Night of the Golden Butterfly

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 travels. 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.

The next morning over breakfast she asked whether she should move to London permanently. There was no way she was going back to Fatherland. She was fearful that Karachi was going to explode and there would be a civil war between the North and the South, Pashtuns versus Urdu speakers with Sindhis applauding from the side, hoping each would destroy the other but fearful that the Punjabi army would ride to the rescue.

‘And Plato?’

‘Plato is dying. I didn’t want to tell you last night, Dara, and for purely selfish reasons. I did not want you to think of anything else.’

This came as a complete shock and was deeply unsettling. For some time neither of us spoke. Another old friend was about to die and with him a large part of my own past and shared memories of catamites that we had collectively cursed. I felt a single, salty tear creep down my face and Zaynab brushing it away.

‘I did wonder when I heard his voice on the phone. It was hoarse, but he could sound like that after a bad night. What is it?’

‘Lung cancer that has spread. It was diagnosed a few months ago. I pleaded with him but he refused to come abroad. He refused chemotherapy. He lives on painkillers. All he does is paint. He said you would like his last paintings because they are from inside him, like the very first etchings. Except these are huge canvases. There is a ladder in the studio. Before I left he said, “Look at this one. My last work. This huge cat is me and I’m watching Fatherland. Look, here are Fatherland’s four cancers: America, the military, mullahs and corruption. For the cat there’s just a single one, but the cat will die first. Fatherland is on intensive chemotherapy. All sorts of new drugs are being used, but they might end up producing new cancers.” It’s a horrific painting, Dara. The inner circle of Hell. He wants you to write about it.’

‘I will after I’ve seen it, but why didn’t he tell me?’

‘He didn’t want you or Alice Stepford to know. I have no idea why this is so. And that is the real reason he was so desperate that you write about him. It had nothing to do with any request from me.’

When Plato died, Zahid and I would be virtually the sole survivors of the table around which we had all become friends. Of all of us, Plato had had the most extraordinary qualities, and while some of these were visible in his art, one always felt that he had never allowed himself to reach full bloom. He was at once the most honourable and the most unforgiving of men.

I think he felt that loss when I drove him to Cambridge all those years ago; I observed his concentrated gaze as he looked at the latest books in the field that never became his own. He had smiled in a strange way that I interpreted as regret but was probably not.

‘Do you still understand this stuff, Plato?’

‘A little, but it has moved so far ahead. Way beyond me now. The cold would have killed me. Like poor Ramanujan, incapable of tolerating the cohabitation of extremes.’

‘I thought it was repressed homosexuality that sent him scurrying back to India.’

‘Another way of putting it could be that it was the unrepressed homosexuality of the great mathematician who invited him here that frightened the poor catamite.’

‘Both of us could be right.’

‘Let’s avoid Punjabi melodrama. I think he died of tuberculosis that he contracted here, but I’m not sure.’

It was a crisp November day, but bitterly cold. We had walked for an hour by the river and a friendly poet at Kings gave us lunch. Plato never spoke much in company and when he did there was no artifice. That is why I was puzzled by his failure to tell me he was dying. It would have been in character for him to joke about it and regret that he wasn’t a Believer, otherwise he could have looked forward to at least one houri and his ailment instantaneously cured. Ours was a heaven for old men. When we were driving back from Cambridge, he expressed no regrets. All he would say is that one can never completely determine the path that one’s life takes. Other factors always intervene to shape our biographies. I asked if he was thinking of anything specific.

‘If there had been no Partition I might have come here.’

‘But you would never have had time to paint.’

‘I would not have needed to paint.’

Zaynab ordered more coffee.

‘Perhaps you should have left him the poison capsule.’

‘He would be dead by now, and he is desperate to finish the painting.’

‘He never will. He can’t. He knows that and all he’ll do is to carry on enriching the colours.’

‘Listen to me, Dara. I hired two nurses to be with him at all times. There is a doctor on call who has promised me to make his last hours easy. I just could not bear to be there when he died. He knew that, which is why he asked me to leave the country.’

I believed her. Suddenly I had a desperate urge to speak to him one last time. To say a few things I had never said to him. About how important he’d been for all of us. Of how the pleasure he took in defying public opinion had infected us, who were a generation younger, and how his unceasing attacks on time-servers and opportunists during a military dictatorship had given us courage.

