The Tyrant's Novel

by Thomas Keneally

  Then I found we were members of Professor Duncan's same drama seminar at the university. She would say at the start of each session, Hello, Alan. At the second or third meeting of the group, she told me she had read one of my stories, had tracked it down in Writers' Magazine, which the National Broadcasting Network had published for a while under Andrew Kennedy's aegis, until lack of funds and some official disapproval closed it down.

  I said, That's very kind of you.

  She gave a rare laugh. I'm reading Chekhov's short stories too, she said. Should Chekhov feel it's very kind of me?

  But he's dead, I said stupidly.

  When called on to read the few times the group had met, she read from Uncle Vanya, so flatly and tentatively the rest of us were stunned. Professor Duncan asked her to stop after a while, and told us that she was doing honor to Chekhov's text, letting it dominate as a monotone which suggested meanings, contours, and points of departure to it. That's the way she rehearsed for television and film. Isn't it? Professor Duncan asked her. Yes, of course, she said, not making a fuss of it.

  Only amateurs like the rest of us, said Duncan, had the luxury of imposing emphasis instinctively on the texts they read. We were right to do so, but we ran the risk of making too many misreadings. But she was right in her method.

  Sarah kept her eyes lowered like a schoolgirl. She did not like being defined as distinct from the eleven other members of the seminar. She had begun to sit near me in the seminar because, some instinct told her, I was too poleaxed to be as annoying and importunate as I would have liked to have been.

  I had a problem of honor. I had met at the university's primitive radio station, still then operating under sufferance (though its days were numbered), an enthusiastic girl named Louise James, who managed to combine her studies with broadcasting a two-hour interview show six days of the week. Her father was a famous broadcaster who had done the same sort of show on the National Network, and had then become a television interviewer. Louise was tall, full-faced, with wide, hopeful eyes. After the interview she took me to a coffee-and-cake soiree at a wealthy student's house. There had been other such events, a walk, and a visit to the cinema. I have to say that these outings were sedate. We students laughed at country people who seemed to consider that if a man courted a woman for an evening or two, he was bound to marry her, a proposition often enforced with chardris and shotguns. But unlike the Western countries, there was, for all of our university bravado, a code of concern that one must not, for one's own safety, lead women on. Once you were introduced to the parents, you incurred the debt of marriage. I could see on the rational plane why I should ultimately marry Louise James, who had shown signs of thinking along the same lines. She was a brave young woman, temperamentally much maturer than I, and of a good, positive cast of mind. She was also a leader by nature. Her features were pleasant, particularly when lit up by intellectual curiosity. When she folded her arms polemically across her full breast, I was entranced and hoped to become more so. But that was it. I could not argue myself into being sufficiently entranced, and that fact made me feel both guilty and hapless.

  At the university library one day I watched my fellow classmate Sarah Manners move across the vivid tiles of the reading room. There was a tension and a sort of unconscious cooperation of movement and static color between her and the expanse of eighteenth-century tiles. They added to her mystery, but then everything that had happened at our few meetings had done that. She really did have, as they say in America, the sort of bone structure the camera loves. Even I, as a fan of European and American film, could see that. And she had that look that I've noticed in other beautiful thespians—offstage, offscreen, they moved negligently but warily, and were less made up than many others, less beringed, with a fine paleness created partly by residual television or stage makeup, and by long hours in the studio. She created an impact in men, or at least in me, transcending sex. Really! The appetites she evoked were subtler by far. I wanted to be consumed and to consume, yet I did not think at first of this communion in sensual terms.

  Besides, I was a speck of mustard and she, so obviously, a sea of nectar. So there was no use dreaming.

  As well as by her beauty, she terrified me by her offhandedness. Just let me say that had I been as beautiful as that, I would have simply stood still and absorbed like benign oil the regard washing my way from the reading tables, from librarians emerging from the stacks, from browsers on the galleries of books above. Beauty is something I have never been able to work out. I know the clichés about how those beautiful folk who live for their own splendor are destroyed by its passing. Et cetera. Et cetera. But I still could never understand why Sarah didn't pause in midstride, self-stunned.

  There were about eight of us from the drama studies course in the library that day, all attending to our Chekhov assignment. Sarah passed me without a look and went to sign on for an hour's use of one of the library's two computers—this in an era when the Internet was something mysterious to many of us, and the bite of oil and other sanctions meant that public facilities like universities and high schools and hospitals were losing ground. In any case we had limited access to the Internet—the articles and catalogues considered necessary to our work were downloaded and catalogued by trusted librarians, according to the guidelines of the Ministries for Education and State Security.

  Sarah and I happened to be the stars of the course. I spoke plentifully to Professor Duncan and gave the subject the greater share of my energy merely to impress her through impressing Duncan. The strategy had had no impact, but I could not abandon it. Yet she later astonished me by saying that it was from a sort of respect that she spoke to me that day in the library.

  Hello, she said. Mind if I sit down? I'm waiting for the computer. Don't let me disturb you.

  I immediately hid my hands, red and less than handsome from a skin condition I'd caught during the war, under the table.

  She held a photocopied and stapled mess of pages entitled Chekhov: The Short Stories. I hoped for the sake of her grandeur that whoever had translated them had done a good job.

