Authors: Hanif Kureishi
Marriage as a problem, and as a solution, has always been the central subject for drama, the novel and the cinema. Most of us come from a marriage, and, probably, a divorce, of some sort, and both bring together the most serious things: sex, love, children, betrayal, boredom, frustration, and property. The kind of questions which surround lengthy relationships – What is it like to live with another person for a long time? What do we expect? What do we need? What do we want? What is the relation between safety and excitement, for each of us? – are the most important we can ask.
Set in contemporary Paris,
Le Week-End
is a film I developed with the director Roger Michell, with whom I’ve worked on a TV series,
The Buddha of Suburbia,
and two films,
The Mother
and
Venus.
The films were mostly concerned with a subject we believed was neglected in the cinema: the lives and passions of older people, whose anxieties and desires, we found, were as intense, if not more significant, than those of the young.
Le Week-End
concerns a late-middle-aged couple, Nick and Meg, who are both teachers, one in a school,
the other in a university, and who go away to Paris to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary. While there they discuss the meaning and direction of their marriage now their children have left home. Time and health are running out for them, as they consider their impending old age, and wonder what sort of future they might want, either together or apart. They think about how they might die, but this couple also need to talk about how they have lived: the way in which they have brought up their children, and how the family has worked, where it failed, and where there is regret, bitterness and even fury.
The film shows the depredations of time, but also the lability of the past, its different meaning and value for each of the couple, and how, now they are talking, it can seem as unstable as the future. They are looking in the same direction, but cannot see the same thing. There is no narrative they can agree on.
Their short sojourn, whatever else it is, will be a time of difficult conversations. What if it occurs to one or other of them that their relationship was a mistake, that it didn’t resemble their original hopes at all, and they could have had a far better life elsewhere? Meanwhile, what have they done to one another? Was there harm? What did they use one another for?
The couple are from a suburb of Birmingham, where they have taught for decades. But ‘Paris was where the twentieth century was,’ says Gertrude Stein in
Paris
France.
And Paris, in their provincial English imaginations, represents several desirable things: the fresh ideas and radicalism of the sixties and the barricades of 1968, along with the intellectual revolutions of their youth as exemplified by Derrida, Althusser, Lacan, Foucault. There are also personal revolutions: the idea of the equal, committed, but ‘open relationship’, represented by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, for whom ‘the game of love’ – the rondo of seduction, rejection and change – never had to end. As Stendhal writes in
Love
, ‘The pleasures of private life ought to be augmented to an infinite degree by recurrent exposure to danger.’ But was it true that love could easily be turned into a form of sport or frivolous distraction? Surely love was no closer to sport than sex was to exercise?
As well as these essential questions, Paris, for our couple, represents continuity, and an ideal of civilisation. It means a certain quality of living when it comes to clothes, sex, transgression, tolerance, conversation, bohemianism. This pair like to eat well; it is in French restaurants that they find sensuous enjoyment together, perhaps the one place now where there is real collaboration and exchange between them.
In the London suburbs of the 50s and 60s, where I grew up in relative safety after the turbulence of the war, all, apparently, was set forever. Conventional marriage was the paradigm. My father, an exile from colonial India’s
religious strife and partition, was a commuter, and my mother was happy to call herself a housewife. The relation between work, marriage and play was perfectly arranged. Nothing was missing; it was all there already. All you had to do was fit in. That, at least, was the idea.
As Nick and Meg are aware, marriage frees a certain sort of companionate love, if you’re lucky. But it domesticates sex. The couple are over-intimate. They know too much about one another. Without obstacles, there can be no fascination. How can you desire what you already have? That’s not all: the arrangements which marriage requires to survive – security, duration, reliability, repetition – can seem liberating in their continuity, or stifling, according to your nature. The suburbs suited my father, since he’d come from a more dangerous place, and wanted contentment. But there was something about living there that could make you want to scream. For some, it would never be sufficient. You might learn, as Nick does in Paris with his wife – whom he still wants and needs – that the problem with desire is not that you cannot get rid of it, but that there is too much of it. It is ever-present, and ever-pressing, however much you want to discount it. You cannot wish it away, and it cannot be replaced by a substitute.
