Shalimar the Clown

4

In the city of Strasbourg, a place of charming old quarters and pleasant public gardens, near the charming parc des Contades, around the corner from the old synagogue on what is now the rue du Grand Rabbin René Hirschler, at the heart of a lovely and fashionable neighborhood peopled by delightful and charming folks, there stood the ample and, yes, undeniably charming mansion house, a petit palais of the Belle Époque in which Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls, a man famed for possessing what a newspaper editorialist once described as “dangerous, possibly even lethal quantities” of charm, grew up in a family of highly cultured Ashkenazi Jews. Max Ophuls himself agreed with the leader writer’s jaundiced assessment. “To be a Strasbourgeois,” he was fond of saying, “was to learn the hard way about the deceptive nature of charm.”

When he was appointed by Lyndon Johnson to succeed John Kenneth Galbraith as ambassador to India nearly two years after the Kennedy assassination, Max Ophuls went so far as to say-he was speaking at a Rashtrapati Bhavan banquet in his honor, hosted by the philosopher-president Sarvepalli

Radhakrishnan soon after Ophuls’s presentation of his diplomatic credentials-that it was because he came from Alsace that he hoped he might be able to understand India a little, since the part of the world where he was raised had also been defined and redefined for many centuries by shifting frontiers, upheavals and dislocations, flights and returns, conquests and reconquests, the Roman Empire followed by the Alemanni, the Alemanni by Attila’s Huns, the Huns by the Alemanni again, the Alemanni by the Franks. Even before the year acquired four digits Strasbourg had belonged first to Lotharingia and then to Germania, had been smashed up by nameless Hungarians and reconstructed by Saxons called Otto. Reformation and revolution were in its citizens’ blood, which counter-reformation and reaction spilled in its charming streets. After the Thirty Years’ War weakened the German Empire, the French made their move. The Frenchification of Alsace, which Louis XIV began, led in turn to de-Frenchification in 1871, after the Prussians starved and burned the city through the brutal winter of 1870. So there was Germanification, but less than forty years later there was de-Germanizing too. And then came Hitler, and Gauleiter Robert Wagner, and history stopped being theoretical and musty and became personal and malodorous instead. New place-names became a part of Strasbourg’s story and the story of his family as well: Schirmeck, Struthof. The concentration camp, the extermination camp. “We know all about being part of an ancient civilization,” Ambassador Ophuls said, “and we have suffered our share of slaughter and bloodletting as well. Our great leaders, and our mothers and children, too, have been taken from us.” He bowed his head, momentarily unable to speak, and President Radhakrishnan reached over and took his hand. Everyone was suddenly in a heightened emotional state. “The loss of one man’s dream, one family’s home, one people’s rights, one woman’s life,” said Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls, when he could resume, “is the loss of all our freedoms: of every life, every home, every hope. Each tragedy belongs to itself and at the same time to everyone else. What diminishes any of us diminishes us all.” Few people paid much attention to these rather too generalized sentiments at the time; it was the handclasp that stuck in the mind. Those few seconds of undefended human contact caused Max Ophuls to be seen as a friend of India, to be gathered to the national bosom even more enthusiastically than his admired predecessor had been. From that moment Max’s popularity soared, and as it became evident to everyone with the passage of time that he was in fact a great enthusiast for most things Indian, the relationship deepened toward something not unlike love. It was for this reason that the storm of scandal, when it broke, was so horrifyingly ferocious. The country felt more than mere disappointment in Max Ophuls; it felt jilted. Like a scorned lover, India turned on the charming cad of an ambassador and tried to break him into charming little bits. And after his departure, his successor, Chester Bowles, who tried for many years to tilt American policy away from Pakistan and toward India, was nevertheless given an altogether rougher ride.

Like most people from his part of the country, the young Max Ophuls had been raised to distrust Paris. His parents, Anya Ophuls and Max senior, owned an apartment at 8, avenue du Bois, but they rarely used the place, except when business necessitated the unwelcome journey west, and they invariably returned home as soon as possible with their eyebrows lifted high in fastidious disdain. Max junior himself had spent some years in Paris after graduating from the University of Strasbourg with brilliant degrees in economics and international relations, and had almost been seduced. In Paris he added the law to his accomplishments, established a reputation as a dandy and a ladykiller, affected spats and carried a cane, and demonstrated an astonishing technical skill as a spare-time painter, making Dalís and Magrittes of such subtle brilliance that they fooled the art dealer Julien Levy when he visited Max’s studio apartment after a long drunken night at the Coupole. “Why are you wasting your time with law and money when you should dedicate your life to being a forger?” Levy shrieked when the deception was revealed. He was the lover of Frida Kahlo and exhibitor of the magic realist Tchelitchew, and in those days he was also in a permanent rage because his plan to build a Surrealist pavilion in the shape of a giant eye in the middle of the New York World’s Fair had just been turned down. “These aren’t forgeries,” Max Ophuls said, “because there are no originals.” Levy was silenced and examined the pictures more closely. “There’s only one thing wrong with them,” he said. “I’ll bring the artists over to sign them one of these days, and then they will be complete.” Max Ophuls was flattered, but he knew that art was not the world for him. He was right about this; about his future membership in the world of forgers, however, he was incorrect. History, which was his true métier, the real profession to which he would devote his life, would for a time value his skills as a faker above his talents in other fields.

Paris wasn’t his place, either. Soon after the Levy visit he stunningly declined the offer of a partnership in one of the city’s most illustrious legal practices and announced that he was going home to work with his father. This was a refusal as preposterous as the original offer, his astounded Parisian friends said, startled into agreeing with his envious enemies: he was far too young to have been offered so great an honor in the first place, and in the second place he was evidently too stupid or-much worse-too provincial to accept it. He returned to Strasbourg, where he divided his time between working as a junior professor of economics at the university-the vice-chancellor, the great astronomer André-Louis Danjon, was “mightily impressed” with him, and called him “one of the coming fellows, the Next People”-and helping his ailing, consumptive father with the family printing business. Within a year the catastrophe of Europe brought that age of the world to an end.

Decades had passed since those times, but Paris lingered in the ambassador’s Americanized memory as a series of flickering images. It was present in the way he held a cigarette, or in the slow drift of smoke reflected in a gilded mirror. Paris was his own fist hammering on a café table to emphasize a political or philosophical point. It was a glass of cognac beside his morning coffee and tepid brioche. That innocent-uninnocent city was a prostitute, was a gigolo, was sophisticated infidelity in the guilty-unguilty afternoons. It was too beautiful, flaunting its beauty as if begging to be scarred. It was a certain precise mixture of tenderness and violence, love and pain. Everyone in the world has two fatherlands, his own and Paris, a Parisian filmmaker told him back then. But he didn’t trust it. It seemed… he struggled for the right word… weak. The weakness of Paris was the weakness of France, which would make possible the dark metamorphosis that was beginning, the trumping of subtlety by crudity, the shriveled victory of wretchedness over joy.

It was not only Paris that changed, obviously. His beloved Strasbourg metamorphosed too, from river jewel into cheap Rhinestone. It turned into tasteless black bread and too many rutabagas and the disappearances of friends. Also the sneer of conquest above the collar of a gray uniform, the living death of collaboration in the eyes of the beautiful showgirls, the stinking gutter finales of the dead. It became rapid capitulation and slow resistance. Strasbourg, like Paris, shape-shifted and was no longer itself. It was the first paradise he lost. But in his heart he blamed the capital, blamed it for its arrogant weakness, for presenting itself to the world-to him-as a vision of high civilization which it did not have the force to defend. The fall of Strasbourg was a chapter in its back-and-forth frontier history. The fall of Paris was Paris’s fault.

When Boonyi Noman danced for him in the Dachigam hunting lodge in Kashmir he thought of those feathered dead-eyed showgirls wreathed in Nazi cigar smoke, flaunting their gartered thighs. The clothes were different but he recognized the same hard hunger in her stare, the readiness of the survivor to suspend moral judgment in the presence of imagined opportunity. But I’m not a Nazi, he thought. I’m the American ambassador, the guy in the white hat. I’m for God’s sake one of the Jews who lived. She swung her hips for him and he thought, And I’m also a married man. She swung her hips again and he ceased to think.

He was a Frenchman with a German name. His family’s printing presses operated under the name Art & Aventure, a name they had borrowed, in French translation, from Jean Gensfleisch of Mayence, the fifteenth-century genius whose own Strasbourg workshop had been called Kunst und Aventur when, in 1440, he invented the printing press and became known to the world as Gutenberg. Max Ophuls’s parents were wealthy, cultured, conservative, cosmopolitan; Max was raised speaking High German as easily as French, and believing that the great writers and thinkers of Germany belonged to him as naturally as the poets and philosophers of France. “In civilization there are no borderlines,” Max senior taught him. But when barbarism came to Europe, that erased borderlines as well. The future Ambassador Ophuls was twenty-nine years old when Strasbourg was evacuated. The exodus began on September 1, 1939; one hundred and twenty thousand Strasbourgeois became refugees in the Dordogne and the Indre. The Ophuls family did not leave, although their household staff disappeared overnight without giving notice, silently fleeing the exterminating angel, just as the Kashmiri palace servitors would abandon the royal Dassehra banquet in the Shalimar gardens eight years later. The workers at the printing presses also began to desert their posts.

The university was moving to Clermont-Ferrand in the Zone Sud, outside the area of German occupation, and vice-chancellor Danjon urged his budding young economics genius to accompany them. But Max the younger would not leave unless he could get his parents to a place of safety as well. He tried hard to persuade them to join the evacuation. Wiry, graceful, their white hair cropped short, their hands the hands of pianists, not printers, their bodies leaning intently forward to listen to their son’s absurd proposition, Max senior and his wife, Anya, looked more like identical twins than a married couple. Life had made them into each other’s mirrors. Their personalities, too, had shaded into each other, creating a single, two-headed self, and so complete was their unanimity in all matters, both great and small, that it was no longer necessary for either to ask the other what they wished to eat or drink, or what their opinion might be on any subject of concern. At present they were seated side by side on carved wooden chairs in a six-hundred-year-old restaurant near the Place Kléber-an absolutely charming and historical spot-feasting heartily on choucroute au Riesling and caramelized lamb shoulder in a beer and pine honey sauce, and gazing on their brilliant son, their onliest golden child, with a mixture of profound love and gentle, but genuine, contempt. “Max junior isn’t eating,” Max senior mused with an air of wonderment, and Anya replied, “The poor boy has lost his appetite on account of the political situation.” Their son urged them to be serious and they immediately put on their gravest expressions with every appearance (and none of the substance) of obedience. Max took a deep breath and launched into his prepared speech. The situation was desperate, he said. It was only a matter of time before the German army attacked France and if the border country should go the way of Poland the family’s German name would not protect them. Theirs was a well-known Jewish household in a strongly Jewish neighborhood; the risk of informers was real and had to be faced up to. Max senior and Anya should go away to their good friends the Sauerweins’ place near Cro-Magnon. He himself would go to Clermont-Ferrand and teach. They would have to lock and seal the Strasbourg house and the printing works and simply hope for the best. Was that agreed?

His parents smiled at their son the lawyer and his skillfully marshaled arguments-and these were identical smiles, cocked up to the left a little, smiles affording no glimpses of aging teeth. They put down their utensils in unison and clasped their pianist’s hands in their laps. Max senior gave a little glance at Anya and Anya gave a little glance back, offering each other the right of first reply. “Son,” Max senior finally began, pursing his lips, “one never knows the answers to the questions of life until one is asked.” Max was familiar with his father’s circumlocutory philosophizing and waited for the point to arrive. “You know what he means, Maxi,” his mother took over. “Until you have back pain you don’t know your tolerance for back pain. How you’re going to tolerate not being so young anymore, you won’t know until you grow old. And until danger comes a person doesn’t know for sure how a person’s going to think about danger.” Max senior picked up a breadstick and bit it in half; it broke with a loud crack. “So now this question of peril has been posed,” he said, pointing the remaining half of the stick at his son and narrowing his eyes, “and so now I know my answer.”

Anya Ophuls drew herself up in a rare show of disunity. “It’s my answer also, Maximilian,” she corrected her husband mildly. “I think this slipped your mind a moment.” Max senior frowned. “Sure, sure,” he said. “Her answer as well, I know her answer as well as I know my own, and my mind, excuse me, nothing slips it. My mind, excuse me, is a fist of steel.” Max junior thought it was time to press a little. “And what is that answer?” he asked as delicately as possible, and his father with a loud short laugh forgot his irritation and smacked his palms together as hard as he could. “I discover that I am a stubborn bastard!” he cried, coughing hard. “I discover bloody-mindedness in myself, and mulishness to boot. I will not be chased from my home and my business! I will not go to Sauerwein’s and be made to look at his trembling old man’s paintings and eat quenelles of pike. I will stay in my house and run my factory and face the enemy down. Who do they think they are dealing with here? Some common inky-fingered ragamuffin from the streets? Maybe I’m on my last legs, young fellow, but I stand for something in this town.” His wife tugged at the sleeve of his coat. “Oh, yes,” he added, sinking faintly back into his seat and dabbing a napkin at his brow. “And your mother. She’s a stubborn bastard too.” Then came a series of coughs and expectorations into a silk kerchief that declared the subject closed.

“In that case, I won’t raise this with you again,” said Max junior, admitting defeat. “On one condition. If the day arrives when I have to come to you and say, today it’s time to run, on that day I want you to run without any argument, knowing that I will never say such a thing to you unless it is the simple truth.” His mother beamed with unqualified pride. “See how he drives a hard bargain, Maximilian, isn’t that so,” she cried. “He leaves us no honorable choice except to agree.”

Professor Max Ophuls informed vice-chancellor Danjon that family responsibilities obliged him to remain in Strasbourg. “What a waste,” Danjon replied. “If you should choose to stay alive before they kill you, come and see us. Although it is possible that we will not be spared, either. I fear that this will be an L=0 eclipse.” In the 1920s André Danjon had devised a scale of luminosity, the so-called Danjon scale, to describe the relative darkness of the moon during a lunar eclipse. L=0 meant total blackness, a complete absence of the reflected earthshine that could give the eclipsed moon a residual color ranging from a deep grey to a bright copper-red or even orange. “If I’m right,” Danjon told Max, “you and I are simply choosing to die in different towns during the general blackout.”

From that day forward each of the three Ophulses kept a small bag packed in a closet, but otherwise went about their work. In the absence of domestic help, most of the Belle Époque mansion was dust-sheeted and closed up. They ate meals together in the kitchen, moved extra desks into Max senior’s library to construct a three-person office, kept their own bedrooms clean and dusted, and maintained one small living room in which to receive their dwindling list of guests. As for Art & Aventure, two of the famous firm’s three Strasbourg presses were closed down at once. The third, on the quai Mullenheim, a smaller art-book facility-both letterpress and photogravure-where for many generations volumes dedicated to the finest artists in Europe had been produced to the highest standards in the world, was the scene of the Ophulses’ last stand. At first all three of them went in every day and manned the machines. However, contracts were being canceled constantly, so that soon enough the parents were obliged angrily to “retire,” and Max junior went to the print shop alone. Every call from a grand publisher from the capital deepened Max’s scorn for the weakness of Paris. He remembered his mother shouting into the telephone, “What do you mean, this is no time for art? If not now, when?”-and then staring fire-eyed at the silent receiver in her hand as if it were a traitor. “He hangs up,” she said to the room at large. “After twenty years’ business, without so much as good-bye.” The death of courtesy appeared to distress her more than the collapse of the family business. Her coughing husband moved at once to comfort her. “Take a look on the shelves,” he said. “You see that army of volumes? That army will outlast whatever iron men come clanking across our lives.”

When Max junior, hiding behind a burned-out truck just over a year later, saw the treasures of Art & Aventure’s backlist being tossed onto a bonfire outside the burning synagogue, his father’s words came back to him. If he had been able to discuss the burning books with Max senior the old man would probably have shrugged and quoted Bulgakov. Manuscripts don’t burn. Well, maybe they do and maybe they don’t, thought orphaned Max in the incandescent night; but people, of course, will blaze away nicely, given a decent chance.

Strasbourg had become a ghost town, its streets ragged with absences. It was still charming, naturally, with its medieval half-timberings, its covered bridges, its pleasing aspects and riverside parks. As he prowled the largely deserted alleys of the Petite France district, the future Ambassador Ophuls told himself, “It’s as if everyone went away for August, and any day now it will be time for la rentrée and the place will be bustling again.” But in order to believe that one had to ignore the broken windows, the evidence of looting, the feral dogs in the streets, many of them abandoned pets driven insane by abandonment. One had to ignore the ruination of one’s own life. There were traditional, time-honored ways of doing this, and during the course of that year in which his family lost everything Max Ophuls did not ignore tradition. He frequented the few brothels and drinking dives that were still in business; they welcomed him in, glad of the trade, and offered him their best goods at bargain prices. The melancholy strain that had been lying dormant in his personality revealed itself in those months, inducing periods of Churchillian depression during which he considered ending his life more than once, and was only prevented from doing so by the knowledge that he would profoundly disgust his parents. As the year 1940 moved forward, a year in which all the news was bad, he walked the city streets and squares, alleys and embankments at high speed, hour after hour, with his head down, his hands jammed deep into the pockets of a double-breasted serge greatcoat, and a dark blue beret pulled low over his frowning brow. If he moved fast enough, like an American comic-book superhero, like the Flash, like a Jewish Superman, maybe he could create the illusion that the people of Strasbourg were still there. If he moved fast enough maybe he could save the world. If he moved fast enough maybe he could break through into another universe in which everything wasn’t so full of shit. If he moved fast enough maybe he could outpace his own anger and fear. If he moved fast enough maybe he could stop feeling like a helpless fool.

These thoughts were interrupted one May afternoon by a violent collision. As usual, he hadn’t been looking where he was going, and on this occasion there was someone in the way, a surprisingly small woman, so small that at first he thought he had knocked over a child. A parcel wrapped in string and brown paper dropped from the small woman’s hands as she fell, and the brown paper tore. Her companion, a big shambling fellow as oversized as she was tiny, helped her to her feet and hurriedly retrieved the torn parcel, carefully taking off his own raincoat and wrapping the parcel in it. He also picked up and dusted off his companion’s fallen hat, with its single upright feather, placing it carefully, even lovingly, back on her head of marcelled black hair. The fallen woman had not cried out, nor did the big man seek to remonstrate with Ophuls for his clumsiness. They simply gathered themselves together and moved on. It was as if they were phantoms, ill-assorted phantoms surprised that they still possessed solidity, mass, volume, that people were still able to collide with them and knock them down, rather than passing through their bodies with nothing more than a small icy shudder of subconscious recognition.

