The Tyrant's Novel

by Thomas Keneally

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Visitor's Preface

  Alan Sheriff's Story

  After-Tale

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Also by Thomas Keneally

  Copyright Page

  To my brother, John Patrick,

  the good practitioner,

  with fraternal love

  The Visitor's Preface

  It's a truism almost embarrassing to repeat that a particular government might find it suitable to have an enemy in-the-midst, more imagined than real, whom they can point out to the populace as the threat. And from that threat, only this party, this view of the polity they manage, can save the innocent sleep of the citizenry.

  That's how it was with us when there appeared in our plain outer suburbs and our desert towns double-walled gulags. Those who, sincerely or opportunistically, came from afar to seek asylum in our community were detained and isolated there as a virus too toxic to be released. They were isolated not for six weeks, not merely until it was discovered whether they had dangerous powers or connections, or were carrying antibiotic-resistant TB; not for six months, to allow the watchers to observe their behavior. But for years. The apolitical infant fugitives were detained with their complex and supposedly dangerous parents.

  The government was officially proud of these installations. Yet there were no signposts to them. In the deserts they were remote. In the cities they seemed to be surrounded by industrial parks with many cul-de-sacs and unexpected crescents leading back to the street you recently left. But at last persistent visitors came suddenly, amidst small engineering works and warehouses, upon the high walls of steel mesh and razor wire. I say walls with reason—first an outer wall topped with the static buzz saws of razor wire to a height which Afghanistan's, Iraq's, Iran's, Bangladesh's champion pole vaulters could not possibly clear. Then an intervening road down which trucks could patrol or go on maintenance errands. And finally an inner wall, similarly exceeding an Olympic-standard clearance. And one now knew why the proud government did not signpost these places. One minuscule sign from the Hume Highway, and another one from Woodville Road, white-on-black and designed to defeat all but the sharpest eye, gave the driver an indication of the location of these prison walls in our city. Rarely had such a vote-engaging venue, never such a glory of policy, been so well hidden from common gaze. There was something about the miles of wire, and its height, which might shock a citizen who, until this moment, had put the merely abstract power of his vote behind the project. And it was not advertised either that citizens could visit the inmates under certain conditions, with photo ID, bringing them perhaps a picnic (wine excluded) and a book or two.

  To get inside these walls, apart from presenting photo ID and the name of a detainee, pockets need to be emptied of anything metallic and the visitor passes through a detector. The hand is stamped with an ink which shows up in the ultraviolet-lit intervening room between the front desk and the visitors' compound. On some days the shape stamped on the hand is of a teddy bear, on others of a dolphin, on others of a dog. That stamps of the kind used in a classroom are used here is one of the absurdities which always seem to cling round the flanks of noxious institutions. And so one goes from the ultraviolet chamber to a gate, and thus into the compound.

  At tables and chairs on dusty ground the visitors sit—in some cases relatives of the internees; various nuns. Immigration lawyers are pointed out by other visitors you get to know. The lawyers can tell the full, irrational story: who is locked up, and for how long, and who is let go. How the detainees are rendered crazy by the inconsistency of it all, and might become desperate.

  The first time I went there, I went with a friend, another writer, a woman named Alice. She introduced me to a refugee, very competent in English, who insisted that he be addressed as Alan Sheriff. (The reason for the Western-style name will soon become apparent.) He had been in this place, and in similar enclosures out in the desert, for more than three years. The government would neither give him asylum nor send him back to his country, for fear of what that regime would do to him. So he was caught here, with his lively eyes and his smile into which irony easily crept. He was the sort of man, said my companion, the writer, whom women found disarming and, to use her word, “cheeky.” She also told me that he had got into trouble with the regime he'd fled over some “writing business.” Since the regime he had escaped from was led by a man whose name was a synonym for gratuitous tyranny, it was an easy idea to believe.

