Shame

by Salman Rushdie

  ‘Sixty-five years old,’ the other sneered, ‘and acting like a baby. Get a move on, I haven’t got all day. I am expected at the polo ground very shortly.’

  ‘A pardon is really possible?’ Omar Khayyam inquired. The interrogator shrugged in a bored way. ‘Anything is possible,’ he replied, ‘God is great, as you will doubtless be aware.’

  ‘What shall I put,’ Omar Khayyam wondered, picking up the pen, ‘I can confess to many things. Fleeing-from-roots, obesity, drunkenness, hypnosis. Getting girls in the family way, not sleeping with my wife, too-many-pine-kernels, peeing-tommery as a boy. Sexual obsession with under-age brain-damaged female, resultant failure to avenge my brother’s death. I didn’t know him. It is difficult to commit such acts on behalf of strangers. I confess to making strangers of my kin.’

  ‘This is not helpful,’ the interrogator interrupted. ‘What kind of man are you? What type of bounder will wriggle out of his guilt and let his mothers take the rap?’

  ‘I am a peripheral man,’ Omar Khayyam answered. ‘Other persons have been the principal actors in my life-story. Hyder and Harappa, my leading men. Immigrant and native, Godly and profane, military and civilian. And several leading ladies. I watched from the wings, not knowing how to act. I confess to social climbing, to only-doing-my-job, to being cornerman in other people’s wrestling matches. I confess to fearing sleep.’

  ‘We are getting nowhere.’ The interrogator sounded angry. ‘Evidence is beyond dispute. Your swordstick, gifted to you by Iskander Harappa, the victim’s arch-enemy. Motive and opportunity, plenty of both. Why keep up this pretence? You bided your time, for years you lived a false life, you won their trust, finally you drew them to the killing ground. Promising flight across the frontier to lure them on. Most effective bait. Then you pounced, stab stab stab, over and over. This is all obvious to see. Cut the cackle now, and write.’

  ‘I am not guilty,’ Omar Khayyam began, ‘I left the swordstick at the C-in-C’s,’ but just then his pockets started feeling very heavy, and the interrogator stretched out his hands to pluck out what-weighed-pockets-down. When Omar Khayyam saw what Talvar Ulhaq was holding out to him on an accusing palm, his voice turned falsetto. ‘My mothers must have put them in there,’ he shrieked, but there was no point in going on, because staring up at him from his inquisitor’s hand were the terrible exhibits, pieces of Raza Hyder, neatly sliced, his moustache, his eyeballs, teeth.

  ‘You are damned,’ Talvar Ulhaq said, and, raising his pistol, shot Omar Khayyam Shakil through the heart. The cell had begun to burn. Omar Khayyam saw the abyss open up beneath his feet, felt the vertigo come as the world dissolved. ‘I confess,’ he cried, but it was too late. He tumbled into the black fire and was burned.

  Because they had grown accustomed to ignoring the house, it was not until that evening that someone noticed a change, and shouted out that the great front doors of the Shakil mansion were standing open for the first time that anybody could remember; but then they all knew at once that something important had happened, so that it hardly seemed like a surprise when they found the congealing pool of blood below the dumb-waiter of Mistri Balloch. For a long while they stood transfixed by the open doors, unable to go inside, even for a peep, in spite of their curiosity; then all in a moment they rushed in, as if some unseen voice had given them permission: cobblers, beggars, gas-miners, policemen, milkmen, bank clerks, women on donkeys, children with metal hoops and sticks, gram vendors, acrobats, blacksmiths, wives, mothers, everyone.

  They found the dejected palace of the sisters’ haughty pride standing defenceless, at their mercy, and they were amazed by themselves, by their hatred of the place, a hatred which oozed out of sixty-five-year-old, forgotten wells; they ripped the house to pieces as they hunted for the old women. They were like locusts. They dragged the ancient tapestries off the walls and the fabric turned to dust in their hands, they forced open money-boxes which were full of discontinued notes and coins, they flung open doors which cracked and fell off their hinges, they turned beds upside-down and ransacked the contents of silver canteens, they tore baths from their moorings for the sake of their gilded feet and pulled out the stuffing from the sofas in search of hidden treasure, they threw the useless old swing-seat out of the nearest window. It was as if a spell had been broken, as if an old and infuriating conjuring trick had finally been explained. Afterwards, they would look at each other with a disbelief in their eyes that was half proud and half ashamed and ask, did we really do that? But we are ordinary people …

  It grew dark. They did not find the sisters.

