The Tyrant's Novel

by Thomas Keneally

  He told me then that there were other prices, too, not as apparent. He had fled for good cause, he said. He had been given an impossible task to perform. A task of such a massive nature that he had for some days considered suicide before his wife and German editor persuaded him to escape with her. And he couldn't complain. For Frankfurt was full of our fled compatriots, academics, scientists, whose arrival had gone utterly unnoted by anyone but immigration bureaucrats, and who now worked as parking attendants.

  But now he got to the point. I should, he urged, let my friends know that they should not lightly go into exile. After all, in retrospect he wasn't certain that if he had summoned up all his powers he could not have attended to the demands, however ridiculous, which caused him to flee! This morning, wrote Collins,

  I walked out of my door to get a newspaper, and found a box there, addressed to me, and delivered by a courier. The courier's sticker gave it legitimacy in my eyes, so I took it in, checked on its provenance—it claimed to come from the University Press, hence its heaviness. I cut the adhesive tape with a knife, and took the lid off. There was something indistinct encased in bubble wrap. I undid the bubble wrap with some disquiet, because the object within seemed messy. It was the head of Charlie McKay, my former file manager from the Cultural Commission. The poor bastard! You can imagine how I reacted to the horror—I dropped it on the floor. Freda screamed. I'd read that the Overguard had an international presence, but I had never believed it. Charlie's head! I took it to the Polizei, who seemed very calm about it all. Oh yes, they said. It had happened to Ted Bowers in Paris. The head of his liaison officer in the Department of Science and Technology had been served up to him this way.

  Freda and I are artists, not warriors. That's a nice way of saying we're neurotics. I wondered if one of our heads would turn up at the door of some other émigré soon. No, said the police. That would make too much news.

  Please, Alan, I tell you this with great anguish. Because if any of my friends need to escape, then they must do so, but there is a price, and they need to know. I thought you were a good man to tell.

  I gulped my orange juice. Was this really Collins's signature? Could it have been created electronically? I looked at the paper carefully. Collins had made an indentation when writing the P and added a flamboyant tail to the r. The more authentic it looked, the more suspect. And the more suspect, the more authentic.

  I went straight home, my brain itching, and compared the letter's signature with one of Collins's signed books from my shelf. It certainly seemed exact. I called McBrien. Come right away, I told him, and my urgency seemed to cheer him up.

  While he was on his way, I drank vodka and tried to put the horror that Collins had passed on to me beside the image of Great Uncle, so calm, so full of cultivated concern, so confident in public relations rather than the axe, so willing to let me have the royalties.

  There had been at least a display of some sort of equity behind what he proposed to me. But there was nothing equitable about Charlie McKay's head delivered in bubble wrap.

  McBrien arrived promptly. He placed a file on my living room table. He told me, Captain Chaddock said that file comes to you from high sources. You'll find some loose-leaf notes from me as well. Just some narrative ideas I wrote down. You don't have to take any notice of them. But there might be a catalyst there.

  In that instant I found myself not annoyed but liking him more again, in the old way I did before he became a Cultural Commissioner. His willingness, his faith, his naïve but powerful hope.

  I'm sorry, Matt. I have something to show you.

  I gave him Collins's letter to read, and he attacked it with the slight frown of the speed reader. He looked up at me once, after, I guess, he had read the bit about Charlie McKay's head. When he was finished he set it aside and expelled air through his teeth. God Almighty! he said.

  Is it Collins's handwriting? I asked.

  Looks like it. How would we know? What motive would anyone have to fake a letter like this, anyhow?

  Oh, I said, I can imagine motivation. To get me to work.

  I suppose you think I might share that motivation too?

  No. I've decided you're not malicious, Matt. We're friends. Besides, you seemed to think Charlie had run away with a woman. You see now, though, that you and Sonia have to clear out.

  Or else you could finish the damned novel that's there to write!

  I am incapable, I pleaded again.

