Professor Solanka apologized to his wife for his distractedness, whereupon she wept, a loud honking noise that squeezed at his heart, for he was by no means a heartless man. He waited silently for her to stop. When she did, he spoke in his most mandarin manner, denying himself—denying her—the slightest hint of emotion. “I accept that what I have done must feel inexplicable to you. I am remembering, however, what you yourself taught me about the importance of the inexplicable”—here she hung up on him, but he finished the sentence anyway—“in, ah, Shakespeare.” Which unheard conclusion conjured up the vision of his wife in the nude, of Eleanor Masters fifteen years ago in her long-haired, twenty-five-year-old glory lying naked with her head in his lap and a battered Complete Works, bound in blue leather, face down across her bush. Such had been the indecorous but sweetly swift conclusion of that first dinner. He had brought the wine, three expensive bottles of Tignanello Antinori (three! Evidence of a seducer’s excessiveness there), while she had roasted a lamb shank for him and also served, to accompany the cumin-scented meat, a salad of fresh flowers. She wore a short black dress and walked lightly, and barefoot, through a flat much influenced by Bloomsbury Group design and craft-work, and boasting a caged parrot who imitated her laugh: a big laugh for so delicate a woman. His first and last blind date, she turned out to be fully the equal of her voice; not only beautiful but smart, somehow both confident and vulnerable, and a great cook. After eating many nasturtiums and drinking copiously of his Tuscan red, she began to explain her doctoral thesis (they were sitting on the floor of her living room by now, lounging on a handmade rug woven by Cressida Bell), but kisses interrupted her, for Professor Solanka had fallen tenderly, like a lamb, in love. They would happily argue, during their long good years, about which of them had made the first move, she always hotly (but with bright eyes) denying that she could ever have been so forward, he insisting—while knowing it to be untrue—that she had “thrown herself at him.”
“Do you want to hear this stuff or not?” Yes, he’d nodded, his hand caressing one small, finely wrought breast. She put her hand over his and launched into her argument. Her proposition was that at the heart of each of the great tragedies were unanswerable questions about love, and, to make sense of the plays, we must each attempt to explicate these inexplicables in our own way. Why did Hamlet, loving his dead father, interminably delay his revenge while, loved by Ophelia, he destroyed her instead? Why did Lear, loving Cordelia best of his daughters, fail to hear the love in her opening-scene honesty and so fall prey to her sisters’ unlovingness; and why was Macbeth, a man’s man who loved his king and country, so easily led by the erotic but loveless Lady M. toward an evil throne of blood? Professor Solanka in New York, still absently holding the cordless telephone in his hand, recalled with awe naked Eleanor’s erect nipple beneath his moving fingers; also her extraordinary answer to the problem of Othello, which for her was not the “motiveless malignity” of Iago but rather the Moor’s lack of emotional intelligence, “Othello’s incredible stupidity about love, the moronic scale of the jealousy which leads him to murder his allegedly beloved wife on the flimsiest of evidence.” This was Eleanor’s solution: “Othello doesn’t love Desdemona. The idea just popped into my head one day. A real lightbulb moment for me. He says he does, but it can’t be true. Because if he loves her, the murder makes no sense. For me, Desdemona is Othello’s trophy wife, his most valuable and status-giving possession, the physical proof of his risen standing in a white man’s world. You see? He loves that about her, but not her. Othello himself, obviously, is not a black man but a ‘Moor’: an Arab, a Muslim, his name probably a Latinization of the Arabic or Ataullah. So he’s not a creature of the Christian world of sin and redemption but rather of the Islamic moral universe, whose polarities are honor and shame. Desdemona’s death is an ‘honor killing.’ She didn’t have to be guilty. The accusation was enough. The attack on her virtue was incompatible with Othello’s honor. That’s why he didn’t listen to her, or give her the benefit of the doubt, or forgive her, or do anything a man who loved a woman might have done. Othello loves only himself, himself as lover and leader, what Racine, a more inflated writer, would have called his flamme, his gloire. She’s not even a person to him. He has reified her. She’s his Oscar-Barbie statuette. His doll. At least that’s what I argued, and they gave me the doctorate, perhaps just as a prize for brazenness, for my sheer gall.” She took a big gulp of the Tignanello, then arched her back and put both arms around his neck and pulled him down to her. Tragedy vanished from their thoughts.
