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VINTAGE

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Copyright © Salman Rushdie 2017
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Salman Rushdie has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape in 2017

Lines from ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’, Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T.S. Eliot reproduced with permission from Faber and Faber Ltd.

Selected Poems by Anna Akhmatova translated by D.M. Thomas, published by

Vintage Classics. First published as You Will Hear Thunder by Martin

Secker & Warburg. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

Translation copyright ©D.M. Thomas 1976, 1979, 1985

Quotation from La femme d’á côté (1981, France, Director: François Truffaut, Screenplay: François Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman and Jean Aurel) is reprinted with the permission of Laura Truffaut.

penguin.co.uk/vintage

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

1

ON THE DAY of the new president’s inauguration, when we worried that he might be murdered as he walked hand in hand with his exceptional wife among the cheering crowds, and when so many of us were close to economic ruin in the aftermath of the bursting of the mortgage bubble, and when Isis was still an Egyptian mother-goddess, an uncrowned seventy-something king from a faraway country arrived in New York City with his three motherless sons to take possession of the palace of his exile, behaving as if nothing was wrong with the country or the world or his own story. He began to rule over his neighbourhood like a benevolent emperor, although in spite of his charming smile and his skill at playing his 1745 Guadagnini violin he exuded a heavy, cheap odour, the unmistakable smell of crass, despotic danger, the kind of scent that warned us, look out for this guy, because he could order your execution at any moment, if you’re wearing a displeasing shirt, for example, or if he wants to sleep with your wife. The next eight years, the years of the forty-fourth president, were also the years of the increasingly erratic and alarming reign over us of the man who called himself Nero Golden, who wasn’t really a king, and at the end of whose time there was a large – and, metaphorically speaking, apocalyptic – fire.

The old man was short, one might even say squat, and wore his hair, which was still mostly dark in spite of his advanced years, slicked back to accentuate his devil’s peak. His eyes were black and piercing, but what people noticed first – he often rolled his shirtsleeves up to make sure they did notice – were his forearms, as thick and strong as a wrestler’s, ending in large, dangerous hands bearing chunky gold rings studded with emeralds. Few people ever heard him raise his voice, yet we were in no doubt that there lurked in him a great vocal force which one would do well not to provoke. He dressed expensively but there was a loud, animal quality to him which made one think of the Beast of folk tale, uneasy in human finery. All of us who were his neighbours were more than a little scared of him, though he made huge, clumsy efforts to be sociable and neighbourly, waving his cane at us wildly, and insisting at inconvenient times that people come over for cocktails. He leaned forward when standing or walking, as if struggling constantly against a strong wind only he could feel, bent a little from the waist, but not too much. This was a powerful man; no, more than that – a man deeply in love with the idea of himself as powerful. The purpose of the cane seemed more decorative and expressive than functional. When he walked in the Gardens he gave every impression of trying to be our friend. Frequently he stretched out a hand to pat our dogs or ruffle our children’s hair. But children and dogs recoiled from his touch. Sometimes, watching him, I thought of Dr Frankenstein’s monster, a simulacrum of the human that entirely failed to express any true humanity. His skin was brown leather and his smile glittered with golden fillings. His was a raucous and not entirely civil presence, but he was immensely rich and so, of course, he was accepted; but, in our downtown community of artists, musicians and writers, not, on the whole, popular.

We should have guessed that a man who took the name of the last of the Julio-Claudian monarchs of Rome and then installed himself in a domus aurea was publicly acknowledging his own madness, wrongdoing, megalomania and forthcoming doom, and also laughing in the face of all that; that such a man was flinging down a glove at the feet of destiny and snapping his fingers under Death’s approaching nose, crying, ‘Yes! Compare me, if you will, to that monster who doused Christians in oil and set them alight to provide illumination in his garden at night! Who played the lyre while Rome burned (there actually weren’t any fiddles back then)! Yes: I christen myself Nero, of Caesar’s house, last of that bloody line, and make of it what you will. Me, I just like the name.’ He was dangling his wickedness under our noses, revelling in it, challenging us to see it, contemptuous of our powers of comprehension, convinced of his ability easily to defeat anyone who rose against him.

