Once again he had withdrawn from the world. Even checking his voice mail was hard. Mila had married, Eleanor left tight, miserable messages about lawyers. The divorce was all but done. Solanka’s days began, passed, ended. He had given up the New York sublet and taken a suite at Claridge’s. Most days he only left it to allow the cleaners to get in. He contacted no friends, made no business calls, bought no newspaper. Retiring early, he lay wide-eyed and rigid in his comfortable bed, listening to the noises of distant fury, trying to hear Neela’s silenced voice. On Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve he ordered room service and watched brainless television. This expedition by taxi to North London was his first real outing in months. He had been far from sure he would even see the boy, but Asmaan and Eleanor were creatures of custom, and their movements were relatively easy to predict.
It was a holiday weekend, so there were funfairs on the Heath. On their way back to the house on Willow Road—it would be on the market any day now—Asmaan, Eleanor, and Morgen wandered through the usual rides and stalls. Asmaan was thawing toward Franz, Solanka observed: laughing with him, asking him questions, his hand disappearing inside Uncle Morg’s great hairy-knuckled fist. They went in a bumper car together while Eleanor took photographs. When Asmaan leaned his head against Morgen’s sports coat, something broke in Malik Solanka’s heart.
Eleanor saw him. He was lounging by a coconut shy and she looked right at him and stiffened. Then she shook her head vehemently, and her mouth silently but very emphatically made the word “no.” No, this was not the right time; after such a long gap it would be too much of a shock for the lad. Call me, she mouthed. Before any future meeting they ought to discuss how, when, where, and what Asmaan should be told. The little fellow needed to be prepared. This was how Solanka had known she would react. He turned away from her and saw the bouncy castle. It was bright blue, blue as an iris, with a bouncy staircase at one side. You climbed up the stairs to a bouncy ledge, slid and tumbled down a wide, bouncy slope, and then, to your heart’s content, you bounced and bounced. Malik Solanka paid his money and slipped off his shoes. “’Ang about,” the enormous woman attendant cried. “Kids only, guv. No adults allowed.” But he was too quick for her, and with his long leather coat flying in the breeze, he leapt up on the wibbly-wobbly stairs, leaving astonished children floundering in his wake, and at the top of the stairs, standing high above the fairground on the wibbly-wobbly ledge, he began to jump and shout with all his might. The noise that emerged from him was awful and immense, a roar from the Inferno, the cry of the tormented and the lost. But grand and high was his bouncing; and he was damned if he was going to stop leaping or desist from yelling until that little boy looked around, until he made Asmaan Solanka hear him in spite of the enormous woman and the gathering crowd and the mouthing mother and the man holding the boy’s hand and above all the lack of a golden hat, until Asmaan turned and saw his father up there, his only true father flying against the sky, asmaan, the sky, conjuring up all his lost love and hurling it high up into the sky like a white bird plucked from his sleeve. His only true father taking flight like a bird, to live in the great blue vault of the only heaven in which he had ever been able to believe. “Look at me!” shrieked Professor Malik Solanka, his leather coattails flapping like wings. “Look at me, Asmaan! I’m bouncing very well! I’m bouncing higher and higher!”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SALMAN RUSHDIE is the author of nine novels: Grimus, Midnight’s Children (which was awarded the Booker Prize and the “Booker of Bookers,” for the best novel to have won the prize), Shame (winner of the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger), The Satanic Verses (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel), Haroun and the Sea of Stories (winner of the Writers Guild Award), The Moor’s Last Sigh (winner of the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature), The Ground Beneath Her Feet (winner of the Eurasian section of the Commonwealth Prize), Fury (a New York Times Notable Book), and Shalimar the Clown (a Time Book of the Year). He is also the author of a book of stories, East, West, and three works of nonfiction—Imaginary Homelands, The Jaguar Smile, and The Wizard of Oz. He is the co-editor of Mirrorwork, an anthology of contemporary Indian writing.
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Salman Rushdie has also been awarded Germany’s Author of the Year Prize, the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the Mantua Literary Award. He holds honorary doctorates at five European and two American universities and is an honorary professor in the humanities at M.I.T. He has been awarded the Freedom of the City Award in Mexico City, and holds the rank of Commander in the Order of Arts and Letters—France’s highest artistic honor. His books have been translated into thirty-seven languages.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2006 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2001 by Salman Rushdie
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2001, and in paperback by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2002.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Hal Leonard Corporation: Excerpt from “The Donkey Song,” words and music by Irving Burgie and William Attaway. Copyright © 1955 and copyright renewed 1983 by Cherry Lane Music Publishing Company, Inc. (ASCAP), Lord Burgess Music Publishing Company (ASCAP), and DreamWorks Songs (ASCAP). Worldwide rights for Lord Burgess Music Publishing Company and DreamWorks Songs administered by Cherry Lane Music Publishing Company, Inc. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.
Appleseed Music, Inc.: Excerpt from “The Motorcycle Song” by Arlo Guthrie.
Copyright © 1967, 1969 (Renewed) by Appleseed Music, Inc.
All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Grubman Indursky & Schindler, P.C.: Excerpt from “I’m On Fire” by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 1984 by Bruce Springsteen (ASCAP).
Reprinted by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rushdie, Salman.
Fury: a novel / Salman Rushdie.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-058-8
1. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6068.U757 F87 2001
823′.914—dc21 00-054699
www.atrandom.com
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