Either cannily or madly, John Cheever took up residence at the heart of the American Dream in a New York suburb, more affluent than the one I came from. He was
a homosexual alcoholic artist attempting to be a straight married man. The mask and myth required to enact the gestures of servitude and constraint needed to live this kind of life proved disabling and humiliating. Cheever gave it a long try, and it enabled him to become an artist. But it never worked out; it was never going to. Chaos returned, and any fool could have predicted it would, even Cheever himself in certain moods. Perhaps there is only so much about yourself you can bear to understand.
A lot of this turns up in American writing at the time. And the question is always the same: was the repression worth it? Had too much that was essential been sacrificed for the ideal? How much of yourself could you give up and remain an ‘authentic’ person? Couldn’t there be less painful or difficult, more satisfying ways to live, more in line with ‘human nature’, as the romantics might have put it?
An interesting version of someone wondering about this was Wilhelm Reich, the subject of a biography by Christopher Turner. A psychoanalyst trained by Freud in Vienna, and living in the US in the 50s, he and other ‘liberationists’ of the times, such as Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse and R. D. Laing, were thinking about how desire could free people from oppressive and frustrating ways of living. According to Reich, the wrong life could make your body rigid, inflexible and awkward.
He says, in
The Function of the Orgasm,
‘that the average human being of today has lost contact with his real nature’, and he writes of ‘the incrustations and rigidities in human emotional life’.
Reich considered Freud conventional and pessimistic, and thought he didn’t go far enough when it came to acknowledging the central place of sexuality in human life. For Freud, renunciation made some happiness possible, whereas Reich wanted to know why there had to be renunciation at all. Weren’t human beings attacking that which in themselves was most alive: their capacity for love? Weren’t fascist, authoritarian structures also inside the individual? Of course they were, argued Freud. But people loved their illness; they wanted to be unhappy; pleasure was the last thing they desired. A ‘complete Eros’, or ultimate cure, was impossible.
It wasn’t long before Reich gave up on the most dangerous thing – speech – and the idea of the ‘talking cure’. Speaking took too long; it was indirect and inconclusive. He began to touch his patients, believing that more and stronger orgasms were the solution. A full blast of pleasure, of orgiastic potency, would enable you to see you’d been living badly, or not according to your nature. This Salvationist view, from our less credulous and more cynical time, might seem like the least of it. But Reich was onto something here. If pleasure isn’t your guide, what will be? Reich had some grasp of the creativity of sexual
desire, and the cost of constraining it. And numerous people have been awoken from relative slumber by the unexpectedness of love or sex, and by the sense of opening out to more life and possibility.
I can recall a student of mine, a woman in her mid-forties, telling me a long, moving story about being ‘awakened’ emotionally, sexually and intellectually when she fell in love with a friend of her husband. Their love caused a huge trauma for both families, but it was worth it, she said. There would have been more suffering all round – wasted energy, unused love, unemployed passion – had she remained in the status quo.
The revolutionaries of the 60s called for new ways of being and alternative forms of social interaction. However, what the adulterer usually wants is better relationships, conversation, support, attention, pleasure. Her question is: how can we get what we want while behaving well, which means, at least, not being ashamed of ourselves?
The unhappy are no good to anyone. The unhappy are dangerous. The discontented and jaded become perverse or sadistic. Adulterers are not necessarily utopians: adultery merely shows the possibility of meaning, hope and love. My student didn’t wish for anything like ‘total liberation’ – a revolution, a new social set-up – just for a satisfying marriage. And it is worth noting about the classic heroines of literature – Anna Karenina or Madame
Bovary, or even the characters in David Lean’s
Brief
Encounter
– that they are not compulsive transgressors. They are asking for very little, and for everything, which, for them, is a fuller, more satisfying love. Complete happiness is a fiction, but some happiness is possible; indeed, it is essential. There are some people you can ‘realise’ yourself in relation to, and they are worth searching out. But there is a price. Something radical does have to change to make this possible – certainly, for women, in terms of the whole society – and there will be inescapable guilt.
Compared to Freud, Reich and his coevals prove, in the end, to be the more limited, if not conservative, concentrating on too small a notion of human need and fulfilment. Freud had a novelist’s capaciousness; Reich was a headline writer. If constraint of some sort is impossible to avoid, the question is: which constraint, when, where?