He came to the city like one of those fallen European monarchs, heads of discontinued houses who still used as last names the grand honorifics, of-Greece or of-Yugoslavia or of-Italy, and who treated the mournful prefix, ex-, as if it didn’t exist. He wasn’t ex-anything, his manner said; he was majestic in all things, in his stiff-collared shirts, his cuff-links, his bespoke English shoes, his way of walking toward closed doors without slowing down, knowing they would open for him; also in his suspicious nature, owing to which he held daily separate meetings with his sons to ask them what their brothers were saying about him; and in his cars, his liking for gaming tables, his unreturnable ping-pong serve, his fondness for prostitutes, whiskey and devilled eggs, and his often repeated dictum – one favoured by absolute rulers from Caesar to Haile Selassie – that the only virtue worth caring about was loyalty. He changed his cellphone frequently, gave the number to almost no one, and didn’t answer it when it rang. He refused to allow journalists or photographers into his home but there were two men in his regular poker circle who were often there, silver-haired lotharios usually seen wearing tan leather jackets and brightly striped cravats, who were widely suspected of having murdered their rich wives, although in one case no charges had been made and in the other, they hadn’t stuck.

Regarding his own missing wife he was silent. In his house of many photographs, whose walls and mantelpieces were populated by rock stars, Nobel laureates and aristocrats, there was no image of Mrs Golden, or whatever she had called herself. Clearly some disgrace was being implied, and we gossiped, to our shame, about what that might have been, imagining the scale and brazenness of her infidelities, conjuring her up as some sort of most high-born nymphomaniac, her sex life more flagrant than any movie star’s, her divagations known to one and all except to her husband, whose eyes, blinded by love, continued to gaze adoringly upon her as he believed her to be, the loving and chaste wife of his dreams, until the terrible day when his friends told him the truth, they came in numbers to tell him, and how he raged!, how he abused them!, calling them liars and traitors, it took seven men to hold him and prevent him from doing harm to those who had forced him to face reality, and then finally he did face it, he accepted it, he banished her from his life and forbade her ever again to look upon her sons. Wicked woman, we said to one another, thinking ourselves worldly-wise, and the tale satisfied us, and we left it there, being in truth more preoccupied by our own stuff, and only interested in the affairs of N. J. Golden up to a certain point. We turned away, and got on with our lives.

How wrong we were.

2

WHAT IS A good life? What is its opposite? These are questions to which no two men will give the same answers. In these our cowardly times, we deny the grandeur of the Universal, and assert and glorify our local Bigotries, and so we cannot agree on much. In these our degenerate times, men bent on nothing but vainglory and personal gain – hollow, bombastic men for whom nothing is off-limits if it advances their petty cause – will claim to be great leaders and benefactors, acting in the common good, and calling all who oppose them liars, envious, little people, stupid people, stiffs, and, in a precise reversal of the truth, dishonest and corrupt. We are so divided, so hostile to one another, so driven by sanctimony and scorn, so lost in cynicism, that we call our pomposity idealism, so disenchanted with our rulers, so willing to jeer at the institutions of our state, that the very word goodness has been emptied of meaning and needs, perhaps, to be set aside for a time, like all the other poisoned words, spirituality, for example, final solution, for example, and (at least when applied to skyscrapers and fried potatoes) freedom.

But on that cold January day in 2009 when the enigmatic septuagenarian we came to know as Nero Julius Golden arrived in Greenwich Village in a Daimler limousine with three male children and no visible sign of a wife, he at least was firm about how virtue was to be valued, and right action distinguished from wrong. ‘In my American house,’ he told his attentive sons in the limousine as it drove them from the airport to their new residence, ‘morality will go by the golden standard.’ Whether he meant that morality was supremely precious, or that wealth determined morality, or that he personally, with his glittering new name, would be the only judge of right and wrong, he did not say, and the younger Julii, from long filial habit, did not ask for clarification. (Julii, the imperial plural they all preferred to Goldens: these were not modest men!) The youngest of the three, an indolent twenty-two-year-old with hair falling in beautiful cadences to his shoulders and a face like an angry angel, did, however, ask one question. ‘What will we say,’ he asked his father, ‘when they enquire, where did you come from?’ The old man’s face entered a condition of scarlet vehemence. ‘This, I’ve answered before,’ he cried. ‘Tell them, screw the identity parade. Tell them, we are snakes who shed our skin. Tell them we just moved downtown from Carnegie Hill. Tell them we were born yesterday. Tell them we materialised by magic, or arrived from the neighbourhood of Alpha Centauri in a spaceship hidden in a comet’s tail. Say we are from nowhere or anywhere or somewhere, we are make-believe people, frauds, reinventions, shapeshifters, which is to say, Americans. Do not tell them the name of the place we left. Never speak it. Not the street, not the city, not the country. I do not want to hear those names again.’

