But the plumber, like the Punjabi construction workers, was a talker, an octogenarian named Joseph Schlink. Erect, wiry, with Albert Einstein white hair and Bugs Bunny front teeth, Joseph came through the door impelled by a form of defensive pridefulness to get his retaliation in first. “Don’t tell me, eh?, I’m too old you’re maybe thinking, or maybe not, mind reading I make no claim on, but a better plumber in the tristate area you von’t find, also fit like a fiddle or I’m no Schlink.” The thick, unimproved accent of the transplanted German Jew. “My name amuses you? So laugh. The chentleman, Mr. Simon, calls me Kitchen Schlink, to his Mrs. Ada I’m also Bathroom Schlink, let zem call me Schlink the Bismarck, it von’t bother me, it’s a free country, but in my business I haff no use for humor. In Latin, humor is a dampness from the eye. This is to quote Heinrich Böll, Nobel Prize nineteen hundred seventy-two. In his line of vork he alleges it’s helpful, but in my job it leads to mistakes. No damp eyes on me, eh?, and no chokes in my tool bag. Chust I like to do the vork prompt, receive payment also prompt, you follow me here. Like the shvartzer says in the movie, show me the money. After a war spent plugging leaks on a Nazi U-boat, you think I can’t fix up your little doofus here?”
An educated plumber with a tale to tell, Solanka realized with a sinking feeling. (He refused the tempting “Schlinking.”) This when he was almost too tired to remain upright. The city was teaching him a lesson. There was to be no escape from intrusion, from noise. He had crossed the ocean to separate his life from life. He had come in search of silence and found a loudness greater than the one he left behind. The noise was inside him now. He was afraid to go into the room where the dolls were. Maybe they would begin to speak to him, too. Maybe they would come to life and chatter and gossip and twitter until he had to shut them up once and for all, until he was obliged by the everywhereness of life, by its bloody-minded refusal to back off, by the sheer goddamn unbearable head-bursting volume of the third millennium, to rip off their fucking heads.
Breathe. He did a slow circular breathing exercise. Very well. He would accept the plumber’s garrulity as a penance. Dealing with it would be an exercise in humility and self-control. This was a Jewish plumber who had escaped the death camps by going underwater. His skills as a plumber meant the crew had protected him, they hung on to him until the day of their surrender, when he walked free and came to America, leaving behind, or, to put it another way, bringing along his ghosts.
Schlink had told the story a thousand times before, a thousand thousand. Out it came in its set phrases and cadences. “You can chust imagine it. A plumber in a submarine is already a little comic, but on top of that you haff the irony, the psychologische complexity. I don’t haff to spell it out. But I stand before you. I haff liffed my life. I haff kept, eh?, my appointment.”
A novelistic life, Solanka was forced to concede. Filmic, too. A life that could be a successful mid-budget feature film. Dustin Hoffman maybe as the plumber, and as the U-boat captain, who? Klaus Maria Brandauer, Rutger Hauer. But probably both parts would go to younger actors whose names Malik didn’t know. Even this was fading with the years, the movie knowledge in which he had always taken such pride. “You should write this down and register it,” he told Schlink, speaking too loudly. “It’s as they say high-concept. U-571 meets Schindler’s List. Maybe a double-edged comedy like Benigni’s. No, tougher than Benigni’s. Call it Jewboat.” Schlink stiffened; and, before giving his full, injured attention to the toilet, turned on Solanka his mournful, disgusted gaze. “No humor,” he said. “As I haff already told you. I am sorry to say that you are a disrespectful man.”
And in the kitchen downstairs, the Polish cleaner Wislawa had arrived. She came with the sublet, refused to do the ironing, left cobwebs untouched in corners, and after she left you could make a line in the dust on the mantelpiece. On the plus side she had a pleasant temperament and a big, gummy smile. However, if you gave her half a chance, or even if you didn’t, she too would plunge into narrative. The dangerous, unsuppressable power of the tale. Wislawa, a devout Catholic, had had her faith profoundly shaken by an ostensibly true story told by her husband who got it from his uncle who got it from a trusted friend who knew the person concerned, a certain Ryszard, who was for many years the personal driver of the pope, this of course before he was elected to the Holy See. When it was time for that election, Ryszard the chauffeur drove the future pope all the way across Europe, a Europe standing on the very hinge of history, on the cusp of great changes. Ah, the comradeship of the two men, the simple human pleasures and annoyances of such a long journey! And then they arrived in the Holy City, the man of the cloth was walled up with his peers and the driver waited. At last the white smoke was seen, the cry of habemus papam was raised, and then there was a cardinal all in red, descending an enormous, wide flight of yellow stone steps slowly, and crabwise, like a character in a Fellini movie, and right at the bottom of the steps waited the smoky little car and its excited driver. The cardinal came mopping his brow and puffing up to the driver’s window, which Ryszard had wound down in anticipation of the news. And so the cardinal was able to deliver the personal message of the new, the Polish pope:
“You’re fired.”