When they had taken a dozen steps away, however, they stopped and looked back over their shoulders without turning their bodies. They saw Max staring after them and were covered in a kind of spectral embarrassment. Ghosts were probably always surprised to be seen, Max supposed. The woman was nodding furiously and the man, slowly, as if in a dream, turned and walked back toward Max. He’s going to hit me after all, Max thought, and wondered whether he should take to his heels. Then the man reached him and spoke, carefully, in a low voice: “You are the printer?” With those four words he gave Max Ophuls back a sense of purpose in life.

You are the printer. Even before the fall of the Maginot Line, the first stirrings of what would become the Resistance were making themselves felt. The couple with the brown paper parcel, whom he would only know by the work-names of “Bill” and “Blandine,” were his first links to that world. Their group would later start calling itself the Seventh Column of Alsace, but for the moment it was just Bill and Blandine and a few like-minded associates, doing what they could to prepare for the coming unpleasantness. Yes, he was the printer, Max affirmed. Yes, he was a Jew. Yes, he would help. “Time is short,” Bill said. “Escape routes are being built. Identity documents must be printed. However many possible. The need is very great. Your parents included. You included also.” Max looked at the parcel. “These are adequate,” Bill said, grimacing. “But not guaranteed to pass. Work of a higher standard is required.” Bill’s manner was always courteous and deferential. Blandine was the sharp-tongued one of the pair. “Do you actually know how to do what we need,” she asked Max that first time, looking unblinking into his eyes, “or are you just a pampered milord who underpays his workers and spends the money on whores?”

Her enormous lover looked discomfited and shifted his feet. “But no, my dearest, be good, the gentleman is going to be of assistance. Please excuse her, sir,” he said to Max. “The communism burns hot in her, the class war and autonomy and such.” Ever since Gouraud’s Fourth Army brought Strasbourg back under French control in November 1918, the local communists had favored the autonomy of Alsace from both France and Germany, whereas socialists had favored a rapid assimilation with France. How obsolete both positions looked now, how pathetic the passions they had so recently aroused. Max glared back at Blandine. “Yes,” he told her, not knowing if he was telling the truth, suddenly determined to prove himself unworthy of her scorn. “I can print any damn thing you want me to.” She spat into a gutter. “Good,” she said. “Then there’s work to be done.”

If he moved fast enough maybe he could break through into another universe. He had been granted his wish. Julien Levy had been right. Max turned out to have a real gift for forgery, the painstaking miniaturist zeal of a monk illuminating a Bible, that enabled him to create plausible counterfeits of whatever was required and make good his boast. When the materials provided by Bill and Blandine were inadequate-when the paper had the wrong sort of coarseness or the ink was fractionally the wrong color-he scavenged and scrounged tirelessly until he came up with the goods. On one occasion he actually broke into a deserted art-supplies store and took what he needed, promising himself that if liberation ever came he would return and repay the owner, a promise that, as he recorded in his book of wartime memoirs, he faithfully kept. As he forged and printed the documents-one by one, at snail’s pace, always by night, alone in the pressroom, with the shutters locked, and by the light of no more than a single small lantern-he felt he was also forging a new self, one that resisted, that pushed back against fate, rejecting inevitability, choosing to remake the world.

Often, as he labored, he had the sense of being the medium, not the creator: the sense of a higher power working through him. He had never been a religious man, and tried to rationalize this feeling away; yet it stubbornly persisted. A purpose was working itself out through him. He could not give it a name, but its boundaries were far greater than his own. When he had contact with Bill or Blandine and handed over the identity cards and doctored passports he spoke in effusive, optimistic words about what they were doing. Bill was monosyllabic at best in responding to such torrents, until Max learned the lesson of his silences and did his best to restrain himself. Blandine was, as ever, cuttingly to the point. “Oh, shut up,” she said. “To listen to you, one would think we were on the verge of overthrowing the Third Reich, instead of just hoping to prick the beast’s behind here and there and maybe save a few wretched souls as well.”

It was four o’clock in the morning of the fifteenth of June, 1940. Paris had fallen. The French military command had believed that tanks could not pass through the heavily wooded hill country of the Ardennes and that the German advance could therefore be resisted at the immense Maginot Line defense system in Lorraine. This was a mistake. Along the Line there was a well-dug-in force, also an extensive underground system of tunnels, railways, hospitals, kitchens and communications centers. While they waited for the German assault the French soldiers whiled away their subterranean days by painting trompe-l’oeil murals on the tunnel walls-tropical landscapes, rooms with chintz wallpaper and open windows looking out onto bucolic spring scenery, heroic crests bearing such mottoes as They shall not pass. Unfortunately, they did not need to pass. Panzer divisions commanded by Rommel and others invaded through the supposedly impassable Ardennes and reached the villages of Dinant and Sedan on the Meuse on May 12. On June 13 the government of France abandoned the capital to the aggressor. Outflanked and irrelevant, the French forces at the Maginot Line surrendered a few weeks later. Four years after that the tide of history would have turned and the Normandy landings would begin, but those four years would be a century long.

“I have to go,” Blandine said, gathering up the papers Max had for her, without a word of thanks or of appreciation for the quality of the work. This was her way. But at the back door, as he let her out, she saw the first light of dawn slinking into the sky and trembled and leaned back against him. “The dawn before the darkness,” she said, and turned, and kissed him. They stumbled back through the door into the room of the printing presses and had sex against one of the big dark green machines, without getting undressed. He had to lift her up to enter her and for a moment her feet in their high heels dangled awkwardly. Then she swiftly wrapped her legs around his waist and squeezed. He saw that her height was a matter of sensitivity. To compensate for it she remained almost savagely composed at all times. Even during their congress the hat with the feather remained firmly planted on her head. Four days later the Nazi flag flew over the Cathedral and the darkness began.

The city’s charm was no defense. It ran deep, there were subterranean tunnels of charm underground, subterranean charm hospitals and charm canteens in case of need, and so there were those who had allowed themselves to believe that nothing much would change, the Germans had been here before, after all, and this time as on previous occasions the city would bewitch them and shape them to its ways. Max senior and Anya Ophuls succumbed slowly to this fantasy of a Maginot Line of charm, and their son despaired of them. Gauleiter Wagner, he pointed out, was not a charming man. His parents put on serious expressions and nodded gravely. All of a sudden, when he hadn’t been looking, they had become very old and frail, deteriorating sharply with the same simultaneity with which they had lived the greater part of their married lives. They had always belittled their difficulties, but in the past their lightness had had an undercurrent, a knowing, ironic intelligence. That undercurrent had disappeared. What remained was a sort of foolishness, a forgetting, happy sort of unwisdom. They laughed a great deal and whiled away the days playing card and board games in the shrouded house, behaving as if the times were not out of joint, as if it were an excellent idea that the house was largely shuttered up and the population had fled and the street names were being Germanized and the speaking of the French language and the Alsatian dialect had been forbidden. “Well, dear, we do all speak Hochdeutsch, don’t we, so there’s no difficulty, is there,” Anya said when Max junior brought her the language news. And when Wagner’s minions banned the wearing of the beret, calling it an insult to the Reich, old Max told his son, “I never thought it suited you anyway; wear a trilby instead, there’s a sensible fellow,” and returned to his game of solitaire.

Some days, Max thought his parents believed they could behave the Nazis out of existence, could make them disappear by simply treating them as if they weren’t there. At other times it was clear that they were losing their hold on things, slipping out of the world and into a region of dreams, sliding charmingly and uncomplainingly toward senility and death.

The university district was as deserted as the rest of the city but a couple of bars somehow managed to stay open. One of these was Le Beau Noiseur, and as the desire for resistance grew among the city’s remaining residents this became one of the places where interested parties met. Bill, Blandine, Max and a few others were regulars. Afterwards the innocence and openness of those early days would strike everyone as the height of insanity. The group openly referred to itself as les noiseurs, “the squabblers.” Yet in spite of such foolhardiness its members managed surprising feats. After the French surrender Blandine, for example, became an ambulance driver and visited several internment camps near Metz, where French soldiers were being interrogated before being released and sent home. Nobody paid this tiny woman in uniform much attention, with the result that as she distributed food and medicines she was able to learn a good deal about German troop and supply movements. The problem was that she didn’t know who to give the information to; which did nothing to sweeten her disposition. Her irritability was greater than ever, her tongue sharper, and most of her worst barbs were aimed at Max. The clumsy, hurried episode at the print shop was never repeated, nor did she allude to it. It was evident now that she and Bill were married, though neither of them wore a ring. Max filed away the memory of the sexual encounter, and eventually managed to forget it altogether. Then, twenty years later, while he was researching the period for a book, he made the chance discovery that in the vicious death-throes of the Nazi phase, when the Allies were sweeping across France after the successful D-Day landings, Blandine-real name Suzette Trautmann-had been captured in a refitted garage basement trying to send messages to the liberating army on a ham radio set, and had been executed on the spot. In the breast pocket of her shirt was a passport-sized photograph of an unknown man. The photograph had not survived.

Suppose it was me in that photo, Max suddenly thought. Suppose all those tongue-lashings were inverted signs of love, coded pleas for me to do what she could not do herself: to tear her away from her marriage and make off with her into some impossible wartime Eden. He tried to set aside these speculations, which were only a form of vanity, he scolded himself. But the possibility of misunderstood love went on eating away at him. Blandine, Blandine, he thought. Men are fools. No wonder we made you so mad. That afternoon in the archives when he discovered Suzette Trautmann’s fate he promised himself that if a woman ever sent him such signals again, if a woman were ever trying to say please, let’s get out of here, please please let’s run away and be together forever and to hell with the damnation of our souls, please, he would not fail to decipher the secret code.

He never found out what happened to Bill.

By the fall of 1940, the camps outside the city were being readied for guests, and, right on cue, the citizens of Strasbourg started returning to the city, under German instructions. Tens of thousands of young men, the so-called malgré-nous, were quickly pressed into front-line service in the German army. Max Ophuls understood that, paradoxically, now that everyone was home, however temporarily, it was time for him and his family to leave. The new homes being prepared near Schirmeck at Natzweiler-Struthof, intended for homosexuals, communists and Jews, sounded like a step down in the world. (The gas chamber being constructed down the road from the Struthof facility was still a secret.) It had not been possible to go to the printing works on the quai Mullenheim for some time now, and the family’s money shortage had forced Max to pawn and sell quantities of the Ophuls jewelry and silver. These would be gone soon, and with them the best chance of escape, for which substantial finances would almost certainly be required. Silver was the easiest thing to fence; melted down and anonymous, it told no tales about its provenance. Jewelry carried with it the higher risk of being classified as a looter, a charge carrying the death penalty; so in those confused days before the underworld reestablished its systems, even spectacular pieces, offered in exchange for a pittance, might be refused by the city’s ever-prudent pawnbrokers, those perpetual weathercocks of the winds of change. When the jewels could be fenced-jewels on whose true value the family could have lived for decades-the prices were so low that they barely paid for a week’s worth of essential provisions. Possessions were the past, and the future was arriving rapidly, and nobody had time-or cash-for yesterdays.

Thus far the Art & Aventure works had not been raided or seized by the city’s new authorities, but it was only a matter of time. Max did his best to conceal his forging materials from view, finding a number of ingenious hiding places both at the quai Mullenheim and at home, but a thorough search might easily uncover some damning cache, and after that… well, he preferred not to imagine what might happen after that. This increasingly uneasy and precarious state of affairs lasted until the spring of 1941. Then, one evening at Le Beau Noiseur, Bill told Max in whispers that an escape route had been readied for use, and that he and his parents had been selected to make the first run. Members of the faculty and student body of Strasbourg University-les non-jamais-had refused to return to the “Motherland,” the Gross Reich, and had remained in internal exile in Clermont-Ferrand, in spite of the risk of being declared deserters by the Germans. The vice-chancellor, a certain Monsieur Dungeon, had somehow persuaded Vichy officialdom to maintain the Strasbourg University at this “external campus,” and for the moment the Germans were prepared to let Pétain’s people have their way. A history professor named Zeller, assisted by student and teacher volunteers, and with some help from the Clermont-Ferrand military governor, had spent the summer building a large “country cottage” at Gergovie, near the well-known Gallo-Roman excavations, about which Bill knew nothing except that they were well known. “You leave tonight,” Bill said, passing him a piece of paper. “If your family can reach Gergovie, you will be contacted there and given new orders.” Max Ophuls kept a poker face throughout this briefing, telling Bill nothing he did not need to know, keeping his university connections to himself. Gaston Zeller, he thought. It will be good to see his ugly mug again.

He left the café without looking back. At home his parents had taken the dust sheets off the grand piano in the main drawing room and Anya was playing from memory, smiling beatifically, even though the instrument was harshly out of tune. Max senior stood behind her, his hands resting lightly on her shoulders, his eyes closed, his expression distant and serene. Their son interrupted their reverie. “The day has come,” he said. “It’s time for us to run.” The elderly couple looked as if the universe had quivered slightly; then his mother put on her sweetest smile. “Oh, but it’s out of the question, dear,” she said. “You know that our dear friend Dumas’s son Charles receives his bachot tomorrow. We’ll talk about going once that’s done with.”

This was a dreadful statement. Charles Dumas was thirty, the same age as the younger Max, and not in Strasbourg. The day of their baccalauréat graduations was long past. “But you promised,” Max said, in great distress. “You said that if I ever came to you with this warning, you would do as I asked.” His father inclined his head. “It’s true we made a promise,” he said. “And you rightly stress the importance of our having given our word. Thus two great principles are in conflict here: honesty and friendship. We prefer to be good friends to our friends, and stay here for their family’s important day, even if that makes us dishonest in your eyes.” “For God’s sake,” shouted Max the younger, “there’s no such ceremony-you know perfectly well that all the schools and colleges have been closed since the evacuation, and even if they weren’t, this isn’t the right time of year…” Anya Ophuls prepared to resume playing the piano. “Shh, shh, my darling, for goodness’ sake,” she admonished him. “It’s just one day. The day after tomorrow we’ll pick up those bags we packed and scurry off to wherever you see fit.”

There was nothing for it but to acquiesce. On the piece of paper Bill had given Max at the bar was the location of the rendezvous point, a stable in a remote corner of the Bugatti estate in the village of Molsheim, and the word Finkenberger, which Max had always thought of as the name of a local wine, not a particular man. He took this to be the pseudonym of the passeur, the man who would be responsible for facilitating the run and getting the Ophuls family across enemy lines. That night, a moonless night which had no doubt been selected on account of its unusual darkness, Max bicycled twenty kilometers down the so-called wine road to Molsheim to inform M. Finkenberger that there would be a twenty-four-hour delay in the plan. The choice of meeting place was risky because the Bugatti factory was now in German hands; but then again, there were no risk-free places that fall. Molsheim, a beauty spot with old-world cobbled streets and leaning Geppetto houses, was so utterly charming that you expected to see blue fairies at its windows and the new Disney movie’s already famous talking cricket on its hearths. Tonight, however, the tragedy of the Bugatti family lay over the village like a shroud, darkening the unmooned darkness until it felt like a blindfold. The closer Max came to the great estate the darker it grew, until he had to dismount from his bicycle and grope his way forward like a blind man.

Within the space of a single year the legendary car designer Ettore Bugatti, “Le Patron,” had suffered the loss first of his son Jean-in an automobile accident-and then his father Carlo, who died just before the German invasion, as if reluctant to be a part of that future. Ettore had been living in Paris, and although he remained the company’s engineering genius, Jean had for several years been in charge of the coachwork design, the distinctive curved fenders, the futuristic body shapes. After his son’s death Ettore returned to the quasi-baronial Molsheim factory-estate, where all the buildings-even the pattern shop, the body shops, the foundry, the drafting room-boasted great, polished doors of oak and bronze. The Bugattis had lived in feudal splendor. There was a sculpture museum, a carriage museum, luxurious facilities for their Thoroughbred horses, a riding school. They kept prize terriers, prime cattle, racing pigeons. They had their own distillery, and housed clients in a spectacular residence, the Hotel of the Pure Blood. The grandeur of the private world he had built served only to twist the knife in Ettore’s heart, magnifying the sudden emptiness of his life. Within a few months of his return he sold out to the Germans-was forced to do so-and left Molsheim with the air of a man emerging from a tomb. He moved his manufacturing operations to Bordeaux, but no Bugatti cars were ever built again; Ettore now made crankshafts for Hispano-Suiza aircraft engines. Less well known was his work with the Resistance, into which many of his former employees followed their benevolent but dictatorial boss. One such employee, the leathery old horse trainer now known to Max Ophuls as the passeur Finkenberger, was waiting at the end of a tiny wooded dead-end lane behind the stable, sitting on a fence post, smoking. Max stumbled down the lane, colliding with other fence posts and sadistic trees, trying not to cry out. The lighted tip of Finkenberger’s cigarette was his beacon, and he swam toward it through the eyeless darkness like Leander in the Hellespont. When the horse man first spoke it was as if the night’s curtain had been torn. Around the words, Max Ophuls began to be able to see or at least imagine a face, which to his great surprise turned out to be familiar. “Fuck me,” were the waiting man’s first words. “I know you, don’t I? Fuck.”

Max Ophuls had been on close terms with Jean Bugatti, had learned to fly planes with him, performing daredevilry in the innocent prewar sky. They had also ridden the length and breadth of this formerly blessed countryside on golden stallions across brilliant summer afternoons. Tonight, exhausted, filled with trepidation, Max was rushed back to that happier time by the unmistakable, obscene tongue of the passeur. “Ophuls, Max,” he said. “And sure, I know you, Finkenberger. Who could forget.” The other offered a cigarette, which Max declined. “Everything’s gone to fuck,” the horse trainer confided. “Nazis want to use the shop to build guns, obviously. Cunts. But they like the dogs and horses and of course they want to drive the fucking cars. I see a 57-5 with that fucking swastika flying on the hood, I want to fucking throw up. Fucking gutter rats playing at being aristos. Fucking pond scum. And that hotel, I always thought the name was a mistake. They fucking love that place. Hotel of the Pure Blood. It’s a fucking whorehouse now. Why are you alone, anyway? I was told three persons.”

Max explained the problem and there was an abrupt change of mood. The darkness itself seemed to tighten, to gather itself into a pair of clenched fists. Finkenberger threw away his cigarette and, to judge by his breathing, seemed to be making an effort to suppress his rage. Finally he spoke. “Le Patron, he left Molsheim and fucked off to Paris because he thought the workers weren’t grateful. Old school, he is. Take your fucking cap off when he comes by, touch the fucking forelock, bend the fucking knee, you catch my drift. And yeah, maybe there were those who weren’t grateful for the chance to behave like fucking serfs, even if they did get houses and benefits and such. There were those who weren’t too fucking grateful at all. Monsieur Jean was different. Common fucking touch. Had it in spades. Think yourself lucky you were his pal. If you weren’t his pal and came to me saying what you’re saying to me now I’d have told you to go fuck yourself. If you were one of Le Patron’s highfalutin pricks I’d have told you what you could fucking do with your twenty-four-hour delay. Do you know how fucking hard it is to set this stuff up, the danger of using the radio, the number of people waiting on you down the road that have to be stood down and stood up again tomorrow, do you know the fucking danger you’re putting them in? Fucking dilettante fuckers like you can’t think about anyone else. But you’re the lucky bastard, I say again, on account of Monsieur Jean, on account of his fucking beautiful fucking memory. Be here on time tomorrow the three of you or you can go fuck yourselves to death in the fucking synagogue on the fucking Sabbath day.”

