The Islam Quintet

by Tariq Ali

  On a personal level I have no complaints. Our marriage was one of convenience. Neither of us pretended we were in love. We knew each other reasonably well and that helped. Better than marrying a complete stranger. There were no hidden corners in our lives. We both had our ghosts. He knew everything about D and me. I knew a few things about him and Anjum. Her loss had hurt him more than he would ever acknowledge. In the early days of our marriage I would try and draw him out, but the pain was too strong. He told me: ‘Talking about her to you or anyone else won’t help. If it did I would.’ I never mentioned her name again.

  After he announced his new political affiliation, I left the room. He didn’t follow me to try and explain the philosophical leap that he had made. There was only one explanation. Opportunism born of greed. He is a doctor. He can turn the microscope on himself. I avoid him now. The children know that something’s wrong.

  Today he tried to confront me. Pure bluster. He didn’t believe in it, but others had insisted. It would help the community of doctors from Fatherland. What did it matter to me, since I had never shown the slightest interest in politics. I let him wallow in self-pity for a while, before replying.

  ‘I was never political like you were, but the reason I liked you and married you was because I thought you had some integrity. Some principles in which you believed. That meant a lot to me. Now I find you loathsome. I can never respect you again. You’re no different from your colleagues who still organise gender-segregated dinners to show their affection for the old country. You’ve become one of them. If it weren’t for the children I would leave you now and make sure I hired a really good divorce lawyer.’

  He didn’t reply and I couldn’t resist a final kick.

  ‘Dara was so right when he told me once that it wasn’t institutions like marriage that mattered. The only unions that work have to be based on genuine passions. Love and politics.’

  He was silent.

  I told the children. They didn’t reply, either.

  Poor Zahid. He must have been as stunned by this response as I was now. Did I say that to her? Slowly it came back. It must have been that night in the Shalimar Gardens. It had been a response to something she had said linking love to marriage. Eighteen at the time, she was limited in her experiences and had a fixed notion of the perfect lover-husband. She may well have identified with Dai-yu, the ethereal heroine in Cao Xueqin’s masterpiece, but surely her ideal lover couldn’t possibly be Bao-yu—or had the fiction become so real that it had impinged on reality? Even so, not Bao-yu. No. He was far too flaky. She had certainly changed since those days. Experience is often the best teacher, but what on earth had impelled her to stay on, and especially after the children left home? Habit? Convenience? I wanted answers. She had to come back soon. A fortnight was too far away.

  The train had reached the Gare du Nord.

  TWELVE

  I WASN’T COMPLETELY SURE why I was in Paris. Zaynab was a pretext, since she was returning to London. I was too old to brush up my French. The time for j’aime, tu aimes, il aime, nous aimons was long gone. And an old and close friend here, Mathurin, a gifted composer, was no longer alive. Usually Matho was the first person I rang. We would meet within hours, debrief each other on the state of the world and the world of our personal lives, retire to a café near St-Germain, and there he would detail the latest atrocities of certain Parisian intellectuals, far gone in vanity and conceit, that we had both come to loathe. They were the ‘ultras’ of the new order: social, economic, political liberals, they hated their own radical pasts and now even opposed traditional conservative Gaullism and republicanism for being too gauchiste and étatiste. Their carpings, far from costing the intended targets any sleepless nights, simply provoked mirth.

  Matho would provide me with rich gossip, complete accounts of what was really going on underneath the surface. Political and sexual affairs were effortlessly combined in his narrative. What angered him greatly was that even some of the French extreme left had become partially infected with the neoliberal ideology; Liberation acted as the principal conduit of these ideas and was often less interesting than the traditional conservative journals. The paladins of the financial markets were seen as bold crusaders, opening new paths for the subalterns of consumerist excess. It was not envy that had soured Mathurin. It was a mixture of contempt and anger with the new order. He would speak of some colleagues in the world of music as having become so tense that they stifled the music they were being paid to play. He would name names from the past, friends we had in common, women we both knew, and describe their current activities. He often spoke of one woman in particular, a particularly dogmatic ouvrieriste for whom he had kept a permanent space in his heart, a bit like the irritating reserved signs in public car-parks, who was now an enormously successful arms dealer and had bought herself a farm where she reared pedigreed horses and rode them as a leisure activity. We laughed. He was firmly convinced it would end badly for the turncoats.

