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 parallel 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 Faberge 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 facades; 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 interro
gator 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 Basho 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 Averroes, 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-house 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 Andree 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.
“Or, alternatively,” Dubdub pondered, “one could go in for the more commercial stuff. Valley of the Dollybirds. Or there’s the happy medium, halfway between the highbrow and the dross. Most people are middle brow, Solly, don’t argue. They want a little stimulation but not too blasted much. Also, by the by, not too blasted long. None of your great doorstops, your Tolstoy, your Proust. Short books that don’t give you a headache. The great classics retold—briefly—as pulp fiction. Othello updated as The Moor Murders. What do you say to that?”
That did it. Lubricated by the Waterford-Wajdas’ vintage champagne—neither of his own parents had seen fit to travel from Bombay to attend his graduation, and Dubdub had generously insisted on pouring him a glass, and refilling it frequently—Solanka erupted into an impassioned protest against Krysztof’s absurd proposals, pleading earnestly that the world be spared the literary outpourings of Waterford-Wajda, author. “Please, no obscurely menacing country-house sagas: Brideshead in the style of The Castle. Metamorphosis at Blandings. Oh, have mercy. Even more, regarding sex romps, restrain yourself. You’re more Alex Portnoy than Jackie Susann, who said, remember, that she admired Mr. Roth’s talent but wouldn’t want to shake his hand. Above all, from your blockbuster classics, desist. The Cordelia Conundrum? The Elsinore Uncertainty? Oh,oh, oh.”
After several minutes of such friendly-unfriendly teasing, Dubdub good-naturedly relented: “Well, p’raps I’ll be a film director instead. We’re just off to the South of France. They probably need film directors down there.”
Malik Solanka had always had a soft spot for goofy Dubdub, in part because of his ability to say things like this, but also because of the fundamentally good and open heart concealed beneath all the posh heehaw. Also, he owed him. At the Market Hill hostel of King’s College on a cold fall night in 1963, the eighteen-year-old Solanka had needed rescuing. He had spent his whole first day at college in a state of wild, overweening funk, unable to get out of bed, seeing demons. The future was like an open mouth waiting to devour him as Kronos had devoured his children, and the past—Solanka’s links with his family were badly eroded—the past was a broken pot. Only this intolerable present remained, in which he found he couldn’t function at all. Far easier to stay in bed and pull up the covers. In his characterless modern room of Norwegian wood and steel-frame windows he barricaded himself against whatever was next in store. There were voices at the door; he didn’t answer. Footsteps came and went. At seven P.m., however, a voice unlike any other-louder, plummier, and utterly confident of a reply-shouted out, “Anyone in there mislaid a bloody great trunk with some funny wog name on it?” And Solanka, to his own surprise, spoke up. So the day of terror, of su
spended animation, ended and his university years began. Dubdub’s appalling voice, like a prince’s kiss, had broken the evil spell.
Solanka’s worldly goods had been delivered by mistake to the college’s hostel on Peas Hill. Krys—he hadn’t yet become Dubdub—found a cart, helped Solanka haul the trunk onto it and steer it to its proper home, then dragged the trunk’s hapless owner off for a beer and dinner in the college hall. Later they sat side by side in that hall listening to the dazzlingly shiny Provost of King’s tell them they were at Cambridge for “three things—Intellect! Intellect! Intellect!” And that in the years ahead they would learn most, more than in any supervision or lecture hall, from the time they spent “in one another’s rooms, fertilizing one another.” Waterford-Wajda’s unignorable bray—“HA, ha, ha, HA’ shattered the stunned silence that followed this remark. Solanka loved him for that irreverent guffaw.
Dubdub did not become a novelist or a film director. He did his research, got his doctorate, was eventually offered a fellowship, and snapped it up with the grateful look of a man who has just settled for ever the whole question of the rest of his life. In that expression Solanka glimpsed the Dubdub behind the golden-boy mask, the young man desperate to escape from the privileged world into which he had been born. Solanka tried inventing for him, by way of explanation, a hollow socialite of a mother and a boorish brute of a father, but his imagination failed him; the parents he had actually met were perfectly pleasant and seemed to love their son a great deal. Yet Waterford-Wajda had certainly been desperate, and even spoke, when drunk, of the King’s fellowship as a “blasted lifeline, the only thing I’ve got.” This, when by anyone’s ordinary standards he had so much. The fast car, the drum kit, the family spread in Roehampton, the trust fund, the Tatlerish connections. Solanka, in a failure of sympathy he later much regretted, told Dubdub not to roll about so much in the mud of self-pity. Dubdub stiffened, nodded, gave a hard laugh—“HA-ha-ha-HA”—and did not speak of personal matters again for many years.
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