The Tyrant's Novel

by Thomas Keneally

  Kennedy continued. I think his German editor helped him with the necessary, he explained. Maybe we should all have such friends. The whole thing is, he took his wife with him.

  Wilf Apple, a slim figure though fifty years old, emerged from the cabana, a wet towel in his hand, beside his young boyfriend, Paul. He came with purpose to where Kennedy and I were standing. He asked, Did you tell Alan? I nodded to let him know I had the news, and did not need a further recital. I shook my head with wonderment, tilted it back, and opened my throat to the acidic comfort of liquor.

  He took his wife, Wilf insisted on telling me. He was separated from her, and he ended up taking her instead of his girlfriend.

  Andrew had an opinion on that. He said, The editor in Frankfurt must have told the wife. Not knowing about their split and that young singer of his. And once the editor let her know . . . well, dear God, did she have a weapon?

  Andrew said, He loved that little singer though. He idolized her. And so why did he take the opportunity to go just now? I mean, the fellow's so popular with the kids even Great Uncle has to pretend to be a fan. The Overguard adopted one of his songs as their own. And I didn't know he was under any sort of threat. Even if the German editor said, Here's a packet of U.S. dollars, so go and charter a plane . . . why would he need to go? And take that bitter wife of his?

  Wilf Apple had his ideas. He said the Germans probably had a chair lined up for him at Tübingen or Konstanz or somewhere else. All those literary theorists loved Collins's work. He could speak German too. He could perform for them. He could write his own ticket.

  No dishwashing for Peter, said Wilf. Straight into the heart of the intelligentsia, and an instant rock star as well. Elvis Collins meets Derrida Collins. And he can bring his little chanteuse to him later maybe.

  Andrew Kennedy shook his head. If the Overguard don't decide to interrogate her, he said.

  Andrew's bafflement and Wilf's knowingness added wings to my depression. I wanted at least another half glass of Scotch. A man does not take the trouble to come amongst his friends for the sake of getting as blue as I now felt. There was anger as well. I, who rarely had a fight with Sarah, felt as if I wanted now to take her home and start one over Mrs. Carter and Peter Collins.

  The young McBriens appeared on a pathway—they had been walking amongst the pines. This evening, they both looked cheerful and animated. They started speaking to the Garners, the architect and his wife, and slowly we all coalesced over in that direction, some standing, some sitting on the sun lounges.

  As we moved, I saw Sarah semaphore to me with a small wave her regret at having piled Mrs. Carter on top of the story of Collins's absconding. Beloved, I thought—though a minute earlier I'd wanted to take issue with her.

  To the group, Andrew said, Whatever you thought of him, you have to agree the cultural landscape's changed for good.

  Toby Garner agreed. You're going to have a few gaps in your programming, all right, Andrew.

  Grace Kennedy said, He could be a pompous shit.

  Yes, said Andrew, but he had gifts which nearly justified it.

  In the midst of this anxious hubbub, Matt McBrien seemed possessed of a rare serenity. There's always someone to step into the breach, he told us. Even genius isn't indispensable. I wonder did he think of his audience, anyhow, before he left them in the lurch?

  A certain uneasiness overtook the company, and many began to abandon their reverence for the escaped icon.

  To hell with him, said Wilf Apple, with a stuttering laugh. Some of his lyrics were absolute crap. Love of the twilight, love of the night, love of the East in predawn light . . . Only the music saved them from banality.

  Some of us nodded. He was too prolific. But we were, in the end, not consoled. To help us out, Hope Garner said, Toby's had an interesting few days. Cheer them up with your story, Toby!

  Garner was the supervising architect on the Northbourne Palace restoration. He always had interesting tales about Overguard officers turning up with new and, to a normal person, gratuitous demands from Great Uncle. A poor sleeper, Great Uncle, who had determinedly developed a gift to read English, would skim through Architectural Digest or books of architectural pictures late at night, and by morning would issue orders that an entire terrazzo floor be pulled up, or that the molding of the state banquet hall—there was one such in each of Great Uncle's twenty palaces—be done in the style of the Frick museum.