  You're very welcome, I assured her.

  She riffled the pages but did not settle on one in particular. I closed my copy of Chekhov by Ernest. J. Simmons. The point of Chekhov was to attract a word from Sarah. That having been achieved, I was willing to abort any further studies.

  So we got talking properly. The most astonishing thing about her was her joy in sharing information. She had researched Chekhov as part of a Russian tradition—something that I hadn't thought to do; I and the others just took him as he came, as if he were Shakespeare or Eugene O'Neill, and that was that. She sat down to tell me, plainly and without vanity, of Chekhov's debt to A. S. Suvorin, a newspaper publisher, a debt both as an individual and a short-story writer and dramatist. The relationship would split up because of Chekhov's revulsion at the trial of Dreyfus and Suvorin's enthusiasm for it. You can make a note of that name, if you like, said Sarah. It might impress Duncan.

  Holding my breath, I began to take notes. Perhaps she could become habituated to passing on enlightenment to a plain fellow like me.

  I'll never forget the details of her educating me. For as the battered, improvised edition of the great writer's tales she held in her hands indicated, she had also taken the trouble to read all Chekhov's short stories and was involved in making a comparison between a range of Chekhov's prose, including “A Boring Story,” which she said was brilliant, and Uncle Vanya. In “A Boring Story,” the old professor of medicine, Nikolai Stepanovich, bemoans the split between science and the humanities, which undermines the ability of graduating physicians to give proper care to their patients. She pointed out to me Stepanovich's statement “Feelings I never felt before have built a nest in my heart. I hate, I despise, I am filled with indignation.” She looked at me significantly after reading that passage—as if there were someone closer to home in whom such sentiments could be rooted. She was frank, but fortunately not rowdy, in her disl
ike of our President for Life. Pointed to it by her, I read with unutterable longing Chekhov's short story “The Beauties,” which I would never have read to this day without Sarah. “An Attack of Nerves” was next. A law student, visiting whorehouses with friends, becomes obsessed with the problem of prostitution. His moral agony is such that his friends take him to a psychiatrist, who numbs his outrage with bromide and morphine. By doing that, the psychiatrist proves that certain immoralities abhorred by many members of society are actually necessary to the functioning of a community.

  Everything in Chekhov seemed to Sarah and me suddenly to relate to our community, our fraught nation. Tales of false love—“The Two Volodyas,” for example—seemed in their way to be a critique of the Hour of Devotion on our televisions. Sarah had also found and given me a copy of Chekhov's second full-length play, The Wood Demon, which was unsuccessful and later proved the basis for Uncle Vanya.

  Meanwhile, most of the rest of us were willing to accept whatever we could find in the university stacks. I began to think, She's really no flippant girl, this one. And she wasn't, either.

  Were you wounded? she asked suddenly. In the battles for the straits?

  Oh, no. I was very lucky. We were well dug in.

  She smiled. You won't become like one of those old soldiers in Russian stories, talking about nothing but their cavalry wounds.

  No, I agreed. I don't want to sound dramatic. But most of the wounds down there were not of that clean . . . that gallant variety.

  What's your best story? Maybe not the one I read, “The Water Truck Driver.” It was good, but it didn't sound like the last word you had to say.

  Please, I said, making a gesture of literary modesty, hands to forehead. There's one coming out in the university newspaper next week.

  After my session in the library with Sarah, I knew I could not string Louise James along any further. I was in agony over that. I knew that if anyone dumped anyone else, it should so obviously be glamorous Louise dumping me.

  I found her at the end of her show. As she emerged from the gimcrack studio her eyes were alight with the joy of what was so obviously her craft—broadcasting. Another show transmitted without mishap.

  I took her to the student café. Inevitably, to outsiders, my speech would have sounded a little Jane Austenish. Louise, I said, after we'd ordered Turkish coffee, I can't go about with you anymore. It would imply I had intentions which I don't have.

  She leaned forward, arms still folded in that way I had always admired, and frowned. But I wouldn't need you to have intentions, she said frankly, a modern woman, not dropping her eyes.

  I can't meet them, I said. I was almost ready in my panic, as her wide eyes grew wider still, to claim some problem arising from the war, some obscure wound of flesh or spirit.

  I'm very sorry, then, she told me through near-closed lips. Do you imagine to yourself you've got the power to break my heart? No one has that power.

  You're worthy of—

  Don't dare finish that sentence, she warned me.

  She imitated a male voice. You're worthy of someone better than me. All that means is, I've found someone I like more.

  There were tears in her eyes now, but she refused to dissolve. She would not be a weak woman.

  Go to hell, then! she told me, and she got up and gathered her things together without any of the urgency of a wronged woman, though with her considerable jaw set and her eyes blazing. Then she walked away. No scene. No thrown crockery. A warrior woman. I had given up someone admirable in the empty hope of someone transcendent.

  I would later see her around the campus, always busy, always genially vocal, though not in my direction. She did not lack for company, and she was said to be engaged to a young doctor. But then, for whatever reason, her family fled, and her esteemed father took a university job in America.