Nick and Meg go to Paris because love is the most considerable business of all, and they need to know what sort of relationships make life worth living, and, if they have a future together, what it might be like. Do they suffer less together than they would apart? The decision they make at the end of the film can only be provisional, and the questions they ask have to be confronted repeatedly, since there isn’t one answer that can satisfy them.
More or less the last thing Farhana remembered before finding herself on the Boulevard Saint-Germain was her son Yasin waking up his driver and her guard, and ordering them to take her to Karachi airport. As Yasin was too drunk to drive her himself, he instructed the men to put Farhana on the 2 a.m. flight to Istanbul, where she could change for Paris.
Yasin, who had not long before dragged her across the marble floor by her loveliest silk chiffon dupatta, and struck her across the face with the back of his hand, smashing her lip, now bowed before his mother. He said that after her behaviour she should never come back to Pakistan. And since he doubted whether he would live to be old, or that he would go to the West again, it was, as he put it, goodbye, or
‘khuda hafiz’.
‘May Allah protect you, and, never forget this –’ his mother said, wagging her finger at him as she was helped into the car, ‘Allah is always watching you.’
She could hear him laughing as she closed the window.
The following morning, once more wrapped in her favourite trench coat, she was walking around her adopted
city. First she’d go to the market; then, perhaps, she’d go to an exhibition, or look again at La Hune, her favourite bookshop, or the other wonderful little places on the Left Bank where she lived, selling hand-made paper and bizarre knick-knacks. In the afternoon she liked to go to the Tuileries or the Luxembourg for a sorbet, watching the children with their au pairs. There was plenty to see. When her first husband had been alive, she’d been a photographer, selling her pictures to Pakistani papers and magazines, and she knew how to look. It wasn’t that Paris looked different now; she had only been in Karachi for a month. But she was full of new words, and would talk about the city differently, when she had the opportunity.
Farhana’s husband, Michel, a retired critic and journalist, was, as always at that time of the morning, reading in his study on what she called his charpoy – his day-bed – supported by oriental tasselled cushions. He hadn’t seen his wife the previous night, and now he didn’t get up to greet or kiss her, as if it would take too much physical effort. He didn’t say he was glad to have her home. But he did wave, lean forward a little, and say, ‘You are back early. What happened to your lip?’
‘I’ll tell you, darling,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you everything.’
He did say he was keen to hear her story. Not that she knew how to tell it. It would have to come out as it came.
In the late 90s, Farhana’s first husband, an army general who had been educated in America, had been publicly
beheaded by the Taliban at the behest of his military colleagues, who thought he had become too pro-American. They believed, in fact, that he was betraying the complicity of the army with the Taliban to their mutual enemy, the Americans. For this reason he was captured and driven to the mountains. After she had been sent a photograph of a hand holding up his head, with a large crowd of cheering local villagers in the background, she had fled. Yasin had refused to join her, but remained on the family’s country estate, keeping out of politics.
Farhana went to Paris to stay with a wealthy friend, who advised her never to go home. It would also be a good idea to find a steady man to look after her. Paris was ideal for exiles; once, it had welcomed the stateless. But Farhana would have little money and no status, and the French were notoriously racist, only liking people of colour if they were artists or could play the trumpet. What if they mistook her for an Algerian?
Farhana didn’t seem concerned, and went along with others’ wishes as if she only wanted a quiet life. Now, looking back, she guessed she had been traumatised, and probably still was.
The good friend did a good thing and found the widower Michel, who was ten years older than her. Now in his mid-seventies, he had retired from regular writing in order to read Balzac, study Trollope in English, and become properly familiar with the history of poetry. He
had stuck to his word: he was a reader. His chosen destiny made him happy.
At the time he was seen as a tremendous catch, an opportunity not to be missed. He was widowed, well off, cultured, well connected, with numerous books to his name and a lovely flat off the Rue du Bac, on the Left Bank, full of pictures and theatre memorabilia. Farhana, from a distinguished family, was unused to telling anyone who she was. Now she was often informed that she was lucky. Many Parisian women would have wanted this dry old stick. But it was she, a frightened, declining Pakistani woman then in her mid-fifties, who had grabbed the prize. How? She guessed that because she said so little to him, she seemed more demure and mysterious than the others. She certainly had had no idea what she was doing. Perhaps he had pitied her.
