A novelistic life, Solanka was forced to concede. Filmic, too. A life that could be a successful mid-budget feature film. Dustin Hoffman maybe as the plumber, and as the U-boat captain, who? Klaus Maria Brandauer, Rutger Hauer. But probably both parts would go to younger actors whose names Malik didn’t know. Even this was fading with the years, the movie knowledge in which he had always taken such pride. “You should write this down and register it,” he told Schlink, speaking too loudly. “It’s as they say high-concept. U-571 meets Schindler’s List. Maybe a double-edged comedy like Benigni’s. No, tougher than Benigni’s. Call it jewboat.” Schlink stiffened; and, before giving his full, injured attention to the toilet, turned on Solanka his mournful, disgusted gaze. “No humor,” he said. “As I haff already told you. I am sorry to say that you are a disrespectful man.”
And in the kitchen downstairs, the Polish cleaner Wislawa had arrived. She came with the sublet, refused to do the ironing, left cobwebs untouched in corners, and after she left you could make a line in the dust on the mantelpiece. On the plus side she had a pleasant temperament and a big, gummy smile. However, if you gave her half a chance, or even if you didn’t, she too would plunge into narrative. The dangerous, unsuppressable power of the tale. Wislawa, a devout Catholic, had had her faith profoundly shaken by an ostensibly true story told by her husband who got it from his uncle who got it from a trusted friend who knew the person concerned, a certain Ryszard, who was for many years the personal driver of the pope, this of course before he was elected to the Holy See. When it was time for that election, Ryszard the chauffeur drove the future pope all the way across Europe, a Europe standing on the very hinge of history, on the cusp of great changes. Ah, the comradeship of the two men, the simple human pleasures and annoyances of such a long journey! And then they arrived in the Holy City, the man of the cloth was walled up with his peers and the driver waited. At last the white smoke was seen, the cry of habemus papam was raised, and then there was a cardinal all in red, descending an enormous, wide flight of yellow stone steps slowly, and crabwise, like a character in a Fellini movie, and right at the bottom of the steps waited the smoky little car and its excited driver. The cardinal came mopping his brow and puffing up to the driver’s window, which Ryszard had wound down in anticipation of the news. And so the cardinal was able to deliver the personal message of the new, the Polish pope:
“You’re fired.”
Solanka, not a Catholic, not a believer, not much interested in the story even if true, not remotely convinced that it was true, not anxious to referee the cleaner’s wrestling match with the imp of doubt who presently had her immortal soul in a stranglehold, would have preferred not to speak to Wislawa at all, would have wished her to glide around the apartment rendering it spotless and habitable, leaving the laundry done, pressed and folded. But in spite of the expenditure of over eight thousand dollars a month on the sublet, cleaner included, fate had dealt him a pretty much unplayable hand. On the topic of Wislawa’s imperiled reservation in heaven, he most earnestly did not wish to comment; yet she returned to the theme constantly. “How to kiss the ring of a Holy Father like that one, he is of my own people, but 0 God, to send a cardinal, and just like that, so lightly, to give the sack. And if not the Holy Father, then how his priests, and if not the priests, then how confession and absolution, and here are opening below my feets the iron gates of Hell.”
Professor Solanka, his fuse shortening, grew daily more tempted to say something unkind. Paradise, he considered telling Wislawa, was a place to which only the coolest and highest in New York possessed the secret number. As a gesture to the democratic spirit a few ordinary mortals were allowed in, too; they would arrive wearing properly reverential expressions, the expressions of those who know that they have truly, just this once, lucked out. The wide-eyed thrilledness of this bridge-and-tunnel mob would add to the jaded satisfaction of the in-crowd, and of course of the Proprietor himself. It was extremely improbable, however, the laws of supply and demand being what they were, that Wislawa would turn out to be one of the fortunate few in the public seats, the sun-kissed bleachers of eternity.