These many years later, Professor Solanka stood under a hot shower, warming himself after his soaked ramble with the calypso revelers and feeling like a pompous dope. To quote Eleanor’s thesis against her was a cruelty he might easily have spared her. What was he thinking of, giving himself and his paltry actions these high Shakespearean airs? Did he truly dare to set himself beside the Moor of Venice and King Lear, to liken his humble mysteries to theirs? Such vanity was surely a more than adequate ground for divorce. He should call her back and tell her that, by way of apology. But that, too, would strike the wrong note. Eleanor didn’t want a divorce. Even now, she wanted him back. “You know perfectly well,” she had told him more than once, “that if you decided to give this up, this stupidity of yours, everything would be fine. It would be so fine. I can’t bear it that you won’t.”
And this was the wife he had left! If she had a failing, it was that she didn’t give blow jobs. (His own eccentricity was that he hated having the top of his head touched during the act of love.) If she had a failing, it was that she had so acute a sense of smell that she made him feel as if he stank the place up. (As a result, however, he had begun to wash more often.) If she had a failing, it was that she bought things without ever asking what they cost, an extraordinary trait in a woman who did not, as the British say, come from money. If she had a failing, it was that she had grown accustomed to being kept, and could spend more money on Christmas than half the population earned in a year. If she had a failing, it was that her mother-love blinded her to the rest of humanity’s desires, including, to be blunt, Professor Solanka’s. If she had a failing, it was that she wanted more children. That she wanted nothing else. Not all the gold of Araby.
No, she was faultless: the tenderest, most attentive of lovers, the most extraordinary mother, charismatic and imaginative, the easiest and most rewarding of companions, not a big talker but a good one (reference that first phone call), and a connoisseur not just of food and drink but of human character, too. To be smiled on by Eleanor Masters Solanka was to feel subtly, pleasingly complimented. Her friendship was a pat on the back. And if she spent freely, what of it? The Solankas were unexpectedly well-off, thanks to the almost shocking worldwide popularity of a female doll with a cheeky grin and the cocky insouciance that was just beginning to be called “attitude,” and of whom Asmaan Solanka, born eight years later, uncannily looked like the fair-haired, dark-eyed, sweeter-natured flesh-and-blood embodiment. Though he was very much a boy, preoccupied by giant diggers, steamrollers, rocket ships, and railway engines, and captivated by the I-think-I-can-I-think-I-can-I-thought-I-could-I-thought-I-could determination of Casey Jones, the indomitable circus-hauling little engine in Dumbo, Asmaan was constantly, infuriatingly, taken for a girl, probably because of his long-eyelashed beauty, but possibly also because he reminded people of his father’s earlier creation. The doll’s name was Little Brain.
2
Professor Solanka in the late 1980s despaired of the academic life, its narrowness, infighting, and ultimate provincialism. “The grave yawns for us all, but for college dons it yawns with boredom,” he proclaimed to Eleanor, adding, unnecessarily as things turned out, “Prepare for poverty.” Then to the consternation of his fellows, but with his wife’s unqualified approval, he resigned his tenured position at King’s, Cambridge—where he had been inquiring into the development of the idea of the state’s responsibility to and for its citizens, and of the par
allel and sometimes contradictory idea of the sovereign self—and moved to London (Highbury Hill, within shouting distance of the Arsenal Stadium). Soon afterward he plunged into, yes, television; which drew down much predictably envious scorn, especially when the BBC commissioned him to develop a late-night series of popular history-of-philosophy programs whose protagonists would be Professor Solanka’s notorious collection of outsize egghead dolls, all made by himself.
This was simply too much. What had been a tolerable eccentricity in a respected colleague became intolerable folly in a craven defector, and The Adventures of Little Brain was unanimously derided, before it was ever screened, by “intellos” both great and small. Then it aired, and within a season, to general astonishment and the knockers’ chagrin, grew from a sophisticated coterie’s secret pleasure into a cult classic with a satisfyingly youthful and rapidly expanding fan base, until at last it was handed the accolade of being moved into the coveted slot after the main evening news. Here it blossomed into a full-blooded prime-time hit.