It was indeed the case that Michel knew actors, writers and directors. Many of them were distinguished or even world famous in their own world, and they came for dinner once a month and drank a lot. The talk was always of the latest films and books, of what Sarkozy was, or wasn’t, doing. If Farhana wondered what Michel wanted from her, there really was no obscurity. They had never been moved by one another. It was companionship: he liked someone to be there while he talked – an urgent and more or less continuous monologue concerning what was in the newspapers. He liked having someone arrange
the film screenings he went to, and the plays he attended, often with her. He liked her to sit with him when he listened to entire symphonies by Brahms or Beethoven, nodding at her instructively during the finer parts. She loved this, as it was an opportunity for her to think about important things.
The friend who arranged the marriage included a warning. ‘Until the age of sixty a woman still needs passion. But I suspect, dear girl, that your man will make love like a critic.’
‘Without asking for it, one day I ran to the airport and found myself dumped in a completely new life, as a middle-aged immigrant,’ said Farhana. ‘How would I know how a critic makes love?’
‘Watch out,’ said her friend. ‘Fastidious.’
Farhana and Michel had sex twice: once before the marriage, and once after, which was more than enough for him. The first time he ejaculated immediately, and the second he suffered cramp and howled awfully, followed by a coughing fit which he thought was a heart attack. Farhana suspected the catastrophe might have been caused by her removing his tie. She had never seen him during the day without a tie, and she only saw him at night, wrapped in a dressing gown, if they both had insomnia. She had bought him a cashmere polo-neck one Christmas, but Michel felt his being was an obscenity without a tie, and he never wore casual clothes.
Farhana thought she was done with her homeland; she had been ripped from the past, and the future was comfortable but null. Then, one afternoon, Yasin’s wife Nasira, who had escaped him at last to London, insisted on coming to Paris to talk. Now working for a travel agent in Cricklewood, North London, Nasira came from a famous family, and had been a Cleopatra, one of the most striking women of Karachi, who wore the most glamorous saris and shimmering shalwar kameez, with solid gold bangles. Many men had been wild about her, which was, Yasin insisted, part of the problem. Now, in jeans and sweater, she was – apart from the Rolex – as diminished and plain as Farhana realised that she herself was. But these two women, both escapees, liked one another, and had much in common.
Farhana put her fingers under Nasira’s chin and raised her face. ‘Why have you come to see me here?’
‘I must warn you,’ Nasira said. Farhana’s wild-tempered son, never the most stable of people, was developing into a madman. Out on his country estate in Sind, where he was a feudal landlord, Yasin was, apparently, playing polo aggressively, drinking whisky, copulating brutally, and shooting his many guns at anything alive. And because of the kidnappings, he was trying to import a brand-new armoured BMW with blacked-out windows into the country. His wife believed that, although this tank was extremely heavy and therefore somewhat slow, the ‘local
Mr Toad’, as she called her husband, would smoke a joint, turn up his favourite Punjabi bhangra music, and soon embrace a tree with the vehicle. Although she despised him, she didn’t think another violent death in the family would be good for Farhana.
‘What can I do about it?’ Farhana asked. ‘Are you saying I must go there? I’m too weak now: I can’t face it.’
‘You can only feel you have done your duty,’ her daughter-in-law replied. ‘And then live your life – which is what I am doing at last.’
Haltingly, Farhana asked Michel if he would be interested in accompanying her, but he wondered whether it would be dusty, or inconvenient for his stomach. That was the least of it. Still, she made sure to take her first husband’s gold watch, cufflinks and fountain pens, which she would deliver to Yasin at last.
On her first afternoon in Paris after the trip, her husband asked her to walk with him. That day there was a wind, and he had his waistcoat on. As always, his hands were behind his back. Leaning forward, he barely lifted his feet from the ground, for fear of falling. ‘An old man can come to believe that he could easily be knocked down,’ he said. ‘If he takes a step—’
Farhana interrupted to say, ‘When you return to a country after a terrible shock, and more than a decade away, you will know that the roads will have got wider and the skyscrapers higher. There will be more apartment
blocks, more people on the street, new immigrants and tourists coming to see the sights. Michel, I must be ageing because I remember when Karachi was a pleasant post-colonial city.’