Solanka, not a Catholic, not a believer, not much interested in the story even if true, not remotely convinced that it was true, not anxious to referee the cleaner’s wrestling match with the imp of doubt who presently had her immortal soul in a stranglehold, would have preferred not to speak to Wislawa at all, would have wished her to glide around the apartment rendering it spotless and habitable, leaving the laundry done, pressed and folded. But in spite of the expenditure of over eight thousand dollars a month on the sublet, cleaner included, fate had dealt him a pretty much unplayable hand. On the topic of Wislawa’s imperiled reservation in heaven, he most earnestly did not wish to comment; yet she returned to the theme constantly. “How to kiss the ring of a Holy Father like that one, he is of my own people, but O God, to send a cardinal, and just like that, so lightly, to give the sack. And if not the Holy Father, then how his priests, and if not the priests, then how confession and absolution, and here are opening below my feets the iron gates of Hell.”
Professor Solanka, his fuse shortening, grew daily more tempted to say something unkind. Paradise, he considered telling Wislawa, was a place to which only the coolest and highest in New York possessed the secret number. As a gesture to the democratic spirit a few ordinary mortals were allowed in, too; they would arrive wearing properly reverential expressions, the expressions of those who know that they have truly, just this once, lucked out. The wide-eyed thrilledness of this bridge-and-tunnel mob would add to the jaded satisfaction of the in-crowd, and of course of the Proprietor himself. It was extremely improbable, however, the laws of supply and demand being what they were, that Wislawa would turn out to be one of the fortunate few in the public seats, the sun-kissed bleachers of eternity.
This and much else Solanka restrained himself from saying. Instead he pointed out cobwebs and dust, to be answered only by that gummy smile and a gesture of Krakóvian incomprehension. “I work for Mrs. Jay long time.” This answer dealt, in Wislawa’s view, with all complaints. After the second week Solanka gave up asking, wiped down the mantels himself, got rid of the cobwebs, and took his shirts to the good Chinese laundry just around the corner on Columbus. But her soul, her nonexistent soul, continued intermittently to insist on his pastoral, his uncaring care.
Solanka’s head began to spin lightly. Sleep-deprived, wild of thought, he headed for his bedroom. Behind him through the thick, humid air he could hear his dolls, alive now and jabbering behind their closed door, each loudly telling the other his or her “back-story,” the tale of how she or he came to be. The imaginary tale, which he, Solanka, had made up for each of them. If a doll had no back-story, its market value was low. And as with dolls so with human beings. This was what we brought with us on our journey across oceans, beyond frontiers, through life: our little storehouse of anecdote
and what-happened-next, our private once-upon-a-time. We were our stories, and when we died, if we were very lucky, our immortality would be in another such tale.
This was the great truth against which Malik Solanka had set his face. It was precisely his back-story that he wanted to destroy. Never mind where he came from or who, when little Malik could barely walk, had deserted his mother and so given him permission, years later, to do the same. To the devil with stepfathers and pushes on the top of a young boy’s head and dressing up and weak mothers and guilty Desdemonas and the whole useless baggage of blood and tribe. He had come to America as so many before him to receive the benison of being Ellis Islanded, of starting over. Give me a name, America, make of me a Buzz or Chip or Spike. Bathe me in amnesia and clothe me in your powerful unknowing. Enlist me in your J. Crew and hand me my mouse ears! No longer a historian but a man without histories let me be. I’ll rip my lying mother tongue out of my throat and speak your broken English instead. Scan me, digitize me, beam me up. If the past is the sick old Earth, then, America, be my flying saucer. Fly me to the rim of space. The moon’s not far enough.