They emerged from the car in the old heart of the Village, on Macdougal Street a little below Bleecker, near the Italian coffee place from the old days that was still somehow struggling on; and ignoring the honking cars behind them and the outstretched supplicant palm of at least one grubby panhandler, they allowed the limousine to idle in mid-street while they took their time lifting their bags from the trunk – even the old man insisted on carrying his own valise – and carried them to the grand Beaux-Arts building on the east side of the street, the former Murray mansion, thereafter to be known as the Golden house. (Only the eldest son, the one who didn’t like being out of doors, who was wearing very dark dark glasses and an anxious expression, appeared to be in a hurry.) So they arrived as they intended to remain, independently, with a shrugging indifference to the objections of others.

The Murray mansion, grandest of all the buildings on the Gardens, had lain largely unoccupied for many years, except for a notably snippy fifty-something Italian-American house manager and her equally haughty, though much younger, female assistant and live-in lover. We had often speculated on the owner’s identity, but the fierce lady guardians of the building refused to satisfy our curiosity. However, these were years in which many of the world’s super-rich bought property for no reason other than to own it, and left empty homes lying around the planet like discarded shoes, so we assumed that some Russian oligarch or oil sheikh must be involved, and, shrugging our shoulders, we got used to treating the empty house as if it wasn’t there. There was one other person attached to the house, a sweet-natured Hispanic handyman named Gonzalo who was employed by the two guardian dragons to look after the place, and sometimes, when he had a bit of spare time, we would ask him over to our houses to fix our wiring and plumbing problems and help us clear our roofs and entrances of snow in the depths of winter. These services, in return for small sums of cash money folded discreetly into his hand, he smilingly performed.

The Macdougal–Sullivan Gardens Historic District – to give the Gardens their full, overly sonorous name – was the enchanted, fearless space in which we lived and raised our children, a place of happy retreat from the disenchanted, fearful world beyond its borders, and we made no apology for loving it dearly. The original Greek Revival-style homes on Macdougal and Sullivan, built in the 1840s, were remodelled in Colonial Revival style in the 1920s by architects working for a certain Mr William Sloane Coffin, who sold furniture and rugs, and it was at that time that the rear yards were combined to form the communal Gardens, bounded to the north by Bleecker Street, to the south by Houston, and reserved for the private use of residents in the houses backing onto them. The Murray mansion was an oddity, in many ways too grand for the Gardens, a gracious landmark structure originally built for the prominent banker Franklin Murray and his wife Harriet Lanier Murray between 1901 and 1903 by the architectural firm of Hoppin & Koen, who, to make room for it, had demolished two of the original houses put up in 1844 by the estate of the merchant Nicholas Low. It had been designed in the French Renaissance manner to be both fancy and fashionable, a style in which Hoppin & Koen had considerable experience, gained both at the École des Beaux-Arts and, afterwards, during their time working for McKim, Mead & White. As we later learned, Nero Golden had owned it since the early 1980s. It had long been whispered around the Gardens that the owner came and went, spending perhaps two days a year in the house, but none of us ever saw him, though sometimes there were lights on in more windows than usual at night, and, very rarely, a shadow against a blind, so that the local children decided the place was haunted, and kept their distance.

This was the place whose ample front doors stood open that January day as the Daimler limousine disgorged the Golden men, father and sons. Standing on the threshold was the welcoming committee, the two dragon ladies, who had prepared everything for their master’s arrival. Nero and his sons passed inside and found the world of lies they would from now on inhabit: not a spanking-new, ultra-modern residence for a wealthy foreign family to make their own gradually, as their new lives unfolded, their connections to the new city deepened, their experiences multiplied – no! – but rather a place in which Time had been standing still for twenty years or more, Time gazing in its indifferent fashion upon scuffed Biedermeier chairs, slowly fading rugs and sixties-revival lava lamps, and looking with mild amusement at the portraits by all the right people of Nero Golden’s younger self with downtown figures, René Ricard, William Burroughs, Deborah Harry, as well as leaders of Wall Street and old families of the Social Register, bearers of hallowed names such as Luce, Beekman and Auchincloss. Before he bought this place the old man had owned a large high-ceilinged bohemian loft, three thousand square feet on the corner of Broadway and Great Jones Street, and in his far-off youth had been allowed to hang around the edges of the Factory, sitting ignored and grateful in the rich boys’ corner with Si Newhouse and Carlo De Benedetti, but that was a long time ago. The house contained memorabilia of those days and of his later visits in the 1980s as well. Much of the furniture had been in storage, and the reappearance of these objects from an earlier life had the air of an exhumation, implying a continuity which the residents’ histories did not possess. So the house always felt to us like a sort of beautiful fake. We murmured to one another some words of Primo Levi’s: ‘This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real.’