‘Tell me!’
‘The men wore suits and the women dresses. People still read Somerset Maugham, drank gin-and-tonics, and listened to “In the Mood”, as if the British had just popped north for the summer. There were flowers in the centre of the road. You could get
The Times
at your club. This time I saw rubble everywhere, a gun every ten yards, high walls and barbed wire. The women outside were afraid, and covered themselves to avoid harassment. A city in lockdown, a war zone after a war. A state of petrifaction. Decline and decay everywhere.’
Yasin had returned from his estate to welcome his mother. During the brief period he was sober, after he woke up around lunchtime and his servant went in to cut his toenails and shave him, Farhana went to his room. Although he had put on weight, and his body was flabby, his head was also shaven now, making him look thuggish.
Visas to the West were almost impossible to obtain these days; terrorism had rendered Pakistanis pariahs. All the same, Farhana wanted to persuade Yasin, before he destroyed his health, to do his best to escape to the West or even, since times were hard, to Australia or New
Zealand, if he could bear it.
He laughed and replied, ‘There is no doubt that we have made a mess of things here. We all love to declare our devotion to the country, but apart from Imran Khan, every single one of us, if offered a visa, would pack hurriedly and rush to the exit tomorrow. But, I am sorry, Mother, I will not be joining the others at the border, humbly begging to be let into the land of plenty and reason. Being “tolerated” is the last thing I want.’
‘Darling, please, give me one good reason for you not to start a new life.’
‘It is here that the reality of the world is lived out.’
The last time he was in France, with his then wife, Yasin said he saw a sign saying ‘Disneyland Paris’ and laughed so much he wished, for the only time, that his father was also around to appreciate it. He had come to dislike the West more as he got older, and had developed a particular animus against the authority of the EU, which he seemed to believe was run by Dominique Strauss-Kahn. He said not only was the EU hypocritical, but Europe was ‘risk-free and easy’. Everything was polite and over-careful in its ‘multiculturalism and love for homosexuals’. The brutality was now exported, and the only victims today were Muslims, whom the West had never given up believing were lesser beings.
He said, ‘Our family sacrificed good lives in India to ruin this new country. As you know, we are a wild and
self-destructive people who live carelessly. Life is cheap, only alcohol is expensive. Think how direct we are: all the hotels have been attacked with suicide bombs. When I walk out onto the street I like to know the chances are I will be shot at. What other country in the world would hide Osama Bin Laden in the centre of a city while pocketing vast amounts of American money to finance the search for him? Mother, you must agree it takes perverse genius of the highest order to walk through that looking glass.’
‘It’s not comfortable to be so stressed.’
‘You stress us, with your drone bombings of civilians.’ He asked, ‘How is your husband, the man who replaced my father? Do you like him? I can see from your lack of expression that you really don’t mind, but you did hurry into his arms very quickly.’
‘Forgive me, but I was half-dead and stunned. I’m diabetic, and was diagnosed with extreme anxiety. Day by day I sewed my life back together. Michel gets up in the morning with purpose. You lie there like a teenager.’
‘Even if that man’s work is pointless?’
‘He writes about plays.’
‘But what would
Hay Fever
mean here?’
‘He respects himself. You say you are religious, but you wallow in cynicism. Didn’t you say, in this country the educated have no religion, and the religious have no education?’
‘I am not religious,’ he said. ‘But I am a Muslim.’
‘Yasin, it is this country which has corrupted your imagination. Your father wasn’t like this. He kept saying that without many voices, including the Christian, devotion to one religion will make us autocrats.’
‘Then the fool was begging to be murdered. He would have handed over the country to Jews, colonialists and those who want to bomb us into fundamentalist capitalism. Who here doesn’t think that Osama taught those arrogant imperialists a good lesson?’ He laughed. ‘But are we really to discuss this, Gertrude, Mother?’
‘You are too old to play Hamlet.’
There were no theatres, bars or new restaurants in Karachi, and people went to one another’s houses. At first she accompanied her son on his nightly round of parties. It was an opportunity for her to see the people she’d grown up with, and for them all to notice how much they had aged.