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Fiction • Knopf Canada
• Hardcover, 416 pages • September 2005
• $34.95 • 0-676-97754-5
Chapter 1
At twenty-four the ambassador’s daughter slept
badly through the warm, unsurprising nights. She woke
up frequently and even when sleep did come her body
was rarely at rest, thrashing and flailing as if trying
to break free of dreadful invisible manacles. At times
she cried out in a language she did not speak. Men
had told her this, nervously. Not many men had ever
been permitted to be present while she slept. The
evidence was therefore limited, lacking consensus;
however, a pattern emerged. According to one report
she sounded guttural, glottal-stoppy, as if she were
speaking Arabic. Night-Arabian, she thought, the dreamtongue
of Scheherazade. Another version described her words
as science-fictional, like Klingon, like a throat
being cleared in a galaxy far, far away. Like Sigourney
Weaver channeling a demon in Ghostbusters. One night
in a spirit of research the ambassador’s daughter
left a tape recorder running by her bedside but when
she heard the voice on the tape its death’s-head
ugliness, which was somehow both familiar and alien,
scared her badly and she pushed the erase button,
which erased nothing important. The truth was still
the truth.
These agitated periods of sleep-speech were mercifully
brief, and when they ended she would subside for a
time, sweating and panting, into a state of dreamless
exhaustion. Then abruptly she would awake again, convinced,
in her disoriented state, that there was an intruder
in her bedroom. There was no intruder. The intruder
was an absence, a negative space in the darkness.
She had no mother. Her mother had died giving her
birth: the ambassador’s wife had told her this
much, and the ambassador, her father, had confirmed
it. Her mother had been Kashmiri, and was lost to
her, like paradise, like Kashmir, in a time before
memory. (That the terms Kashmir and paradise were
synonymous was one of her axioms, which everyone who
knew her had to accept.) She trembled before her mother’s
absence, a void sentinel shape in the dark, and waited
for the second calamity, waited without knowing she
was waiting. After her father died — her brilliant,
cosmopolitan father, Franco-American, “like
Liberty,” he said, her beloved, resented, wayward,
promiscuous, often absent, irresistible father —
she began to sleep soundly, as if she had been shriven.
Forgiven her sins, or, perhaps, his. The burden of
sin had been passed on. She did not believe in sin.
So until her father’s death she was not an
easy woman to sleep with, though she was a woman with
whom men wanted to sleep. The pressure of men’s
desires was tiresome to her. The pressure of her own
desires was for the most part unrelieved. The few
lovers she took were variously unsatisfactory and
so (as if to declare the subject closed) she soon
enough settled on one pretty average fellow, and even
gave serious consideration to his proposal of marriage.
Then the ambassador was slaughtered on her doorstep
like a halal chicken dinner, bleeding to death from
a deep neck wound caused by a single slash of the
assassin’s blade. In broad daylight! How the
weapon must have glistened in the golden morning sun;
which was the city’s quotidian blessing, or
its curse. The daughter of the murdered man was a
woman who hated good weather, but most of the year
the city offered little else. Accordingly, she had
to put up with long monotonous months of shadowless
sunshine and dry, skin-cracking heat. On those rare
mornings when she awoke to cloud cover and a hint
of moisture in the air she stretched sleepily in bed,
arching her back, and was briefly, even hopefully,
glad; but the clouds invariably burned off by noon
and then there it was again, the dishonest nursery
blue of the sky that made the world look childlike
and pure, the loud impolite orb blaring at her like
a man laughing too loudly in a restaurant.
back to top
In such a city there could be no grey areas, or so
it seemed. Things were what they were and nothing
else, unambiguous, lacking the subtleties of drizzle,
shade and chill. Under the scrutiny of such a sun
there was no place to hide. People were everywhere
on display, their bodies shining in the sunlight,
scantily clothed, reminding her of advertisements.
No mysteries here or depths; only surfaces and revelations.
Yet to learn the city was to discover that this banal
clarity was an illusion. The city was all treachery,
all deception, a quick-change, quicksand metropolis,
hiding its nature, guarded and secret in spite of
all its apparent nakedness. In such a place even the
forces of destruction no longer needed the shelter
of the dark. They burned out of the morning’s
brightness, dazzling the eye, and stabbed at you with
sharp and fatal light.