In Strasbourg there were fires burning, and helmeted goon squads in the street. Max Ophuls went carefully, on foot, pushing his bike, hiding in shadows. When he saw the flames licking at Art & Aventure the fear began pounding in him, kneading him like dough. Long before he reached home he knew what he would find, the broken door, the wanton damage, the shit on the Biedermeiers, the daubed slogans, the urine in the hall. If the house had not been torched it could only be because some Nazi high-up wanted it for himself. All the lights were on and nobody was home. He went through the rooms one by one, darkening them, returning them to the night, letting them mourn. In the library with the three desks the destruction was very great, the books scattered and torn, a mound of them burned in the middle of the rug, a great charred heap of wisdom that somebody had pissed on to put it out. Desk drawers hung open. Gashed paintings hung askew in broken frames. He had brought his parents’ false papers home with him and had made the mistake of leaving them at home when he went on the errand that had temporarily saved him. The discovery of those documents increased his parents’ peril and doomed him as well. Nobody was home but by the end of this night of looting the house would have passed into enemy hands, like the Hotel of the Pure Blood. Nazi whores would loll where once his mother lay. He should leave. He should definitely leave at once. There was nobody home but that would change. He found a bottle of cognac that had somehow been spared. It lay unbroken in a corner next to a chaise between blowing curtains. He pulled out the cork and drank. Time passed. No, it did not pass. Time stood still. Beauty passed, love passed, bloody-mindedness and mulishness passed. Time stood still with its hands up. Stubborn bastards faded away.

After the war he found out how their story had ended. He learned the numbers burned into their forearms, memorized them and never forgot. The record showed that they had been used for medical experimentation. They were old and losing their reason and good for nothing and so a use had been found for them. After lifetimes lived mainly in their now-enfeebled minds they ended up as mere bodies, bodies that reacted this way to pain, this way to greater pain, this way to the greatest pain imaginable, bodies whose response to being injected with diseases was of interest, of high scientific interest. So they were interested in learning? Very well then. They had helped the advancement of knowledge in a valuably practical way. They never made it to the gas chamber. Scholarship killed them first.

Drunk, close to physical collapse, Max Ophuls got back on his bicycle and made the twenty-kilometer wine road dash for the third time that night. When he got back to Molsheim he realized he had no idea how to find the passeur, no idea which of the many workers’ cottages on the Bugatti estate might be his, didn’t even remember his real name. The night was no longer absolute; a hint of future color softened the black. More by luck than memory he found his way back to the small stable at the estate’s edge, an interim sort of place, a way station for tired riders, and wheeled his bicycle inside and passed out on the muddy floor in one of the stalls. This was where Finkenberger found him several hours later, in broad daylight, and shook him roughly, shouting curses into the sleeper’s ear. Max came awake fast and was frightened to find a horse nuzzling at him as if to determine whether he might be edible. Next to the horse’s head was Finkenberger’s head. Finkenberger by daylight was a jockey-sized gnome with a caustic face filled with bad and probably aching teeth. “You’re one lucky fuck,” he hissed at Max. “Gauleiter Wagner, the big cunt himself, was planning to ride here today, but it seems everybody wants twenty-four-hour delays right now.” Then he read the look on Max’s face and his manner changed. “Shit,” he said. “Shit, I’m sorry. Oh, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. I shit on myself for my insensitivity, I shit on their fascist grandmothers’ graves, I wish them shit for dinner in hell for all eternity.” He sat down in the mud and put his arm around Max, who was unable to cry. Then in a flash the passeur was all business, all questions and options. The escape route to the Zone Sud had been set up again, he had done that before going to sleep, but if the big round-ups had begun the risk factor had risen, was maybe unacceptable. Yes, of course he was confident of the route, but only as confident as it was possible to be, because this would be the first time and the first time is never sure. And if the bastards were in the middle of a big operation then there could be no guarantees but of course everyone would do his best. “That sounds good,” Max said bitterly. “Sure, let’s do that.” It was at that moment that Finkenberger the passeur had the idea that would make Max Ophuls one of the great romantic heroes of the Resistance: the Flying Jew.

At the beginning of the war Ettore Bugatti, along with the well-known aeronautical engineer Louis D. de Monge, designed a plane-the so-called Model 100-to break the world speed record, which a German Messerschmitt Me209 had raised to 469.22 miles per hour on April 26, 1939. As the threat of war grew Bugatti was given a contract to build a military version of the Racer, with two guns, oxygen cylinders and self-sealing fuel tanks. The plane was built in secret on the second floor of a Parisian furniture factory, but had never had the chance to fly. As the German armies marched on Paris, Ettore Bugatti had the plane lowered to the street, loaded it onto a truck and sent it out of the city and into hiding. “The Racer,” Finkenberger whispered to Max Ophuls, grinning his snaggletoothed grin. “I know where she is. If you can fly her, take her.”

She was hidden right under the enemy’s nose, in a hay barn on the estate. She could fly at over five hundred miles an hour, or that, at any rate, was what her designers believed. She was powered by two Bugatti T50B auto-racing engines, had forward-swept wings and a revolutionary system of variable wing geometry, a system of self-adjusting split trailing edge flaps that responded to airspeed and manifold pressure and then automatically set themselves into any of six different positions: takeoff, cruise, high-speed dash, descent, landing, rollout. She was fast, fast, fast, and painted Bugatti blue. Finkenberger brought Max to the barn after darkness made it safe to move again, and the two men worked silently for an hour and a half removing the camouflage of hay and netting and revealing the Bugatti Racer in all her glory. She was still standing on the truck that had brought her out of Paris, like a greyhound in the slips. Finkenberger said he knew a stretch of straight road nearby that would serve as a runway. Max Ophuls marveled at the Racer’s streamlined bullet beauty. “She’ll reach Clermont-Ferrand all right, but don’t go crazy, okay? No need to go for the fucking speed record,” Finkenberger said. “Now look and learn.” So he was more than a horse trainer, Max realized. Finkenberger was explaining the aircraft’s unorthodox engine/power arrangement, its canted engines, its counter-rotating propellers. The cooling system, the tail-fin control system: these, too, were innovations. “Nothing like her ever built,” Finkenberger said. “One of a fucking kind.”

“Can you authorize this?” Max Ophuls asked, his voice heavy with wonder, his thoughts already rushing skywards. “Her maiden flight will be an act of resistance,” Finkenberger replied, the blue language disappearing as he revealed a previously hidden streak of emotional patriotism. “Le Patron would not wish it otherwise. Just take her, okay? Take her before they find her. She needs to escape as well.”

The night flight of the Bugatti Racer from Molsheim to Clermont-Ferrand would become one of the grand myths of the Resistance, and in the whispered retelling it swiftly acquired the supernatural force of a fable: the impossible super-speed of the aircraft bulleting the black sky; the low-altitude streak toward freedom that only the most skillful and fearless pilot could have pulled off; the five-hundred-miles-per-hour barrier broken through for the first time in history as the world record was unofficially but unquestionably shattered, and, more important, reclaimed for France from the Germans, thus becoming a metaphor for the Liberation; the daring takeoff from a country road and the even more dangerous dark-of-the-moon landing on the grassy plain down which Julius Caesar’s legions had marched toward the oppidum of Gergovia, where Vercingetorix, the chief of the Arverni, defeated them.

Some of this was certainly true, but in later years Maximilian Ophuls himself seemed prepared to allow the myths to embellish the truth. Had he really broken the record in spite of Finkenberger’s warnings about fuel? Had he really flown at or near rooftop level all the way, or had he escaped radar detection by luck, and on account of the strong element of the unexpected in his dash? In his own memoir of the war years, Max Ophuls clarified nothing, speaking instead with a hero’s modesty of his great good fortune and of the many helpers without whom, and so on. “I thought of Saint-Exupéry,” he wrote. “In spite of the anxious situation I understood what he meant when he spoke in Vol de nuit of flying as a form of meditation. That profound meditation in which one tastes an inexplicable hope. Yes, yes. It was like that.”

Here, again, an ungenerous reader might perceive a calculated merging of Max’s own story with that of another beloved figure. In 1940 the writer and pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry played a heroic part in the battle of France, then left with his squadron for North Africa, and later reached New York. He was already famous as the author of Night Flight, but when Max Ophuls in his memoir went on to reference a later Saint-Exupéry book he was guilty of anachronism. At the time of his own flight to Gergovia, Pilote de guerre, published in English as Flight to Arras, was still being written, and even after its publication a year later and its considerable American success it was banned by the Vichy government and the Gallimard edition of 1942 was suppressed. It was therefore impossible for Max Ophuls in the Bugatti Racer to have had any knowledge of its contents. In spite of these awkward details, Max Ophuls unashamedly set down his airborne reflections on a text of which he could not then have been aware. “War, for us, signified disaster. But was it the case that France, to spare itself a defeat, had refused to fight? I do not believe it.” Max reliving his own vol de nuit added approvingly, “As I whistled over the heads of my sleeping countrymen, I did not believe it either. France would soon awake.” The error wasn’t important. He got away with it. Even those critics who spotted the blunder said it was within the bounds of poetic license. A hero was a hero and deserved to be cut a little slack. Max’s book was highly praised and became a commercial success, notably in America. After all, by the end of the war Saint-Exupéry was dead, lost in action over Corsica, whereas Max Ophuls was a living flying ace and giant of the Resistance, a man of movie-star good looks and polymathic accomplishment, and in addition he had moved to the United States, choosing the burnished attractions of the New World over the damaged gentility of the Old.

Once he had landed, the aircraft was quickly concealed in the nearby forest by a small team of volunteers who were nicknamed the Gergovians and led by the redoubtable Jean-Paul Cauchi, the organizer of Combat Universitaire, also known as Combat Étudiant, the Resistance group based at the Strasbourg university-in-exile and answerable to Henri Ingrand, the Chief for Combat Region Six. Max was taken to the forest cottage where his colleagues vice-chancellor Danjon and the historian Gaston Zeller were waiting with a bottle of wine. As his personally forged papers were in the name of “Sebastian Brant” his arrival as part of the Strasbourgeois faculty would need some explanation. He would be described as a scholar from the south, and Danjon, who exercised an almost hypnotic power over the Nazi fellow travelers of Vichy, would square the paperwork. “But you took a stupid risk by giving yourself a well-known name,” Danjon chided him. “One might almost say you yourself traveled here in an airborne ship of fools.” The real Brant was the fifteenth-century Strasbourg author of Stultifera Navis, or Das Narrenschiff (1494), a satire of human follies illustrated in part by the young Albrecht Dürer. Ophuls spread his hands apologetically: yes, it was true, he had made an idiotic choice.

“It will pass muster,” Zeller reassured him. “Nobody you need to worry about round here does any reading at all.”

Not long after his arrival in Gergovie, Max acquired a second false identity. Hungry for revenge, he joined the Action Section of Combat Étudiant under the work-name “Niccolò” and learned about blowing things up. The first and only bomb he threw was built by an assistant named Guibert in the Institute of Chemistry, and its target was the home of Jacques Doriot, a Vichy stooge who ran the pro-Nazi Doriot Association. The explosion-the gigantic excitement of the moment of power, followed almost immediately by a violent involuntary physical reaction, a parallel explosion of vomit-taught him two lessons he never forgot: that terrorism was thrilling, and that, no matter how profoundly justified its cause, he personally could not get over the moral hurdles required to perform such acts on a regular basis. He was moved to the Propaganda Section and in the two years that followed went back to what he knew: the creation of false identities. “The reinvention of the self, that classic American theme,” he would write in his memoir, “began for me in the nightmare of old Europe’s conquest by evil. That the self can so readily be remade is a dangerous, narcotic discovery. Once you’ve started using that drug, it isn’t easy to stop.”

Forgery had become the section’s most important task. As the Resistance became more unified and organized, and the numbers of men and women involved increased, false papers were the essentials without which nothing serious was possible. Combat Étudiant gradually built closer alliances with the intelligence networks of the Auvergne, George Charaudeau’s Alibi network, Colonel Rivet’s Kléber organization, and Christian Pineau’s Phalanx; also with other action commandos, the Ardents whose symbol was the flame of Joan of Arc, the Mithridate and the ORA. This work took Cauchi away from Clermont-Ferrand for long periods and a surly, haughty fellow named George Mathieu deputized for him, actually becoming the acting head of Mithridate. Mathieu was a large man, all bones and teeth. His blue eyes were somewhat bulging and his blond hair was slicked down with macassar oil. He insisted on wearing a beret as a gesture of defiance, and was respected on account of his icy, military manner. His girlfriend Christiane worked in the Vichy offices, as the secretary of a certain Captain Burcez. This seemed like a valuable “inside” connection. At any rate, for a plurality of reasons, nobody questioned Mathieu’s right to lead.

At that time many packages needed to be carried back and forth as the commando attacks grew in frequency and force, and as the German hunt for the Resistance intensified. Max Ophuls decided to stop asking himself what those packages might contain. The couriers needed documents to ensure their safe passage and it was his business to provide them. Then, after the Jews of Paris were rounded up, perhaps one thousand Jewish children escaped the death-trains to Auschwitz; false papers had urgently to be supplied if they were to be brought south to safety. Max Ophuls, whose work was praised by his immediate superior Feuerstein as well as the more exalted, though increasingly remote figures of Cauchi and Ingrand as the best they had seen, created many of these new identities, which he dispatched to their new owners via secret drop points from which they were collected by anonymous go-betweens. But perhaps the greatest contribution Max Ophuls made to the Resistance was sexual; although in order to pull off the feat he had to create yet another phony self and inhabit it fully and, alas, somewhat painfully. He was the man who seduced the Panther, Ursula Brandt.

In November 1942 the Germans invaded the Zone Sud and at once the stakes rose. Until then students at the Strasbourg university-in-exile could play at resistance, but with the Germans established in Clermont-Ferrand it became a far more dangerous game. In all, one hundred and thirty-nine students and faculty members would die as a result of their involvement in Resistance activities. That November, SS captain Hugo Geissler set up a Gestapo “antenna” in Clermont-Ferrand. Its director was Paul Blumenkampf, who pretended to be a hearty, good-natured fellow. His immensely influential assistant made no such pretense. She was known as the Panther because she wore a coat of panther fur which she never removed, even on the hottest days of the year. Her particular expertise was infiltration, demolition from within; and her prize witness, her quisling, her inside man was none other than George Mathieu. Many Resistance groups-the Mithridate, the ORA-were smashed and their leaders seized thanks to Mathieu’s treason. In a series of raids on these organizations, several university students were arrested, and Reichsführer-SS Himmler was finally able to authorize the attack on the university, against which Danjon’s influence with Vichy, and Foreign Minister Ribbentrop’s reluctance to overrule the puppets he had installed, had protected it for so long.

The assault on the university, which became known as the Great Raid, took place on November 25, 1943. The literature professor Paul Collomp, a good friend of Max Ophuls’s, was shot dead trying to bar the attackers from the secretariat where the teachers’ addresses were kept. A theology professor, Robert Eppel, whom Max had also befriended, was shot in the stomach in his own home. The traitor George Mathieu identified many students holding false identity papers. There were over 1,200 arrests. Max Ophuls escaped because of an instinct for self-preservation that had led him to deal with Mathieu on a strict need-to-know basis. Consequently the names Sebastian Brant and Max Ophuls could not be connected by the traitor to the Resistance operative and master forger Niccolò, and Max was safe for the moment. As a precaution, however, he moved out of Zeller’s cottage, moved in with a pretty young law student named Angélique Strauss, one of the lovestruck young women of whom there would never be a shortage in his life, forged himself yet another new identity (“Jacques Wimpfeling,” after yet another medieval humanist) and took a leave of absence from university duties.

The day after the attack André Danjon wrote a powerful letter of protest to the French prime minister Laval, a tirade in which more or less every sentence was a lie. He lied about the number of Jews at the university, and about the students’ and faculty’s involvement with the Resistance. In those years of eclipse his determination was like earthshine; it provided the only available light. As a result of his well-feigned outrage the university was allowed to remain open. Danjon then telephoned Max personally at Strauss’s apartment. “It’s the last act,” he said. “The curtain has already begun to fall. You need to think about leaving France.” During his sojourn in the cottage at Gergovie, Max Ophuls had passed his time discussing military history with Gaston Zeller and writing papers on international relations, which he himself feared were excessively utopian, and in which he speculated about the construction of a more stable world order in the aftermath of the defeat of Nazism, improbable as that sounded at the time. These papers, in which he foresaw the need for entities similar to those that would afterwards come into being as the Council of Europe, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, had been greatly admired by Danjon, who revealed that he had managed to have them smuggled to the Free French headquarters in London, where they had impressed de Gaulle. “You can do more for your country at the Général’s side than you are doing here,” Danjon said. “Get ready and we will prepare the run. I’m afraid you can’t fly this time. Twice would be pushing your luck.”

“Before I go,” Max replied, “there’s something I have to do.”

The second legendary exploit of Max Ophuls during his Resistance years became known as “Biting the Panther.” When people spoke of it their voices fell into the hushed tones reserved for the achievement of the ridiculously, beautifully impossible. Agent Niccolò, by now a senior figure in the unified resistance known as MUR-which had been created by the merging of Combat with the two other large armies of the Resistance, Franc-Tireur and Libération-simply disappeared from view. It was as if he, and Sebastian Brant, and Jacques Wimpfeling, and Maximilian Ophuls had all ceased to exist. In their place arrived a German officer, Sturmbahnführer Pabst, transferred from Strasbourg to assist Ursula Brandt’s team in its investigations, with papers of authorization personally signed by Heinrich Himmler, whose antipathy to the university-in-exile was of long standing. It was a testament to the impostor’s skill that the phony Pabst aroused no suspicion: a tribute to the implacable force of his will, which simply did not permit anyone to entertain the thought that he might not be what he said. He spoke immaculate German, was notable for his utter devotion to the Reich, his papers were perfectly in order, and there could be no questioning the authenticity and force of the Reichsführer-SS’s autograph. He was also, as the Panther noticed when he complimented her on the powerful, feline quality that made her nickname so appropriate, a man of immense personal charm and physical appeal. Ursula Brandt was a short, stocky woman to whom the term pantherlike could not truthfully be said to apply, but she received the compliment without demur. Within the week she and the Sturmbahnführer were lovers.

