It was three weeks into the month-long visit that, one afternoon, as she wrote, Yasin came into the room yelling, waving his pistol and saying his father’s legacy of watch, pens and cufflinks had been stolen, and he was having the house searched.
‘I expect you just threw it all in a drawer, Yasin. Look again.’
‘They are happening all the time, these thefts. The people are poorer than you can conceive, Mother. But the cook is particularly naughty. My eye has been on him since I noticed he dyed his beard. He has been filling the fridge with meals no human being has the capacity to eat – I suspect he is feeling guilty. He is our George Clooney – the male kingpin – and the neighbourhood servant girls are in and out of the kitchen, a place I never enter, as you know. Being a kind man, I pay for the abortions on a “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” basis. After that, the girls are sent to their village, where they are reviled, persecuted and sometimes killed for their shame. Since I’m not a hundred per cent certain it is that exact bastard, I will follow the correct procedures …’
‘Good, thank you. Now put the gun away, you’re frightening me.’
She was reassured, in a place where, increasingly, she realised no reassurance was possible. Her closest friend, an English teacher whom she’d been at school with, was kidnapped while driving to meet Farhana. Her car was sandwiched between two other cars until it could only come to a stop; her driver had been dragged out at gunpoint, beaten and thrown into a ditch. The woman was blindfolded and taken to a house which, when she could see, resembled a waiting room. At least twenty other kidnapees sat on the floor, waiting for their families to provide money, while other victims were brought in.
That afternoon, when Farhana walked around Paris with her husband, she said, ‘My friend has always taught English literature, but more recently wanted to add a post-colonial module so the students might glimpse themselves in an artist’s words. But there was a void in the curriculum because she cannot teach Rushdie, or even mention his name. She went into a shop to buy Midnight’s Children, and the owner shouted, “Get out – how dare you mention these hush-hush matters! You can look at pictures of men having sex with camels, or with children or babies. You can call for the death of the apostate. But promote that writer and this place will be ashes – Mullah Omar said this in 2005! Why can’t you read P. G. Wodehouse like everyone else!”’
Farhana’s husband, when he heard this, said, ‘I am reminded that I saw Milan Kundera the other morning, across the street. He walks to his office every day at the same time. I stop and bow respectfully as he passes. Of course, he pretends not to notice me.’
‘He doesn’t notice you,’ she giggled. ‘Why should he notice every old man who stops on the street?’
‘I know he notices me. As I say, he prefers not to look up since he is thinking creatively.’ He went on, ‘At the beginning of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, if I remember correctly, a Czech politician, Clementis, soon to be accused of treason and hanged, is erased from a photograph, leaving only the hat he passed to Gottwald on the day. They are doing the same in your country.’
‘They despair, and cling to the old certainties because they think the writer tears them apart.’
‘Though it is unbearable, they should be grateful, since he has done them the favour of speaking their disloyalty. The artist chews and digests the world for us, and then presents us with evidence of our humanity. What stands between us and barbarism?’
‘Your tie.’
‘Apart from my tie, Farhana, there is the complexity of literature. If they cannot see that, they are lacking in the civilisation you see around you. Anyone here could tell you that extreme religion can only create sacrilege and perversion – like Catholic France producing the Marquis de Sade.’
‘Please, you go too far, Michel.’
‘But how is the boy?’
‘The conditions in which he lives have put a jinn inside him.’
‘What a massive human effort it must have been to make such a wasteland!’
‘And you cannot go onto the street without seeing people carrying rifles and machine guns. When I look around here – at this city – at the people walking peacefully, and the hundreds of years of accumulated achievement, I wonder how it’s done.’
‘Thank God you have seen that, Farhana. I never thought you noticed where you were. What you describe is not achieved by driving out the Jews, Hindus, Catholics, and anyone who adds to the character and creativity of a city, until you have a monotonous monoculturalism – a new puritanism. If you let the pleasure-haters do that, there will be nothing living.’ He stood and looked around at the city as if he had built it himself. ‘The careful preservation of the past is the basis of culture. After the Second World War we learned how destructiveness stalks us, and how fragile civil society is.’
She said, ‘Everywhere around the world the young are rising up, but in Pakistan they are going to the airport. I’ve never before been to a place without hope, nor anywhere without one beautiful thing in it, apart from the orchids in my son’s garden.’
Michel said, ‘This door – to the West – is shut now. In here it is an exclusive spa. Farhana, we are glad to have you, provided you respect our liberality.’
‘I do!’
‘Count yourself lucky to have slipped inside.’
‘Thank you for reminding me, husband.’
‘Now tell me, how is it you made such a boy?’
‘I will think about that – in my writing.’
‘Writing, did you say? Farhana – no!’
Yasin had the house searched several times. ‘It’s gone,’ he said at last. ‘We can’t find any of it. The only things Father left me. I want you to know, Mother, that I let my servants eat meat, which is like caviar to them. I give them food which is not rotten. And of course they steal from me, and only rarely, when I am really wild, do I whip them. They would never be treated so well elsewhere, and this is how they reward me.’