‘Zaynab, ring the nurse, please. I want to speak with him.’

She dialled the number. There was no reply.

‘Keep trying, keep trying.’

Finally the nurse answered. She was in an ambulance. Plato had collapsed some hours ago and was unconscious. They were taking him to the hospital. Zaynab and I embraced each other and wept. We spent most of that day in the Louvre, walking in a daze, sitting for a long time in front of a Poussin, thinking of Plato all the time and wondering whether he was already dead. When we returned to her hotel there were dozens of messages. We did not eat, but went straight up. We wept first and then laughed as we sat on the bed and talked about him. We paused to drink some cognac and went to bed, but sleep came fitfully. Images of Plato at different stages of his life kept me half awake, and when I trembled, Zaynab’s soothing hands would massage my head.

Plato had left firm instructions regarding his burial. No protection money was to be paid to secure a place in any graveyard. He was quite happy to be eaten by dogs. Zaynab had suggested that since his painting of the dead hound for her dead brother had enhanced the value of the Shah estates, he should be buried close to where she had first sighted him. Pir Sikandar Shah accordingly arranged for Plato’s body to be transported to his lands and he was Buried in the Shah family graveyard, but without any headstone, as is the custom in that region.

‘I can talk to him when I next visit the prison of my youth. May I ask you something?’

It was obvious that we were going to spend this day doing nothing, but I needed a brisk walk and Zaynab showed no inclination to get dressed.

‘What?’

‘If you were asked to describe me to someone who had no idea of me, what would you say?’

‘A Sindhi matron whose natural beauty is inextricably linked to her pride.’

‘Why matron? Am I really getting plump, you unfeeling hound? Apart from “matron” I liked that description.’

‘“Matron” stays. It denotes maturity and authority more than plumpness.’

‘When the Stepford lady was questioning me about intimate matters you did not speak at all. Does that mean you had no thoughts, or were they repressed?’

‘I did think that, for your peasant paramour, making love to you must be like having a nun for a mistress, not that he would have got the reference. Not that you were a nun. A nun is full of piety, and the sin of having a lover provides her with an exceptional frisson that can’t be faked. The piety produces the passion. In your case, I think, there was neither. Just simple mechanics.’

‘You can think what you like. Was it simple mechanics this morning?’

‘I wasn’t referring to us.’

‘Good. Yesterday was a bit sorrowful. I kept hearing a Sindhi lament in my head as I tried to arouse you. Do you have to leave today?’

‘I must. I have to prepare a talk for a conference. I need a few days in the library’

‘That seems excessive. When is your Chinese friend returning from the murder inquiry in Isloo?’

‘How did you know about that?’

‘I made it my business. My brother says they have no idea who killed the general. It wasn’t the usual suspects who are blamed for everything these days.’

‘I never thought it was, but why are you so interested?’

‘Because you are, and I feel linked through you. I thought if I discovered something you could pass it on to your friend. What my brother did say was that General Rafiq had several mistresses.’

‘A crime of passion?’

‘Always possible and not just in beloved Fatherland. And there will be another one if you ever turn your back on me. I like you.’

‘Remain calm. We’re both matrons and must preserve a certain decorum. No reason to regress to our teen years. Sorry, that doesn’t apply to you.’

‘When will you be back?’

‘Within a fortnight.’

‘Should I buy an apartment in Paris or London? Has to be a big city.’

‘Berlin.’

‘So I can leave you in peace to take a Chinese mistress in London. No way. I’m buying an apartment in London. Prices are dropping more and more each day, and Alice has sighted a suitable buy.’

I sat down and shook her.

‘Listen to me carefully. Jindié is a friend from the past who lives with Zahid, another friend, whom I once wronged. She is not my mistress.’

‘She will be soon. Of this I’m sure. Let’s not argue. We’ll both know when it happens. As a matter of fact I prefer Paris. Let’s go and see apartments today.’

‘In the Fauborg St-Germain?’

‘Why not? I want something in the Latin Quarter and wouldn’t it be fun if I found something nice on the rue de Balzac. And which of Stendhal’s novels should I read first?’