It was well known at King’s that in Amsterdam in his middle twenties Malik Solanka—in the city to speak on religion and politics at a left-leaning institute funded by Fabergé money—visited the Rijksmuseum and was entranced by that great treasure-trove’s displays of meticulously period-furnished dollhouses, those unique descriptions of the interior life of Holland down the ages. They were open-fronted, as if bombs had knocked away their façades; or like little theaters, which he completed by being there. He was their fourth wall. He began to see everything in Amsterdam as if miniaturized: his own hotel on the Herengracht, the Anne Frank house, the impossibly good-looking Surinamese women. It was a trick of the mind to see human life made small, reduced to doll size. Young Solanka approved of the results. A little modesty about the scale of human endeavor was to be desired. Once you had thrown that switch in your head, the hard thing was to see in the old way. Small was beautiful, as Schumacher had just then begun to say.
Day after day, Malik visited the Rijksmuseum dollhouses. Never before in his life had he thought of making anything with his hands. Now his head was full of chisels and glue, rags and needles, scissors and paste. He envisioned wallpaper and soft furnishings, dreamed bedsheets, designed bathroom fixtures. After a few visits, however, it became clear that mere houses would not be enough for him. His imaginary environments must be peopled. Without people there was no point. The Dutch dollhouses, for all their intricacy and beauty, and in spite of their ability to furnish and decorate his imagination, finally made him think of the end of the world, some strange cataclysm in which property had remained undamaged while all breathing creatures had been destroyed. (This was some years before the invention of that ultimate revenge of the inanimate upon the living, the neutron bomb.) After he had this idea, the place began to revolt him. He started imagining back rooms in the museum filled with giant heaps of the miniature dead: birds, animals, children, servants, actors, ladies, lords. One day he walked out of the great museum and never went back to Amsterdam again.
On his return to Cambridge he immediately started to construct microcosms of his own. From the beginning his dollhouses were the products of an idiosyncratic personal vision. They were fanciful at first, even fabulist; science-fiction plunges into the mind of the future instead of the past, which had already and unimprovably been captured by the miniaturist masters of the Netherlands. This sci-fi phase didn’t last long. Solanka soon learned the value of working, like the great matadors, closer to the bull; that is, using the material of his own life and immediate surroundings and, by the alchemy of art, making it strange. His insight, which Eleanor would have called a “lightbulb moment,” eventually led to a series of “Great Minds” dolls, often arranged in little tableaux—Bertrand Russell being clubbed by policemen at a wartime pacifist rally, Kierkegaard going to the opera for the interval so that his friends didn’t think he was working too hard, Machiavelli being subjected to the excruciating torture known as the strappado, Socrates drinking his inevitable hemlock, and Solanka’s favorite, a two-faced, four-armed Galileo: one face muttered the truth under its breath, while one pair of arms, hidden in the folds of his garments, secreted a little model of the earth spinning around the sun; the other face, downcast and penitent under the stern gaze of the men in the red frocks, publicly recanted its knowledge, while a copy of the Bible was tightly, devoutly clutched by the second pair of arms. Years later, when Solanka quit the academy, these dolls would go to work for him. These, and the questing knowledge-seeker he created to be their television interrogator and the audience’s surrogate, the female time-traveling doll Little Brain, who afterward became a star and sold in large numbers around the world. Little Brain, his hip, fashion-conscious, but still idealistic Candide, his Valiant-for-Truth in urban-guerrilla threads, his spiky-haired girl-Bashō journeying, mendicant bowl in hand, far into the Deep North of Japan.
Little Brain was smart, sassy, unafraid, genuinely interested in the deep information, in the getting of good-quality wisdom; not so much a disciple as an agent provocateur with a time machine, she goaded the great minds of the ages into surprising revelations. For example, the favorite fiction writer of the seventeenth-century heretic Baruch Spinoza turned out to be P. G. Wodehouse, an astonishing coincidence, because of course the favorite philosopher of the immortal shimmying butler Reginald Jeeves was Spinoza. (Spinoza who cut our strings, who allowed God to retire from the post of divine marionettist and believed that revelation was an event not above human history but inside it. Spinoza who never wore unsuitable shirts or ties.) The Great Minds in The Adventures of Little Brain could be time-hoppers, too. The Iberian Arab thinker Averroës, like his Jewish counterpart Maimonides, was a huge Yankees fan.