‘It is mislaid, please, believe me,’ she said. ‘I have come here and seen that you are a victim awaiting a murderer. Please look more – behind the sofa, for instance – before you follow the procedures.’
She called it work now, her writing. Hadn’t her life been more interesting than most? An arresting opening had occurred to her: she would begin with her two husbands, and compare Parisian men, their world and methods of love, to that of the men of Pakistan.
She began to get down to it as soon as she woke up, hunched over the ping-pong table, with some rotis on a plate and two standing fans turned full on. It was the only time Farhana felt content and safe in this country, and she had begun this work away from Paris since she knew that, far from encouraging her, Michel would condemn her work as ‘a waste of effort’. It was his job to condemn the bad stuff. ‘Even before it is written?’ she enquired, when discussing the idea with him. ‘That would be confinement – and premature.’
Now she said, ‘I feel as if I have had two men, you and my son, chattering and bullying me in the ear.’
‘Bullying?’
‘Don’t you see you are beginning to operate more like a big fat censor than a critic. I will resist you,’ she said. ‘I will even mention to your friends and perhaps to the concierge that I am writing! How the filthy foreign woman stains the quartier with her amateur words!’
‘Please. Not that.’
‘If you don’t announce it to them next time at dinner, there will be a fuss. Look at my cut lip – there is evidence.’
She saw, when she said this, that he was afraid; she might stand up to him and, in time, gain an advantage.
One evening in Karachi she returned from a visit to her friend to find the gates locked. The guard, who sat on a chair outside with his rifle, didn’t come to her car. Instead her driver had to get out of their vehicle to let her into the house. Inside, it was silent, and it was never silent: there were more staff than family.
She called her son. ‘Where is everyone?’
‘
I’ve had enough. I’m following the procedures.’
‘What procedures?’
‘I set a deadline for the return of my possessions but they were not recovered. I ordered the police to take everyone away. You will see how soon, inshallah, my belongings will come back.’
‘How?’
‘It is tragic, Mother, but you and I will have to get our own food tonight. The servants are hanging upside down on meat hooks in the police station. They will be there for a few hours, in their own urine and faeces, until they begin to feel uncomfortable. Meanwhile, I am waiting for the Security Expert to become available.’
‘Security Expert? What is that?’
‘The torturer. This service has now been privatised. We are following your example in the West. He is available by the hour, and I will tip him if the result is positive. What is a fingernail here or there? This is not Downton Abbey. Let’s say it is more like your Guantanamo.’
‘No, Yasin.’
‘Mother, you will see how efficiently we can do things, after your determination to find nothing good in this ravishing country.’
The bell rang. Before she went to her room to think, Farhana saw Yasin and the torturer taking whisky in the living room. She pictured the servants, with whom she’d been friendly – asking for their stories – in the police station.
When she heard the car start in the yard, and the two men got up and went outside, blood and fury rose to her head, and she went to her son before he drove away.
‘I am outraged by this. You must not do it. I forbid it absolutely.’
‘You don’t live here.’
‘I said I forbid it.’
‘Excuse me.’
‘I do not excuse you. He can tear my body instead.’ She turned to the torturer. ‘Open your bag and start on me! Tear out my heart, bastard! It was me who stole the things! Okay? I don’t care if I live or die!’ She began to expose her upper body. ‘Begin here!’
‘You’re making a fool of yourself, Mother. Leave the man alone. I have paid him and can’t afford to waste money.’
‘I attacked Yasin then,’ she said to Michel. ‘I went for his eyes with my nails, I was so outraged by what he had become. Then I ran into my room, took the sheet from the bed, tied one end around my neck and threw the other over the propellers of the fan. I was beginning to die when they came in. They chased me, and Yasin pulled me across the floor. I was screaming so much, it was a nightmare for them. He struck me, but still I insisted he bring the servants back.’
‘And did he?’ asked Michel.
‘Later I saw them come in, a bedraggled bunch, the women weeping and the sweepress with a broken arm and bleeding head, as Yasin got me into the car and sent me away.’
‘You did a good thing, my dear.’
She took his arm. Her husband, walking beside her, looked at the lighted cafes, the churches and the shops, and hummed a song.
She said, ‘I want to believe that people can make good lives and can even be happy, despite what has happened to them and the burdens they have to bear.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It would be a good idea to believe that.’
These Mysterious Strangers:
The New Story of the Immigrant
The immigrant has become a contemporary passion in Europe, the vacant point around which ideals clash. Easily available as a token, existing everywhere and nowhere, he is talked about constantly. But in the current public conversation, this figure has not only migrated from one country to another, he has migrated from reality to the collective imagination, where he has been transformed into a terrible fiction.
Whether he or she – and I will call the immigrant he, while being aware that he is stripped of colour, gender and character – the immigrant has been made into something resembling an alien. He is an example of the undead, who will invade, colonise and contaminate, a figure we can never quite digest or vomit. If the twentieth century was replete with uncanny, semi-fictional figures who invaded the decent, upright and hard-working – the pure – this character is re-haunting us in the guise of the immigrant. He is both a familiar, insidious figure, and a new edition of an old idea expressed with refreshed and forceful rhetoric.