Brandt in bed revealed that she was pantherlike in one respect at least: she was fond of using her teeth and claws. Her lover stoically professed to enjoy this, and encouraged her not to restrain herself, but rather to give free rein to all her sexual proclivities, no matter how extreme. After their lovemaking the bedsheets would often be bloodstained, and Brandt would be afflicted by a strangled, stiff-backed contrition that made her unusually malleable. Thus in return for the shared secret of his nocturnal scars the nonexistent Sturmbahnführer gained almost unlimited access to the secrets of her office by day. During the month of their liaison the false Pabst was able to transmit a torrent of priceless intelligence information to the MUR. Then, when the agreed warning sign from the maquis-a small chalk circle with a dot in the center, meaning “they’re beginning to suspect you-get lost”-appeared one morning on the door of his lodgings, he quietly disappeared again.

This was the only known instance in the whole of World War II of a successful “reverse sting” on a Gestapo infiltration operation, and once the deception became known Ursula Brandt’s position became untenable, and she, like her imaginary lover, disappeared from view. Reichsführer-SS Himmler was an unforgiving man.

In his memoir, Maximilian Ophuls reflected on the events of the Great Raid and his own revenge on one of its architects in a somber passage. “Every moment of joy in the Resistance, every triumph, was marred by our knowledge of other tragedies. We were fortunate to be successful in the Panther operation, but as I look back on those days I think not of victory but of fallen comrades. I think, for example, of Jean-Paul Cauchi, our founder, our leader, who was arrested in Paris just two months before the D-Day landings and sent to Buchenwald. On April 18, 1945, at the very moment at which American troops were closing in on Buchenwald, he was vindictively killed by the camp’s soulless German personnel. And I think with a little more satisfaction of the trial of George Mathieu, who was arrested in September 1944, claimed that he had turned traitor because Ursula Brandt had threatened to kill his pregnant girlfriend if he didn’t, was found guilty, and was executed by firing squad on December 12. I have been an opponent of the death penalty all my life, but in the case of Mathieu I must confess that my heart rules my head.”

And he also wrote, “Entering the Resistance was, for me, a kind of flying… One took leave of one’s name, one’s past, one’s future, one lifted oneself away from one’s life and existed only in the continuum of the work, borne aloft by necessity and fatalism. Yes, a sort of soaring feeling possessed me at times, tempered by the perpetual knowledge that one could crash or be shot down at any moment, without warning, and die in the dirt like a dog.”

It was only after his safe arrival in London that Max Ophuls understood how privileged he had been to be given access to the so-called Pat Line, the escape system based in Marseille, created by Captain Ian Garrow and controlled, after Garrow’s betrayal and capture, by the pseudonymous “Commander Pat O’Leary,” a Belgian doctor whose real name was Albert-Marie Guérisse. This line, operated by the DF Section of the British Special Operations Executive, was primarily set up and maintained for the rescue of British airmen and intelligence personnel marooned behind enemy lines, and in spite of the constant dangers of treachery and capture it had a spectacular record, smuggling over six hundred fighters back to safety. However, in the light of the growing tensions between Général de Gaulle and both Churchill and Roosevelt, it was most unusual for the services of the Line to be made available to a nonmilitary individual just because de Gaulle wanted him to join the Forces Françaises Libres at their Carlton Gardens headquarters. The reason for so exceptional an arrangement was the recent arrival at the FFL HQ of the wife of the général’s new aide-de-camp, Mme. François Charles-Roux, née Fanny Zarifi, whose namesake and aunt Fanny Vlasto Rodocanachi and her husband Dr. George Rodocanachi had allowed their Marseille apartment to be used as the Pat Line’s headquarters and local safe house. Max Ophuls, traveling down bumpy minor roads in the back of a produce truck under a mountain of beets, knew nothing of such arcana. He was wondering whether the rat-run would fail because the bumping and banging and the weight of the beet sacks broke his goddamn back. The one thing that never crossed his mind was that he was about to meet the extraordinary woman who would become his only wife.

Her name was the Grey Rat. Her real name was Margaret “Peggy” Rhodes but when she was introduced to Max in George and Fanny Rodocanachi’s sitting room by her fellow Englishwoman Elisabeth Haden-Guest, it was her celebrated nickname that was used-a name the Germans had given her on account of her elusiveness. “Niccolò the master forger,” Haden-Guest said playfully, “meet the rat the ratcatchers can’t catch.” Max Ophuls was astonished by the air of relaxation and enjoyment, even of hilarity, that prevailed in the Rodocanachis’ embattled apartment, and quickly saw that the orchestrator of the evening’s good time was the Grey Rat herself. That the Rat was beautiful was obvious enough, even though she did her best to hide it. Her shock of fair hair looked like it hadn’t been washed for a month and stuck out behind her head like a bottle brush. She wore a loose-fitting man’s checked shirt which hadn’t seen an iron in days and which she buttoned all the way up to the neck. The cuffs, too, were buttoned. Below the shirt were baggy corduroy pants and canvas shoes. She looked like a vagrant, Max thought, a buttoned-up hobo who had somehow strayed into the secret passages of the war. And yet her eyes were immense dark lakes and her body, furtively perceptible under all that camouflage, was long and lean. Above all she possessed so much exuberant energy that the room seemed too small to hold her.

“You are lucky you are going with her,” Fanny Rodocanachi told Max. “When the fighting starts she’s like five men.” The Grey Rat roared with laughter. “God, Fanny darling, you really know how to recommend a girl to a fellow,” she guffawed. “What do you say, Niccolò? Are you ready to crawl through the Spanish border thornbushes all alone with a girl who has killed a man with her bare hands?”

She was twenty-four years old, almost ten years younger than Max, and had already been married once, to a Marseillais businessman named Maurice Liota, who was tortured and killed by the Gestapo a year after their wedding for refusing to reveal her whereabouts, and whom she described to Max Ophuls before, during and after their own marriage as “the love of my life.” She had escaped capture on skis, and by driving a car so fast and skillfully that the airplane chasing her couldn’t stop her. Once she jumped from a moving train. Once in Toulouse she was detained in prison but she impersonated an innocent Provençal housewife so convincingly that after four days the Germans set her free and never knew that they had actually had the Grey Rat in their hands. “I hate war,” she said to Max at that first meeting in the Marseille safe apartment, “but here it is, eh? So I’m not bally well planning to wave my hanky at the departing men and then stay home and knit them balaclavas.”

The run was successful: terrifying, with close shaves so bizarre as to feel almost fictional, but they made it. Barcelona, Madrid, London. In the eyes of the passeurs on both sides of the border, beneath their studied neutrality of expression, Max sometimes thought he detected a strange combination of resentment and contempt. You’re going and we can’t alternated with You’re running and we’re not. He was too distracted to mind; because by the time they arrived at RAF Northolt in a British military aircraft, Maximilian Ophuls had fallen in love. Northolt was wrapped as always in the icy wind of the London winter; nor did it avoid the cliché of sleety rain. François Charles-Roux had been sent to meet hobbling Max, and a nameless intelligence officer was waiting for the Grey Rat. The two refugees stood bundled up on the tarmac in the frozen drizzle and the Grey Rat tried to say good-bye, but before they went their separate ways Max asked if he could see her again. This reduced her to confusion, and unleashed an astonishing routine of foot shuffling and deep blushing and hand-wringing and small sharp manic laughs punctuating bursts of staccato speech. “Ha! Ha! Well, I’ve absolutely no idea! Why you’d ever want to! But, ahem! Aha! If that is you’re really, I mean! Serious, you know? One doesn’t wish to! Hahaha! Impose! Not that it would be a bally imposition I suppose? Eh, eh, haha? Since you’re doing the asking in the first place! Since you’re, ah, kindly enough, oh blow I’m so pathetic at this! Oh, help, mother, all right.” Then, moving toward him to peck him awkwardly on the cheek, she stepped hard on his foot.

Their first date, at the Lyons Corner House in Piccadilly, was a catastrophe. Margaret was a mess, red-eyed, runny-nosed and unable to restrain her tears. The Pat Line had been betrayed. A man they had trusted, Paul Cole, whose real name was Sergeant Harold Cole, and who used the alias of Delobel, turned out to be a fraudster and double agent and pointed the finger at everyone in the Marseille group. Fanny Vlasto and Elisabeth Haden-Guest escaped, but “Pat O’Leary”-Guérisse-was seized by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau. Astonishingly, he would survive torture and live to see a better day and to grow old in the new Europe which he had done so much to free. Dr. George Rodocanachi was not so fortunate. He died in Buchenwald a few months after his capture. “I’m going back in, you know,” the Grey Rat said, blowing her nose fiercely. “I’m going back in just as soon as I can force them to let me.” Max wanted to beg her to stay, but remained silent, and held her hands instead. Three months later she was allowed to return. The tide of the war had turned, and Maximilian Ophuls’s life had changed direction, too, flowing powerfully toward this beautiful, gawky, fearless, sexually unawakened woman-and, in addition, away from France and toward America, because of the unexpected but powerful dislike, bordering on hostility, shown toward him by Général Charles de Gaulle.

London that winter was a cratered heart. The gashes of the Blitz were everywhere, the severed streets, the halved houses, the gaps, the lack, the lack. There weren’t many cars on the road. Yet people went about their business matter-of-factly, as if nothing had happened, as if they weren’t going to be spending the night on a tube station platform without so much as a change of clothes, as if their evacuated children’s welfare wasn’t preying on their minds. Carlton Gardens was relatively unscathed. Charles-Roux brought Max to meet the général. De Gaulle stood at a window in a wood-paneled office, in profile, like a cartoon of himself, and greeted Max without turning. “So: Danjon’s young genius,” he said. “Let me tell you this, monsieur. I do not question the judgment of my friend the vice-chancellor. Your accomplishments and talents are no doubt remarkable. However the propositions in your theses are for the most part untenable. Some sort of European association, very well. It will be necessary to forget what has happened and make friends with Germany. That, yes. Everything else you propose is barbaric rubbish which will deliver us, bound and gagged, into the power of the Americans, which is to say a new captivity following immediately upon an old one. This I shall never permit.” Max remained silent. De Gaulle also ceased to speak. After a moment Charles-Roux touched Max’s elbow and steered him from the room. As they left, de Gaulle, still positioned at the window with his hands clasped behind his back, was heard to remark, “Ah, when they know what broken bits of matchsticks I had to use to make France free!”

“You must understand that Roosevelt has been treating him like dirt,” Charles-Roux said outside the général’s door. “And Churchill also, he shows insufficient respect. There are many, even in the French diplomatic corps, who have advised against becoming too close to the FFL. Roosevelt would get rid of the général if he could. He favors, for example, Giraud.” Max had few dealings with de Gaulle after that day. He was put to work in the propaganda section, writing messages to be dropped into France, translating German texts, marking time, waiting for the evenings, and the Rat.

Porchester Terrace, Bayswater, stripped by the requirements of the weapons industry of its traditional gates and railings, like all the denuded streets of London, hid its nakedness in the winter fog. Max was living in the basement of a house owned by Fanny Rodocanachi’s brother Michel Vlasto. A large segment of the staircase had been destroyed by a phosphorus bomb and the house smelled strongly of burning. To go up and down it was necessary to hug the wall. Life everywhere had holes in it, was a book with pages ripped out, crumpled up, tossed away. “Newer min’, eh,” said Vlasto’s Indian housekeeper, Mrs. Shanti Dickens, an ample woman who affected a huge beret, baggy green overcoat and lacy boots. Mrs. Dickens was a person of such great appetite that she chewed up the language itself. “Nobody being ’urt, ’at is the mai’ thing, hisn’t it.” She pointed at a bucket of sand. “One isstanding on ewery flower. Bay-cement, ground flower, first flower, all. Case ow need.” Mrs. Dickens was able to recite from memory the crime reports in the Sunday rags. “’E chopp’ ’er up, sir, just to ’magine,” she’d say with relish. “Wery wery hawful, sir, hisn’t it. Maybe ’e is heatin’ ’er for ’is tea.”

The Rat came to visit him whenever she could, struggling through the blackout and green fog, being careful to keep her torch pointed downwards. On the evenings when she didn’t show up Max sat alone in his greatcoat by a single-bar electric heater, cursing fate. The depression that was always waiting in the corners of his brain surged into the center of the room, using cold weather and loneliness as its fuel. Treason was the currency of the times. The Americans despised the Free French because they believed the organization to be penetrated by Vichy traitors, and the British responded by infiltrating Carlton Gardens with British informers as well. George Mathieu, Paul Cole. Your friends became your assassins. If you trusted too much, too easily, you died. Yet what kind of life was possible without trust, how could there be any depth or joy in human relations without it? “This is the damage we will all carry over into the future,” Max thought. Distrust, the expectation of deceit: these were the craters in every heart.

“If we live through this, Ratty, I’ll never betray you,” he swore aloud in his lonely room. But he did, of course. He didn’t kill her but he spent his life sticking the knives of his infidelities in her heart. And then came Boonyi Kaul.

The difficult truth was that Margaret “Peggy” Rhodes was a lousy lover. Her heart wasn’t in it. She had been shaped by resistance and had no concept of the joys of yielding. Maximilian Ophuls tried carefully, and without appearing didactic, to school her, and for short periods she seemed willing to learn, but she didn’t have the patience for it, she just wanted it over with so they could talk, and snuggle, and behave in the nude exactly like fully dressed people: not as lovers, but as friends. She had always had a “low libido,” she confessed. She insisted, however, that she loved him. Holding him tightly under the tartan blankets of that basement winter, she swore that she had never been so happy, and that as a result she was newly afraid to die. She also told him she was barren. “I mean, does that make a difference? Is it all off? Because with a lot of chaps that would be it, you know? No possibility of sprogs, whole bally thing goes to the bally dogs. Ha! Aha! Hahaha!” He answered, surprising himself, that it did not matter. “Okay, jolly D,” she said. “Change the subject? You don’t mind? Fellow who met me at Northolt, remember him? MI9 johnny? Wants a word with you. I mean I’m just the messenger. No problem either way. But I could set it up.”

The meeting with the intelligence officer, whose name was Neave, took place a week later in the Metropole Hotel on Northumberland Avenue. “I was rescued by the Pat Line myself, you know,” the Englishman said by way of introduction. “So we’re graduates of the same school, so to speak.” Max Ophuls was thinking how warm it was in the Metropole, and that one might be prepared to do almost anything to be as warm as this. Would he have turned down the proposal Neave delivered that day if the deed had been done in a cold, drafty room? Was he as shallow as that? “… In short, we want you on board,” Neave was finishing. “But that does mean you have to jump ship. Big decision, I know. You probably need to think about it. Go ahead. Take five minutes. Take ten.” The moment he heard the proposition Max Ophuls knew he would not turn it down. The British, speaking with American knowledge and backing, wanted him on board. His way of thinking was just the ticket, and the world community was falling into line, even if the crusty big-nosed général wasn’t. The Germans were going to lose the war. The future was going to be built in New Hampshire over three weeks in July at a place called Bretton Woods. Delegates from, probably, forty-odd nations would assemble with their “boffins,” their “eggheads,” their “dreamers,” to shape the postwar recovery of Europe and to address the problems of unstable exchange rates and protectionist trade policies. Maximilian Ophuls was a key piece of the puzzle. There was a university chair in it for him, Columbia, most probably, and an Oxbridge fellowship. “Hands across the sea,” Neave said. “We see you as one of the main chaps. You don’t have to be affiliated to a national delegation. We need you to chair working parties, do the deep work, give us structures that will stand.”

The future was being born and he was being asked to be its midwife. Instead of the weakness of Paris, the effete house of cards of old Europe, he would build the iron-and-steel skyscraper of the next big thing. “I don’t need time,” he said, “Count me in.” He felt as if he had received, and accepted, a proposal of marriage from an unexpected but infinitely desirable suitor, and knew that France, the bride chosen for him by parentage and blood, France with whom a marriage had been arranged on the day of his birth, might never forgive him for leaving her at the altar. Certainly Charles de Gaulle would not. That night, huddled with Peggy Rhodes beneath the covers of his bed on the slightly sloping floor of the Porchester Terrace basement flat, he made a marriage proposal of his own. “Will you marry me, Ratty?” To which she replied, “Ooh. Ooh. Ooh. Ooh, yes, Moley, I will.”

He met Neave once again, in the early 1980s, by which time Max Ophuls had rejoined the secret world while the former intelligence officer had become a member of Parliament and a close confidant of Prime Minister Thatcher. They had a drink on the terrace of the Palace of Westminster and talked about old times. Soon after their talk Airey Neave was blown to pieces by an IRA “tilt-bomb” while driving out of the House of Commons car park. There was no end to treachery. Survive one plot and the next one would get you. The cycle of violence had not been broken. Perhaps it was endemic to the human race, a manifestation of the life cycle. Perhaps violence showed us what we meant, or, at least, perhaps it was simply what we did.

In April 1944, Max Ophuls’s newly-wed wife the Grey Rat was parachuted into the Auvergne. Her mission was to locate bands of maquis and lead them to the ammunition and arms that were being dropped by the RAF every other day. Then she was to help organize them for the armed uprising that was to coincide with the Normandy landings. As part of this process of preparation she led a Resistance raid against the Gestapo headquarters in Montluçon and also attacked a German gun factory. Then it was the sixth of June, it was D-Day, H-Hour, M-Minute, and she stayed on the ground to fight alongside the MUR, whose longed-for time had finally come. When Maximilian Ophuls left for the Bretton Woods conference at the end of June, he had no way of knowing if the Rat was alive or dead. As he had feared, the FFL had been instructed by its leader to treat him as a pariah, an almost-traitor. His disloyalty would never be forgiven. No information would reach him from that quarter. In the end it was Mrs. Shanti Dickens who came through, by telephone. “Sir! Sir! Mr. Max, hisn’it? Yes, sir! Wery good! Letter, Mr. Max, from Mrs. Max! I hopen it, sir? Yes, sir! Hokay! Mrs. Max is bein’ fine, sir! She is lovin’ you, sir! Hurray! She is askin’ sir, where the fuck you gone? Hokay? Wery good, sir! Hurray!”

On August 26, the day after the liberation of Paris, de Gaulle marched down the Champs-Élysées with representatives of the Free French movement as well as members of the Resistance. One Englishwoman marched with the French that day. And on August 27, Mrs. Max, Margaret Rhodes, the Grey Rat, flew to New York and the Ophulses began their American married life.