Little Brain went too far just once. In her interview with Galileo Galilei, she, in the beer-swilling, trash-talking fashion of the new ladettes, offered the great man her own nobody-fucks-with-me point of view on his troubles. “Man, I wouldn’t have taken that stuff lying down,” she leaned toward him and fervently said. “If some pope had tried to get me to lie, I’d have started a fucking revolution, me. I’d have set his house on fire. I’d have burned his fucking city down.” Well, the bad language got toned down—to “freaking”—at an early stage of production, but that wasn’t the problem. Arson at the Vatican was too much for the bosses of the airwaves to bear and Little Brain suffered, for the first time, the numbing indignities of censorship. And could do nothing about it except, perhaps, to mutter the truth along with Galileo: it does too move. I would too let it all go up in flames …
Rewind to Cambridge. Even “Solly” Solanka’s first efforts—his space stations and podlike domestic structures for assembly on the moon—displayed qualities of originality and imagination which, in the loud dinner-table opinion of a French Lit specialist who was working on Voltaire, were “refreshingly absent” from his scholarly work. The quip raised a big laugh from everyone within earshot.
“Refreshingly absent.” This is the Oxbridge way of speech, this easy, bantering offer of insults which are simultaneously not at all serious and in deadly earnest. Professor Solanka never grew accustomed to the barbs, often received terrible injuries from them, always pretended he saw the funny side, never once saw it. Oddly, this was something he had in common with his Voltairean assailant, the alarmingly named Krysztof Waterford-Wajda, known as Dubdub, with whom he had in fact forged the most unlikely of friendships. Waterford-Wajda, like Solanka, had gotten the hang of the expected conversational style under the pressure of their ferocious peer group, but he too remained uncomfortable with it. Solanka knew this, and so didn’t hold “refreshingly absent” against him. The laughter of the listeners, however, he never forgot.
Dubdub was jovial, Old Etonian, loaded, half-Hurlingham Club deb’s delight, half-Polish glowerer, the son of a self-made man, a stocky immigrant glazier who looked, talked, and drank like a backstreet fighter, made his bundle in double glazing, and married amazingly well, to the horror of the country-ho
use set (“Sophie Waterford’s married a Pole!”). Dubdub had floppy-haired Rupert Brooke good looks marred by a lantern jaw, a wardrobe full of loud tweed jackets, a drum kit, a fast car, no girlfriend. At a freshers’ ball in his first term, emancipated young sixties women refused his invitations to dance, prompting him to cry out, plaintively, “Why are all the girls in Cambridge so rude?” To which some heartless Andrée or Sharon replied, “Because most of the men are like you.” In the dinner line, hooray-Henry playfully, he offered another young beauty his sausage. To which she, this deadpan Sabrina, this Nicki used to blowing off unwanted admirers, without turning a hair retorted sweetly, “Oh, but there are some animals I simply never eat.”
It has to be admitted that Solanka himself had been guilty of needling Dubdub more than once. On their joint graduation day in the liberated summer of 1966, when gowned and elated and hemmed in by parents on the college front lawn they were allowing themselves to dream the future, innocent Dubdub astonishingly announced his intention of becoming a novelist. “Like Kafka perhaps,” he mused, grinning that big upper-class grin, his mother’s hockey-captain grin which no shadow of pain, poverty, or doubt had ever darkened and which sat so incongruously below his paternal inheritance, the beetling, dark eyebrows reminiscent of untranslatable privations endured by his ancestors in the unglamorous town of Lodz. “In the Rat Hole. Construction of a Machine Without a Purpose. Fury. That sort of thing.”
Solanka restrained his mirth, charitably telling himself that in the conflict between that smile and those eyebrows, between silver-spoon England and tin-cup Poland, between this glowing six-foot Cruella De Vil fashion plate of a mother and that squat, flat-faced tank of a father, there might indeed be room for a writer to germinate and flourish. Who could say? These might even be the right breeding conditions for that unlikely hybrid, an English Kafka.