There was nothing in the house that hinted at their origins, and the four men remained obstinately unwilling to open up about the past. Things leak out, inevitably, and we found out their story in time, but before that we all had our own hypotheses about their secret history, wrapping our fictions around theirs. Even though they were all fairish of complexion, from the milky-pale youngest son to leathery old Nero, it was clear to everyone that they were not conventionally ‘white’. Their English was immaculate, British-accented, they had almost certainly had Oxbridge educations, and so at first we incorrectly assumed, most of us, that multicultural England was the country that could not be named, and London the multiracial town. They might have been Lebanese, or Armenian, or South Asian Londoners, we hypothesised, or even of Mediterranean European origin, which would explain their Roman fantasies. What dreadful wrong had been done to them there, what awful slights had they endured, that they went to such lengths to disown their origins? Well, well, for most of us that was their private affair, and we were willing to leave it at that, until it was no longer possible to do so. And when that time came, we understood that we had been asking ourselves the wrong questions.

That the charade of their newly adopted names worked at all, let alone for two entire presidential terms, that these invented American personae living in their palace of illusions were so unquestioningly accepted by us, their new neighbours and acquaintances, tells us much about America itself, and more about the strength of will with which they inhabited their chameleon identities, becoming, in all our eyes, whatever they said they were. In retrospect one can only wonder at the vastness of the plan, the intricacy of the details that would have had to be attended to, the passports, the state ID cards, the drivers’ licences, the SSNs, the health insurance, the forgeries, the deals, the pay-offs, the sheer difficulty of it all, and the fury or perhaps fear that drove the whole magnificent, elaborate, cockeyed scheme. As we afterwards learned, the old man had worked on this metamorphosis for perhaps a decade and a half before he put the plan into action. If we had known that, we would have understood that something very large was being concealed. But we did not know. They were simply the self-styled king and his soi-disant princes, living in the architectural jewel of the neighbourhood.

The truth is that they didn’t seem so odd to us. People in America were called all sorts of things – throughout the phonebook, in the days when there were phonebooks, nomenclatural exoticism ruled. Huckleberry! Dimmesdale! Ichabod! Ahab! Fenimore! Portnoy! Drudge! To say nothing of dozens, hundreds, thousands of Golds, Goldwaters, Goldsteins, Finegolds, Goldberrys. Americans also constantly decided what they wanted to be called and who they wanted to be, shedding their Gatz origins to become shirt-owning Gatsbys and pursue dreams called Daisy or perhaps simply America. Samuel Goldfish (another golden boy) became Samuel Goldwyn, the Aertzoons became the Vanderbilts, Clemens became Twain. And many of us, as immigrants – or our parents or our grandparents – had chosen to leave our pasts behind just as the Goldens were now choosing, encouraging our children to speak English, not the old language from the old country: to speak, dress, act, be American. The old stuff we tucked away in a cellar, or discarded, or lost. And in our movies and comic books – in the comic books our movies have become – do we not celebrate every day, do we not honour, the idea of the Secret Identity? Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne, Diana Prince, Bruce Banner, Raven Darkhölme, we love you. The secret identity may once have been a French notion – Fantômas the thief, and also le fantôme de l’Opéra – but it has by now put down deep roots in American culture. If our new friends wanted to be Caesars, we were down with that. They had excellent taste, excellent clothes, excellent English, and they were no more eccentric than, say, Bob Dylan, or any other sometime local resident. So the Goldens were accepted because they were acceptable. They were Americans now.

But at last things began to unravel. These were the causes of their fall: a sibling quarrel, an unexpected metamorphosis, the arrival in the old man’s life of a beautiful and determined young woman, a murder. (More than one murder.) And, far away, in the country that had no name, finally, some decent intelligence work.

3

THIS WAS THEIR untold story, their exploding planet Krypton: a sob story, as things kept secret often are.