  So at a table under a eucalyptus tree we sat with this Alan and skirted round his motives for skipping out on the tyrant. He was dark in complexion and that seemed to suit his intensity. He gestured in a way which made it possible for me to see five marks on his wrist, dots of scarring. I decided these were tribal marks.

  Was the president where he came from as bad as they said? I asked. Oh, of course, he replied, but though I would have liked him to elaborate he didn't. So we moved on to his immediate life within the wire here, in sight of small engineering works and distant bungalows. It became clear that he was one of the leaders of this enforced community of refugees. He talked about his informal counseling of men who had trouble sleeping, who were racked by the uncertainty of the immigration process, which they saw as a lottery and thus a tyranny of chance to match the tyranny of intent or danger they had run, floated, or flown away from. Sleeping was difficult here in the four-to-a-room huts, he said. Men often lay awake from three o'clock, when the need to urinate woke them, until dawn, fretting about their visa applications and families left behind.

  There's a library, I suggested, still wanting to think of our polity as civilized enough to provide that kind of refined facility. People could not concentrate to read, he told me. Even I, he declared, I find it hard to read. If I read, say, African history, or Irish history, or the history of Crazy Horse or some other figure, I begin to feel the injustice in my gut, and I can't read further. It's stupid, but it's true.

  Religion—Assyrian, Christian, Islam, Baha'i—was any of that a comfort?

  For some, Alan admitted. Sadly, not for me. He grinned in apology. I'm such a weak Mediationist.

  I asked what that was.

  Just one of the sects at home, he told me. Scratch a Mediationist, he explained, and you'll find an agnostic.

  I didn't have the expertise to argue this point.

  After a while, as the afternoon heat grew thicker and Alice and I leaned forward to catch his fairly reticent voice, we got him talking about other camps he'd been held in during his detention years. This is a holiday camp, he said, compared to the ones in the west and in the desert. I have seen the guards for no reason and in ill will separate families till a husband breaks a bottle and puts it to his neck and pleads to be reunited. Then the government can say, See, see what sort of people are these? Instead of reunion, he is charged with disorder. I have seen them put a father and his four-year-old in an observation cell for ten days. I have seen them start a fight with young men in a dining room, over nothing. For the guard and the prisoner, you see, for both of them, boredom is the great problem. For the guards, blows, and what you'd call the theater of blows, are a great opium. A morning's entertainment!

  We ate some of the mandarins and nuts Alice had brought. The pungency of the rinds scented the heavy air. Your name? I asked. Alan . . .

  It's a good name, isn't it? he asked.

  Of course, I admitted.

  Look at it this way. It's the name of a man you'd meet on the street. I would very much like to be the man you meet in the street. A man with a name like Alan. If we all had good Anglo-Saxon names . . . or if we were not, God help us, Said and Osama and Saleh. If we had Mac i
nstead of Ibn.

  I did not mention then that I understood Sheriff to be originally an Arabic name. I think he knew that it, like him, had made a transition and he liked the idea. I did not refer to his other and real name we had used, Alice and I, when we signed ourselves in.

  I asked what he used to do before he fled his country. I wrote some short stories, he said, dismissing the idea of short stories. But I liked subtitling foreign movies for the broadcasting network.

  I said, Oh?

  That's the great neglected art form, and generally left to the literalists. The sort of people who could translate menus but don't understand the text below what is said. I liked that work. A lot.

  But on what made him decide to become a refugee he was as discreet as about a love affair.

  My colleague Alice had an unblemished olive complexion and huge, limpid, oriental-like eyes. How could a man in detention not half fall for her? And she confided to me by telephone when next I asked her how Alan Sheriff was that he had taken her wrist gently and said, Alice, this recent marriage of yours . . .

  She had been married a year to a book editor. Is it serious? Alan had asked. Will it last? I think we two are fated.