  No, said McBrien. I want to see this through. I want to see how it works out. And I'm just well known enough that if I go, someone will suffer in my place. You, for example.

  I won't suffer. The evening of August seventh, I shall drink red wine and open my veins in the bath.

  And what if you don't? What if Chaddock comes rampaging in? Come on, Alan! You've been talking suicide for two months. There's something in you that doesn't want to take that route. So just get to work, like a good lad. It's only an exercise after all. And we still have loads of time. Another ten days and nothing done and I'd start to panic a little. But settle to it, that's a good boy. By the way, Captain Chaddock wants to come up and have coffee with you at seven. He might make it a regular thing. He's not a bad fellow.

  McBrien went. I picked up his notes and gave them a quick reading, sighing. Then I picked up the file, and saw that it carried the presidential seal. Within was a moderately thick sheaf of pages, of the computer printout variety. I hoped for a moment that Great Uncle was writing my book for me. The title on the first page read: SOME USEFUL PLOT POINTS FROM THE LIFE OF

  HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT-FOR-LIFE, NATIONAL CHIEFTAIN, COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, AND GREAT UNCLE OF THE PEOPLE.

  I flipped at once to the back page to look for a signature or a covering letter. Nothing. The document's authorship went unclaimed.

  The document began:

  1. The President was born on April 27, 1939, in the small village of Lower Piedmont, west of Scarpdale. His 22-year-old mother was Sophie Stark, whose husband, Henry, was killed in a truck smash on the winding roads of the area. A maternal uncle, Fred Simmons, raised him with a loving strictness, but like most of the poorer Mediationists who occupied that arid hills district, Sophie, her brother, and her first child lived in dusty poverty.

  I liked that term—“dusty poverty.” I could perhaps use it as a grace note in the fraudulent book.

  The boy's mother remarried to Ron Jenkins, a watermelon farmer, through which alliance the future President acquired three stepbrothers, including Reginald Jenkins, the future General Jenkins, General-in-Charge of Military Research. In their small adobe house, the family lacked all plumbing and sanitary arrangements, and had no electricity. Sophie Stark-Jenkins frequently cooked the family rice on an outside fire. It is believed that one day this one-room ruin of a house will be restored as a national monument as famous in our nation as Abraham Lincoln's Kentucky birthplace is in the American firmament.

  Thus it was that from an early age the future President experienced some of the pain—the lack of protein from red meat and fowl—which his people now suffer as they cook their lentils in the streets. The President-for-Life sees them from his car and feels for them. Many of them grew up like him, and now in middle age feel that same bite of want and hunger again.

  The boy also knew the oppression of labor, working in his stepfather's fields. He was the lowest of the low, and felt it, as his people feel the bite of sanctions now. He was required to take the sheep for grazing into those stony hills, and did so without shoes, his parents not having the money for them and he, though the eldest of Sophie's children, being considered—according to country custom—lower in the family pecking order than the Jenkins sons.

  His hero had always been his uncle Richard Stark, a Scarpdale schoolteacher who had spent many years in prison for his part in the 1941 army rebellion against the Anglophile government of the time. Uncle Richard, like other patriots, did not wish to succumb to Churchill's demands that our government and soldiers become i
nvolved in a European war. Uncle Richard, a lieutenant in the army, was discharged for his part in this patriotic endeavor, and his years in prison enhanced his convictions. National policy should favor not the interests of the great powers but the interests of the people! It is because, however unlettered, the future President-for-Life admired the values of his uncle that he wanted to live with him, and when he was ten, with the blessing of his mother and stepfather, he went to reside in Richard Stark's household in Scarpdale.

  2. There he met his cousin Adrian, the future Minister for Defense, who though a year younger than the future President was already reading. Though teased at school for his late start on literacy, for an ignorance that was none of his fault and characteristic of such villages as Lower Piedmont, the future President-for-Life struggled for a scholarship and suffered the pangs of inadequacy which are characteristic of the dispossessed of the earth.