  But before Toby Garner could tell us his latest experience of the way absolute power encourages absolute gratuitousness in architectural taste, the housekeeper and caterers appeared with our dinner of rice and salad, fish and lamb. Set out on tables by the pool, it consumed our time, as we advanced one by one along the line asking the normal questions of the buffet—what mayonnaise is this? Is this a marinade? I carried my refilled glass of Scotch, pecking away at it, feeling its false but vivid consolation behind my sternum and thinking as ever, Why do you need consolation? You have Sarah.

  When we were all seated attacking the food, and Mrs. Clarke, the housekeeper, moved around filling wineglasses, Toby Garner sat up with the anticipatory glow of the storyteller who has the chair. But Sonia McBrien, sitting on the same side of the table and thus not able to see Toby's move to begin, said in a shrill, young voice, We have news. Matt has news.

  Matt waved the statement away, but it was apparent the news was effervescing in him too, and must froth forth soon. Almost aggressively, Grace Kennedy asked that Matt McBrien cough it up. Matt still pursed his lips in amusement and shook his head as if he didn't want to. Sonia said, Tell them.

  You tell them, said McBrien.

  The two of them were annoying us more than was customary.

  Sonia announced, Old Billy Salter has asked Matt to take the appointment of Acting Commissioner of Culture.

  If they had worked themselves into a state where they expected us to be prolix with congratulations, they were a bit confused by the silence this announcement produced. Why shouldn't we be enthusiastic though? After all, Andrew had achieved a big state job, and the house to go with it. We said, Well, that's remarkable. Congratulations, Matt. You must be proud, Sonia!

  But Wilf quickly got to the point. Don't do it, he advised.

  Matt's smile frosted. Do you say that, he asked, because you're not in favor at the moment?

  Wilf declared, I say it because I have not sought favor. I haven't consented to become an apparatchik.

  And when was your last feature film? asked Sonia, offended for her husband's sake.

  I make my films with handheld cameras. So do my assistants. We are documenting this age, and it will be interesting to those who come after us.

  Sonia said, So you look for your rewards after you're dead?

  Wilf Apple said, No, I get my rewards now. By being free of people like Old Billy Salter.

  As the dialogue grew poisonous, Toby Garner sat forward, a genial soul. As much as I admire that, Wilf, he said, we have to live. After all, like Matt, I took Great Uncle's shilling, I'm afraid. But whose shilling am I to take if not his?

  Wilf Apple said, Your work is not as censorable as ours.

  Toby Garner cast his hands up, passing judgment on no one. Of everyone at this table, he said, you'd be the hero of the future, Wilf. Your name will be justly honored. You create the record of intolerable times.

  Wilf Apple murmured, It's not only Great Uncle. The Western sanctions are shit too.

  Garner said, I should perhaps welcome young Matt to the circle of government employees, but my story, the story I want to tell—listen to it well, Matt, because you're not just joining a payroll. You'll find yourself squeezed, sooner or later. I thought I was squeezed by having to alter a colonnade here and there. But what happened to me two days ago, it was the true damn squeeze!

  He laughed confidingly in his wife's direction. He said, It made me light-headed with exhilaration, because I could be dead now, the bullet angled up into my brain. So I'm ecstatic.

  This compelled ou
r attention.

  He told his two-days-old tale. At the Northbourne Palace he had supervised the installation of Courtney Witt's brilliantly designed bronze gates: dazzling with the reflected sun, opened and closed by means of electronic devices embedded in their stone columns. So that something so brilliant would not be tarnished, he had left a road, a gap in the stone wall, either side of the gates for the trucks bringing their cement and steel, their milled cedar, their mosaic tiles, to enter and exit, all without the risk of collision with Witt's lovely work.

  Two afternoons before this party of the Kennedys, as the day shift of construction workers was going off duty, three vanloads of Overguard men in their red berets so feared by the populace, their camouflage kit which implied that some peril to the state was imminent, and their automatics carried in the particularly ominous way, the butt poking up over their shoulder blades, arrived outside Toby Garner's prefabricated on-site office. Eight of them crowded in, others milled in the dust outside.