  I imagined the scene, his half smile, but the jollity probably desperate and a bit demented. Meanwhile her laughter would be lighter than air, the wafer-thin, half-wary, half-flattered laughter of a woman who possessed the automatic confidence of the beautiful, taking account of the desires of men almost as dispassionately as a nurse might take temperatures. I have to say that she told me his story not so much from vanity or condescension but to make the point that Alan, this normal man, had the same predictable desires as men walking free in the streets, and so could fit easily into open society.

  The next time I saw the man who insisted on being Alan Sheriff, I went on my own. I brought him science fiction books, since he'd told me they were least likely to distress him and make his stomach churn. He said, as we sat at one of the tables in the yard, Did Alice mention I touched her wrist and spoke of destiny?

  My hesitation in answering was itself an answer.

  He scratched his reddened hands, which seemed to suffer from some kind of eczema, probably brought on by internment. He said, If only she knew, she has so little to fear from me.

  I think she realizes that, I said.

  From my side, he said, it was like the hand of an amputee. The palm feels itchy but it means nothing, because it's gone. One day I might tell you a story. Man-to-man. No confidences to Alice or anyone else.

  Do you know me well enough?

  Well, you like to talk, but . . . Do you know, my story is the saddest and silliest you would ever hear.

  I remembered a book by Ford Madox Ford, one of the great and now unread classics of the early twentieth century, The Good Soldier. It had made the boast in its first line that it was the saddest story the reader would ever hear. From what I remembered, Ford Madox Ford hadn't quite delivered on the promise.

  I found out that Alan Sheriff had become well known in the pro-asylum-seeker community for his work in trying to keep his fellow internees sane and healthy. He had written essays against detention, some published in the daily press, and now was to receive a UNESCO Human Rights Award.

  Twenty people, including Alice and myself and one opposition politician, went out to the detention center for the award ceremony. But the minister had decreed that only three persons could enter the center, and they, of necessity, were members of the UNESCO committee. Nor could a camera or tape recorder or anything else designed to leave an image of the event be brought in. Alice and I and fifteen others waited in October sunlight by the very outer wire near the car park, shifting from foot to foot, engaged in desultory gossip and badmouthing the minister. Someone said, If I wanted to be a citizen of a pre-Fascist country, I'd rather be a citizen of a big, dramatic, baroque pre-Fascist country like the United States than of a little, pissant, head-stuck-up-the-arse pre-Fascist country like this.

  Yet the guard who operated the gate seemed typical of our jovial culture and got into quite friendly and ironic conversation with us. He said, I know you jokers would like to close this place down, but then where would I go for a job?

  At last the UNESCO officials emerged from having given the man with the saddest and silliest story in the world his award.

  Alan is in good spirits, said one of them. Though there was another name on the certificate, his myth of Anglo-Saxonism was becoming slowly pervasive.

  Alice now wrote a long magazine article about her visits to the detention center. Most of its readers considered it a generous article and praised it for presenting the intimate human features of the detainees whom the government wanted people to see as an inhuman, peevish mass. Alan Sheriff played a considerable part in the article. She identified him to the readers by true first and second names, his patronym and name of the hearth, and explained why he had adopted the name Alan. She admitted that some thought this grotesque, but she defended it as a brave stratagem designed to demand the sort of regard the minister would no doubt pay to all the suburban Alans who voted for him.

  In another attempt to give Alan human identity, she mentioned that he sometimes took her wrist and absorbed her with his sad, ironic eyes and wistfully considered her breasts. She was chastened to find on her next visit, with a copy of the magazine in her hand, that Alan Sheriff was appalled specifically at that, that she had mentioned the dialogue of eyes and touch between him and her. Laid down on paper, he said, these things made him seem silly to the minister. This man who had sustained other detainees through their depressions, and was credited with having prevented many suicides in the center, now announced to her, I am so depressed. I don't want to see you for now.

  He was not angry, she told me. She wished he had been. She could then have expected him to recover soon.

