Shame Read Online Free PDF Page B

capable of acquiring more than the most
fundamental rudiments of civilization . . . Omar Khayyam, too,
fed at too-many mammary glands; and he wandered for some four
thousand days in the thing-infested jungle that was 'Nishapur', his
walled-in wild place, his mother-country; until he succeeded in
getting the frontiers opened by making a birthday wish that could
not be satisfied by anything lifted up in the machine of Mistri
Balloch.
    'Drop this jungle-boy business,' Farah sneered when Omar
tried it on her, 'you're no fucking ape-man, sonny jim.' And,
educationally speaking, she was right; but she had also denied the
wildness, the evil within him; and he proved upon her own body
that she was wrong.
    First things first: for twelve years, he had the run of the house.
Little (except freedom) was denied him. A spoiled and vulpine
brat; when he howled, his mothers caressed him . . . and after the
nightmares began and he started giving up sleep, he plunged
deeper and deeper into the seemingly bottomless depths of that
decaying realm. Believe me when I tell you that he stumbled
down corridors so long untrodden that his sandalled feet sank into
    Escapes from the Mother Country ? 25
    the dust right up to his ankles; that he discovered ruined staircases
made impassable by longago earthquakes which had caused them
to heave up into tooth-sharp mountains and also to fall away to
reveal dark abysses of fear ... in the silence of the night and the
first sounds of dawn he explored beyond history into what seemed
the positively archaeological antiquity of 'Nishapur', discovering
in almirahs the wood of whose doors disintegrated beneath his
tentative fingers the impossible forms of painted neolithic pottery
in the Kotdiji style; or in kitchen quarters whose existence was no
longer even suspected he would gaze ignorantly upon bronze
implements of utterly fabulous age; or in regions of that colossal
palace which had been abandoned long ago because of the col-
lapse of their plumbing he would delve into the quake-exposed
intricacies of brick drainage systems that had been out of date for
centuries.
    On one occasion he lost his way completely and ran wildly
about like a time-traveller who has lost his magic capsule and fears
he will never emerge from the disintegrating history of his race -
and came to a dead stop, staring in horror at a room whose outer
wall had been partly demolished by great, thick, water-seeking
tree-roots. He was perhaps ten years old when he had this first
glimpse of the unfettered outside world. He had only to walk
through the shattered wall � but the gift had been sprung upon
him without sufficient warning, and, taken unawares by the
shocking promise of the dawn light streaming through the hole,
he turned tail and fled, his terror leading him blindly back to his
own comforting, comfortable room. Afterwards, when he had had
time to consider things, he tried to retrace his steps, armed with a
purloined ball of string; but try as he might, he never again found
his way to that place in the maze of his childhood where the
minotaur of forbidden sunlight lived.
    'Sometimes I found skeletons,' he swore to disbelieving Farah,
'human as well as animal.' And even where bones were absent, the
house's long-dead occupants dogged his steps. Not in the way you
think! � No howls, no clanking chains! � But disembodied feel-
ings, the choking fumes of ancient hopes, fears, loves; and finally,
    Shame ? 26
    made wild by the ancestor-heavy, phantom oppressions of these
far recesses of the run-down building, Omar Khayyam took
his revenge (not long after the episode of the broken wall) on
his unnatural surroundings. I wince as I record his vandalism:
armed with broomstick and misappropriated hatchet, he rampaged
through dusty passages and maggoty bedrooms, smashing glass
cabinets, felling oblivion-sprinkled divans, pulverizing wormy
libraries; crystal, paintings, rusty helmets, the