5

Nearly twenty-one years later, on the night before she left with her husband for New Delhi, Mrs. Margaret Rhodes Ophuls dreamed that after the long barren decades she would finally become pregnant and have a child in India. The baby was beautiful and furry with a long, curling tail but she was unable to love it and when she put it to her breast it bit her nipple painfully. It was a girl baby and even though her friends were horrified to see her cradling a black rattess she didn’t care. She had once been a rat herself but she had turned into a human being eventually, hadn’t she, these days she washed her hair and wore smart clothes and hardly ever twitched her nose or crawled through garbage or did anything rodentlike at all, and no doubt it would be the same with her baby girl, her Ratetta. And she was a mother now and so if she simply behaved as if she did love Ratetta then the love would probably begin to flow, there was just some sort of temporary blockage. Some mothers had trouble lactating, didn’t they, the milk didn’t want to come down, and she was having the same kind of trouble with love. After all she was in her middle forties and the baby had come to her late in life so a few unusual problems were to be expected. It was nothing serious. Ratetta, sweet Ratetta, she sang in her dream, who could be better than you?

She didn’t tell her husband about the vision. By this time she and Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls pretty much led separate lives. However, a public façade was maintained. Max’s memoir had made their wartime love story public property, had it not, and the book had remained on the bestseller lists for two and a half years, so how could they not continue to be the thing that had given them their shot at immortality? For they were, and had been for two decades, “Ratty and Moley,” the golden couple whose New York kiss at the mighty battle’s end had become for a generation an image, the iconic image of love conquering all, of the slaying of monsters and the blessings of fate, of the triumph of virtue over evil and the victory of the best in human nature over the worst. “If we tried to break up-ha! Hoho!-we’d probably-wouldn’t we?-be lynched,” she once said to him, concealing heartbreak beneath staccato stoicism. “Lucky, really, that I don’t-heh-heh-heh!-actually believe in bally divorce.”

So the fiction of undying romance was kept up, impeccably by her, extremely peccably by him. She kept tabs, however. She was a wealthy woman nowadays. Since the deaths of her parents she had come into possession of impressive tranches of prime Hampshire farmland as well as substantial port wineries on the Douro. This gave her the wherewithal to finance her investigations, on the rare occasions that her old contacts in the shadow world came up empty-handed. Consequently she knew the name of every woman her husband had seduced, every adoring college postgrad, every assistant willing to be researched, every wanton uptown society beauty and downtown party slut, all the personal two-way simultaneous translators at his international conferences, every East End summer whore he’d fucked in their South Fork home perched on the forested heights left behind by retreating glaciers, the uplands of the terminal moraine. In most cases she had also acquired their home addresses and unlisted telephone numbers. She had never contacted any of these women but she told herself she liked to have the information, that she preferred to know. This was a self-deceiving lie. The women’s names twisted in her like knives, their street addresses, apartment numbers, zip codes and phone numbers burned holes in her memory like little phosphorus bombs.

Yet she found it difficult to blame only Max. As the war retreated into the past so had her erotic urges. Her interest in such matters, always perfunctory and intermittent, seemed to wither on the vine. “Let the poor man get it elsewhere if he has to,” she told herself grimly, “as long as he doesn’t rub my bally nose in it. Then I can get on with my reading and gardening and not be bothered with all that sticky palaver.” In this way she blinded herself to her real feelings so effectively that when misery assailed her, as it periodically did, causing her to burst into hot tears without warning and to suffer from inexplicable attacks of the shakes, she couldn’t work out what she was so damned unhappy about. On the plane to India with the great man by her side she allowed herself to think, “Dash it, it is a pretty terrific love story, ours. Not conventional, I grant you; but then, what is conventional when you really look at it? Lift the lid of any life and there’s strangeness, bubbling away; behind every quiet domestic front door lurk the idiosyncratic and the weird. Normality, that’s the myth. Human beings aren’t normal. We’re an odd lot, that’s the honest truth: off-kilter, rum. But we get by. Look, here we are, Max and I, flying high, and still holding hands after twenty years. Not so shabby, really. Not too bad at all.” Then she closed her eyes and there was the vision again, the midnight rat standing up on its hind legs, begging for love, calling her mother in its high Ratetta voice. In India, she decided, she was going to have a great deal to do with orphans. Yes: the motherless children of India would discover that they had a good friend in her. Maybe that was the meaning of the dream.

“They liked Galbraith,” Lyndon Johnson was rumored to have told Dean Rusk, “so go ahead and send them another liberal professor, but don’t let this one go native on us.” When Secretary Rusk called Maximilian Ophuls in the immediate aftermath of the 1965 Indo-Pakistani war and offered him the Indian embassy, Max realized that he had been waiting for the call, waiting without knowing he was waiting, and that India, which he had never visited, might prove to be, if not his destiny, then at least the destination to which the mazy journey of his life had been leading all along. “We need you to go right away,” Rusk said. “Those Indian gentlemen need a good old American spanking and it’s our belief you’re just the man to hand it to ’em.” In his classic inquiry Why the Poor Are Poor Max Ophuls had used India, China and Brazil as economic case studies, and in the book’s much-discussed last chapter had proposed a means by which these “sleeping giants” might awake. This was perhaps the first time a major Western economist had seriously analyzed what came to be known as “South-South collaboration,” and Max, putting down the telephone that humid Manhattan evening-it was late September but the summer wouldn’t end-wondered aloud why an academic who had published a theoretical model of how Third World economies might flourish by learning to bypass the U.S. dollar should be chosen to represent the United States in one such southern land. His wife the Rat knew the answer to that. “Glamour, dear, glamour. Ha! Don’t you get it, you dope? Everyone loves a star.”

America didn’t know what to do about India. Johnson liked the dictator of Pakistan, Field Marshal Mohammed Ayub Khan, so much that he was even willing to turn a blind eye to Pakistan’s growing intimacy with China. “A wife can understand a Saturday night fling by her husband, so long as she’s the wife,” he told Ayub in Washington. Ayub laughed. Of course America was the wife, how could the president doubt it? Then he went home and forged even closer ties with China. Rusk, meanwhile, was openly hostile to Indian interests. This was the period in which the devaluation of the Indian rupee and the national food crisis had put India into the humiliating position of being dependent on American supplies. Yet these supplies were slow in coming, and B. K. Nehru, India’s ambassador to the United States, had to confront Rusk about it: “Why are you trying to starve us out?” The answer was equally blunt: because India was receiving arms from the Soviet Union. Before Max left for New Delhi, he visited Rusk at Foggy Bottom and found himself on the receiving end of an extended anti-Indian tirade, in which Rusk not only opposed the Indian line on Kashmir but also criticized the annexations of Hyderabad and Goa, and the vocal support of several Indian leaders for the government of North Vietnam. “Professor Ophuls, we are at war with that gentleman, Ho Chi Minh, and you will be so good as to make plain to the Indian authorities that our enemy’s friend can only be our foe.” This was why Max Ophuls told Margaret, after the Radhakrishnan hand-holding incident, that his sudden popularity would probably prove short-lived. “If I dance to Rusk’s tune,” he said, “they’ll start throwing things at us soon enough.”

When he expressed a desire to go immediately to Kashmir, the Indian home minister Gulzarilal Nanda objected strongly: the security concerns were too great, his safety could not be guaranteed. Then for the first time in his life Max Ophuls exercised the power of the United States of America. “The nature of overwhelming might,” he would later write in The Man of Power, “is such that the powerful man does not need to allude to his power. The fact of it is present in everyone’s consciousness. Thus power does its work by stealth, and the powerful can subsequently deny that their strength was ever used at all.” Within hours, Nanda was overruled by Prime Minister Shastri’s office, and the visit to Kashmir was green-lit.

Five days later Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls, in fur earmuffs, greatcoat, bulletproof vest and hard hat, was standing on what was then called the cease-fire line, and would later come to be known as the Line of Control. His whole life suddenly seemed absurd. The Belle Époque Strasbourg mansion, the cottage in Gergovie, the Porchester Terrace basement, the economic summit in New Hampshire, the eleventh-floor apartment on Riverside Drive, and even Roosevelt House, the sprawling, recently completed ambassador’s residence built by the half-praised, half-derided Edward Durrell Stone in the Chanakyapuri diplomatic enclave of the Indian capital… all these faded away. For a long moment Max slipped loose of all his different selves, the brilliant young economist, lawyer and student of international relations, the master forger of the Resistance, the ace pilot, the Jewish survivor, the genius of Bretton Woods, the bestselling author, and the American ambassador cocooned in the house of power. He stood alone and as if unclothed, dwarfed by the high Himalayas and stripped bare of comprehension by the scale of the crisis made flesh, the two frozen armies facing each other across the explosive borderline. Then his history reasserted itself and he climbed back into its familiar garments-in particular the history of his hometown, and the whiplash movements of the Franco-German frontier across its people’s lives. He had come a long way but perhaps not so very far. Could any two places have been more different, he asked himself; could any two places have been more the same? Human nature, the great constant, surely persisted in spite of all surface differences. One snaking frontier had made him what he was, he found himself thinking. Had he come here, to another such unstable twilight zone, in order to be unmade?

The Indian foreign minister Swaran Singh touched his arm. “It’s long enough,” he said. “It really is not safe to stand still here for very long.”

For the rest of his life Max Ophuls would remember that instant during which the shape of the conflict in Kashmir had seemed too great and alien for his Western mind to understand, and the sense of urgent need with which he had drawn his own experience around him, like a shawl. Had he been trying to understand, or to blind himself to his failure to do so? Did the mind discover likeness in the unlike in order to clarify the world, or to obscure the impossibility of such clarification? He didn’t know the answer. But it was one hell of a question.

He had begun to look for allies in Washington and had found a few: the national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, his eventual successor, Walt Whitman Rostow, and the man who would follow Max to New Delhi after the scandal, Chester Bowles. Bundy learned that the Ayub-China relationship was “significantly closer” than either would admit, and advised Johnson that India, the “largest and potentially most powerful non-Communist Asian nation,” was “the biggest prize in Asia,” and that on account of the United States’ handing seven hundred million dollars in military aid to Pakistan, that prize was in danger of being lost. The tail was wagging the dog. Rostow agreed. “India is more important than Pakistan.” And Bowles argued that America’s unwillingness to arm India had pushed the late Jawaharlal Nehru, and now Lal Bahadur Shastri, into the Russians’ arms. “Only when it became clear that we were not prepared to give India this assistance, did India turn to the Soviet Union as its major source of military equipment.” Johnson remained reluctant to favor India. “We ought to get out of military aid to both India and Pakistan,” he replied. However, Max Ophuls’s Washington contacts charged him to discuss urgently, “on the front burner,” what India wanted most: to purchase American supersonic fighter jets in significant numbers and on advantageous terms. Sitting on carpets and cushions in the Dachigam hunting lodge, laughing and drinking in the intermissions between the acts of the play being performed by the bhands of Pachigam, Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls, “the Flying Jew,” the man who had flown the Bugatti Racer to safety, murmured to the Indian Foreign Ministry delegation about the various ways in which it might be possible to structure a deal for the high-speed jets. Then Boonyi Kaul Noman came out to dance and Max realized that his Indian destiny would have little to do with politics, diplomacy or arms sales, and everything to do with the far more ancient imperatives of desire.

Just as Anarkali dancing her sorceress’s dance in the Sheesh Mahal, the hall of mirrors at the Mughal court, had captured Prince Salim’s heart, just as Madhubala dancing in the hit movie had bewitched millions of gaping men, so Boonyi in the hunting lodge at Dachigam understood that her dance was changing her life, that what was being born in the eyes of the moonstruck American ambassador was nothing less than her own future. By the time he got to his feet and applauded loudly and long, she knew that he would find a way to bring her to him, and all that was left for her to do was to make a single choice, a single act of will, yes or no. Then her eyes met his and blazed their answer and the point of no return was passed. Yes, the future would come for her, a messenger descending from the heavens to inform a mere mortal of the decision of the gods. She needed only to wait and see what form the messenger would take. She put the palms of her hands together, touched her fingertips to her chin, gazed at and then bowed her head before the man of power, and had the feeling as she left his presence that she wasn’t leaving the stage but making an entrance on the greatest stage she had ever been allowed to walk upon, that her performance was not ending but beginning, and that it would not end until her life ran out of days. It would be up to her to ensure that her story had a better ending than the court dancer’s. Anarkali’s punishment for the temerity of loving a royal personage was to be bricked up in a wall. Boonyi had seen the movie, in which the filmmakers had found a way of allowing the heroine to live: Emperor Akbar, relenting, has a tunnel constructed under her tomb to allow Anarkali to escape into exile with her mother. A lifetime’s exile wasn’t much better than death, Boonyi thought. It was the same as being bricked up, only in a larger grave. But times had changed. Maybe in the second half of the twentieth century it was permissible for a dancing girl to bag herself a prince.

The embassy aide Edgar Wood, floppy-haired, tall, pale and skinny, with a large, permanent zit on his right cheek to hint at his ridiculous youth, and the feeble shadow of a Zapata moustache to confirm it, was a former graduate student of international relations at Columbia who had followed Max to India at the ambassador’s special insistence. The reason for this was not Wood’s brilliance or industry (though he was indeed smart and a quick learner, known at Columbia as Eager Wood, a nickname he brought with him into the embassy). No, the reason Wood was indispensable was that he would do anything the ambassador needed done and keep his mouth shut about it. It wasn’t easy to find the perfect set-up man, the loyal go-between, the faultless fixer, but without such a person it was impossible for a man in the public eye to lead the kind of life that Max Ophuls’s nature compelled him to lead. He had his own nickname for Wood; in his eyes the kid was not so much an “Eager,” more of a “Beaver”; but of course he never told him so. The first time he had broached the subject of his assignations with women and his need for a discreet assistant, Beaver Wood volunteered immediately. “Just one question, sir,” he asked Max. “Do you have a bad back?” Max was puzzled. No, he answered, his back was fine. Wood bobbed his head in approval and apparent relief. “Excellent,” he said. “Because too much sex and a bad back is what got the president assassinated.”

This was strange, Max thought, and also evidence that Wood was a more interesting fellow than his raw young looks had yet found a way of revealing. “The truss, sir,” Wood explained. “Kennedy’s back was bad to begin with, but it got so much worse because of all the screwing around that he had to wear the truss all the time. He was wearing it in Dallas and that’s why he didn’t fall over after the first shot hit him. He was wounded and lurched over and the truss just sat him up again, boing, and then the second bullet blew off the back of his head. You see what I’m saying, Professor, maybe if he’d had less sex, he maybe wouldn’t have been wearing the truss, and then no boing, he’d just have fallen flat after being wounded; the first bullet wasn’t fatal, remember, and he wouldn’t have been as they say available for the second shot, and Johnson wouldn’t be president. There’s a moral in there somewhere, I guess, but as you don’t have a bad back, Professor, it doesn’t apply to you.”

In the hunting lodge at Dachigam, Max Ophuls reclining on carpets and cushions leaned backward, away from the Indian foreign minister, to whisper to Edgar Wood. “Get her details,” he said. Wood replied: “Sir, she’s allegedly buried in Lahore, Pakistan, and her real name was either Nadira Begum or Sharf-un-Nissa. Prince Salim gave her the love-name of Anarkali, meaning ‘pomegranate bud.’ Sir.” Max frowned. “Not the damn character, Wood. Not the damn apocryphal historical figure.” Wood grinned. “I’m on it, sir. I was just messing with you.” Max tolerated such cheekiness. It was a small price to pay for the services Wood so uncomplainingly, even enthusiastically rendered. He turned back to Swaran Singh, a soft-spoken man of simple habits whose charm and erudition were as great as Max’s own, and whom Max had begun to like very much. Swaran wanted to offer his own reaction to the dance piece. “You see, Akbar was remarkably tolerant of Hinduism,” he said. “Indeed his own wife Jodhabai, Salim’s mother, remained a practicing Hindu throughout their marriage. Interesting that class difference was where he drew the line. Suggests that as a people social order matters more to us than religious belief. Just like the English, eh? No wonder we hit it off so well.” Max laughed obligingly. “By the way,” added Swaran Singh, who was known for his strict moral rectitude but was also a shrewd man who knew the effectiveness of a shock tactic, “did you by any chance notice that young woman’s breasts?” He let out a loud guffaw, which Max, for the sake of Indo-American relations, felt the need to emulate. “National treasures,” he replied seriously, using much self-control to conceal his deeper feelings, but fearing that Swaran had noted the powerful involuntary reaction he had gone fishing for. “Integral parts of India,” he added, for good measure. This set Swaran Singh off again. “Ambassador,” the foreign minister chuckled, “I can see that with you as our guide, the new India will become more pro-West than ever before.”

When Peggy Ophuls, alone in the New York apartment, had answered her telephone and heard from one of her informants that Edgar Wood was slated for transfer to India her heart pounded and she threw the tall glass of Pellegrino she was holding as hard as she could in the general direction of ZOOMMM!!!!, the widescreen Lichtenstein portrait of her husband flying the Bugatti Racer which she had commissioned as a gift of love and which hung, when it was not being lent to this or that major gallery, on one long living-room wall in their capacious Riverside Drive home. Such was her agitation that the glass missed the large painting entirely and shattered on the white wall to the right of the unprotected canvas. She left the pieces where they fell, clenched both fists and controlled herself. Better the pimp you know, she told herself angrily. If Wood had been left behind in America her husband would certainly have found another little helper, and for a time Margaret wouldn’t have known who was setting up the action without which Max Ophuls apparently couldn’t live, and which she herself was, by this time, emphatically unwilling to provide. Neither Max nor Edgar had any idea that she knew all about them-that she knew everything-that she knew where all the bodies were-not buried-ha! aha!-what was the right word-yes! laid, that she knew in detail where all his damned damned damned bodies were well and truly laid, that she had made it her business to, that she was in a position to, that one of these days by God she would, that any woman in her situation-and she had killed a man once!-had a right to, to. To take her dashed revenge.

The seduction of Boonyi Kaul Noman-or, more accurately, the seduction of Max Ophuls by Boonyi-took time. Even for a man of Edgar Wood’s unusual aptitudes it was not easy to arrange a private meeting between the American ambassador and a married Kashmiri dancing girl. At the end of the Dachigam hunting lodge festivities Wood voiced the ambassador’s desire to thank personally all those who had given him such a delightful evening, and out they came in a crowd, the poets and santoor players, the actors and cooks. Max moved among them with an interpreter and the genuineness of his interest and concern touched everyone he spoke to. At one point, casually, as if it were not the point of the entire exercise, he turned to Boonyi and congratulated her on her artistry. “A talent like yours,” he said, “must surely seek to advance and develop itself.” The interpreter translated, and Boonyi, her eyes modestly downcast, felt a breeze on her cheek, as if a door were opening and the air of the outside world were being allowed to enter. She told herself, Patience is everything now. You must just fold your hands in your lap and wait for what will be.

