Read Online Fury by Salman Rushdie - Free Book Online Page A

caused him a degree of distress disproportionate to the problem, and he spoke vehemently of his feelings to Mr. Simon Jay, the gentle, bemused owner of the apartment, who had lived there happily for thirty years with his wife, Ada, had raised his children in these rooms, toilet-trained them on these very water closets, and had found every day of his occupancy a simple and unqualified delight. Solanka wasn’t interested. A second flushing invariably dealt with the trouble, he conceded, but that was not acceptable. A plumber must come, and soon.
    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 Boll, 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 sbvartzer 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 psychologiscbe 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