So the fiction of undying romance was kept up, impeccably by her, extremely peccably by him. She kept tabs, however. She was a wealthy woman nowadays. Since the deaths of her parents she had come into possession of impressive tranches of prime Hampshire farmland as well as substantial port wineries on the Douro. This gave her the wherewithal to finance her investigations, on the rare occasions that her old contacts in the shadow world came up empty-handed. Consequently she knew the name of every woman her husband had seduced, every adoring college postgrad, every assistant willing to be researched, every wanton uptown society beauty and downtown party slut, all the personal two-way simultaneous translators at his international conferences, every East End summer whore he’d fucked in their South Fork home perched on the forested heights left behind by retreating glaciers, the uplands of the terminal moraine. In most cases she had also acquired their home addresses and unlisted telephone numbers. She had never contacted any of these women but she told herself she liked to have the information, that she preferred to know. This was a self-deceiving lie. The women’s names twisted in her like knives, their street addresses, apartment numbers, zip codes and phone numbers burned holes in her memory like little phosphorus bombs.
Yet she found it difficult to blame only Max. As the war retreated into the past so had her erotic urges. Her interest in such matters, always perfunctory and intermittent, seemed to wither on the vine. “Let the poor man get it elsewhere if he has to,” she told herself grimly, “as long as he doesn’t rub my bally nose in it. Then I can get on with my reading and gardening and not be bothered with all that sticky palaver.” In this way she blinded herself to her real feelings so effectively that when misery assailed her, as it periodically did, causing her to burst into hot tears without warning and to suffer from inexplicable attacks of the shakes, she couldn’t work out what she was so damned unhappy about. On the plane to India with the great man by her side she allowed herself to think, “Dash it, it is a pretty terrific love story, ours. Not conventional, I grant you; but then, what is conventional when you really look at it? Lift the lid of any life and there’s strangeness, bubbling away; behind every quiet domestic front door lurk the idiosyncratic and the weird. Normality, that’s the myth. Human beings aren’t normal. We’re an odd lot, that’s the honest truth: off-kilter, rum. But we get by. Look, here we are, Max and I, flying high, and still holding hands after twenty years. Not so shabby, really. Not too bad at all.” Then she closed her eyes and there was the vision again, the midnight rat standing up on its hind legs, begging for love, calling her mother in its high Ratetta voice. In India, she decided, she was going to have a great deal to do with orphans. Yes: the motherless children of India would discover that they had a good friend in her. Maybe that was the meaning of the dream.
“They liked Galbraith,” Lyndon Johnson was rumored to have told Dean Rusk, “so go ahead and send them another liberal professor, but don’t let this one go native on us.” When Secretary Rusk called Maximilian Ophuls in the immediate aftermath of the 1965 Indo-Pakistani war and offered him the Indian embassy, Max realized that he had been waiting for the call, waiting without knowing he was waiting, and that India, which he had never visited, might prove to be, if not his destiny, then at least the destination to which the mazy journey of his life had been leading all along. “We need you to go right away,” Rusk said. “Those Indian gentlemen need a good old American spanking and it’s our belief you’re just the man to hand it to ’em.” In his classic inquiry Why the Poor Are Poor Max Ophuls had used India, China and Brazil as economic case studies, and in the book’s much-discussed last chapter had proposed a means by which these “sleeping giants” might awake. This was perhaps the first time a major Western economist had seriously analyzed what came to be known as “South-South collaboration,” and Max, putting down the telephone that humid Manhattan evening-it was late September but the summer wouldn’t end-wondered aloud why an academic who had published a theoretical model of how Third World economies might flourish by learning to bypass the U.S. dollar should be chosen to represent the United States in one such southern land. His wife the Rat knew the answer to that. “Glamour, dear, glamour. Ha! Don’t you get it, you dope? Everyone loves a star.”
America didn’t know what to do about India. Johnson liked the dictator of Pakistan, Field Marshal Mohammed Ayub Khan, so much that he was even willing to turn a blind eye to Pakistan’s growing intimacy with China. “A wife can understand a Saturday night fling by her husband, so long as she’s the wife,” he told Ayub in Washington. Ayub laughed. Of course America was the wife, how could the president doubt it? Then he went home and forged even closer ties with China. Rusk, meanwhile, was openly hostile to Indian interests. This was the period in which the devaluation of the Indian rupee and the national food crisis had put India into the humiliating position of being dependent on American supplies. Yet these supplies were slow in coming, and B. K. Nehru, India’s ambassador to the United States, had to confront Rusk about it: “Why are you trying to starve us out?” The answer was equally blunt: because India was receiving arms from the Soviet Union. Before Max left for New Delhi, he visited Rusk at Foggy Bottom and found himself on the receiving end of an extended anti-Indian tirade, in which Rusk not only opposed the Indian line on Kashmir but also criticized the annexations of Hyderabad and Goa, and the vocal support of several Indian leaders for the government of North Vietnam. “Professor Ophuls, we are at war with that gentleman, Ho Chi Minh, and you will be so good as to make plain to the Indian authorities that our enemy’s friend can only be our foe.” This was why Max Ophuls told Margaret, after the Radhakrishnan hand-holding incident, that his sudden popularity would probably prove short-lived. “If I dance to Rusk’s tune,” he said, “they’ll start throwing things at us soon enough.”
When he expressed a desire to go immediately to Kashmir, the Indian home minister Gulzarilal Nanda objected strongly: the security concerns were too great, his safety could not be guaranteed. Then for the first time in his life Max Ophuls exercised the power of the United States of America. “The nature of overwhelming might,” he would later write in The Man of Power, “is such that the powerful man does not need to allude to his power. The fact of it is present in everyone’s consciousness. Thus power does its work by stealth, and the powerful can subsequently deny that their strength was ever used at all.” Within hours, Nanda was overruled by Prime Minister Shastri’s office, and the visit to Kashmir was green-lit.
Five days later Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls, in fur earmuffs, greatcoat, bulletproof vest and hard hat, was standing on what was then called the cease-fire line, and would later come to be known as the Line of Control. His whole life suddenly seemed absurd. The Belle Époque Strasbourg mansion, the cottage in Gergovie, the Porchester Terrace basement, the economic summit in New Hampshire, the eleventh-floor apartment on Riverside Drive, and even Roosevelt House, the sprawling, recently completed ambassador’s residence built by the half-praised, half-derided Edward Durrell Stone in the Chanakyapuri diplomatic enclave of the Indian capital… all these faded away. For a long moment Max slipped loose of all his different selves, the brilliant young economist, lawyer and student of international relations, the master forger of the Resistance, the ace pilot, the Jewish survivor, the genius of Bretton Woods, the bestselling author, and the American ambassador cocooned in the house of power. He stood alone and as if unclothed, dwarfed by the high Himalayas and stripped bare of comprehension by the scale of the crisis made flesh, the two frozen armies facing each other across the explosive borderline. Then his history reasserted itself and he climbed back into its familiar garments-in particular the history of his hometown, and the whiplash movements of the Franco-German frontier across its people’s lives. He had come a long way but perhaps not so very far. Could any two places have been more different, he asked himself; could any two places have been more the same? Human nature, the great constant, surely persisted in spite of all surface differences. One snaking frontier had made him what he was, he found himself thinking. Had he come here, to another such unstable twilight zone, in order to be unmade?