Unlike other monsters, the foreign body of the immigrant is unslayable. Resembling a zombie in a video game, he is impossible to kill or finally eliminate not only because he is already silent and dead, but also because there are waves of other similar immigrants just over the border coming right at you. Forgetting that it is unworkable notions of the ‘normal’ – the fascist normal – which make the usual seem weird, we like to believe that there was a better time when the world didn’t shift so much and everything appeared more permanent. We were all alike and comprehensible to one another, and these spectres didn’t forever seethe at the windows. Now there seems to be general agreement that all this global movement could be a catastrophe, since these omnivorous figures will eat us alive. From this point of view, the immigrant is eternal: unless we act, he will forever be a source of contagion and horror.
It is impossible to speak up for the immigrant or, more importantly, hear him speak for himself, since everyone, including the most reasonable and sensitive, has made up their mind that the immigrant is everywhere now, and he is too much of a problem. There is, of course, always good reason to be suspicious of agreement: there is nothing more coercive and stupid than consensus, and it is through consensus that inequality is concealed.
Nevertheless, the immigrant is easily dismissed and denigrated since he is now no longer a person. The recently arrived immigrant, the last through the door, and now settling down in the new country, can himself be disgusted by the idea of this newer arrival or interloper, the one who could take his place, because this threatening other does not resemble him in any way. The migrant has no face, no status, no protection and no story. His single identity is to be discussed within the limited rules of the community.
Too superstitious, ambitious, worthless and strange – deposited outside the firmament of the acceptable – the migrant is degraded to the status of an object about whom anything can be said and to whom anything can be done. One thing is certain about him: he will not only rob you of your wealth and social position, he will be monstrous and obscene in his pleasures. These jouissances, it goes without saying, he has obtained at your expense, even as he is subjugated as your slave.
As an idea, then, this concept of the immigrant is familiar, and the usual clichés – the confining power of negative description – apply, as they always have done to those shadows who haunt the in-between or border zones. The immigrant will be inbred, suffer from sexual incontinence and mental illness, and will be both needy and greedy. But in this particular form the immigrant is also a relatively recent creation. Since we depend so much on that which we hate the most, the worse the economy, the more the need for the immigrant – even in a time when we like to compliment ourselves on our relative tolerance.
Women, gays, the disabled and other former marginals might, after some struggle, have been afforded dignity, a voice and a place. Yet diversity and multiculturalism can become forms of exoticism and self-idealisation, and exaggerations of difference new types of conceit. Meanwhile, a necessary level of hatred is kept going with regard to the reviled figure of the immigrant. Integration can never continue; there has to be someone shoved off the map. Today it will be him, and tomorrow someone else: the circulation of bodies is determined by profit. The rich buy freedom; they can always go where they like, while the poor are not welcome anywhere. But, all the time, by some perverse magical alchemy, those we need, exploit and persecute the most are turned into our persecutors.
Others only have the power we give them. The immigrant is a collective hallucination forged in our own minds. This ever-developing notion, like God or the devil, is an important creation, being part of ourselves, but the paranoiac, looking wildly around, can never see that the foreign body is inside him. Of course not: when the world is divided so definitively into
the Hollywood binary of good and bad, no one can think clearly. Hate skews reality even more than love. If the limits of the world are made by language, we need better words for all this. The idea of the immigrant creates anxiety only because he is unknown and has to be kept that way.
This group fantasy and prison of cliché – a base use of the imagination – reduces the world to a Gothic tale in which there is only the violence of exclusion, and nothing can be thought or done. If it could be, the stranger, with a mixture of naivety and knowing, might be in a position to tell us the truth about ourselves, since he sees more than we know.
The Woman Who Fainted
Luca said goodbye to the party host; he left the alcohol and his friends, took a last look back, almost waved, as if he were going into permanent exile, and went to find his coat with relief, but not without regret. Many of the most important people in his life – some he had known since he was eighteen and worked for a small theatre magazine – were laughing and drinking on comfortable sofas in that large room hung with modern paintings. Others were talking and smoking outside, on the balmy balcony overlooking the city. As it was a seventieth birthday party, a few of his friends had their grown-up children and even their grandchildren with them. Most of the people there, he thought, he would never see again.
But what more was there to say to such a group of successful actors, writers, directors, producers, designers, other critics? A number of acquaintances, knowing he had left regular employment more than five years ago, had asked what he was doing now. Earlier that evening, as he’d strolled to the party, Luca had worked out his story, replying to enquiries, ‘working, writing, thinking …’ It was easy to say, and soon his interlocutors were talking about themselves. What had disturbed him was that at least three people had failed to recognise him, not out of cruelty or even short-sightedness. It was worse than that: they had no idea who he was. He had made a simple mistake, one he swore he would never make again – he had aged.
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