“Ask her name,” Max Ophuls ordered the interpreter. “Boonyi,” the fellow answered. “She tells that it is her preferred, how to say it, her optioned name. Actually her given name is Bhoomi, the earth, but her friends are calling her by this Boonyi cognomen which, sir, is the beloved tree of Kashmir.” “I see,” said Max, “a name for outsiders and a pet name for her friends. Ask her then, Bhoomi the earth or Boonyi the beloved tree-as a dancer, in her career as a dancer, what is it she wants?” There was nothing personal in his voice or manner, no hint of impropriety. Her reply was similarly courteous, freighted with nothing, a neutral politeness. “Boonyi says first that she is Boonyi,” the interpreter translated, “and second that to please you is joy enough.” Max Ophuls saw Swaran Singh looking across the crowded room with a faint smile on his face, the most innocent of smiles, a gentle smile, quite devoid of guile.

Max moved away from Boonyi and didn’t look in her direction again all evening. However, he spoke at length to Abdullah Noman, asking carefully about economic conditions in the valley, learning about the decline of the fortunes of the bhand pather, expressing a fascination with their ancient hand-me-down skills which he did not have to fake. Soon enough, Abdullah took the bait, as Max had known he would. “He, Pachigam headman, sir, is saying it would be lifetime honor for him if one day you will grace his village,” the interpreter said. “It will be lifetime privilege for him to afford you full performances of traditional and modern plays and if interest is in you, also you may see how techniques et cetera are refined. Cooking too is there, wazwaan cooks are coming tonight from that place only.” Here Edgar Wood intervened, all haste and business. “The ambassador’s schedule does not presently permit…” Max patted his eager young aide on the arm. “Edgar, Edgar, we’re just chatting,” he said. “Who knows? Could be that some day even the American ambassador may have a moment to spare.”

After so successfully choreographed an encounter, Max Ophuls returned to Delhi, to the cool, sprawling New Formalist palazzo of decorated modernism encased in a mosaic grillwork of white stone where he now lived. He walked by its fountain-lined reflecting pool, and, like Boonyi Noman, waited. Edgar Wood quietly arranged for him to receive daily private lessons in Hindi and Kashmiri. The ambassador’s wife, meanwhile, was mostly absent from the ambassadorial residence. Transformed into her new persona of Peggy-Mata, mother of the motherless, she had embarked on a nonstop nationwide tour of Indian orphanages, and would occasionally send Max a note saying things like These children are so beautiful I just absolutely want to scoop a few of them up and bring them home. Her success in raising funds in America and Europe to improve conditions at orphanages all over India increased the couple’s popularity. “Perhaps we should regard Peggy-Mata as the real U.S. ambassador,” one newspaper editorial suggested, “and Mr. Ophuls as her charming and personable consort.” Next to the editorial was a large photograph of Peggy Ophuls standing beside a handsome young Catholic priest, Father Ambrose, and surrounded by smiling young girls from his orphanage, the Holy Love of India Evangalactic Girls’ Orphanage for Disabled & Destitute Street Girls in Mehrauli. “The dying in Calcutta have Mother Teresa,” Father Ambrose was reported to have said, “but for the living we have Peggy-Mata right here.”

Meanwhile the Ophuls marriage continued to decay. Six months after the ambassador’s first visit to Kashmir, the thing that Peggy Rhodes Ophuls had most dreaded had happened. Instead of playing the field and bedding every woman who succumbed to his famous charm, her bastard husband had become fixated on one particular girl, a nobody, a nothing, damn him. When the spring came he had visited the village of the traveling players who had by all accounts put on quite a show, drama, comedy, high-wire stunts and of course the dancing, and soon afterwards Max had decreed that a banquet be given “for Indian friends” at Roosevelt House, which by the by was the residence not only of the lecherous U.S. ambassador but of the ambassador’s wretched wife as well, he probably came up with the idea just so that he could bring the hussy down to New Delhi on the pretext of providing after-dinner entertainment-after-dinner entertainment indeed!-the scheme had that young so-and-so Wood’s fingerprints all over it, and the worst of it, the worst of the worst, was that he, her husband, the ambassador-the man she still loved, in her way, in the only way she knew, it didn’t give him what he needed but that didn’t mean it wasn’t love-her Max had made her, Peggy, come home from her orphanage inspections to act as hostess, to sit in her own home and watch that girl dance for him, did he think she was blind, she didn’t need any spies to see what that girl was doing, the effrontery of her hips, the recklessness of her eyes, it was as if they were naked and making love right there in front of Peggy, in front of everyone, the humiliation of it, she had seen a good deal of human cruelty in her life, they both had, so she wasn’t going to lose perspective, this wasn’t as bad as that, but still it was pretty goddamned cruel, pretty goddamned impossible to take.

They had come all this way together, the Rat and her Mole, they had survived so much, only to be shipwrecked at last on the rock of a gold-digging Kashmiri beauty. If the liaison lasted, Peggy Ophuls would of course have to leave him, after all this time and the expenditure of so much love and tolerance she would have to turn back into Margaret Rhodes and somehow live without him for the rest of her life. “Pumpkin time, Cinders,” she told herself. The magic spell was about to break, her gown would once again be an ashy rag, her footmen would turn back into mice, the beautiful fiction of her marriage would finally have to yield to the unpalatable facts. The glass slipper didn’t fit her anymore. It was on another woman’s foot.

The government of India was GOI. The government of Pakistan was GOP. In the aftermath of the Tashkent Peace Conference (TPC) between the two countries, during the period of partial political vacuum created by the fatal heart attack of the Indian prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri (LBS) on the day following the signature of the Tashkent Declaration (TD), Max Ophuls launched a major new American initiative. In this interregnum, a bitter stalemate between the potentates of the Congress Party ended when the kingmakers Kumaraswami Kamaraj (KK) and Morarji Desai (MD) elevated Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi (IPG) to the premiership in the mistaken belief that she would be their helpless puppet. During this period of savage intraparty warfare only President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan rose above the political storm. His national stature and his air of a philosopher-saint gave him unusual influence over all government matters, even though the authors of the Indian constitution had clearly intended the president’s role to be largely ceremonial. Max’s close friendship with this revered figure (PSK) provided the opening for the so-called Ophuls Plan.

The ambassador’s idea was that if he could persuade both governments to work together on multilateral projects (GOI/GOP-MP) they could start getting used to interdependence instead of conflict. Mastering the language of unpronounceable acronyms which was the true lingua franca of the subcontinent’s political class, he proposed a fuel exchange program, or FEP: Pakistan would export its gas (PG) to India and India would send coal (IC) to Pakistan. He further proposed that the two nations cooperate over hydroelectric and irrigation projects (HAIP) in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Tista river system (GBTRS or, colloquially, GABTRIS). He spoke to the Indian government minister for planning and social work (GOIMPSW or MINPLASOC), Asoka Mehta, and assured him of World Bank support. He encouraged his old pal the minister for foreign affairs, GOIMFA Swaran Singh, to send out a feeler to his GOP counterpart concerning the possibility of back-channel arms limitation talks (BALT). Indira Gandhi was settling in as GOIPM, a.k.a. MADAM, and Max urged her to move down the path of reconciliation. The result of all his cajoling and bullying was the briefly celebrated Islamabad Joint Statement, the so-called IJOSTAT or GOIGOPJS(ISL)66. Max received personal messages of congratulations from both POTUS and UNSGUT. Of late, America had been infected by a Western strain of the South Asian disease of acronymial initialitis. JFK, RFK, MLK, and POTUS of course was LBJ and UNSGUT was the secretary-general of the United Nations, U Thant.

The ugliness of the bureaucratic terminology, its aggressive uninterest in euphony, marked it out as power-speech. Power had no need for prettification, no need to make things easy. By showing its contempt for verbal felicity it revealed itself as itself, naked and unadorned. The iron fist took off the velvet glove.

Euphoria over the Islamabad accords proved short-lived. The estranged nations’ common fondness for alphabet soup did not mean they had developed a taste for peace. MADAM summoned Max to tell him of her anger at the cancellation of all joint projects. The military back-channel proposals had been for territorial adjustments along the cease-fire line; India might compensate Pakistan for lost strategic areas. Or, if this were not acceptable to Pakistan, India had suggested it might agree to accept guarantees of more adequate controls by the U.N. Mrs. Gandhi told Max the actual numbers of the war dead on both sides. They were much higher than the published figures. “We can’t go on letting our young men perish like this,” she said. “And the Pakistanis agree, you know. The generals are furious with Zulfy”-GOPMFA Zulfikar Ali Bhutto-“for leading them into a battle over a stretch of icy wasteland. Quelques arpents de neige, isn’t it.” In spite of the two nations’ common concerns, there would be no effective moves toward greater cross-border understanding. Two powerful men combined to sabotage the Ophuls Plan. The old Congress grandee Vengalil Krishnan Krishna Menon-the great left-wing orator and wit who had once, at the Security Council, filibustered for eight hours without a prepared text on the subject of India’s inalienable right to have and hold Kashmir; who called himself a “tea-totaller” because although he consumed no alcohol he drank a total of thirty-six cups of tea a day, and consequently spoke more rapidly than any man in India; whose rudeness was legendary; and who was considered an enemy by Indira Gandhi even though he had been her father’s friend-had worked assiduously to sabotage the détente. He had found a willing ally in home minister Gulzarilal Nanda, who had been caretaker prime minister twice, for a few days each, first after Jawaharlal Nehru’s death and again after Shastri’s, whose resentment of those who got the job for real was bitter and absolute, and whose nose was still out of joint because Shastri had overruled him about the wisdom of letting Max Ophuls visit the war zone in Kashmir. Together Nanda and Krishna Menon worked hard to build opposition to Ophuls inside the Indian cabinet and parliament, while simultaneously bolstering the Indian army’s military control over the Kashmir valley. At that early stage in her career Mrs. Gandhi was obliged to confess that she had allowed herself to be outmaneuvered. “You also, Mr. Ophuls,” she said. “GOIMHA Nanda and VKKM have foxed you too. Honestly! What a schmuck.” SCHMUCK? wondered Max. Ah… Sabotage of Cooperative… what?… Harmony-Motivated Undertakings Concerning Kashmir? The prime minister of India stroked his arm gently. “It’s not an acronym,” she said.

Boonyi left Pachigam without her husband, because the Americans had only asked Abdullah Noman for a dance act. She had been commanded to give her Anarkali again, to dazzle the capital’s grandees on a specially constructed stage in the residence’s central atrium, below a pyramidal lantern. Himal and Gonwati were with her, to dance behind and beside her, content with their supporting roles, happy to shine a little in her reflected light. Habib Joo the old dance teacher was going, too, and a trio of musicians. “Pachigam sending a troupe to New Delhi, to the American embassy,” Abdullah Noman said happily at the bus stop, embracing each of them. “What honor you bring on us all.”

Shalimar the clown had come to see her off. When the bus arrived, making its usual devil-squawk of a racket and daubed with warnings to motorists and pedestrians alike, Noman climbed onto the roof with her bedroll and made sure everything was safely tied down. When Boonyi said good-bye to him she knew it was an ending. He understood nothing, did not foresee the breaking of his heart. He loved her too much to suspect her of having a traitorous soul. But he was just a clown, and his love led nowhere, would change nothing, would not take her where it was her destiny to go. As she went up through the door of the bus she looked back and saw Shalimar the clown standing with her damaged friend Zoon Misri, a vague drifting presence, half-human, half-phantom, whose place at his side was like a portent of the damage that she, Boonyi, would shortly be inflicting on him. She gave him her best, brightest smile and he lit up in return, as always. This was how she would remember him, his beauty illumined by love. Then the bus set off with a jerk and a rush, and turned a corner, and he was gone, and she began to prepare for what was about to happen. What do you want, the ambassador had asked her. She knew what he wanted. He wanted what men want. But to have an answer to his question was important. To know exactly what she wanted and what she was prepared to offer in return.

When he came to her she was ready. Edgar Wood, that peculiar young man, had arranged everything perfectly. The dancing girls were allocated comfortable rooms in the Roosevelt House guest wing, and Wood was careful to seek Mrs. Ophuls’s approval of the arrangements. Mrs. Ophuls’s private suite was at the far end of the building-she and the ambassador preferred not to share a bedroom-and Beaver Wood had handpicked the Marines guarding the route between the distinguished couple’s quarters, and also the Marines stationed in the corridor outside the dancing girls’ rooms. (After his arrival in New Delhi the Beaver had made it his first business to establish which members of the embassy security detail he could rely on, the ones who understood that their absolute loyalty lay to the ambassador and not to their Midwestern parents’ conservative moral values or even to God.) It was embassy policy, Wood informed the young women, that in order to ensure their safety the residence’s corridors would be off-limits until breakfast time, even for themselves. Himal and Gonwati made no objection, particularly as their rooms were filled with bolts of fabric, bottles of perfume and necklaces and wrist-cuffs made of antique silver, and with wicker baskets overflowing with good things to eat and drink. With cries of delight they rushed toward their gifts. Meanwhile Habib Joo and his trio of male musicians were taken to a suite of rooms at the Ashoka, where they made the acquaintance of minibars for the first time in their lives and decided contentedly that their religion made a special blind-eye exception for expenses-paid nights away from home in deluxe five-star hotels.

In her room at Roosevelt House, Boonyi examined no sari, smelled no perfume, ate no bonbon. Still wearing the clothes of Anarkali, the tight high scarlet bodice that revealed the slenderness of her midriff and the muscled flatness of her belly, the wide, much-pleated dancer’s skirt in emerald green silk edged in gold braid, the white tights below to preserve her modesty when the skirt fanned and flared outwards as she whirled, and the costume jewelry, the “ruby” pendant around her neck, the “golden” nose-ring, the braids of fake pearls in her hair, she sat perfectly still on the edge of her bed, staying “in character,” acting the part of the great courtesan waiting for the heir to the Mughal throne. With her hands folded in her lap she waited, without complaint. It was three o’clock in the morning before she heard a single, quiet knock on her door.

He had prepared a declaration in newly learned Kashmiri but she put a finger across his lips. How handsome he was, how much his eyes had seen, how much his body knew. “I can speak some little English,” she said-not for nothing was she the daughter of Pyarelal Kaul!-and laughed as his whole body relaxed in surprised relief. She had prepared a speech, too, laboring over it in her racing mind as she lay sleepless during the small hours beside her unknowing husband. This was her stage and it was time for her soliloquy. “Please, I want to be a great dancer,” she told him. “So I want a great teacher. Also, I want please to be educated to high standard. And I want a good place to live-please-so that I am not ashamed to receive you there. Finally,” and now her voice trembled, “because I will give up much for this, please, sir, I want to hear from your own lips that you will keep me safe.”

He was both moved and amused. “I will be guided by you in this,” he replied, gravely. “Meh haav tae sae wath. Please show me the way.” Whereupon for an hour they hammered out the treaty of their affiliation as if it were a back-channel negotiation or an international arms deal, each recognizing a need in the other that complemented their own. Max Ophuls was actually aroused by the young woman’s naked pragmatism. Perhaps her notable openness concerning her ambition foreshadowed an equal openness in lovemaking. He looked forward to discovering if this were so. The negotiation was also pleasing in itself. The details of the “Understanding,” as they both elected to call it-though Max privately preferred the term BKN/MO/JSA(C), which more fully summarized the joint statement of accord (classified) between Boonyi Kaul Noman and himself-were quickly agreed. Just as mutual self-interest was the only real guarantee of a durable accord between nations, so Boonyi’s perception that this liaison was her best chance of furthering her own purposes constituted a reliable guarantee of her future seriousness and discretion. That the most delicate clause in the unwritten contract proved not to be an obstacle provided Max with a further necessary guarantee. “And for your part, if I do as you require?” he asked her: the question she had known he would ask, and to which, in her thoughts, her answer had been given, refined and given again a thousand and one times. She looked him in the eyes. “In that case I will do anything you want, whenever you want it,” she replied in immaculate English. “My body will be yours to command and it will be my joy to obey.”

Thus all Max’s significant requirements were in place: not only discretion and seriousness but also complete docility, absolute compliance, maximum attentiveness, exceptional eagerness to please and unlimited access, all fueled by the girl’s determination to better herself, to make the leap from the village to the world, to give herself the future she believed she deserved. The clown of a husband was a problem, but she insisted that Max need not concern himself with this aspect of things as it was something she could easily take care of. Everything was acceptable. Edgar Wood, whose forte was anticipation, had already found the apartment, at Type-1 Number-22 Southeast Hira Bagh, two pink rooms with harsh blue-white neon strip-lights and no balcony located in a sage-green concrete bunker of an apartment block in a low-rent residential “colony” to the south of the city center. The rooms were on the floor above the purple-faced Odissi dance guru Jayababu-Pandit Jayanta Mudgal-who would be paid well to teach the girl everything he knew and to be deaf and blind to everything he should not know. Max and Boonyi actually shook hands on the deal. At the age of fifty-five Ambassador Ophuls was being offered a garden of earthly delights. There was, however, a strangeness. In spite of the cynicism of the Understanding, he felt something that had been asleep for a long time and should not have been awakened begin to stir within himself. Desire was to be expected, for he had rarely been in the presence of so beautiful a woman. But the worm stirring in him lay deeper than desire.

“Don’t do this,” he warned himself. “To fall in love would break the treaty-nothing can come of it but trouble.” But the secret creature within him stretched and yawned, climbed out of its almost-forgotten cellar and rose toward the light. He began to smile a foolish smile whenever he thought of her, to visit her more often than was wise, and to lavish gifts on her. She wanted treasures from the U.S. diplomats’ store: American cheese in a tin, the new ridged American potato chips that looked like miniature plowed fields, 45 rpm recordings celebrating the joys of surfing and driving fast motorcars, and above all candy bars. Chocolates and sweets, which would be her downfall, entered her life in quantity for the first time. She also craved the women’s fashions of 1966, not the boring Jackie Kennedy pillbox-hat-and-pearls styles but the looks in the magazines she devoured, the Pocahontas headbands, the swirling orange-print shift dresses, the fringed leather jackets, the Mondrian squares of Saint Laurent, the hoop dresses, the space-age catsuits, the miniskirts, the vinyl, the gloves. She only wore these things in the privacy of the love nest, dressing up eagerly for her lover, giggling at her own daring, and allowing him to undress her as he pleased, to take his time, or to rip the clothes roughly off her body and leave them in shreds on the floor. Edgar Wood, given the task of acquiring and later dispensing these gifts in such a way as to avoid suspicion falling on the ambassador, fulfilled his duties with a growing hostility which Boonyi regally ignored. He got his revenge by insisting on being present to watch her take the daily contraceptive pills that had been Understood to be essential to the deal.

As a result of Max’s unexpected romantic infatuation-and also because Boonyi was every bit as attentive as promised-he failed to sense what she had silently been telling him from the beginning, what she assumed he knew to be a part of their hard-nosed agreement: Don’t ask for my heart, because I am tearing it out and breaking it into little bits and throwing it away so I will be heartless but you will not know it because I will be the perfect counterfeit of a loving woman and you will receive from me a perfect forgery of love.