  Oh, Great Uncle, I thought, you certainly know how to swamp a tale with bathos! It was as if he thought I was writing a biography.

  In 1953, Richard Stark, his family, and his nephew moved to the capital and settled in the southwestern suburbs, a poor-to-middling area where many Intercessionists from the south had settled.

  For many Intercessionists from the south, one read: many bumpkins without trades or literacy.

  After school, the future President worked at finding passengers for a particular taxi driver, and sold cigarettes around the coffeehouses. He found the clients of the coffeehouses self-indulgent and in some cases corrupt. . . .

  I shook my head, and turned again to the rear of the document, being relieved to read there:

  These ideas are in no sense to be interpreted as prescriptive, but are merely offered as possible help.

  As the sun vanished from the river, I found Captain Chaddock knocking on my door. I surveyed him through the peephole in his impeccably snappy uniform, his red beret at the right angle to convey esprit and rigor. He was so large too. Coffee time.

  I opened up.

  Convenient? he asked.

  Definitely, I said.

  Just a chat, he assured me. Won't be on your doorstep all the time.

  I led him in and he sat near my worktable by the partially disabled laptop as I went to make the coffee. I had already noticed that the prescriptive cologne the Overguard wore had turned stale on him. This distance from the palaces gave him that much latitude.

  Going well? he called to me while I was out of the room.

  So far, I lied.

  Get the envelope this morning?

  Yes. Thanks.

  I put a few pastries on a plate and brought the coffee into him on a tray. He took a lot of sugar.

  Don't want to dent your rations.

  No, please. I've got plenty.

  For a long time, and in silence, he stirred the sweetness in. I considered him, his large, masculine features which might balloon in later life. I asked, You're not outside twenty-four hours a day, are you?

  He said, My men are when I'm not. You're safe. Every hour.

  I tried to humanize this lummox. You must have a family though?

  Not a question to answer, he told me. Could put them in harm's way.

  Of course, I said. But that's not the reason I'm asking.

  All right, he conceded. Wife. Three kids. No more questions.

  Okay. I just wanted to achieve human contact.

  You've got it. With me.

  As you say, with you. Want a pastry?

  Okay.

  He crushed it into his huge warrior mouth, and chewed it slowly. There was a passing delicacy of pleasure on his face. When he had finished he reflected on the aftertaste. Quite good, he told me. Then he drank the hot coffee, pretty much in a single draught, and sat back to consider me.

  He said, My unit's got a specialty, Mr. Sheriff. Watch and guard without interfering. Don't know what you're doing for the state. You're doing something. That's good enough. If you don't see us all the time, doesn't mean we've stopped. We pick up subtle things. Visitors. Your mood. The light in your windows. Yes, even though you're at the back of the building. The light. Maybe, means you're wrestling with the task. Can tell if you're drinking. Best to cut down.

  My face flushed. I'll drink if I damn well choose.

  Long as no rashness, he conceded. Have ladies if you want. We'll know who they are before they turn up. If a risk, they won't turn up.

  I won't be having any women in, I assured him.

  Might change your mind. A man's a man.

  Sometimes, I told him, with futile acidity.

  He stood up. Thanks, Mr. Sheriff. A few words now and then, that's all. Won't see us.

  The neighbors will.

  They'll get used to it. Good night.

  My regards to the wife and kids, I said with unfair sarcasm.

  He saluted. I let him out. I paused a little after the door had shut. Could this man have ordered things on the scale of the shooting and exposure of Mrs. Douglas's nephew? Could he have said, Just a bit of juice, as he applied the electrodes to the vagina of a female prisoner? These were all within the Overguard's repertoire, after all. And how did you go home and be tender with a wife and three kids after such exercises in state security?

  Or maybe he had always been what he was in my case. Mere surveillance. I desired, for his sake and mine, that that was the case.