  They found the bodies in the dumb-waiter, but the Shakil sisters had vanished, and nobody would ever see them again, not in ‘Nishapur’ nor anywhere on earth. They had deserted their home but they kept their vows of retreat, crumbling, perhaps, into powder under the rays of the sun, or growing wings and flying off into the Impossible Mountains in the west. Women as formidable as the three sisters Shakil never do less than they intend.

  Night. In a room near the top of the house they found an old man frowning in a four-poster bed with wooden snakes winding around the columns. The noise had woken him up; he was sitting bolt upright and muttering, ‘So, I’m still alive.’ He was grey all over, ashen from head to foot, and so eaten up by sickness that it was impossible to say who he was; and because he had the air of a spirit who had returned from the dead they backed away from him. ‘I’m hungry,’ he said, looking surprised, and then peered at the cheap electric torches and smouldering firebrands of the invaders and demanded to know what they were doing in his quarters; whereupon they turned and fled, shouting to the police officers that someone was up there, maybe alive, maybe dead, but at any rate someone in that house of death, sitting up in bed and acting smart. The police officers were on their way up when they heard a sort of panic starting in the street outside, and they ran off to investigate, blowing their whistles, leaving the old man to get up and put on the grey silk dressing-gown which his mothers had left neatly folded at the foot of his bed, and to take a long drink from the jug of fresh lime-juice which had been there just long enough for the ice-cubes to melt. Then he, too, heard the screams.

  They were strange screams. He heard them rise to their peaks and then die with uncanny abruptness, and then he knew what was coming into the house, something that could freeze a shriek in the middle, something that petrified. Something that would not, this time, be sated before it reached him, or cheated, or escaped from; that had entered the night-streets of the city and would not be denied. Something coming up the stairs: he heard it roar.

  He stood beside the bed and waited for her like a bridegroom on his wedding night, as she climbed towards him, roaring, like a fire driven by the wind. The door blew open. And he in the darkness, erect, watching the approaching glow, and then she was there, on all fours, naked, coated in mud and blood and shit, with twigs sticking to her back and beetles in her hair. She saw him and shuddered; then she rose up on her hind legs with her forepaws outstretched and he had just enough time to say, ‘Well, wife, so here you are at last,’ before her eyes forced him to look.

  He struggled against their hypnotic power, their gravitational pull, but it was no use, his eyes lifted, until he was staring into the fiery yellow heart of her, and saw there, just for an instant, some flickering, some dimming of the flame in doubt, as though she had entertained for that tiny fragment of time the wild fantasy that she was indeed a bride entering the chamber of her beloved; but the furnace burned the doubts away, and as he stood before her, unable to move, her hands, his wife’s hands, reached out to him and closed.

  His body was falling away from her, a headless drunk, and after that the Beast faded in her once again, she stood there blinking stupidly, unsteady on her feet, as if she didn’t know that all the stories had to end together, that the fire was just gathering its strength, that on the day of reckoning the judges are not exempt from judgment, and that the power of the Beast of shame cannot be held for long within any one fra
me of flesh and blood, because it grows, it feeds and swells, until the vessel bursts.

  And then the explosion comes, a shock-wave that demolishes the house, and after it the fireball of her burning, rolling outwards to the horizon like the sea, and last of all the cloud, which rises and spreads and hangs over the nothingness of the scene, until I can no longer see what is no longer there; the silent cloud, in the shape of a giant, grey and headless man, a figure of dreams, a phantom with one arm lifted in a gesture of farewell.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book was written with the financial assistance of the Arts Council of Great Britain. It also owes a good deal to the entirely non-financial assistance of many others, my gratitude to whom will perhaps best be expressed by leaving them unnamed.

  The unattributed quotation on this page has been taken from The Life Science by P.B. and J.S. Medawar (Wildwood House, 1977). The italicized line on this page is from Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1954). I have also quoted from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera, translated by Michael Henry Heim (Faber and Faber, 1982); from the Muirs’ translation of The Trial by Franz Kafka (Victor Gollancz, 1935); from The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli, in the translation by Luigi Ricci, edited by E.R.P. Vincent, for World’s Classics, Oxford University Press (1935); from N.J. Dawood’s translation of The Koran (Penguin Classics, 1956); and from the plays The Suicide by Nikolai Erdman, translated by P. Tegel (Pluto Press, 1979), and Danton’s Death by Georg Büchner, in the version by Howard Brenton from a translation by Jane Fry (Methuen, 1982). My thanks to all concerned; and to the many journalists and writers, both Western and Eastern, to whom I am indebted.

  My gratitude, too, to Walter, for letting go; and finally, and as always, to Clarissa, for everything.