  ‘And yet’, Matho would say in his gravelly voice, ‘I still miss her sometimes. There was something beautiful and soft underneath the hard exterior that she wore both then and now. Sadness can sometimes last for years. I composed a symphony to bid her farewell. She came to the premiere with one of her clients from the Gulf. They left after fifteen minutes. None of the critics liked the work. I think they were right. It was too sentimental, but it sold well. Too well in Paris and not at all well elsewhere. Later I discovered that a PR firm she used was buying the CDs in bulk from all the shops here. Strange gesture, but my bank was happy.’

  On one occasion, as we were sitting at his table in the Café de Flore, a former acquaintance sauntered over towards us. Matho warned me: ‘He’s completely gone over to the ultras but for some unknown reason likes to pretend he’s still on our side, wallows in rubbishy nostalgia and has nothing to say. Please don’t encourage him to stay. I can’t stand his spindly legs walking in our direction.’

  As long as Matho was alive, I would come often to Paris. I was stuck in deepest Fatherland without access to a computer or cell phone when he died fifteen years ago, and as a consequence I could not attend his funeral. After that I virtually stopped coming to this city. I missed him. I missed his sharp tongue, his energy, his vicious sense of humour and his refusal to surrender to the world in which we all lived.

  Once, after an overlong New Year’s Eve supper—waiting for 1976—at his lover’s apartment, where too many bottles of red wine had already been consumed before the bubbles that greeted the New Year, I thought Matho was fast asleep and not listening to our conversation, knowing that he had the capacity to drop off whenever he felt intellectually exhausted. I’d forgotten that it was foolish to put too much faith in these naps, because as soon as he disagreed, which he did on hearing me discussing the events in Lisbon with his mistress, he would immediately wake up and resume the thread of the discourse taking place around him. That same evening, Matho opened his eyes and became genuinely irate when I confessed to the assembled party that I had never read any Stendhal. To make up for the faux pas I named the French novelists I had read and enjoyed, only to be brushed aside by him.

  ‘No need to flaunt your ignorance, my dear. Read him and I guarantee that you will love him. I don’t know the best English translations, but in French he’s without an equal. Zola is essentially a journalist; Proust is a self-indulgent genius; Balzac is, of course, brilliantly predictable; but Stendhal, he is something else. The way he unveils a struggle of ideas and the resulting emotions is masterful. An unwitting reader not fully able to grasp the writer’s mind suddenly begins to sympathize with a character whose radical beliefs are far removed from his own. Before he knows it he’s trapped. Happiness and misery are often related to the rise and fall of revolutionary politics. Read him, Dara. This is an instruction from the Committee of Public Safety.’

  Thanks to Matho, I did exactly that and have never stopped. His books became the equivalent of an indispensable lover. They accompany me on all my t
ravels. What is so wonderful about them is the way in which he breaks the rules, political and literary. He writes at an enviable pace and explains somewhere in one of his novels that ‘I write much better as soon as I begin a sentence without knowing how I should end it.’

  Once I had read him he became regular fodder in my discussions with Matho, and new questions arose. Had Stendhal ever lain with a woman outside a brothel? I did not think so. His biographers failed to convince me of the opposite, but Matho became indignant at such a thought, even though he had no proof whatsoever. I was quite pleased to discover that the great novelist shared this lack of facility with my painter friend Plato.

  As I dragged my suitcase in the direction of the taxi queue, I wondered what Stendhal’s refined intellect would have made of contemporary France, where the ultras he hated so much had recaptured official politics. The unrequited love that dominated his life and fictions was twined to memories of political passions and betrayed hopes. The sight of Paris, if you don’t live there, brings back all these memories.