Her name was India. She did not like this name. People
were never called Australia, were they, or Uganda
or Ingushetia or Peru. In the mid-1960s her father,
Max Ophuls (Maximilian Ophuls, raised in Strasbourg,
France, in an earlier age of the world), had been
America’s best-loved, and then most scandalous,
ambassador to India, but so what, children were not
saddled with names like Herzegovina or Turkey or Burundi
just because their parents had visited those lands
and possibly misbehaved in them. She had been conceived
in the East — conceived out of wedlock and born
in the midst of the firestorm of outrage that twisted
and ruined her father’s marriage and ended his
diplomatic career — but if that were sufficient
excuse, if it was okay to hang people’s birthplaces
round their necks like albatrosses, then the world
would be full of men and women called Euphrates or
Pisgah or Iztaccíhuatl or Woolloomooloo. In
America, damn it, this form of naming was not unknown,
which spoiled her argument slightly and annoyed her
more than somewhat. Nevada Smith, Indiana Jones, Tennessee
Williams, Tennessee Ernie Ford: she directed mental
curses and a raised middle finger at them all.
“India” still felt wrong to her, it felt
exoticist, colonial, suggesting the appropriation
of a reality that was not hers to own, and she insisted
to herself that it didn’t fit her anyway, she
didn’t feel like an India, even if her color
was rich and high and her long hair lustrous and black.
She didn’t want to be vast or subcontinental
or excessive or vulgar or explosive or crowded or
ancient or noisy or mystical or in any way Third World.
Quite the reverse. She presented herself as disciplined,
groomed, nuanced, inward, irreligious, understated,
calm. She spoke with an English accent. In her behavior
she was not heated, but cool. This was the persona
she wanted, that she had constructed with great determination.
It was the only version of her that anyone in America,
apart from her father and the lovers who had been
scared off by her nocturnal proclivities, had ever
seen. As to her interior life, her violent English
history, the buried record of disturbed behavior,
the years of delinquency, the hidden episodes of her
short but eventful past, these things were not subjects
for discussion, were not (or were no longer) of concern
to the general public. These days she had herself
firmly in hand. The problem child within her was sublimated
into her spare-time pursuits, the weekly boxing sessions
at Jimmy Fish’s boxing club on Santa Monica
and Vine where Tyson and Christy Martin were known
to work out and where the cold fury of her hitting
made the male boxers pause to watch, the biweekly
training sessions with a Clouseau-attacking Burt Kwouk
look-alike who was a master of the close-combat martial
art of Wing Chun, the sun-bleached blackwalled solitude
of Saltzman’s Moving Target shooting gallery
out in the desert at 29 Palms, and, best of all, the
archery sessions in downtown Los Angeles near the
city’s birthplace in Elysian Park, where her
new gifts of rigid self-control, which she had learned
in order to survive, to defend herself, could be used
to go on the attack. As she drew back her golden Olympic-standard
bow, feeling the pressure of the bowstring against
her lips, sometimes touching the bottom of the arrow
shaft with the tip of her tongue, she felt the arousal
in herself, allowed herself to feel the heat rising
in her while the seconds allotted to her for the shot
ticked down toward zero, until at last she let fly,
unleashing the silent venom of the arrow, reveling
in the distant thud of her weapon hitting its target.
The arrow was her weapon of choice.
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.
back to top
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.
The neighborhood’s old men were single, too,
some inhabiting sagging sacks of bodies over which
gravity had exerted far too much power, others grizzle-chopped
and letting themselves go in dirty T-shirts and pants
with unbuttoned flies, while a third, jauntier contingent
dressed sharply, affecting berets and bow ties. These
natty gents periodically tried to engage the widows
in conversation. Their efforts, with yellow glints
of false teeth and melancholy sightings of slicked-down
vestiges of hair beneath the doffed berets, were invariably
and contemptuously ignored. To these elderly beaux,
Max Ophuls was an affront, the ladies’ interest
in him a humiliation. They would have killed him if
they could, if they had not been too busy staving
off their own deaths.
India saw it all, the exhibitionist, desirous old
women pirouetting and flirting on the verandahs, the
lurking, spiteful old men. The antique Russian super,
Olga Simeonovna, a bulbous denim-clad samovar of a
woman, was greeting the ambassador as if he were a
visiting head of state. If there had been a red carpet
on the premises she would have rolled it out for him.
“She keeps you waiting, Mr. Ambassador, what
you gonna do, the young. I say nothing against. Just,
a daughter these days is more difficult, I was a daughter
myself who for me my father was like a god, to keep
him waiting unthinkable. Alas, daughters today are
hard to raise and then they leave you flat. I sir
am formerly mother, but now they are dead to me, my
girls. I spit on their forgotten names. This is how
it is.”
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