The Tyrant's Novel

by Thomas Keneally

  Not, if I might say so, Mr. President, when the work is in fact really bad.

  Do you have any copies on computer disk?

  I went to rather silly extremes, Mr. President, and threw them away in the garbage.

  I hoped he did not get the idea of setting Overguards to work searching the hectares of waste on the northern edge of the city. My lies made me breathless, but I held the gaze.

  Oh, you must have disliked it, Alan. But Andrew Kennedy tells me you've been getting your creative edge back by subtitling films. I believe your subtitling of Casablanca is better than the original.

  As a mere side issue, I felt angry with Andrew—to know that such an informal and semiprivate arrangement had been brought to the attention of Great Uncle.

  Andrew's too kind, I said formally.

  No, Great Uncle insisted. We all have great faith in your talent. We are aware that it was interrupted by a severe trauma. But that it is there—Great Uncle waved his right hand—that it is there, no one doubts.

  I despaired of argument. I simply sat still in dreadful anticipation.

  Great Uncle said, I ask you to loan the state the great benefit of your talent, Alan.

  I was reckless enough to lower my head. These days, you don't find me at my best, Mr. President, I'm afraid.

  You simply need a project, he told me, cheerily. You were on the right line. The impact of the sanctions on the people, on the families of war veterans. This is a great story. Men and women who smuggle oil west to the Mediterranean, and down the straits in barges, are the new heroes. The weight of their deeds, Alan, will render the frippery of sanctions irrelevant.

  Frippery? I thought.

  Great Uncle fixed me with his eyes and told me evenly, I realize my own past novels have been dismissed in the West as pure melodrama. They were fables, of course, and all fables are melodramatic. But because they portrayed the relationship between myself as bridegroom and the state as bride, they were derided by foreigners.

  The Americans are not used to fables, I told him.

  I really shouldn't have. I knew his books to be utter shit, ghostwritten by hacks at the Cultural Commission. I would have liked to argue that I was being polite for McBrien's sake, and his fashionable wife, Sonia's. On the other hand, I might simply have been genuflecting, despite myself. Most human beings can be brave only in snatches. And nobody knows, unless they have been there, with a god, in his office, within reach of his army cot. Nobody can forejudge how they'll behave.

  Great Uncle leaned forward, and I heard his boots squeak like those of a recruit.

  I have a great favor to ask you.

  I knew that he began commands in that fashion.

  In four months, he said, the Group of Seven, or so-called G-7, those self-congratulatory controllers of the goods of the earth, those judges of seemly weapons, will meet in Montreal. I have it on some authority that the sanctions which affect your fellow citizens will come up for consideration. Some of the G-7 are uneasy about them. Canada, France, Italy.

  It does them some honor, I said.

  Great Uncle laughed. They are conditioned to think that way. The French helped the Americans found their tiny republic. What do they think now? Now that the Americans so far outstrip the power of Napoleon? What do the Canadians think, living cheek by jowl with the monster? They support the sanctions at least in the sense that they go along with America and give silent assent in spite of moral unease. But they are also willing to believe the worst of them. Pearson Dysart, our PR company, places in the Canadian and European press little items about our people which would make any heart bleed.

  Yes, I could but say. But they are right to do so. The sanctions are the main issue.

  Exactly, whispered Great Uncle, lightly clapping his hands. A man of such restrained gestures, unlike his coke-inhaling offspring. Now, he confided, our young friend McBrien is a fine fellow, and a splendid writer, but he'd rather write about our past, about intellectuals persecuted by the monarchy in the early 1930s. That's the trouble with our writers. They find it easier, both creatively and, I think, politically, to dwell on historic wrong.

  Perhaps so, Mr. President, I conceded with a lackey politeness.

  Whereas your stories, Alan, they're always in the present. Real soldiers, womenfolk everyone knows . . .