So there were two unspoken clauses in the Understanding, one regarding the giving of love and the other concerning the withholding of it, codicils that were sharply at odds with each other and impossible to reconcile. The result was, as Max had foreseen, trouble; the biggest Indo-American diplomatic rumpus in history. But for a time the master forger was deceived by the forgery he had bought, both deceived and satisfied, as content to possess it as an art collector who discovers a masterpiece concealed in a mound of garbage, as happy to keep it hidden from view as a collector who can’t resist buying what he knows to be stolen property. And that was how it came about that a faithless wife from the village of the bhand pather began to influence, to complicate and even to shape, American diplomatic activity regarding the vexed matter of Kashmir.

Pachigam was a trap, she told herself every night, but the Muskadoon still scurried through her dreams, its cold swift mountain music singing in her ears. She was a girl from the mountains and the climate of the plains affected her badly. When it was summer in Delhi the air conditioners were invariably incapacitated by “load-shedding” power cuts at the hottest times of day. The heat was like a hammer, like a stone. Crushed beneath it, she collapsed onto her illicit bed of shame and thought of Chandanwari, of Manasbal and Shishnag, of flower-carpeted Gulmarg and the eternal snows above, of cool glaciers and bubbling springs and the high ice-temples of the gods. She heard the soft splash of a heart-shaped oar in the water of a mirror lake, the rustle of chinar leaves, the boatmen’s songs and the soft beating of wings, thrushes’ wings, mynah wings, the wings of bluetits and hoopoes, and the top-knotted bulbuls that looked like young girls who had put up their hair. When she closed her eyes she invariably saw her father, her husband, her companions, her appointed place on earth. Not her new lover but her old, lost life. My old life like a prison, she told herself savagely, but her heart called her a fool. She had it all upside down and backward, her heart scolded her. What she thought of as her former imprisonment had been freedom, while this so-called liberation was no more than a gilded cage.

She thought of Shalimar the clown and was horrified again by the ease with which she had abandoned him. When she left Pachigam none of her closest people guessed what she was doing, the dolts. None of them tried to save her from herself, and how could she forgive them for that? What idiots they all were! Her husband was super-idiot number one and her father was super-idiot number two and everyone else was pretty close behind. Even after Himal and Gonwati returned to Pachigam without her and the bad talk began, even then Shalimar the clown sent her trusting letters, letters haunted by the phantom of their murdered love. I reach out to you and touch you without touching you as on the riverbank in the old days. I know you are following your dream but that dream will always bring you back to me. If the Amrikan is of assistance well and good. People always talk lies but I know your heart is true. I sit with folded hands and await your loving return. She lay perspiring on her bed, held captive by the chains of her enslaving solitude, and tore the letters into smaller and smaller pieces. They were letters that humiliated both their author and their recipient, letters that had no business existing, that should never have been sent. Such thoughts should never have come into being, and would not have, were it not for the enfeebled mind of that man without honor whom it was her shame to have espoused.

The paper scraps fell from her enervated summer hand and floated like snowflakes to the bedroom floor, and indeed the messages they bore were as irrelevant to her new life as snow. What kind of husband was he anyway, this clown? Was he storming the capital in his wrath like a Muslim conqueror of old, a Tughlaq or Khilji at least if not a Mughal, or, like Lord Ram, was he at least sending the monkey-god Hanuman to find her before he launched his lethal attack on her abductor, the American Ravan? No, he was mooning over her picture and weeping into the waters of the stupid Muskadoon like an impotent goof, accepting his fate like a true Kashmiri coward, content to be trampled over by anyone who felt like doing a bit of trampling, a wrong-headed duffer who quarreled with his brother Anees who at least had the guts to take matters into his own hands and blow up a few useless things. He was behaving like the performing dog he was, a creature who imitated life to make people laugh but who had not the slightest understanding of how a man should live.

On the night she first lay with him, she remembered, he had menaced her lovingly, swearing to pursue her and take her life, hers and her children’s, if she ever did what she had just so callously done. What empty words men spoke when they had had their way with a woman. He was a weakling, a strutting turkey-cock, a fool. In his place she would have hunted herself down and murdered herself in a gutter, like a dog, so that the shame of it would outlive her.

The letters stopped. But still every night in her dreams he came to her, walking the high wire, jumping rope in the sky, bouncing on air as if it were a trampoline, playing leapfrog with his brothers along the high thin line, pretending to slip on an invisible banana skin, windmilling his arms, saving himself, regaining his balance, then slipping on a second imaginary banana skin and falling in a skillfully chaotic tumble all the way to the ground, a finale that always brought the house down. In her dreams she smiled at his genius but when she woke the smile withered and died.

In short, she could not get her cuckolded husband out of her mind, and because it was impossible to talk to her American lover about anything important she spoke heatedly of “Kashmir” instead. Whenever she said “Kashmir” she secretly meant her husband, and this ruse allowed her to declare her love for the man she had betrayed to the man with whom she had committed the act of treason. More and more often she spoke of her love for this encoded “Kashmir,” arousing no suspicion, even when her pronouns occasionally slipped, so that she referred to his mountains, his valleys, his gardens, his flowing streams, his flowers, his stags, his fish. Her American lover was obviously too stupid to crack the code, and attributed the pronoun slippage to her incomplete command of the language. However he, the ambassador, took careful note of her passion, and was plainly moved when she was at her angriest, when she castigated “Kashmir” for his cowardice, for his passivity in the face of the horrible crimes committed against him. “These crimes,” he asked, reclining on her pillows, caressing her naked back, kissing her exposed hip, pinching her nipple, “these would be actions of the Indian armed forces you’re talking about?” At that moment she decided that the term “Indian armed forces” would secretly refer to the ambassador himself, she would use the Indian presence in the valley as a surrogate for the American occupation of her body, so, “Yes, that’s it,” she cried, “the ‘Indian armed forces,’ raping and pillaging. How can you not know it? How can you not comprehend the humiliation of it, the shame of having your boots march all over my private fields?” Again, those telltale slips of the tongue. Your boots, my fields. Again, distracted by her inflamed beauty, he paid no attention to the errors. “Yes, dearest,” he said in a muffled voice from between her thighs, “I believe I do begin to understand, but would it be possible to table the subject for the moment?”

Time passed. Max Ophuls knew that Boonyi Noman did not love him but at first he shut the knowledge away, blinding himself to its consequences, because she had taken up temporary residence in a tender corner of his heart. He knew she hid a great deal of herself from him, exposing only her body, like a true courtesan, like any common whore, but he agreed with himself to forget this, deceiving himself into believing that she reciprocated what he was pleased to call his love. And he allowed her diatribes on the “occupation” of “Kashmir” to affect his thinking, never suspecting that she was secretly railing against himself and against the ineffectual husband who had failed to come to her rescue. He began to object, in private session and in public speeches, to the militarization of the Kashmir valley, and when the word oppressors passed his lips for the first time the bubble of his popularity finally burst.

Newspaper editorials lambasted him. Here, they said, here beneath all the phony Indiaphile posturing, was just another cheap “cigarette” (this was a slang term meaning a Pak-American, an American with Pakistani sympathies, a play on the name of the Pak-American Tobacco Company), just another uncomprehending gringo. America was trampling over southeast Asia, Vietnamese children’s bodies were burning with unquenchable napalm fire, and yet the American ambassador had the gall to speak of oppression. “America should put its own house in order,” thundered India’s editorial writers, “and stop telling us how to take care of our own land.” It was at this point that Edgar Wood, correctly identifying the source of the ambassador’s problems, decided that Boonyi Noman had to go.

Observe him, this unctuous rodent, this Eager Beaver Wood, this invisible, scurrying oiler of wheels, this subterranean enabler of the visible, this lizard person, this snake at the mountain’s root! A pimp of this ilk, a pander of this water would seem to be ill equipped for the burdensome work of moral disapproval. It is not easy to look down on others when one’s own position lacks elevation. Yet the feat was achieved by the ever-resourceful and duplicitous Wood, who proceeded entirely by inversions. The child of a Bostonian prelate (and therefore a Brahmin of sorts himself), he had turned away from religion at an early age. Having rejected religious observance, he nevertheless continued to harbor a secret love of sanctimony and pomp. Being covertly pompous and sanctimonious, he affected humility and open-minded tolerance. Being humble, he concealed within himself an overweening pride. Being prideful, he offered himself to Max Ophuls as a selfless devotee, an effacer of his own needs, a do-everything, see-nothing man without qualities, a servitor, a low footstool for his high master’s shoe. Thus, though low-natured, he was still able to consider himself high-minded. See him now, coursing through the streets of the Indian capital in a little phut-phut scooter-rickshaw, his white kurta flapping in the wind. Behold the simple chappals on his feet. See him arrive at his residential quarters, and note, if you please, the Indian artworks and memorabilia therein, the Madhubani painting, the Warli tribal art, the miniatures of the Kashmiri and Company schools. Is this not the very picture of a Westerner gone native? Yet this same Wood was privately convinced of the innate superiority of the West, and filled with a shadowy contempt for the nation whose style he sought so assiduously to ape. He was tormented, we may grant him that. Such tergiversations of the soul, such twists in the psyche, such tortuous contradictions between the apparent and the actual, would certainly be painful, we may concede, to endure.

Such a coiled and doubled man-serpent would have been too formidable an adversary for a heavily compromised and largely defenseless young woman in any case, but the truth was that she made his task much easier than he expected; and so, finally, did Max. Things in Delhi had not gone as Boonyi Kaul Noman would have wished. Pink, in her two small lonely rooms, rapidly became the color of her isolation and self-loathing. The blue-white of the neon strip-lighting became the color of judgment, a harsh contemptuous glare that erased shadows and left her no place to hide. And as for the sage-green color of her dance guru’s apartment walls, well, that became the color of her failure. The Odissi master Pandit Mudgal had been scornful of her from the first. He was the guru of Sonal Karnaa and Kumkum Segal! He had taught Alarmel Mansingh! He was the master of Kiran Qunango! No man had done more than he to popularize the Odissi dance form! Where would they all be without him-Aloka Panigrahi, Sanjukta Sarukkai, Protima Mahapatra, Madhavi Mohanty? And now in his mottled old age came this raw, lazy village girl, this kept woman, this nothing. She was a rich American’s toy, and he despised her for that; somewhat he despised himself for taking the Yankee dollars and becoming party to the arrangement, and this, too, he held against her. The lessons had gone badly from the start; nor had there been much subsequent improvement. At length Pandit Mudgal, a thickset man with the physiognomy-and all the sensuality-of an outsized eggplant, told her, “Yes, madam, sex appeal you have, that we can all see. You move and men watch you. That is only one thing. Great mastery requires a great soul and your soul, madam, is damned.” She fled weeping from his sight and the next day the ambassador sent Edgar Wood to tell Mudgal that his salary would be increased-doubled!-if he persevered. Like Charles Foster Kane trying to make a singer out of his discordant wife, Max Ophuls tried to buy what could not be bought, and failed. Jayababu, once long, lean and beautiful and now a dark brinjal of a man, an ill-tempered eggplant, refused the cash.

“I am a man for a challenge,” he told Edgar Wood. “But this girl is not for me. Hers is not the high calling, but the low.”

Max’s attention began to wander after that, though for a long time he refused to acknowledge the change in himself. He stayed away from Boonyi for longer periods. Once or twice he dined privately with his wife. Peggy Ophuls was annoyed with herself for feeling so pleased. She was legendary for her toughness but with him she was always weak. How easily she came back to him, how pathetically she opened her arms and let him slink shamefacedly home! He murmured something about the old days, about the Pat Line or the Lyons Corner House, and at once floods of repressed emotion surged through her body. He did his imitation of the vocal style of Mrs. Shanti Dickens of Porchester Terrace as she relished the day’s crime reports-“Wery wery hawful, sir, hisn’t it? Maybe ’e is heatin’ ’er for ’is tea!”-and tears of laughter stood in the Grey Rat’s eyes. This time had been the hardest of all for her. She had lost him for so long that she had feared she would never get him back. But here he was, coming round to face her again. This was what they had, she told herself, this inevitability. They were built to last. She raised a glass to him and a smile trembled at the corners of her mouth. I am the most deluded woman in the world, she thought. But look at him, here he is. My man.

None of Max Ophuls’s amours ever lasted very long before he came to India. Boonyi had been different. This was “love,” and the nature of love was-was it not?-to endure. Or was that just one of the mistakes people made about love, Max got to wondering. Was he clothing an essentially savage, irrational thing in the garb of civilization, dolling it up in the dress shirt of endurance, the silk trousers of constancy, the frock coat of solicitude and the top hat of selflessness? Like Tarzan the ape man when he came to London or New York: the natural rendered unnatural. But under all the fancy apparel the untamable, unkind reality still remained, a feral thing more gorilla-like than human. Something having less to do with sweetness and tenderness and caring and more to do with spoor and territory and grooming and domination and sex. Something provisional, no matter what sort of treaties you acceded to, signed marriage contracts or private statements of accord.

When he began to speak in this way the matador Edgar Wood understood that the bull was tiring, and sent in the picadors, or, to be precise, the picadoras. The beauties he aimed at Max were carefully selected from the upper echelons of Delhi and Bombay society to make Boonyi look bad. They were wealthy, cultured, accomplished, extraordinary women. They circled him from a distance, then moved closer in. The lances of their flirtatious regard, their graceful motion, their touch, speared him time and time again. He fell to his knees. He was almost ready for the sword.

So perhaps it was her failure to be exceptional as well as beautiful that damned Boonyi, or perhaps it was just the passage of time. Shut away in her pink shame, sometimes for days on end (for the ambassador was an increasingly busy man), with only the opprobrium of her dance master for company, she slid downwards toward ruin, slowly at first and then with gathering speed. The excess of Delhi deranged her, its surfeit of muchness, its fecal odors, its hellish noise, its anonymity, its uncaring crowd of the desperate fighting to survive. She became addicted to chewing tobacco, keeping a little cud of it nestled between her lower molars and her cheek. To pass the empty time she frequently fell ill in a languid, faux-consumptive way, and (more truthfully) suffered often from stress, depression, hypertension, stomach trouble and all the other hysteric ailments, and so as the slow months passed she began to learn about medication, about the capacity of tablets and capsules and potions to make the world seem other than it was, faster, slower, more exciting, calmer, happier, more peaceful, kinder, wilder, better. Pandit Mudgal’s thirteen-year-old hamal, the household boy whom the dance teacher periodically bedded in an offhand, seigneurial manner, led Boonyi deeper into the psychotropical jungle, teaching her about afim: opium. After that she curled herself into the metamorphic smoke whenever she could, and dreamed thickly of lost joy while time, cruelly, continued to pass.

But her narcotic of choice turned out to be food. At a certain point early in the second year of her liberated captivity, she began, with great seriousness and a capacity for excess learned from the devil-city itself, to eat. If her world would not expand, her body could. She took to gluttony with the same bottomless enthusiasm she had once had for sex, diverting the immense force of her erotic requirements from her bed to her table. She ate seven times a day, guzzling down a proper breakfast, then a midmorning plate, then a full luncheon, then a midafternoon array of sweet delicacies, then a hearty dinner, then a second dinner at bedtime, and finally a fridge-raiding gobble in the small hours before dawn. Yes, she was a whore, she admitted to herself with a twist of the heart, but she would at least be an extremely well-fed one.

Of all this her keeper Edgar Wood was fully aware, and in all of it he was wholly complicit. If she was setting out down the road to self-destruction (he reasoned), who was he to prevent her? It saved him the difficulty of steering her down exactly such a path. Without a word to his master he brought her the chewing tobacco that was ruining her smile, filled her little bathroom cabinet with pills to pop, clouded her mind with opium, and above all arranged for food to be cooked and delivered, food by the basketful, the trolleyful, delivered by unmarked car or by a dependable tiffin-runner pushing a laden two-wheeled wooden cart. All this he did with a sober grace that entirely deceived her. She had never trusted him until now, but his immaculate courtesy and her growing list of addictions forged a kind of trust, or at least pushed her to set the issue of his trustworthiness to one side. Pragmatism ruled; he was the only one who could satisfy her now. In a sense, he had become her lover, supplanting the ambassador. He was the one who gave her what she needed.

Edgar Wood himself was far too proper to make any such suggestion. He was simply there to be of assistance, he assured Boonyi. Nothing was too good for the woman the ambassador had chosen to love. She had only to ask. And ask she did. It was as if the nostalgic memory of the Kashmiri “super-wazwaan,” the Banquet of Sixty Courses Maximum, had possessed her and driven her insane. Once she understood that Edgar was prepared to satisfy her every whim she grew increasingly promiscuous and peremptory in her gourmandizing. She sent for Kashmiri food, of course, but also for the tandoori and Mughlai cuisines of north India, the boti kababs, the murgh makhani, and for the fish dishes of the Malabar coast, for the masala dosas of Madras and the fabled early pumpkins of the coast of Coromandel, for the hot pickle curries of Hyderabad, for kulfi and barfi and pista-ki-lauz, and for sweet Bengali sandesh. Her appetite had grown to subcontinental size. It crossed all frontiers of language and custom. She was vegetarian and nonvegetarian, fish- and meat-eating, Hindu, Christian and Muslim, a democratic, secularist omnivore.

Elsewhere in the world it was the summer of love.

Inevitably her beauty dimmed. Her hair lost its luster, her skin coarsened, her teeth rotted, her body odor soured, and her bulk-ah! her bulk-increased steadily, week by week, day by day, almost hour by hour. Her head rattled with pills, her lungs were full of poppies. Soon the pretense of lessons was dropped. The general education she had requested as part of her deal with the ambassador had ceased long ago; she had always been too lazy to be a good student, even in Pachigam. Now the dancing also fell away. Pandit Mudgal stayed downstairs with his young hamal, and Boonyi lived above him in a perpetual daze, with her head in a chemical spin and her belly full of food. Edgar Wood, her candyman, allowed himself to wonder idly if her astonishingly self-destructive behavior might be a deliberate suicide attempt, but quite frankly he wasn’t interested enough in her interior life to pursue the thought. What interested him more was the durability of the ambassador’s feeling for her. Max went on visiting her for a considerable time after she had passed what Edgar Wood privately called the point of revoltingness. It must be like sleeping not only on but with a stinking foam mattress, he thought with a fastidious shudder: yeuchh. According to Mudgal’s boy, a voyeuristic youth whom Wood was paying for information, the ambassador liked the Kashmiri woman’s use during lovemaking of her teeth and clawlike nails. Like many others, Edgar Wood had read Max Ophuls’s unusually frank account of his wartime exploits. How strange, he thought, that the famous anti-Nazi should still be aroused by his memory of the sexual preferences of the fascist Ursula Brandt, the Panther, whom he had fucked for the Cause. How very strange that a bloated Kashmiri woman should close that sexual circle, so that he went on needing her services long after she had ceased to be attractive. In the end, however, the break was made; the ambassador stopped visiting Boonyi. “It’s impossible,” he told Edgar Wood. “See that she is taken care of, the poor wretch. What a wreck she has made of herself.”