  They told him that an hour earlier, Great Uncle had passed the site on his way somewhere. Great Uncle's location was of course always secret, to the extent that the chefs of each of his twenty palaces, soon to become twenty-one with the completion of Northbourne, prepared three meals a day, just in case someone malicious were watching for a clue to Great Uncle's whereabouts.

  Anyhow, an hour before, Great Uncle had passed the Northbourne site and remarked to those who were riding with him that there was a gap either side of the great bronze gates, and that this detracted somewhat from them, and made him angry on the lovely gates' behalf. He told the Overguard escorts that when he passed by again, sometime after nine P.M., certainly before ten, he wanted to see the gaps between the stonework walls and the dazzling gates closed.

  When they declared that they, all of them, were there to help Toby get the job done, he began to see that they were under the same pressure as himself—not that that was much consolation. He told them straight out it couldn't be done. He appreciated their offer, but the day staff was gone and he needed a further delivery of the honeyed sandstone of which the fourteen-feet-high walls were built. Work on the swimming pools and fountains would continue through the night, and wiring in the main residence. But the stonemasons themselves had all gone home. They were in coffee bars, driving their cars, shopping in supermarkets (or selling cigarettes on the black market).

  Give us the lists, said an Overguard officer. We'll find them.

  The stonemasons? asked Toby.

  Every bastard you've got on the payroll. We'll get those lazy damned Overalls working too.

  (The Overalls were the lowly city police, who wore blue overalls.)

  He opened his computer personnel files and printed them off page by page, as the officer distributed them to his three dozen men. Toby could well imagine the quantity of fear that would arrive at each hod carrier's or bricklayer's door in the person of an Overguard officer. Are you Ted Williams? Then please accompany me, sir. The red beret, the great splotches of martial camouflage, the hefty holster, and the submachine gun carried upside down on a belt between the shoulder blades. Timidly, Is there a problem, sir? And if the Overguard were a little genial: You're wanted at work. Tell your missus to keep the dinner hot.

  By five o'clock the workers were largely back at the site. Overguard officers with experience of pneumatic drills were helping out the stonemasons. Everyone in this together. Waves of fear and light-headedness overtaking Toby. It can't be done, I tell you it can't be done. And the Overguard demonstrating that in a sense they were warriors, saying it could be done, the redoubt could be taken, the walls closed up to those gates whose dignity demanded it. To hell with Courtney Witt and his fancy gates! thought Toby.

  You might remember it was a hot evening, he reminded us.

  Fine dust of sandstone fragments democratically clogged the lips and nostrils of workers and Overguard. The stacked and abandoned weaponry was humanized with orange grit, which seemed to hold out a promise that when the impossible job was not done by nine o'clock, or five past, and all or some were put against the wall, the weaponry might benignly clog. Further cement trucks arrived, and winches pulled large friable blocks onto foundations of wet cement. It was impossible. Ten yards either side to be closed, and closed with the same quality as the rest of the palace walls, no sloppy cement, no leakage, no hasty trim on the sandstone itself, no faulty symmetry.

  About six-thirty, Toby said, the job was quarter done, one side closed up but only to human height. Unqualified men were trying to erect scaffolding to take the wall higher. Then the officer of the Overguard suggested they bring in workers from other government sites. There was a Ministry of Oil building going up on Viaduct Bay. An army of riggers and scaffolders were working there. We'll get them! promised the Overguard. Toby did not bother saying, There's not time to get them here. The Overguard officer was sanguine. He said that half the delay had been logistics, the job would move faster now. Even if they could bring in workers who would be effective for an hour and a half, that would be a contribution. More riggers were in any case needed to assemble scaffolding in line on the far side of the gates, where the other stretch of space was to be walled.