  She had somehow earlier smuggled a mobile phone in to him. She hinted it had been done with the help of a generous female guard who also admired Alan. Though she kept on calling this number, she did not get a response for days. Alan is sick, a young Palestinian refugee to whom Alan had entrusted the phone told Alice. She began to visit other detainees in the hope that Alan would wander into the visitors' compound. She heard from the young Palestinian that Alan was feeling a little better but not ready to come out into the visitors' area yet. I think he does not know how to face you, said the young Palestinian.

  I don't know how to face him, Alice said. Tell him that. He must think I'm a very stupid woman.

  At last she called me and told me Alan had said that he would welcome a visit from me. I made the drive and went through the rigmarole and waited in the visitors' compound for him. When he appeared he still retained what I always thought of as an air of gentle proprietorship, his moral right to this dusty space, its scattered plastic tables and chairs. He was wearing shorts this autumn day and seemed to have put on weight during his depression. Jailhouse stodge had no doubt helped. In his accustomed way, murmuring, offering his hand, he greeted immigration lawyers and other visitors. He still had the respect of his fellows, one could see. They obviously forgave his calling himself Alan. They obviously overlooked his reported interest in Alice's breasts.

  Then he came to my table. He spoke my name gently, sat, and pulled out his cigarettes. I smoke too many of these in here, he told me. You know, before the escape I never smoked. It's the truth. I suppose you read the article by Alice.

  Yes, I had to say. I'm sorry it hurt you.

  Miss Kiss-and-Tell, he said, grinning forgivingly. But no. It's so silly. It set something off in me. I don't know.

  I said, She didn't mean any harm. And neither do I. You have to understand, Alice needs you, Alan, as I need you. I imagine grandchildren I may never have asking, What did you say when the government locked up the asylum seekers? And my grown daughter, their mother, can at least say, Well, he visited Alan. He made an attempt. He went to the detainees.

  I don't like that word, said Alan. Detainees.
/>   Neither do I, Alan.

  He said, Alice said those things about me because she thought it meant something. A human touch, I suppose. I wish it meant what she thinks it means. She is an innocent girl.

  In our terms, I told him, she's worldly.

  He made a balancing gesture with his hand, indicating either that innocence and worldliness were mixed in her, or else that my idea of both qualities didn't match his. He said, I decided while I was ill that I wanted to tell my story. I thought I would tell you. In confidence. You are not kiss-and-tell. I do not wish to kiss you anyway.

  He laughed.

  I'm relieved, I said.

  And I don't want to kiss Alice either. Though she likes to think so. If I touch her wrist, I do it to be courtly. What's another word for silly?

  Useless? Futile?

  Futile. My English has gone off a bit. It was better, or seemed better, in the old days. I translated my own prose.

  Oh? I said.

  But he covered his eyes. He didn't want to talk about that.

  He savored the word. He said, Futile.

  A crow flew above the nearby bush, mourning dryly.

  You like to talk man-to-man, said Alan. I like fellows who enjoy gossip but have obviously managed to keep secrets. You're that sort of man.

  I conceded, I've kept a lot of secrets. Though it's hard to do so when they have a good punch line at the end of them.

  Punch line? This hasn't a punch line, he assured me. And you won't keep this secret forever, but long enough. You'll want to tell it in the end. Because it is the saddest and the silliest.

  So he began.

  A tyrant builds up around him more titles than the most slavish subject could possibly utter or remember. Tyrants abound in superlatives. Chosen One, Commander-in-Chief, Regulator of Laws, Supreme Judge, Overchief. If the tyrant goes on naming himself with names implying broad power and intimate connection with the people, he will come up in the end with a title which can be used ironically. In my land, Great Uncle was it. Everyone remembered that one. Great Uncle of the People. I suggest you call him Ian Stark, since Stark is a name associated with tribalism and toughness, and he came from a tribal, tough background—the clan symbol of five dots was incised on Great Uncle's wrist.