This and much else Solanka restrained himself from saying. Instead he pointed out cobwebs and dust, to be answered only by that gummy smile and a gesture of Krakovian incomprehension. “I work for Mrs. Jay long time.” This answer dealt, in Wislawa’s view, with all complaints. After the second week Solanka gave up asking, wiped down the mantels himself, got rid of the cobwebs, and took his shirts to the good Chinese laundry just around the corner on Columbus. But her soul, her nonexistent soul, continued intermittently to insist on his pastoral, his uncaring care.
Solanka’s head began to spin lightly. Sleep-deprived, wild of thought, he headed for his bedroom. Behind him through the thick, humid air he could hear his dolls, alive now and jabbering behind their closed door, each loudly telling the other his or her “back-story” the tale of how she or he came to be. The imaginary tale, which he, Solanka, had made up for each of them. If a doll had no back-story, its market value was low. And as with dolls so with human beings. This was what we brought with us on our journey across oceans, beyond frontiers, through life: our little storehouse of anecdote and what-happened-next, our private once-upon-a-time. We were our stories, and when we died, if we were very lucky, our immortality would be in another such tale.
This was the great truth against which Malik Solanka had set his face. It was precisely his back-story that he wanted to destroy. Never mind where he came from or who, when little Malik could barely walk, had deserted his mother and so given him permission, years later, to do the same. To the devil with stepfathers and pushes on the top of a young boy’s head and dressing up and weak mothers and guilty Desdemonas and the whole useless baggage of blood and tribe. He had come to America as so many before him to receive the benison of being Ellis Islanded, of starting over. Give me a name, America, make of me a Buzz or Chip or Spike. Bathe me in amnesia and clothe me in your powerful unknowing. Enlist me in your J. Crew and hand me my mouse ears! No longer a historian but a man without histories let me be. I’ll rip my lying mother tongue out of my throat and speak your broken English instead. Scan me, digitize me, beam me up. If the past is the sick old Earth, then, America, be my flying saucer. Fly me to the rim of space. The moon’s not far enough.
But still through the ill-fitting bedroom window the stories came pouring in. What would Saul and Gayfryd—“she became the Stanley Cup of trophy wives when trophy wives were as common as Porsches”—do now that they were down to their last $40 or $50 million?… And hurray, Muffie Potter Ashton’s pregnant!… And wasn’t that Paloma Huffington de Woody getting friendly with S. J. “Yitzhak” Perelman on Gibson’s Beach, Sagaponack?… And did you hear about Griffin and his great big beautiful Dahl?… What, Nina’s planning to launch a perfume? But, my dear, she’s so over, she’s starting to smell like roadkill… And Meg and Dennis, just moved to Splitsville, are squabbling over who gets not just the CD collection but the guru… Which big-name Hollywood actress has been whispering that a new young star’s elevation has Sapphic origins involving a major studio boss?… And have you read Karen’s latest, Thin Thighs for Life?… And Lotus, coolest of niteries, nixed O. J. Simpson’s birthday bash! Only in America, kids, only in America!
With his hands over his ears, and still wearing his ruined linen suit, Professor Solanka slept.
5
The telephone woke him at noon. Jack Rhinehart, the phone-smasher, invited Professor Solanka over to watch the Holland-Yugoslavia Euro 2000 quarterfinal on Pay-Per-View. Malik accepted, surprising them both. “Glad to get you out of that mole hole,” Rhinehart said. “But if you plan to root for the Serbs, stay home.” Solanka felt refreshed today: less burdened, and, yes, in need of a friend. Even in these days of his retreat, he still had such needs. A holy man up a Himalaya could do without soccer on TV. Solanka was not so pure of heart. He shed the slept-in suit, showered, dressed quickly, and rode downtown. When he climbed out of the cab at Rhinehart’s building, a woman in shades rushed into it, jostling him, and he had, for the second time in as many days, the unsettling feeling that the stranger was someone he knew. In the elevator he identified her: the squeeze-me-and-I-talk doll-woman whose name was the contemporary byword for tacky infidelity, Our Lady of the Thong. “Oh Jesus, Monica,” Rhinehart said. “I run into her all the time. Around here it used to be Naomi Campbell, Courtney Love, Angelina Jolie. Now it’s Minnie Mouth. There goes the neighborhood, right?”