  The serpent of literary vanity, slick and seething, moved within me, as Great Uncle spoke as if the worst that could befall a writer who wrote the wrong things about the present world would be the mildest of rebukes. I thought of Mrs. Douglas's nephew, who had composed the chemical balance of the water wrongly. Had he had his death announced to him in this softness of tone? In this quiet, chiding atmosphere?

  Great Uncle said again, I want you to do me a favor, Alan. I want you to do, that is, the state a favor. I don't pretend it won't be demanding. The situation is this. In four months the G-7 meet, as I say, in Montreal. My plan is to release a book in New York at that time, published by a bona fide publisher, bearing my name, which displays to the world the suffering of my people, and their patriotic inventiveness in the face of sanctions. You can put it better than that, I know. I want it to be a subtle novel, with heroes and some villains. I want it to be a book an American would enjoy reading. I want some of the villains—exploitative people—punished in the book, for the punishment they inflict, but I want the central characters to be honest people. Write about what you yourself have seen, Alan. I'm afraid that the deadline is a short one—Pearson Dysart in New York have the publisher primed, but they insist they need three months to get the word of this extraordinary literary coup into the market and to attend to producing the book. And, of course, to let it leak into the market that they have signed a contract with the notorious Great Uncle, and that the manuscript of the novel is very good.

  I sat neutralized by conflicting terrors through all this.

  Great Uncle began to think. Then he spoke, as he consulted a calendar on his desk. I think we can afford a full calendar month for the task, and this being July 8, you should deliver your book into the hands of Commissioner McBrien and your Overguard escort officer, Chaddock, by close of office hours on August 8. I should tell you Pearson Dysart have an old left-wing publishing house lined up, and they would be delighted to drive a stake through the American administration's embargoes on our oil and the imposed sanctions.

  Flabbergasted, I came close, but not close enough, to suggesting he might as well use his pistol on me right now. A masterwork can't be written in a month, sir, I told him.

  It's all the timetable permits us, he said with a shrug. Sorry. I know you like to translate your own work, but there won't be time. The top American translator is lined up. He'll work fast too. And the senior editor from the publishing house will work on it in regard to any revisions. You shouldn't let him change anything that's relevant to us, to what we are all going through.

  I took yet another profound breath. I could not deal with the thinness of this air.

  Mr. President, I said. I am very proud to be asked, of course. But I'm not well, sir. My subtitling was nearly remedial work, therapy. I am a shell. What you suggest is simply beyond my powers.

  Great Uncle grasped his upper lip and thought. Then he leaned forward across the desk. You're arguing with destiny, aren't you, Alan? he said. And with so many people depending on you . . . me, Pearson Dysart, the publisher. And members of your own race. This is not an instance of vanity on my part. I want the hypocritical sanctions to be shown up, I want our oil without restriction to flow to the world. I want the world's goods to flow to us. I want a book whose humanity will achieve that, and be a reproach to the G-7. In the face of that, Alan, it's no good claiming personal fragility. It must be done. It will mean a great deal to the career of Cultural Commissioner McBrien, also.

  So he assumes responsibility for me?

  Great Uncle said, I can imagine the two of you swapping ideas in cafés at night. May I suggest you might try dictating? The Ministry of Information has a voice-r
ecognition program on some of its computers, if you wanted to use one of them.

  He had managed to make me giddy with a new kind of despair, a kind I never anticipated. I don't know what to say, Great Uncle, I confessed.

  And indeed, despite my lapse of protocol, he nodded gently like a generous uncle. Did I mention that advance and royalties will very appropriately be paid by my office to you? You will have security for life, Alan. So get to work. On August 8, I'll accept the typescript from your hand.

  There was a long silence in that soundless palace.

  Oh, he said suddenly, I understand.

  He chuckled—a noise like other men would make if preparing to sneeze.

  You ask yourself, once the book is written, why would he not simply bury me away in some prison to make sure rumors of authorship don't start circulating? Or why wouldn't he perhaps be tempted to eliminate me?