  Throughout their labors, the workers on-site were largely silent—no whistling, no pop songs. There were occasional sudden surges of rage. You stupid prick, pick it up! But ultimately each of them came to realize he needed every stupid prick who could be mustered. Some upper wall stones were miscut, were raised, broke the uniformity of the capstones, too narrow or too broad to dignify the gates they were reaching for. Fear took the craft out of some of the craftsmanship. They had to be all hauled down, recut or discarded. It was the Overguard who shouted at mistakes and grabbed their holstered side arms. And Toby amongst them, the only man who had the entire plan in his head, found he became suddenly excited, this challenge meaningful, transcending the mere building materials. Be calm, everyone! Get the measurements right! Nothing to fear! And he heard a stonemason say under his breath, Balls!

  And so the cement was poured on the far stretch of wall, and suddenly the stone began to ascend to the correct height there. Hope was traveling to meet hope, along dug foundations. After the sun went down, lights were brought in from other parts of the site to illuminate the area. The electrically competent amongst the Overguard worked at this and got them shining. A new kind of constructive energy emerged amongst the workers. When a man's hand was crushed in its leather glove, others felt they had time to express commiseration. Whereas two hours before they might have punished him, the Overguard sent for an ambulance. A further work gang, including stonemasons, arrived from the Ministry of Oil site. It was astonishing how much work they got done in an hour, given that everything was already set up for them, the total scaffolding in place within the site, on the blind side of the wall from the street, where it would not offend the gates. The last stone was set at eight-fifty-five. A mason and a bricklayer watched it settle for five minutes to ensure it would not play false. On the street side of the wall, Toby and the Overguard officer watched for mortar seepage or crookedness of the capstones and found none.

  I could, said Toby in telling us the story, have kissed the fellow. As it was, we embraced like brothers.

  The officer told Toby to get out of the way before Great Uncle came by again. Out of obscure duty he remained within the walls, as the tired Overguard cleaned their weapons of fragments of stone and dusted their camouflage kit and stood before the closed walls and the splendid gates to give the salute as the President passed. From a point on the inner scaffolding, Toby watched. He was exhilarated, he said. At that word, exhilarated, his wife reached out and touched his arm, as if she both feared his exuberance and had benefited from it, yet hoped it would not last too much longer. Toby said, I thought at the time, Frank Lloyd Wright never went through this. This is real architecture.

  And what's the moral of this for Mr. McBrien? asked Wilf Apple, his eyes narrowed.

  That if you work for Great Uncle, de
clared Toby joyously, one day you'll get a real deadline.

  What's your smile for then? asked Wilf. You've been tyrannized over, and just because you get some obscure kick out of it, you tell this kid to join the club.

  Sonia McBrien said, My husband is not a kid.

  Apple was unkind enough to assert, He sounds like one.

  Andrew Kennedy, the doyen, intervened. Oh come! All Toby's saying is that anyone who works here should be ready for some exceptional deadlines. We know that to be the case.

  He raised his glass to Toby. I congratulate you that you have survived yours, Toby. My life would be hard to sustain without you.

  This gesture made us all kinder to other, although Wilf Apple said, Our friend Alan Sheriff doesn't have to worry about a deadline, not with his Yankee advance.

  For a second I wanted to answer, but I saw Sarah's eyes dissuading me.

  Don't worry, Wilf, I told him. The dollars will no doubt run out soon.

  Yet it was true that I had a certain security. I had reached the end of the penultimate draft of ninety thousand words, and thus was close to the conclusion of my novel.

  My Sarah. She had already been a classically trained actress and a television and film notable for some years before I talked to her in person and in passing at a Kennedy salon, the first I was invited to. I had recently returned from military service and considered myself lucky to be patronized by old hands like Wilf Apple on the edge of that circle of fraternity and hope the Kennedys provided. Sarah moved in her own sturdy orbit amongst us. Her astonishing eyes lay on me during a twenty-second introduction. She ascertained that my few stories published to that time had dealt chiefly with the war but, said Andrew, placed it in a full human context.

  He manages to get a lot of women into them, said Andrew.

  She said with what I thought of as an inevitably cold, fake earnestness, I'll have to read them.