, of course, Uncle. Yes, the car costs money. No, Uncle. Yes, courteously, always, Uncle, trust me. Yes, best policy. I know”—and also asked Solanka, sheepishly, for directions. It was the boy’s first day at work in the mean streets, and he was scared witless. Solanka, himself in a state of high agitation, treated Beloved gently but did say, as he alighted at Verdi Square, “Maybe a little less of the blue language, okay, Ali Majnu? Tone it down. Some customers might be offended. Even those who don’t understand.”
The boy looked at him blankly. “I, sir? Swearing, sir? When?” This was odd. “All the way,” Solanka explained. At everyone within shouting distance. Motherfucker, Jew, the usual repertoire. Urdu,” he added, in Urdu, to make things clear, “meri madri zaban hai. “Urdu is my mother tongue. Beloved blushed, deeply, the color spreading all the way to his collar line, and met Solanka’s gaze with bewildered, innocent dark eyes. “Sahib, if you heard it, then it must be so. But, sir, you see, I am not aware.” Solanka lost patience, turned to go. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Road rage. You were carried away. It’s not important.” As he walked off along Broadway, Beloved Ali shouted after him, needily, asking to be understood: “It means nothing, sahib. Me, I don’t even go to the mosque. God bless America, okay? It’s just words.”