The grand hotel by the harbour was loved by everyone, even by those too poor ever to pass through its doors. Everyone had seen the interior in the movies, the movie magazines, and their dreams: the famous staircase, the swimming pool surrounded by lounging bathing beauties, the glittering corridors of stores including bespoke tailors who could imitate your favourite suit in an afternoon once you had picked out your preferred worsted or gaberdine. Everyone knew about the fabulously capable, endlessly hospitable and deeply dedicated staff for whom the hotel was like their family, who gave to the hotel the respect due to a patriarch, and who made all who entered its hallways feel like queens and kings. It was a place to welcome foreigners, yes, of course, from its windows the foreigners looked out at the harbour, the beautiful bay that had given the unnameable city its name, and marvelled at the great array of seagoing vessels bobbing before them, motorboats and sailboats and cruise craft of every size, shape and hue. Everyone knew the story of the birth of the city, how the British had wanted it precisely because of this beautiful harbour, how they had negotiated with the Portuguese to marry the princess Catherine to King Charles II, and because poor Catherine was not a beauty the dowry had to be pretty damn good, especially because Charles II had an eye for a beautiful girl, and so the city was part of the dowry, and Charles married Catherine and then ignored her for the rest of his life, but the British put their navy in the harbour and embarked on a great land reclamation scheme to join up the Seven Isles and built a fort there and then a city and the British Empire followed. It was a city built by foreigners and so it was right that foreigners should be welcomed in that grand palace of a hotel looking out on the harbour which was the whole reason for the city’s existence. But it was not only for foreigners, it was too romantic a building for that, stone-walled, red-domed, enchanted, with Belgian chandeliers shining down upon you, and on the walls and on the floors the art and furniture and carpeting from every part of that giant country, the country that could not be named, and so, if you were a young man wanting to impress your love you would somehow find the money to take her to the lounge facing the sea and as the sea breeze caressed your faces you would drink tea or lime juice and eat cucumber sandwiches and cake and she would love you because you had brought her into the city’s magic heart. And maybe on your second date you would bring her back for Chinese food downstairs and that would seal the deal.

The grandees of the city, and the country, and the world made the grand old hotel their own after the British left – princes, politicians, movie stars, religious leaders, the most famous and most beautiful faces in the city, the country and the world jostled for position in its corridors – and it became as much a symbol of the city that could not be named as the Eiffel Tower, or the Colosseum, or the statue in New York harbour whose name was Liberty Enlightens the World.

There was an origin myth about the grand old hotel which almost everyone in the city that could not be named believed even though it wasn’t true, a myth about liberty, about overthrowing the British imperialists just as the Americans had. The story went that in the first years of the twentieth century a grand old gentleman in a fez, who just happened to be the richest man in the country that could not be named, once tried to visit a different, older grand hotel in the same neighbourhood and was refused entry on account of his race. The grand old gentleman nodded his head slowly, walked away, bought a substantial piece of land down the road, and built upon it the finest and grandest hotel ever seen in the city that could not be named in the country that could not be identified, and in a short period of time put out of business the hotel which had refused him entry. So the hotel became, in people’s minds, a symbol of rebellion, of beating the colonisers at their own game and driving them into the sea, and even when it was conclusively established that nothing of the sort had really happened it changed nothing, because a symbol of freedom and victory is more powerful than the facts.

One hundred and five years passed. Then, on November 23, 2008, ten gunmen armed with automatic weapons and hand grenades left by boat from the hostile neighbouring country to the west of the country that could not be named. In their backpacks they carried ammunition and strong narcotics: cocaine, steroids, LSD and syringes. On their journey to the city that could not be named they hijacked a fishing boat, abandoned their original vessel, brought two dinghies aboard the fishing boat and told the captain where to go. When they were near the shore they killed the captain and got into the dinghies. Afterwards many people wondered why the coastguard had not seen them or tried to intercept them. The coast was supposed to be well guarded but on this night there had been a failure of some sort. When the dinghies landed, on November 26, the gunmen split up into small groups and made their way to their chosen targets, a railway station, a hospital, a movie theatre, a Jewish centre, a popular cafe and two five-star hotels. One of these was the hotel described above.