When the man of power withdraws his protection from a concubine, she becomes like a child abandoned in wolf-infested hills. Mowgli’s adoption by the Seeonee pack is untypical; this is not the way such stories usually develop. Boonyi Noman, prostrate on her groaning bed, gasping beneath the weight of her own body, saw Edgar Wood enter her quarters like a predator, without the civility of a knock or a word of greeting and with murder in his eyes, and understood that the crisis was upon her. It was time to tell him her secret.

Edgar Wood heard the news of her pregnancy and accepted that he had been outwitted by a master. He had come to terminate the Understanding, to give Boonyi a final cash payment, a ticket to oblivion and a warning of the dangers of future indiscretion, and he came to her in an ugly way because it was an ugly duty he had to perform, because the man whose ugly deed this was didn’t have the decency to come here himself. But before he could deliver his message of ugliness she played her trump. He had brought her a contraceptive pill every day without fail and had watched her place it in her mouth, take a gulp of water and swallow, but plainly she had fooled him, she had tongued the pills to one side, concealing them beneath those ever-present wads of chewing tobacco, and now she was carrying the ambassador’s child, and she was many months pregnant. She had grown so obese that the pregnancy had been invisible, it lay hidden somewhere inside her fat, and it was too late to think about an abortion, she was too far advanced and the risks were too great. “Congratulations,” said Edgar Wood. “We underestimated you.” “I want to see him,” Boonyi answered. “Tell him to come at once.”

In one version of the story of the dancing girl Anarkali, the Emperor Akbar himself spoke to the young beauty and persuaded her that Prince Salim’s love affair with her must end, that she must trick him into believing she no longer loved him so that he could go away from her and return to the path of destiny that would lead him eventually to the throne; and, just as in La Traviata, just like Violetta giving up Alfredo after the visit from his father Germont, she agreed. But Boonyi was no longer Anarkali, she had lost her beauty and could no longer dance, and the ambassador was nobody’s son but the man of power himself. And Anarkali didn’t get pregnant. Stories were stories and real life was real life, naked, ugly, and finally impossible to cosmeticize in the greasepaint of a tale. Max Ophuls came to Boonyi’s pink bedroom that night. He stood before her bed in the dark, leaning forward slightly and clutching at his straw hat’s brim with both his trembling hands. The sight of her ballooning, cetacean body still had the power to shock him. What lay within it, what was growing daily in her womb, was even more of a shock. His child was taking shape in there. It would be his firstborn child. “What do you want,” he asked in a low voice, while dark thoughts and wild emotions rioted in his inner squares and streets.

“I want to tell you what I think of you,” she said.

Her English had improved and he had learned her language too. At their closest they had sometimes forgotten which language they were speaking; the two tongues blurred into one. As they drifted apart so did their speech. Now she spoke her own language and he spoke his. Each understood the other well enough. He had known there would be abuse and there was abuse. There were empty threats and accusations of betrayal. All this he comprehended. Look at me, she was saying. I am your handiwork made flesh. You took beauty and created hideousness, and out of this monstrosity your child will be born. Look at me. I am the meaning of your deeds. I am the meaning of your so-called love, your destructive, selfish, wanton love. Look at me. Your love looks just like hatred. I never spoke of love, she was saying. I was honest and you have turned me into your lie. This is not me. This is not me. This is you.

And then came another, older line of attack. I should have known, she was saying. I should have known better than to lie with a Jew. The Jews are our enemy and I should have known.

The past reared up. Briefly he saw again the army of the Jewish fallen. He set the memory aside. The wheel had turned. In this moment of his story he was not the victim. In this moment she, not he, had the right to claim kinship with the lost. At least I never spoke of love, she was saying. I kept my love for my husband though my body served you, Jew. Look what you have made of the body I gave you. But my heart is still my own.

“You never loved me, then,” he said, hanging his head, when she had finished. He sounded ridiculously false and hypocritical even to himself. She was laughing at him, viciously. Does a rat love the snake that gobbles it up, she was asking. He winced at the sharpness of her tongue, at the violence welling up in her. “You will be well looked after. Everything you need,” he said, and turned to go. In the doorway he paused. “I once loved a Rat,” he said. “Maybe you were the snake that ate her.”

The scandal broke a week later. A baby changed things. A pregnancy could not be winked at. Max Ophuls never found out who leaked the information to the papers-Boonyi herself, or the eggplant dancing master downstairs, or his young catamite, or one of the group of drivers and security guards handpicked for their alleged discretion by Edgar Wood, or even Wood himself, Wood washing his hands after many years of his master’s grubby work-but within days of Max’s last meeting with Boonyi, every journalist in the city had the story.

It was not the biggest story of the period, but it fed naturally into those stories. The working committee of the national conference of Jammu and Kashmir had unanimously passed a resolution calling for a permanent merger of the state with India. Indira Gandhi had asked for and been given powers to outlaw groups that questioned Indian sovereignty over the valley. A Kashmiri girl ruined and destroyed by a powerful American gave the Indian government an opportunity to look like it would stand up and defend Kashmiris against marauders of all types-to defend the honor of Kashmir as stoutly as it would defend that of any other integral part of India. Nothing less than Max’s head on a plate would do. His friend Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan had retired from the presidency; the new president, Zakir Hussain, was making angry statements in private about the godless American’s exploitation of an innocent Hindu girl. Nobody had said the words sexual assault yet but Max knew they could not be far from people’s lips. He was no longer the well-beloved lover of India, but her heartless ravisher. And Indira Gandhi was out for blood.

The Vietnam War was at its height and so was American unpopularity in Asia. Draft cards were burned in Central Park and Martin Luther King led a protest march to the United Nations and in India the goddamn American ambassador was apparently fucking the local peasantry. So war-torn America turned on Max as well, his alleged oppression of Boonyi becoming a sort of allegory of Vietnam. Norman Mailer wrote about Boonyi and Max as if she were the countryside near Saigon and he was Operation Cedar Falls. Joan Baez made up a song about them. These interventions were not sympathetic to Max Ophuls. It was as if his previous selves were erased overnight-the Resistance hero, the bestselling author, the economic genius, the famous lover of his equally heroic wife, and the Flying Jew-and standing in their place was this Bluebeard-like ogre, this sexual predator who was fit for nothing but gelding. Tarring and feathering were too good for the likes of him. Che Guevara was killed around then, and that was just about the only thing that happened that wasn’t laid at Max’s door.

Back then there were no “media sieges” in the modern sense. All-India Radio sent a radio reporter to stand uncertainly outside the sage-green apartment building at Type-1 Number-22 Southeast Hira Bagh, holding out his microphone as if it were a begging bowl. Doordarshan, in those days the only television channel, sent a cameraman and sound recordist. The text of what they were permitted to say in commentary would no doubt be handed down later from the prime minister’s office, so there was no need to send a journalist. There was a man from the PTI news agency and two or three other men from the print media. They saw Odissi dancing divas come and go, and Jayababu’s boy running errands. The anonymous occupants of other apartments in the same building had seen nothing, knew nothing, shied away from the cameras and microphones as if from danger, and fled. Just once the great Jayababu himself sallied forth to scold the press for making too much noise and disturbing his dance class, whereupon the abashed reporters at once commenced to speak in whispers. Of the principal actors in the drama there was no sign. At mealtimes the watchers dispersed to seek refreshment, and they soon lost interest in staying at their posts. Delhi in winter was cold as a ghost and in the mornings and evenings the fog came down and pushed its clammy hands through your skin and froze your bones. There was no need for anyone to stay. The news was being constructed elsewhere. The American ambassador was being withdrawn in disgrace. The U.S. embassy was the place to be. Hira Bagh was just a gossipy footnote. In the winter mist it looked like a phantom world.

One fog-white night, at about three o’clock in the morning, long after the gentlemen of the press had departed, a hooded figure arrived at Boonyi’s pink apartment. When the pregnant woman beached on her bed like a stranded sea-monster heard the key turning in her front door she assumed it was Edgar Wood making his nocturnal food run. These days he only visited her in the middle of the night, arriving out of breath, burdened by huge amounts of edibles. She had no sympathy for him. He was a necessary side effect of a sick life, like vomit. “I’m hungry,” she called out. “You’re late.” He came into the bedroom wincing as if he were a schoolboy in a bully’s armlock, a child whose ear was being twisted by a disciplinarian aunt. The hooded figure followed him into the room, unveiled herself, and looked Boonyi over with a brisk, nannyish sympathy. “Oh, dear me,” she said. “Dear me, what a dreadful… ha! Can you believe it, my dear, I almost envied-haha!-oh, leave it.-But there’s this. I almost forgave him. Can you believe that?-Extraordinary.-But I almost did, in spite of everything. In spite, my dear, of you.-But look at you. No discipline. We can’t have this.-Hmm.-Edgar, you vile sticky creature, have you made the arrangements?-Well, of course you have, it’s what you do.-It’s what he does, dear. Yes, you loathe him too, of course you do, everyone does.-Harrumph.-We’re going to get you away from here, my dear.-You’ll be needing care. We’ll see you through.-Oh, I see. You misunderstand me.-No, my husband did not send me here. He has left the country. He has left the diplomatic service. However, let me be plain, he has not left me. It is I who have left him.-You follow?-Hmm?-Left him after everything and in spite of everything and at the end of it all.-Oh, let it go.-The point is to get you somewhere else. No more prying eyes and a spot of good medical care.-Hmm?-How far gone are you? Seven months?-More? Eight? Aha. Eight. Good. Won’t be long, then. Oh, get on with it, Edgar, for Christ’s sake.-Edgar’s been sacked too, dear, I thought you’d like to know. I’ll make sure this little shit never works for his country again, I promise you that.-Tonight’s your last hurrah, isn’t it, Edgar? Outlived your blasted usefulness, I’d say.-Poor Edgar. What will you do?-Ha!-No, on reflection, I don’t think we’re going to worry about you, are we, dear?-No.-Well then, Edgar: where’s the bally van?”

“Around the corner.” Thus Edgar Wood through gritted teeth. “But I warned you she might be too big to fit through the door.” Margaret Rhodes Ophuls whirled to face him, shriveling him in the dragon-fire of her gaze. “Quite right, Edgar,” she said, sweetly. “So you did. Run along then, and fetch the bloody sledgehammer.”

Boonyi gave birth to a baby daughter in a clean, simple bedroom in Father Joseph Ambrose’s Holy Love of India Evangalactic Girls’ Orphanage for Disabled & Destitute Street Girls, located at 77-A, Ward-5, Mehrauli, an institution that had benefited greatly from the ex-ambassador’s wife’s fund-raising skills and personal largesse. In spite of everyone at the Evangalactic Orphanage’s affection and admiration for Peggy-Mata, the new resident she had foisted on them was not initially popular. Every detail of Boonyi’s story somehow became common knowledge at the orphanage almost at once. There were girls at the Evangalactic who had been rescued from the whorehouses of Old Delhi at the age of nine, and these children gathered outside Boonyi’s door and conversed in loud, impolite voices about the fallen rich man’s tart who had actually chosen the demeaning life from which they had managed to escape. There were girls who looked like giant spiders because of spinal problems that obliged them to walk on all fours, and they joined the former child prostitutes to jeer at this new type of cripple, who had rendered herself almost immobile through sheer gluttony. There were country girls who had fled to the big city from the dirty old men to whom they had been betrothed-or, rather, sold into betrothal-and these girls, too, added to the crowd at Boonyi’s door to express their disbelief that a woman should leave a good man who had truly loved her.

Things were on the brink of getting out of hand, until Father Ambrose, nudged by Peggy Ophuls, addressed the girls and shamed them into something like compassion. “The holy love of India brought all of you to the harbor of this safe place,” Father Ambrose, a young but charismatic Catholic priest who had grown up in a Keralan fishing village and was accordingly fond of maritime metaphors, rebuked his charges. “God’s love cast out its nets for you upon the filthy seas in which you swam. God caught up your souls from the black water and revealed your shining light. Show me, then, that you, too, can be fishers of the spirit. Cast out the nets of your compassion and bring back to a safe place this new soul crying out for your love.”

After Father Ambrose’s little speech Peggy Ophuls was able to find a few willing helpers, not only a doctor and a midwife but also girls to cook for Boonyi, and to wash her and oil her and comb her tangled hair. Mrs. Ophuls made no attempt to limit the damaged woman’s food intake. “Let’s have the child out safely,” she told Father Ambrose and the orphans (who muttered sullenly, but made no objection). “Then we can think about the mother.”

In due course the baby was born. Boonyi, cradling her daughter, named her Kashmira. “Do you hear me?” she whispered into the little girl’s ear. “Your name is Kashmira Noman, and I’m going to take you home.”

This was when Peggy Ophuls’s face hardened and she revealed her darker purpose, unveiling the secret she had kept hidden until this moment beneath the cloak of her apparently boundless altruism. “Young lady,” she said, “it’s time to face facts. You want to go home, you say?” Yes, replied Boonyi, it is the only thing I now want in the world. “Hmm,” said Peggy Ophuls. “Home to that husband of yours in Pachigam. The one who never came for you. The one who stopped writing. The clown.” Boonyi’s eyes filled with tears. “Yes, my dear, I make it my business to know-Ha! I see!-That’s the chap you’re going back to with another man’s baby in your arms?-Mmm?-And you imagine that’s the chap who will give this little girl his name-Kashmira Noman-and take her for his own, and then it’s off into the sunset for a spot of happily ever after?” The tears were streaming down Boonyi’s face. “That’s a nonstarter, my dear,” said Peggy Ophuls unsentimentally, moving in for the kill. “Noman, indeed!-That’s not her name. And what did you say? Kashmira? No, no, darling. That can’t be her future.” Something new in the tone of her voice made Boonyi dry her tears.

“Tell you what, though,” added Peggy Ophuls, as if the idea had just occurred to her. “Here’s a bit of a plan.-Are you listening? You’d do well to listen.” Boonyi was paying attention now. “It’s winter,” said Peggy Ophuls. “The road over the Pir Panjal is closed. No way into the valley by land.-No matter.-I can give you what you want. I can get an aircraft to fly you in. You’re probably more than one seat wide. That can be taken into account.-You don’t have to worry about nursing the child. I have a wet nurse standing by.-You can probably travel in, what, a week? Let’s say a week. I can have a comfortable vehicle waiting for you at the other end to drive you back to Pachigam in style. How does that sound?-Hmm?-Sounds good, I expect. Ha! Of course it does.”

Boonyi’s tears had dried. “Please, I do not understand,” she said at last. “What is the need for a wet nurse?” As the words left her lips she saw the answer to the question in her benefactress’s eyes.

“Do you know the tale of Rumplestiltskin?” asked Peggy Ophuls, dreamily. “No, of course you don’t.-Well, in brief.-Once upon a time there was a miller’s daughter who was told by one of those whimsical fairy-tale kings, If you have not spun this straw into gold by tomorrow morning, you must die.-You know the type of fellow I mean, dear.-They’ll screw you or chop off your head, those killer princes, love and death being the same sort of thing to them. They’ll screw you and chop off your head. They’ll screw you while your head is being chopped off… -Sorry. As I was saying.-In the middle of the night, while she sat helpless and weeping, locked away in a castle tower, there was a knock at the door, and in came a little manikin, who asked, What will you give me if I do it for you? And he did it, you know, three nights running he spun the straw into gold, and the miller’s daughter lived, and of course she married the whimsical king, and had a child. Silly woman! To marry the man who would have killed her as easily as blinking.-Well!-Scheherazade married her murderous Shahryar, too.-Can’t beat women for stupidity, what?-Take me, for example. I married my whimsical prince as well, the murderer of my love.-But you know all about him, of course, I’m so sorry.-So, where was I.-Yes. In conclusion.-One night the little manikin came back. You know what I came for, he said. Rumplestiltskin was his name.”

They were alone in the room; alone with their desperate needs. The silence was terrible: a dark, hopeless hush of inevitability. But the look on Margaret Rhodes Ophuls’s face was worse, at once savage and happy. “Ophuls,” said Peggy-Mata. “That’s her father’s name. And India’s a nice name, a name containing, as it does, the truth. The question of origins is one of the two great questions. India Ophuls is an answer. To the second great question, the question of ethics, she’ll have to find answers of her own.”

“No,” said Boonyi, shouting. “I won’t do it.” Peggy Ophuls put a hand on the young mother’s head. “You get what you want,” she said. “You live, and go home. But there are two of us here, my dear.-Don’t you see?-Two of us to satisfy. Yes. You know, the night before I came to India I dreamed I would not leave without a child to call my own. I dreamed I was holding a little baby girl and singing her a song I’d made up specially.-And then all this time with all these children I’ve wondered when my child would come.-You understand, I’m sure.-One wants the world to be what it is not.-One clings to hope. Then finally one faces up.-Let’s look at the world as it is, shall we?-I can’t have a baby. That’s clear. More than one reason now. Biology and divorce.-And you?-You can’t keep this little girl. She will drag you down and she will be the death of you and that will be the death of her.-You follow?-Whereas with me she can live like a queen.”

“No,” said Boonyi, dully, hugging her daughter. “No, no, no.”

“I’m so glad,” said Peggy Ophuls. “Hmm?-Yes. Really!-Couldn’t be more delighted. I knew you’d be sensible once it was all properly explained.” As she left the room she was humming the dream-song to herself. Ratetta, sweet Ratetta, she sang, who could be better than you?

Here is ex-ambassador Maximilian Ophuls, falling, for the time being, out of history. Here he is in disgrace, plunging down through the turbulent waters of 1968, past the Prague Spring and the Magical Mystery Tour and the Tet Offensive and the Paris événements and the My Lai massacre and the dead bodies of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy, past Grosvenor Square and Baader-Meinhof and Mrs. Robinson and O. J. Simpson and Nixon. The swollen ocean of events, mighty and heartless, closes over Max as it always does over losers. Here is drowned Max, the invisible man. Underground Max, trapped in a subterranean Edgar Wood world, a world of the disregarded, of lizard people and snake people, of busted hustlers and discarded lovers and lost leaders and dashed hopes. Here is Max wandering among the high heaps of the bodies of the rejected, the mountain ranges of defeat. But even in this, his newfound invisibility, he is ahead of his time, because in this occult soil the seeds of the future are being planted, and the time of the invisible world will come, the time of the altered dialectic, the time of the dialectic gone underground, when anonymous spectral armies will fight in secret over the fate of the earth. A good man is never discarded for long. A use is always found for such a man. Invisible Max will find a new use. He will be one of the makers of this new age, too, until old age at last rings down the curtain, and Death comes to his door in the form of a handsome man, a Mercader, an Udham Singh, Death asking him, in the name of the woman they once both loved, for work.