  There was another stutter of indulgent laughter, in the midst of which he drew a chardri, a regulation short bayonet dagger, traditionally curved, from his belt. He laid it on the surface of the table, and looked for something in his desk drawers and found it, a pack of surgical lint impregnated with some chemical or other.

  I'll solve it by making you one of my Piedmontese. A kinsman. To show how I value your talent and your happiness. You see!

  He extended his own right wrist, fingers upwards. There were five small ridges of scar like a little constellation there.

  All right, he said, snapping his shirtsleeves back in place. Everyone knows how I value kinship. This will be a significant day for you and your progeny.

  He took a square of lint and cleaned the point of his dagger with it. Surgical alcohol, he said. Give me your right hand.

  I pushed forward my fairly effete urban hand and it was suddenly taken in his broad, harsh one. He had worked day after day with farm implements in his childhood. He had strength. With his free hand, he took another alcohol-impregnated cloth and frowned slightly as he reached across the table to wipe the wrist he held.

  Many have tried to copy these marks, he told me, but they're like a secret handshake—hard for an outsider to reproduce.

  He put the point of the thing deftly under the skin of my wrist, digging at an angle, then flipping the nugget of flesh he had purchase on so that it was doomed to heal in a distinctive nodule of scar. Naturally it hurt. But who was I to scream? In his terms, he was paying me a gesture of intense esteem, guaranteeing my safety, making me a five-dotter. Having produced the effect once, he did it immediately again, on the far side of my wrist.

  I was bleeding somewhat by the time he wiped my wrist with yet another square of lint, but not so widely that he would ruin the contours of the curiously raised wounds. The alcohol stung, of course.

  He said, Well done! You get the rest of the marks when the novel is delivered. But you are now a tribal Piedmontese, at least of child status. And my word is my bond to me, and vice versa, and cannot be extracted from you even by torture, or by bribe. You and I are in this secret. But so too is Matt McBrien, who will be your mentor. Mr. McBrien has been briefed to a certain extent by my principal personal assistant, a kinsman. He knows there is to be some writing done for me, over a month, and that he is to give you every assistance. But McBrien is no kinsman. I know you are of course a good friend of Andrew Kennedy's. But he is not to know of this. For his own protection, you understand.

  Again he emitted the small, half-choking stutter of laughter. He said, The orderlies will put antibiotic powder on those, but best not to cover them too tightly in the first day, or they'll look like a mere imitation of the real thing.

  He cleaned his dagger again and put it away, then rose. The matter was settled. I had my task.

  God guide your hand, he said.

  He rang a bell. The door opened and I was taken out into the corridor. Looking over my shoulder I saw the figure of Great Uncle returning to his spartan bedroom.

  Back in the corridors, my wound was sprinkled with antibiotic powder and loosely bound with lint, and my clothes were given back to me.

  Dressed normally, I was taken to the waiting room where McBrien remained. He was alone, studying a dossier someone had obviously given him. Instructions for minding me.

  How did it go? he muttered. McBrien's eyes were drawn to the injury Great Uncle had inflicted. What happened to your wrist? It's bleeding.

  The administrative officer whom we had met in the corridor an age ago arrived and we were led again to the front door and blindfolded by Lieutenant Chaddock and his men. I sat in a daze as we drove, although Chaddock once asked me, How is he? The Man of Men?

  I said, He speaks very softly, and Chaddock laughed.

  Excuse me, sir. But the wrist. Do you have . . .

  Yes, I said.

  Put there? By the man himself?

  Yes.

  Chaddock whistled. Give the world, myself! Congratulations, Mr. Sheriff.

  Thank you, Lieutenant.

  McBrien asked if he and I could be let off at a particular café, and Lieutenant Chaddock said, Sure. We'll wait for you.

  McBrien took me to a private room, where drinks were served. He led me to a booth, asking no further questions, and ordered us both a double Scotch.

  When the drinks had been brought McBrien told me the President's principal private secretary had filled him in on the details of the task.