The attack on the railway station began at 9.21 p.m., and lasted for an hour and a half. The two gunmen fired indiscriminately, and fifty-eight people died. They left the station and were eventually cornered near a city beach, where one was killed and the other captured. Meanwhile, at 9.30 p.m., another team of killers blew up a gas station and then started shooting at the people in the Jewish centre when they came to the windows. Then they attacked the centre itself and seven people died. Ten people died at the cafe. Over the next forty-eight hours perhaps thirty people died in the other hotel.

The hotel that was loved by everyone was attacked around 9.45 p.m. Guests in the swimming pool area were shot first, and then the gunmen went toward the restaurants. A young woman working in the Sea Lounge where young men took their girlfriends to impress them helped many guests escape through a staff door, but when the gunmen burst into the lounge she herself was killed. Grenades were set off and a murder spree followed during what became a three-day siege. Outside there were TV crews and crowds and someone shouted, ‘The hotel is on fire!’ Flames leapt from the windows of the topmost floor and the famous staircase too was ablaze. Among those trapped by the flames and burned to death were the wife and children of the manager of the hotel. The gunmen had blueprints of the hotel’s floor plan and their blueprints were more accurate than those held by the security forces. They used the drugs to stay awake and the LSD – which is not a psychostimulant – combined with the other drugs (which were) to create in the killers a manic hallucinogenic frenzy and they laughed aloud as they killed. Outside, the TV crews reported on escaping hotel guests and the killers watched TV to find out where the guests were escaping from. By the end of the siege over thirty people had died, many of them members of the hotel staff.

The Goldens, under their abandoned original name, lived in the city’s most exclusive neighbourhood, in a gated community on the most exclusive hill, in a large modern house overlooking the art deco mansions lining the Back Bay into which the red sun dove head first every night. We can imagine them there, the old man, not so old then, and the sons, also younger, the big brilliant clumsy agoraphobic firstborn lummox, the middle one with his night-running ways and his society portraits, the youngest boy with the darkness and confusion in him, and it seems that the game of giving themselves classical names was one the old man had encouraged them to play for many years, just as he taught them from their earliest days that they were not ordinary people, they were Caesars, they were gods. The Roman emperors, and afterwards the Byzantine monarchs, were known by Arabs and Persians as Qaisar-e-Rúm, Caesars of Rome. And if Rome was Rúm, then they, the kings of this eastern Rome, were Rumi. That led them to the study of the mystic and sage Rumi, aka Jalaluddin Balkhi, whose quotes the father and his sons batted around like tennis balls, what you seek is seeking you, you are the universe in ecstatic motion, be notorious, unfold your own myth, sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment, set your life on fire, seek those who fan your flames, and if you desire healing, let yourself fall ill, until they grew weary of his nostrums and started making them up to make one another laugh, if you want to be rich, make yourself poor, if someone is looking for you, that’s who you’re looking for, if you want to be right side up, stand upon your head.

After that they were no longer Rumi and became Latinate Julii, the sons of Caesar who were or would be Caesars in their own right. They were an old family claiming to be able to trace their ancestry all the way back to Alexander the Great – alleged by Plutarch to be the son of Zeus himself – so they were at least the equal of the Julio-Claudians who claimed descent from Iulus, the son of pious Aeneas, prince of Troy, and therefore from Aeneas’s mother, the goddess Venus. As for the word Caesar, it had at least four possible origins. Did the first Caesar kill a caesai – the Moorish word for elephant? Did he have thick hair on his head – caesaries? Did he have grey eyes, oculis caesiis? Or did his name come from the verb caedere, to cut, because he was born by Caesarean section? ‘I don’t have grey eyes, and my mother gave birth to me in the usual way,’ said the old man. ‘And my hair, though still present, has thinned; nor have I killed any elephants. To hell with the first Caesar. I choose to be Nero, the last one.’

‘Who are we, then?’ the middle son asked. ‘You are my sons,’ the patriarch said with a shrug. ‘Choose your own names.’ Afterwards, when it was time to leave, they discovered that he had had travel documents made up for them in the new names, and they weren’t surprised. He was a man who got things done.

And here as if in an old photograph is the old man’s wife, a small sad woman with her greying hair up in an untidy bun and the memory of self-harm in her eyes. Caesar’s wife: required to be above suspicion, yes, but also stuck with the worst job in the world.