  Stendhal and Balzac had strolled along these streets, the latter puzzled as to how there could be not a single reference to money in La Chartreuse de Parme. Before them others had walked here, too, Voltaire and Diderot, Saint Just, Robespierre, and later Blanqui and the Communards, followed by Nizan, Sartre and de Beauvoir. It was the intellectual workshop of the world. Here the individual enterprises of philosophers and revolutionaries became part of a continuum that was certainly one side of the intellectual history of France. That is what makes the city precious for outsiders and exiles, even when times are bad. Those who love history must love Paris. Wander the streets late at night in the Quarter and linger over their nameplates; it’s a refreshing antidote to prevalent fashions.

  Matho is no more, but his circle of friends still exists, a valiant minority of dissident publishers, intellectuals and workers who regularly and courageously challenge the established order and its mediacracy—men and women who live in a huge bubble, who are unable to account for themselves, and do not regard this in any way as a problem, who rarely question the sociohistorical realities that have produced them, not even when those realities erupt and threaten to bury their future in the lava.

  I have maintained contact with many of the dissidents, all good people, but none of them can ever replace Matho. The question ‘Why fight back if nobody else does?’ always remained alien to him. Had he been alive I would have attempted to explain the reasons for this trip and he would have asked why I was going to dine with such an unusual lady from Fatherland and why she was staying at the Crillon, and I can read many other questions as if in your living eyes, Matho, old friend. Your absence has made you even more vivid and I can hear your music and your indignation very clearly.

  To my surprise, she was waiting for me at the station, slightly overdressed and a bit tense. I didn’t immediately recognize her. It can’t be the woman I saw in London. She’s transformed. A haute couture trouser suit, makeup, immaculately cut and dressed hair and too much jewellery.

  ‘Dara!’

  ‘You should have warned me. Is it a fancy-dress dinner?’

  ‘Don’t be mean. Why should I spend the rest of my life mourning my past? I have a reasonable income because my only decent brother has a conscience. I’m free here to do as I wish. Don’t I have the right?’

  ‘That’s not a good question and never will be and you know that perfectly well. You look lovely.’

  ‘But you’re disappointed.’

  ‘Paris is always best after it’s rained a bit, the city is cleansed and the sky reverts to blue.’

  ‘You seemed preoccupied when I rang you. Who were you thinking of?’

  ‘Stendhal.’

  My response triggered a memory and I laughed at myself. She insisted on sharing the joke, and realizing that her sparkling eyes and red lips would give me no rest, I told her. Once in Berlin, researching a novel soon after the Wall fell, I returned to my hotel and picked up a message to call Vera Fuch-Coady, an East Coast academic then in town working on Walter Benjamin’s radio broadcasts for children at the Wissenschaft College. I rang. She was obviously distracted. I asked whether I had disturbed her. I could ring back later. ‘No. Not at all. I’m not doing anything. Should we have dinner tonight?’ I agreed. She rang back a few minutes later.

  ‘Dara, you know when you rang a minute ago, I said I was doing nothing. This wasn’t exactly accurate. In fact I was thinking of Adorno. See you later.’

  I was speechless, muttered something to the effect that I looked forward to seeing her soon and hoped she liked oysters, put the phone down and collapsed into laughter.

  Zaynab smiled politely. ‘Who is Adorno?’

  Mercifully a taxi became available at that moment. She seemed nervous, inwardly exasperated or scared. When I asked if anything was weighing on her spirits she described an episode that had taken place earlier that day. While walking in the Quarter and savouring the sunshine she was startled by the sight of a gang of policeman, who poured out of a van, surrounded an African, spread-eagled him against a wall, searched him, demanded papers that were not forthcoming and then bundled him into the van and drove away.

  ‘It happens in Fatherland all the time, but here, too, Dara? I was really shocked. People watched in silence and turned away.’

