Shalimar the Clown Read Online Free PDF Page A

she had heard him acknowledge his infirmity, the first time in her experience that he had conceded the power of time. And why had he kissed her then, spontaneously, when there was no need to do so. That, too, was an indication of weakness, a misjudgment, like the gift of the vulgar car. A sign of slipping control. They were no longer in the habit of demonstrating their affections to each other, except perfunctorily. By such samurai abstinence did they give each other proofs of their love.
    “My time is being swept away,” the ambassador said. “Nothing will remain.” He foretold the Cold War’s accelerated ending, the Soviet Union’s house-of-cards collapse. He knew that the Wall would fall and that the reunification of Germany could not be held back and would happen more or less overnight. He foresaw the invasion of Western Europe by the elated job-hungry Ossis in their Trabants. Ceaus¸escu’s Mussoliniesque ending, and the elegiac presidencies of the writers, of Václav Havel and Arpad Goncz, these too he foresaw. He closed his mind to other, less palatable possibilities, however. He tried to believe that the global structures he had helped to build, the pathways of influence, money and power, the multinational associations, the treaty organizations, the frameworks of cooperation and law whose purpose had been to deal with a hot war turned cold, would still function in the future that lay beyond what he could foresee. She saw in him a desperate need to believe that the ending of his age would be happy, and that the new world which would come after would be better than the one that would die with him. Europe, free of the Soviet threat, and America, free of the need to remain permanently at battle stations, would build that new world in friendship, a world without walls, a frontierless newfound land of infinite possibility. The doomsday clock would no longer be set at seven seconds to midnight. The emerging economies of India, Brazil and a newly opened-up China would be the world’s new powerhouses, the counterweights to the American hegemony of which he had always, as an internationalist, disapproved. When she saw him surrender to the utopian fallacy, to the myth of the perfectibility of man, India knew he could not have long to live. He looked like a tightrope walker trying to keep his balance even though there was no longer a rope beneath his feet.
    The weight of the inexorable bore down on her, as if the gravitational force of the earth had suddenly increased. When she was younger they had often touched. He could place his lips against any part of her body, her hand, her cheek, her back, and find a bird in there and make it speak. Birdsong burst from her skin under the magic pressure of his mouth, soaring, celebratory. Until the age of eight she would climb him like an Everest. She had learned the story of the Himalayas on his knee, the story of the giant proto-continents, of the moment when India broke off from Gondwanaland and moved across the proto-oceans toward Laurasia. She closed her eyes and saw the huge collision, the mighty mountains crumpling up into the sky. He taught her a lesson about time, about the slowness of the earth:
the collision is still happening.
So if he was a Himalaya, if he too had been caused by the smashing together of great forces, by a clash of worlds, then he, too, was growing still. The collision in him was also still taking place. He was her mountain-father and she his mountaineer. He held her hands in his and up she came until she was straddling his shoulders, her groin against his neck. He kissed her stomach and she somersaulted backward off his shoulders to the floor. One day he said, No more of that. She wanted to cry but controlled herself. Childhood was over? Very well, then, it was over. She would put aside childish things.
    The freeway home was empty, shockingly empty, as if the world were ending, and while they were floating along in that asphalt void the ambassador again