In the evening of November 26 something happened in the big house, an argument of some sort between Caesar and his wife, and she sent for the Mercedes and the driver and left the house in distress, on her way to seek the consolation of her friends, and that was how she came to be sitting in the Sea Lounge of the hotel that everyone loved, eating cucumber sandwiches and drinking heavily sweetened fresh lime juice, when the hallucinating gunmen burst in giggling with joy, with spiralling eyeballs and psychedelic imaginary birds fluttering around their heads, and began shooting to kill.

And yes, the country was India, of course, the city was Bombay, of course, the house was a part of the luxurious Walkeshwar colony on Malabar Hill, and yes, of course, these were the Muslim terrorist attacks launched from Pakistan by Lashkar-e-Taiba, the ‘Army of the Righteous’, first on the railway station formerly known as Victoria Terminus or VT and presently, like everything else in Bombay/Mumbai, renamed after the Mahratta hero-prince Shivaji – and then on Leopold Cafe in Colaba, the Oberoi Trident Hotel, the Metro Cinema, the Cama and Albless Hospital, the Jewish Chabad House, and the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel. And yes, after the three-day sieges and battles were done, the mother of the two older Golden boys (of the youngest son’s mother we will have more to say hereafter) was numbered among the dead.

When the old man heard that his wife was trapped inside the Taj his knees gave way and he would have fallen down the marble steps of his marble house, from his marble living room to the marble terrace below, if there had not been a servant close enough to catch him, but then there was always a servant. He remained on his knees and buried his face in his hands and his body was racked by sobs so loud and convulsive that it seemed as if a creature hidden deep within himself was trying to escape. For the entire duration of the attacks he stayed in the position of prayer at the top of the marble steps, refusing to eat or sleep, pounding his chest with a fist like a professional mourner at a funeral, and blaming himself. I didn’t know she was going there, he cried, I should have known, why did I let her go. In those days the air in the city felt dark as blood even at high noon, dark as a mirror, and the old man saw himself reflected in it and didn’t like what he saw; and such was the force of his vision that his boys saw it too, and after the bad news came, the news that ended their whole life up to that point, the weekend walks around the racecourse with representatives of the great old families of Bombay and the new-money people too, squash and bridge and swimming and badminton and golf at the Willingdon Club, movie starlets, hot jazz, all of it gone forever because drowned beneath a sea of death, they went along with what their father said he wanted now, which was to leave this marble place forever, and the broken quarrelling city in which it stood, and the whole dirty corrupt vulnerable country as well, their everything which their father now suddenly or perhaps not so suddenly detested, they agreed to obliterate every detail of what it had been to them and who they had been in it and what they had lost: the woman whose husband had shouted at her and so drove her to her doom, whose two sons had loved her, and who had once been so badly humiliated by her stepson that she tried to kill herself. They would wipe the slate clean, take on new identities, cross the world and be other than what they were. They would escape from the historical into the personal, and in the New World the personal would be all they sought and all they expected, to be detached and individual and alone, each of them to make his own agreement with the everyday, outside history, outside time, in private. It did not occur to any of them that their decision was born of a colossal sense of entitlement, this notion that they could just step away from yesterday and start tomorrow as if it wasn’t a part of the same week, to move beyond memory and roots and language and race into the land of the self-made self, which is another way of saying, America.

How we wronged her, the dead lady, when in our gossiping we ascribed her absence from New York to her infidelity. It was her absence, her tragedy, that made sense of her family’s presence among us. She was the meaning of this tale.

When the emperor Nero’s wife Poppaea Sabina died he burned ten years’ supply of Arabian incense at her funeral. But in the case of Nero Golden all the incense in the world couldn’t finally cover up the bad smell.

The legal term benami looks almost French, ben-ami, fooling the unwary into believing it might mean ‘good friend’, bon ami, or ‘well-liked’, bien-aimé, or something of the sort. But the word is actually of Persian origin, and its root is not ben-ami but bé-námi. Bé is a prefix meaning ‘without’ and nám means ‘name’; thus benami, ‘without a name’, or anonymous. In India, benami transactions are purchases of property in which the ostensible buyer, in whose name the property is acquired, is just a front man, used to conceal the property’s real owner. In old American slang, the benami would be called the beard.