But still through the ill-fitting bedroom window the stories came pouring in. What would Saul and Gayfryd—“she became the Stanley Cup of trophy wives when trophy wives were as common as Porsches”—do now that they were down to their last $40 or $50 million? … And hurray, Muffie Potter Ashton’s pregnant! … And wasn’t that Paloma Huffington de Woody getting friendly with S.J. “Yitzhak” Perelman on Gibson’s Beach, Sagaponack? … And did you hear about Griffin and his great big beautiful Dahl? … What, Nina’s planning to launch a perfume? But, my dear, she’s so over, she’s starting to smell like roadkill…. And Meg and Dennis, just moved to Splitsville, are squabbling over who gets not just the CD collection but the guru…. Which big-name Hollywood actress has been whispering that a new young star’s elevation has Sapphic origins involving a major studio boss? … And have you read Karen’s latest, Thin Thighs for Life? … And Lotus, coolest of niteries, nixed O. J. Simpson’s birthday bash! Only in America, kids, only in America!
With his hands over his ears, and still wearing his ruined linen suit, Professor Solanka slept.
5
The telephone woke him at noon. Jack Rhinehart, the phone-smasher, invited Professor Solanka over to watch the Holland-Yugoslavia Euro 2000 quarterfinal on Pay-Per-View. Malik accepted, surprising them both. “Glad to get you out of that mole hole,” Rhinehart said. “But if you plan to root for the Serbs, stay home.” Solanka felt refreshed today: less burdened, and, yes, in need of a friend. Even in these days of his retreat, he still had such needs. A holy man up a Himalaya could do without soccer on TV. Solanka was not so pure of heart. He shed the slept-in suit, showered, dressed quickly, and rode downtown. When he climbed out of the cab at Rhinehart’s building, a woman in shades rushed into it, jostling him, and he had, for the second time in as many days, the unsettling feeling that the stranger was someone he knew. In the elevator he identified her: the squeeze-me-and-I-talk doll-woman whose name was the contemporary byword for tacky infidelity, Our Lady of the Thong. “Oh Jesus, Monica,” Rhinehart said. “I run into her all the time. Around here it used to be Naomi Campbell, Courtney Love, Angelina Jolie. Now it’s Minnie Mouth. There goes the neighborhood, right?”
Rhinehart had been trying to get divorced for years, but his wife had made it her life’s work to deny him. They had been a beautiful, perfectly contrasted ebony-and-ivory couple, she long, languid, pale, he equally long, but a pitch-black African-American, and a hyperactive one at that, a hunter, fisherman, weekend driver of very fast cars, marathon runner, gym rat, tennis player, and, lately, thanks to the rise of Tiger Woods, an obsessive golfer too. From the earliest days of their marriage Solanka had wondered how a man with so much energy would handle a woman with so little. They had married splashily in London—Rhinehart had for most of his war years preferred to base himself outside America—and, in a ceramic-and-mosaic palazzo rented for the occasion from a charity that ran it as a halfway house for the mentally troubled, Malik Solanka had made a best-man’s speech whose tone was spectacularly misjudged—at one point, doing his then-celebrated W. C. Fields impression, he compared the risks of the union to those of “jumping out of an airplane from twenty thousand feet and trying to land on a bale of hay”—but prophetically apt. Like most of their circle, however, he had underestimated Bronislawa Rhinehart in one essential respect: she had the sticking power of a leech.
(At least there were no children, Solanka thought when his, everybody’s, misgivings about the union proved justified. He thought of Asmaan on the telephone. “Where’ve you gone, Daddy, are you here?” He thought of himself long ago. At least Rhinehart didn’t have to deal with that, the slow deep pain of a child.)
Rhinehart had done her wrong, no denying that. His response to marriage had been to begin an affair, and his response to the difficulty of maintaining a clandestine relationship had been to initiate another one, and when both his mistresses insisted that he regularize his life, when they both insisted on occupying pole position on the grid of his personal auto rally, he at once managed to find room for yet another woman in his noisy, overcrowded bed. Minnie Mouth was perhaps not such an inappropriate local icon. After a few years of this, and a move from Holland Park to the West Village, Bronislawa—what was it with all these Poles who kept cropping up in various positions?—moved out of the apartment on Hudson Street and used the courts to force Rhinehart to maintain her in high style in a junior suite at a tony Upper East Side hotel, with major credit card spending power. Instead of divorcing him, she told him sweetly, she intended to make the rest of his life a misery, and bleed him slowly dry. “And don’t run out of money, honey,” she advised. “Because then I’ll have to come after what you really like.”