  Just to cheer myself up, I began to make notes on a special file named in ironic honor as TASK1.doc. A McCauley-like barge skipper named, for the moment, A, was an oil smuggler, getting oil out of the country and thus creating more wealth than the West permitted us to have. A1, one of his sons, was an idealistic blockade runner who brought pharmaceuticals in by truck from Istria in the northwest. The second son, A2, was an accountant used by a black-market mogul, a friend of Sonny. No, I can't say that. Scratch A2. Press the delete button and expunge it before Chaddock notices the faintest fragrance of such sedition and knocks on the door with his respectful absolutism. No, don't scratch A2 entirely. There were Istrian black-market operators who lived opportunistically amongst us, and when they were caught, Sonny was ruthless with them, because they were competition for his friends. There had been, three months before, outside Wolfmount prison, a public hanging of two Istrians who had tried to profiteer out of car parts they'd brought in. So I could have an Istrian gangster, Z. Bring back A2, but portray him as having lost his job due to the sanctions and succumbed to temptation for the sake of real but corrupt wages.

  It was good to be working, even on shit. The idea that such a character as the Istrian, Z, might spark anti-Istrian feelings did not, under the pressure, mean much. Get the damn thing written and then give it manners!

  Creating even these few bad ideas evoked the forgotten pleasure of imagination fast and fertile. Now the barge skipper A's teenage daughter, F1, becomes involved with the Istrian, Z. A2, the accountant, has to suffer the sting of seeing his boss flaunt his sister round the warehouses of Beaumont. Z wants a piece of A1's, the pharmaceutical smuggler's, action. The accountant brother knows that Z will adulterate the pharmaceuticals and cause death.

  I made a note not to make Z too much of a villain, since the West and the sanctions were to be the chief miscreants. The point of the book was to be that few are able to escape the harshness of Beaumont, the sharp edge of the sanctions. Blah, blah, blah!

  The problem now was I had actually to write this soap opera in such a way that it had the plausibility of a real book. Nonetheless, I turned out the lights at two A.M., strangely contented at having made a plan.

  Next morning I began writing this melodrama. It limped for days, but I always told McBrien, when he called in, how well it was going. If the tale should die on its feet at two weeks, I would still have time to persuade Matt to flee. I operated on the principle now that if one could write one letter after another to people one had no fundamental liking or respect for, one could also write a plausible novel, a few thousand words at a time.

  About the fourth day,
I went back to drinking McBrien's vodka, and it put me into a sort of subtranscendent lather of creativity. About then, McBrien asked could he read some of the pages of this melodrama, and I let him since it might fuel him towards becoming a refugee. But he made applauding noises as he read and seemed to find the material quite acceptable. When, despite myself, I felt flattered by his approval, I produced twenty thousand words in eight days.

  And you'll speed up, said McBrien, joyfully. Because both of us knew the second half of a book is always faster than the first.

  But then a possibly fatal thing happened. I got involved in A2's, the accountant's, experience as a soldier. It was then that Hugo Carter, my military comrade, asserted himself for two days while I wrote in clearheaded fervor the short story I should have long since attended to. This tale I had been waiting to tell began to insinuate itself into the soap opera narrative I was writing. It waited for the point where my feeble, fatuous tale put the McCauley figure's son at Summer Island during the war. And here Hugo Carter had appeared, choosing to disgorge himself into the sluggish waters of my Great Uncle–ordered narrative.

  The story I wrote was along these lines:

  On Summer Island we conscripts were required, when stood-to, to wear both our oppressive gas masks and rubberized gloves. Summer, normally a time for heroic dives into rivers, for folly and ice cream and plaintive evening songs of longing, was a harsh season on Summer Island for the conscripts in this oppressive wear, but they made us wear the mask and gloves long enough so that we became accustomed to them. For there was no guarantee the Others would not try to gas us or drop a biological bomb amongst us. After the day's reconnaissance planes instructed the command that there were no signs of attack, we were allowed to take everything off but keep it within reach.