In 1988 the government of India passed the Benami Transactions (Prohibitions) Act, which both outlawed such purchases and made it possible for the state to recover property ‘held benami’. Many loopholes, however, remained. One of the ways in which the authorities have sought to close these loopholes is the institution of the Aadhaar system. Aadhaar is a twelve-digit social security ID number allocated to each Indian citizen for his or her lifetime and its use is mandatory in all property and financial transactions, allowing the citizen’s involvement in such transactions to be electronically traced. However, the man we knew as Nero Golden, an American citizen for over twenty years and the father of American citizens, was clearly ahead of the game. When what happened happened and everything came to light we learned that the Golden house was owned outright by a lady of a certain age, the same lady who served as the senior of Nero’s two trusted confidantes, and no other legal document could be shown to exist. But what happened did happen, and after that even the walls Nero had so carefully erected came tumbling down, and the full, appalling extent of his criminality stood before us, naked in the daylight of the truth. That was in the future. For now, he was simply N. J. Golden, our rich and – as we discovered – vulgar neighbour.

4

IN THE SECRET, grassy quadrangle of the Gardens, I crawled before I could walk, I walked before I could run, I ran before I could dance, I danced before I could sing, and I danced and sang until I learned stillness and silence and stood motionless and listening at the Gardens’ heart, on summer evenings sparkling with fireflies, and became, at least in my own opinion, an artist. To be precise, a would-be writer of films. And, in my dreams, a film-maker, even, in the grand old formulation, an auteur.

I’ve been hiding behind the first-person plural, and may do so again, but I’m getting around to introducing myself. I am. But in a way I’m not so different from my subjects, who were self-concealers also – the family whose arrival in my neck of the woods provided me with the big project for which I had, with growing desperation, been searching. If the Goldens were heavily invested in the erasure of their past, then I, who have taken it upon myself to be their chronicler – and perhaps their imagineer, a term invented for the devisers of rides in Disney theme parks – am by nature self-effacing. What was it that Isherwood said at the outset of Goodbye to Berlin? ‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.’ But that was then, and this is the age of smart cameras that do all one’s thinking for one. Maybe I’m a smart camera. I record, but I’m not exactly passive. I think. I alter. Possibly I even invent. To be an imagineer, after all, is very different from being a literalist. Van Gogh’s picture of a starry night doesn’t look like a photograph of a starry night, but it’s a great depiction of a starry night nonetheless. Let’s just agree that I prefer the painting to the photograph. I am a camera that paints.

Call me René. I have always liked it that the narrator of Moby-Dick doesn’t actually tell us his name. Call-me-Ishmael might in ‘reality’, which is to say in the petty Actual that lay outside the grand Real of the novel, he might have been called, oh, anything. He might have been Brad, or Trig, or Ornette, or Schuyler, or Zeke. He might even have been called Ishmael. We don’t know, and so, like my great forebear, I forbear to say unto you plainly, my name’s René. Call me René: that’s the best I can do for you.

We proceed. Both my parents were college professors (do you note, in their son, an inherited note of the professorial?) who bought our house near the corner of Sullivan and Houston back in the Jurassic era when things were cheap. I present them to you: Gabe and Darcey Unterlinden, long-time married couple, not only respected scholars but beloved teachers, and, like the great Poirot (he’s fictional, but you can’t have everything, as Mia Farrow said in The Purple Rose of Cairo) … Belgians. Belgians long ago, I hastily clarify, Americans since forever, Gabe oddly persevering with a curious, heavy and largely invented pan-European accent, Darcey comfortably Yankee. The professors were players of ping-pong (they challenged Nero Golden when they heard of his fondness for the game, and he beat them both soundly, though they were both pretty good). They were quoters of poetry to each other. They were baseball fans, oh, and giggling addicts of reality television, lovers of opera, jointly and constantly planning their never-to-be-written monograph on the form, to be called The Chick Always Dies.

They loved their city for its unlikeness to the rest of the country. ‘Rome iss not Italy,’ my father taught me, ‘and London iss not England and Paris iss not France, and dis, where we are right now, dis is not de United States of America. Dis iss New York.’

‘Between the metropolis and the hinterland,’ my mother added her footnote, ‘always resentment, always alienation.’

‘After 9/11, America tries to pretend it loves us,’ said my dad. ‘How long does dat last?’

‘Not so fucking long,’ my mother completed his thought. (She was a user of swear words. She claimed she didn’t know she was doing it. They just slipped out.)

‘Iss a bubble, like everyone says now,’ my father said. ‘Iss like in de Jim Carrey movie, only expanded to big-city size.’

‘The Truman Show,’ my mother helpfully clarified. ‘And not even the whole city is in the bubble, because the bubble is made of money and the money isn’t evenly spread.’