What Rhinehart really liked was food and drink. He owned a little saltbox cottage in the Springs with, at the back of the garden, a shed that he’d equipped as a wine-storage facility and insured for considerably more money than the cottage, in which the most valuable object was the six-burner Viking range. Rhinehart these days was a turbocharged gastronome, his freezer full of the carcasses of dead birds awaiting their reduction—their elevation!—to jus. In his refrigerator the delicacies of the earth jostled for space: larks’ tongues, emus’ testicles, dinosaurs’ eggs. Yet when, at his friend’s wedding, Solanka had spoken to Rhinehart’s mother and sister of the exquisite pleasures of dining at Jack’s table, he had bewildered and amazed them both. “Jack, cook? This Jack?” asked his mother, disbelievingly pointing at her son. “Jack I know couldn’t open a can of beans less’n I showed him how to hold the can opener.” “Jack I know,” his sister added, “couldn’t boil a pan of water without burnin’ it up.” “Jack I know,” his mother concluded, definitively, “couldn’t find the kitchen without a seein’-eye dog leadin’ the way.”
This same Jack could now hold his own with the great chefs of the world, and Solanka marveled, once again, at the human capacity for automorphosis, the transformation of the self, which Americans claimed as their own special, defining characteristic. It wasn’t. Americans were always labeling things with the America logo: American Dream, American Buffalo, American Graffiti, American Psycho, American Tune. But everyone else had such things too, and in the rest of the world the addition of a nationalist prefix didn’t seem to add much meaning. English Psycho, Indian Graffiti, Australian Buffalo, Egyptian Dream, Chilean Tune. America’s need to make things American, to own them, thought Solanka, was the mark of an odd insecurity. Also, of course, and more prosaically, capitalist.
Bronislawa’s threat to Rhinehart’s booze hoard found its mark. He gave up visiting war zones and began to write, instead, lucrative profiles of the super-powerful, super-famous, and super-rich for their weekly and monthly magazines of choice: chronicling their loves, their deals, their wild children, their personal tragedies, their tell-all maids, their murders, their surgeries, their good works, their evil secrets, thei
r games, their feuds, their sexual practices, their meanness, their generosity, their groomers, their walkers, their cars. Then he gave up writing poetry and turned his hand, instead, to novels set in the same world, the unreal world that ruled the real one. He often compared his subject to that of the Roman Suetonius. “These are the lives of today’s Caesars in their Palaces,” he’d taken to telling Malik Solanka and anyone else who was prepared to listen. “They sleep with their sisters, murder their mothers, make their horses into senators. It’s mayhem in there, in the Palaces. But guess what? If you’re outside, if you’re the mob in the street, if, that is, you’re us, all you see is that the Palaces are the Palaces, all the money and power is in there, an’ when dey snaps dey fingers, boy, de planet it start jumpin’.” (It was Rhinehart’s habit from time to time to slip into an Eddie Murphy-meets-Br’er Rabbit manner, for emphasis or fun.) “Now that I’m writing about this billionairess in a coma or those moneyed kids who iced their parents, now that I’m on this diamond beat, I’m seeing more of the truth of things than I did in fucking Desert Storm or some Sniper’s Alley doorway in Sarajevo, and believe me it’s just as easy, easier even, to step on a fucking land mine and get yourself blown to bits.”
These days, whenever Professor Solanka heard his friend deliver a version of this not infrequent speech, he detected a strengthening note of insincerity. Jack had gone to war—as a noted young radical journalist of color with a distinguished record of investigating American racism and a consequent string of powerful enemies—nursing many of the same fears expressed a generation earlier by the young Cassius Clay: most afraid, that is, of the bullet in the back, of death by what was not then known as “friendly fire.” In the years that followed, however, Jack witnessed, over and over again, the tragic gift of his species for ignoring the notion of ethnic solidarity: the brutalities of blacks against blacks, Arabs against Arabs, Serbs against Bosnians and Croats. Ex-Yugo, Iran-Iraq, Rwanda, Eritrea, Afghanistan. The exterminations in Timor, the communal massacres in Meerut and Assam, the endless color-blind cataclysm of the earth. Somewhere in those years he became capable of close friendships with his white colleagues from the U.S.A. His label changed. He stopped hyphenating himself and became, simply, an American.