  Damn me, McBrien said jovially, if it doesn't all depend on you now, Alan. The big task. A novel. I don't want to know all the details! I don't know what it's for, but I know it has to be done. I'm just to supervise you and supply you with what could be needed. I promise that will be done with a light touch.

  What if I do this preposterous thing? I asked him. He could shoot me then, and be secure.

  Except, by the look of your wrist, you're on the way to becoming his kinsman. He doesn't shoot kinsmen unless they really screw up. And your kinsmanship makes me confident about myself.

  He shot one of his son-in-laws, for God's sake!

  But that was for doing unauthorized deals with the Swiss, and the fellow was a wife beater, and he'd tried to defect. Look, Alan, we'll do it one way or another. Even if I have to write half the thing myself. Our man doesn't want more than about, say, two hundred and fifty print pages. Fewer even. That's about eighty to eighty-five thousand words, tops. That's less than three thousand a day.

  I told him he had a strange mind. That he should be selling garden hoses by the length. I drank the double Scotch in two gulps and laughed. Could you do it if it were you? I asked him.

  But you have a book nearly written anyhow, he said. You told me at Andrew's place. You can edit that. It will serve our masters. The private secretary said our man would be pleased with something that had the flavor of your short stories. It can be real work. It doesn't need to be as monochrome as a TV soapie.

  That book is gone, I told him. I destroyed that book. I destroyed printouts and files and floppies and threw my old laptop in the river. It's gone.

  That's a bit extreme, Alan!

  It was a creature of my marriage, McBrien, and my marriage has been destroyed.

  Did you tell Great Uncle that? That you threw the thing away?

  I told him I burned the pages and sent the laptop and tapes away with the garbage.

  Look, Alan, I don't know how to say it. Please. Please! It's like Toby Garner's wall. It has to be done.

  My greatest inventiveness will be dedicated from this point on, I told him, to managing to disappoint the old bastard while saving your bacon. Your suit, your house, your car, your career.

  No. You're joking, aren't you? Let me get you another drink.

  He began waving like a man drowning.

  A waiter came, took the order, and went.

  Don't tell me tales, Matt McBrien pleaded. I didn't know it had gone. Your novel . . .

  Well, it's gone.

  Utterly?

  You could send a diver looking for my laptop. Though with the spring current, it's probably
down near Summer City by now.

  He absorbed this. Well, there's still time.

  He grasped for a narrative concept. Why don't you just talk about an oil smuggler and his family? A barge captain? I could set up an interview with one.

  Great Uncle mentioned oil bargemen, I said, suspicious that McBrien might have been primed by Great Uncle's office. But he wants someone who's smuggling oil for patriotism, and not for the money.

  Well, you could find that patriotism is a motivation. It's a matter of emphasis.

  A fictionalizing, story-conferencing light entered his eye. Listen, say a young kid gets involved with a member of an oil barge crew, and say the others mock his patriotism—he keeps on donating his wages to a kids' home. He wants every dollar to flow back into the economy. He's got at home an amputee brother from the war, and that's his motivation. And then maybe one of the tough guys, the skipper say, surprises him with some act of heroism, and he becomes aware that this hard-bitten man is operating from an unexpressed idealism as well.

  I could barely contain my anger, but thank God the drinks arrived. Once the waiter had gone off, I said, I can see why you write such shitty novels.

  I'm just trying to help you, Alan, to get that side of your brain working. As for my novels, fuck them. This is the job I always wanted. I want to grow to be as aged as Old Billy in it.

  A thought had in the meantime struck me.

  Do you think this is why Peter Collins cleared out? If Great Uncle asked him to do this and gave him three months, but he wouldn't do it on principle? And then Charlie McKay, his handler, vanishes.

  We chewed on this. I don't think so, McBrien said conclusively.

  There's nothing for it, Matt. You and Sonia will have to go. I'll stay here and take the medicine. I bet that barge captain of yours could get you onto a Russian freighter.

  Yes, and as much as I paid him up front, he'd get double for telling the Overguard.

  Well, you might just have to get your nifty suede shoes dirty walking through the mountains.