  But back now to Sarah. The short story I had told her about in the library, the one about to emerge, was one which Peter Collins would later call a classic—“The Women of Summer Island,” that is, the women who staffed the oil refineries, within range of enemy artillery. The story was in fact utter truth. Not as true as the story of Private Carter, which I dared not tell and thus covered with this other true tale.

  One evening during my military services, a medical orderly and myself—purely because I happened to be talking to him at the time—were ordered away from our company, supporting a battery of seventy-two-millimeter cannon, to help one of the women in one of the oil workers' dormitories give birth to a baby girl. I was to be the driver, and he was to show due regard for the midwife but intervene in the case of emergency. After all, the midwife would not have such resources as painkillers, muscle relaxants, and blood-clotting agents. The story dealt with the way the ultimate birth, and the drinking of tea with the other women later, brought out a frankness that was not the frankness of those who cower, but the honesty of those who generate life. Thus the orderly and myself talked with the women about the question of staying on the island or fleeing. The voices of children not born urged us all to get out, and the new baby had brought that impulse close to the surface of our skin. And then, as a truck came to take the mother away to suckle her baby in a rear area, various women laughingly proposed that the orderly and I provide them with a similar means of exit—even though we knew that an offensive from the other side would occur long before they could complete their pregnancies.

  This was extraordinary behavior in terms of the suburbs and rural towns they came from, but their closeness to the guns and their loss of men in war had altered them. And according to this comforting but un-acted-upon idea of fortuitous pregnancy, they sat on our laps. Even Intercessionist girls far from their clergy bounced around to simulate copulation. It was as if the tea had been gin. The medic was slightly shocked. Like me, he wished they would either behave themselves or that singular women from the crowd would take each of us by the hand to a more hidden place, if there was any such thing in the refinery complex of Summer Island. And then a woman of nearly sixty said, Well, girls, our shift starts in six hours. And we've all got to stay here for the oil.

  The orderly and I drank the lees of the tea, said good-bye, and drove back to our company, drained, and knowing we, like the women, had to stand to at first light.

  Why the oil? the medic asked me in real life and in the tale. Why do we live for it?

  This tale appeared in the student newspaper soon after Sarah's and my delightful session in the library. The next day she told me that the University Drama Society had voted to turn it into a play. In return she would teach me how to download and print computer files. After a week, she had already created a play script from my short story. And so it was rehearsed over three or four weeks. Produced by Sarah Manners, the foremost youngster of the National Theater, who played one of the young women. Old Billy Salter, Cultural Commissioner, let it run ten nights, attracting people from throughout the city, before he closed it down in response to complaints that the students took the play's ritualized sexuality beyond the limits of propriety.

  That production sealed the closeness between us. I was by now enchanted not by her casual splendor but by the energy and nobility of her soul. To my delight and bemusement we became a couple. I thought myself mere protective covering for her, and I restrained myself through breathless fear I would be dismissed from that high office. It was only by her unambiguous signs that I realized my job was more dazzling still, that of intended lover. There was more wonder in that idea than I could use in a lifetime.

  We walked, delightedly enyoked, as one creature. Sarah and Alan. What a phenomenon! He with a grin of idiot delight, she with the slight frown of her art producing one small crease across the bridge of her nose, a harbinger of doubts and pains years from revealing themselves.

  We had not made it to the Kennedys' for the Thursday night gathering following the one at which Toby had told his astonishing tale of walls and gates. And on Friday, Sarah went to bed early, half blinded by migraine and the
normal sickening yellow blotches of light in her vision. I had until now unjustly associated migraine with neurotic thyroidy women and was surprised by how profoundly Sarah had recently been struck by the complaint. I would sit beside her on a chair, since any sudden weight shift on the bed caused her pain, and place cold cloths of the lightest cotton on her brow. Once I said, Maybe you should have gone on with that part in the soapie, and she laughed painfully. I regretted the joke, of course, since nearly every human gesture was agonizing when these bouts came upon her.

  She had been to our doctor, who gave her some potent capsules and a form of suppository, but none of that worked very quickly when she was at the apogee of her pain. Instead they made recovery quicker and then gave her some eight hours' seamless sleep. I have to say, part of me dared be gratified that Friday night—the attack was severe enough to justify canceling the next day's visit to Mrs. Carter. In case it did not, I had recourse to the black-market vodka bottle.

  The next morning, however, Sarah dragged herself up and took extra painkillers, specifically because she did not want to give me an excuse to put off Mrs. Carter. She did not want to cancel one stressful appointment and then have another in a few weeks' time hanging over us. Best for all our sakes, for the ease of my questionable soul and her clearing brain, that we get it over today! To brace myself I drank some more, and Sarah declared herself more than well enough to drive. The yellow blotches had disappeared and her head felt clear.

  Mrs. Carter lived in a seedy but interesting old building where the young intellectuals of the Fusion Party had gathered in the 1940s and 1950s for rumored free love, irreligious drunkenness, and political discussion and subversion. Mrs. Carter had once been, during the time of puppet governments, clients of the West, a famously beautiful woman, favored by the monarchy but also a lovely presence in the early party from which Great Uncle came, which he had ultimately perverted and subsumed.