  ‘Just like Fatherland,’ I told her. ‘It happens all over Europe. In Italy they love burning gypsies and taunting Muslims. Repression and cowardice in the face of it have become everyday occurrences. Africans from the colonies, kids from the banlieus, are often treated like shrivelled leaves. Kicked into the dirt. You’ll get used to it.’

  ‘Have you?’

  I didn’t reply.

  Later that evening as our meal was being served I tried to discuss her life and Plato’s, which was after all, the supposed purpose of my trip. She was determined to discuss literature. We compromised. My reference to Stendhal had intrigued her.

  ‘I must confess I’m still besotted with Balzac. I can match many of his stories with real-life equivalents in Fatherland. Money and power, corruption feeding on corruption, and the origins of every rich family usually uncover a crime.’

  The only Stendhal she had ever read was his compendium Love.

  ‘I could never identify with the crystallizing bough in the Salzburg mines. So European. Not his fault, of course. I tried to transfer his method to Sind. Here, I would say, it is the sand that is supreme. The dust storms, the hot winds that sear the skin and the mind, leaving us numb and temporarily paralyzed and distraught. That, too, is like love. Have you never read Ibn Hazm’s treatise on love? He wrote it in Cordoba, eight centuries before Stendhal. Very brilliant. I’ve surprised you. You prefer thinking of me as a martyred provincial from an Asian backwater.’

  I had not been sure till then, but now I knew I wanted to spend the night with her. She read my face.

  ‘Did you know that my lush room with a four-poster was once a torture chamber, or so the maid told me.’

  ‘Are you still in love with Plato?’

  ‘No. I was for the first few weeks, but it was pure fantasy. He was very honest with me regarding his condition and we became very close friends. I could discuss anything with him.’

  ‘He’s always loved martyred provincials. Why the hell did you insist I write a book about him?’

  ‘Just to see if you could and would, and if you did we had to meet.’

  ‘I’m flattered, but did it never occur to your provincial mind that we could have met without the book?’

  ‘Had you been a composer I would have insisted on a Plato sonata. If you had been a painter I would have asked for a portrait, just to see how you saw him. Try to understand, Dara. I was bored.’

  ‘Hmmm.’

  ‘He told me you were once in love with a Chinese girl. Where on earth did you meet her?’

  ‘In Lahore. She was a Chinese Punjabi.’

  ‘How sweet. Tell me more.’

  ‘No. Provincials trying
to patronize their superiors always make themselves look foolish. She’ll be in the Plato book. It’s all about milieu these days, not just the individual and his ideas.’

  ‘I need some advice from you.’

  ‘How could I dare to advise such a strong-minded and singular woman as yourself? You’ve managed pretty well on your own till now.’

  ‘I’m touched. Does this mean you’ll spend the night in my torture chamber?’

  ‘Would you like me to?’

  ‘Yes, but only after we’ve had dessert. It’s too delicious here.’

  ‘Are you sure it isn’t an ill-considered subterfuge?’

  She laughed as she placed the order, and after an espresso each, I suggested some fresh air before retiring. She took my arm and we walked the Paris streets, which were slowly emptying of people as the city went to sleep, discussing its history and the ways of the world. I spoke of the country where I could not live, where people were spewed out and forced to seek refuge abroad, where human dignity had become a wreckage. Her own life was a living-death example of a human being putrefying in the filth that was our Fatherland.

  ‘You hate it so much?’

  ‘Not it, but its rulers. Scum of the earth. Blind, uncaring monsters. Fatherland needs a tsunami to drown them and their ill-gotten gains.’

  She became quiet.

  After we made love, she returned to the question of Jindié and I told her the story.

  ‘Another strong-minded and singular woman. You seem to specialize in them. How could she bear to walk off with Zahid? You were such close friends.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s why Plato, unlike Zahid, remains a very good friend.’

  ‘Don’t worry about him. He knew we were destined for each other. He told me that every woman he really loves but can’t satisfy ends up in bed with you.’

  ‘Surely there’ve been more than two.’

  She laughed without restraint, highlighting another attractive feature of her personality.