‘Difficult. Buy them all and toss a coin. How lucky you are to read them in French. I love them all, but if you put a gun to my head I’d say Lucien Leuwen. That and the two best-known ones need to be reread every two years, and at my age every six months. One always learns something new. I would also strongly recommend his thinly disguised memoir.’

‘By the time you return I’ll have finished them. I read very fast.’

‘Does understanding keep up with your pace?’

‘Does insolence keep up with the charm?’

‘Rewrite.’

She was serious enough about buying a flat, and we spent a few hours in various streets looking at available property. She liked one on the rue de Bièvre, and when I pointed out that Mitterand and a Polish Marxist intellectual had once shared the street, adding that Balzac’s favourite eatery was here, she became agitated. The agent was rung. The apartment was huge for such a small street, but she would have friends to stay over and would be entertaining regularly. There was no haggling. She would pay the asking price. The agent gave me an astonished look as if to ask whether she was serious. I suggested that he close the deal quickly before she saw something on the rue de Balzac.

‘Well, that’s settled. Now should we go and inspect some antique furniture?’

Her living room was especially large, and I suggested that the space above the fireplace might be a home for Plato’s unfinished masterpiece. She screamed.

‘Hai Allah, never. Never. It’s a frightening painting. You haven’t even seen it. Anyway it’s too big for this apartment or any other. It should be in a public space.’

‘Where is it at the moment?’

‘At our Sind home, I hope, carefully covered with muslin sheets to dry it properly. He was worried that local hoodlums might raid his studio when news of his death became known. All the other paintings are in a warehouse. This last one is now at home. We need a museum in Europe or North America to give it a home, and someone like you should write an explanation. It really needs one. Can you think of a title?’

‘Canceristan?’

‘Don’t be silly. Something simple and nonprovocative, like Unfinished…’

‘Last Thoughts in a Dying Country?’

‘No. I visit regularly, and Fatherland’s death has been predicted far too often.’

‘Dying Thoughts in the Last Country.’

‘Shut up. One more try, and then I’ll—’

‘Artistic Structures of Political Meaning in an Unknown Country. Unfinished, 2009.’

‘Brilliant. That will be the title. In fact, given that you haven’t seen the work, it’s pretty close to the mark and sounds obscure. “Unknown” in the sense of being unknown to its rulers. Yes? Good.’

I received a kiss on the cheek. It turned out that she was the sole executor of Plato’s estate, and she gave me complete authority to negotiate the sale of ASPMUC to a serious modern museum wherever I wished. She would arrange for it to be photographed and have slides posted directly to me.

‘Unless you want to just fly over and see it.’

‘Not this month, but I might do that sometime. Always helps. In any case the curator of whichever museum takes it will certainly want to see it before the purchase, or at least send an expert.’

‘This book you’re writing. It isn’t just about Plato?’

‘No, and it’s not a biography. It’s fiction.’

‘Allah protect you.’

‘No reason for Allah to be upset. I’m just sad that Plato will never read it. He was one of the sixteen people I was writing it for.’

‘Am I included?’

‘Plato and I went back forty-five years. I’ve barely known you a week.’

‘I feel I’ve known you a long time, and the book was my idea. I will be one of the sixteen. Let the figure remain.’

On the train back to London, I thought mainly about Plato, since I had been asked by a daily paper to write his obituary. His life had rarely been untroubled or happy till Zaynab offered him a haven. But nor had he died a physically or mentally broken man, like so many of his wealthy peers whose lives had been led without a trace of generosity or compassion, men who had justified, for petty gain, some indescribable horrors of the modern world. Plato died with his pride and self-respect intact.

One summer evening in Lahore we were discussing the fate of Islam in the West. Plato first mocked the nostalgia and sentimentality that prevailed on the subject — a sure sign of total ignorance, he remarked. Zahid backed him up, and when another friend said that the decision by Muslims in al-Andalus to eat pork in order to survive was a crime, Zahid defended their right to eat cow dung if necessary in order to survive. A strange, sad smile prefaced Plato’s response.

‘It’s one thing to eat pork in order to survive. I would have done the same. But they wanted us to swallow our history, our culture, our language, our entire past, and all that is not so easily digestible.’