The Tyrant's Novel

by Thomas Keneally

  I said to her, Please, no coffee, no cake. I'll be right over.

  When I left the building—why should I not visit the mother of an army friend?—I saw the Toyota and limo in their usual place across the street. Though they no doubt wrote down the time of my exit, and the limo would probably follow me at a funeral-pace distance, there was no frantic reaction to my emergence.

  I knew I would suffer a retribution from the old lady. She was not an old lady, of course, but had condemned herself to be one. She seemed to be bent on proving that the truest love is the love between mothers and sons. I remembered my mother, holding my hand and weeping, in her last week in the Republic Hospital. A mother who had been restrained and now, lucky enough to be a patient in a time of plenty before the sanctions, primed with the sort of painkillers that made one weak rather than kill the truest pain. She said, You were always my joy.

  Had she lived, she would have been saying it when I was sixty.

  Partway to Mrs. Carter's, I felt an urge to get things over and hailed a taxi. The limo easefully increased its pace as I made good speed towards the apartment of a woman whom half this city in my father's day had gasped for and declared unapproachable, but who had now become a hag for her son's sake.

  My descriptions of her were, of course, cast up by my sense of being hunted by her. Now I was to liberate her back into the stream of womanhood, and liberate myself as well. I would hear the army's knock at my door and I would rejoice as I was taken away before the startled gaze of Captain Chaddock. After all, the Overguard was the Overguard, but the army was the army!

  When Mrs. Carter opened the door, I could see she had not been able to help herself. There was not a set table of goodies, but there was coffee on the coffee table, and three or so plates full of various delicacies. She admitted me with a slight frown, in response to my own.

  Dear Mrs. Carter, I said, finding the nearest chair to the door and sitting as soon as I could. You should sit down too.

  She obeyed me, placing herself crookedly on a chair by the corner of the table. She was agog.

  All right, I said. I have to tell you at last that you have been misled. The government version of what befell your son is not the truth of it. I regret the part I have had in sustaining the deception.

  I told the story, a fraught smile appearing on her face each time I mentioned her son early in the tale. Whenever I paused, her coffeepot made a metallic ticking sound, as if to warn us it was getting cold, growing less and less drinkable. She listened with a careful, stricken quality, massaging the corners of her mouth with thumb and forefinger. When I had finished, she seemed very controlled. She leaned on her fist and released a few tears, and I rose from my seat and caressed her shoulders. For the first time, I was not frightened of her, and thought of all the times Sarah had helped nurse me towards meetings with this woman.

  Sit down, she told me in a minute voice.

  I sat again, like a man expecting punishment, my fists, indifferent to defense, spread on my knees. I heard her gasp once, silent tears fell from her eyes, and she straightened herself in the chair. Then she put her head back and emitted the most ghastly, high-pitched wail. I stood again, whimpering, spreading my hands like a man letting go of deceit. She rose too with a plate of honey pastry in her hands, and hurled it against the wall behind my head. It did not matter now, she clearly thought. She was not preserving a home decor for someone. She walked to me and drew back her hand and slapped me across the face, stingingly, twice. For the first time since the funeral I began to cry. Poor Hugo, poor Hugo! I howled. She returned to the coffee table and upended it. I could see in her stride some of her legendary force, revived.

  She yelled, You say he did not have his gas mask?

  I said, He was not good at all that stuff. He always left one or two items behind. He had a gift for poetic approximation.

  This isn't the truth, she asserted, wild-eyed. I did not raise him that he'd vanish through a simple accident like that.

  Did you notice how I came to your afternoon teas? Like a sullen teenager. That was because I was lying. Now . . .

  Why didn't you stop him? Why didn't you stop that officer?

  I knew I would have to do it if he didn't.

  Why didn't you run with him, out of that trench? Out of that poisoned air? You stood and watched him vomit and froth?

  Then a thought struck her. I know, she went on. You're punishing me for the death of your wife. You're punishing me. I was once as beautiful as your wife, and now she's gone, and you're punishing me.

  I saw your son die. Why would I tell you that if it were not true?

  She fumbled in her mind awhile for possible reasons. Because you are a fabulist, she hissed, splendid and electric in fury, wanting to provoke me, wanting, and I swear to it, a blow so she could hit back.

  I loved your son, Mrs. Carter. It was a heinous waste. There's no justice in these things. I wish he were here and bringing your grandchildren to visit you in some cranky old Saab.

  Now she leveled a finger at me. I am going straight to the Ministry of War. I will tell them what you say, and they will tell me whether it is true or malicious.

  It's true, I told her, though they'll tell you it isn't. They initiated the lie.

  I watched her as she struggled to believe or disprove me. I meanly thought, I don't need to drink your coffee anymore.

  I rose and went to the door. Is there a friend I can call to come and sit with you? I asked.

  Where are my friends? she howled. They have all fallen away.

  Call one of them, though, I advised her.

  I opened the door and heard her say, Wait a second there! But I passed through. She signified that she would really speak to the Ministry of War by throwing something solid against the door I had just closed.

  This method of letting myself and the McBriens off the hook had proved painful beyond belief, and there was no sign at all that it would save Mrs. Carter from her obsessions.

  Are you well? McBrien asked me by telephone.

  Yes. I've written a lot in the last three days.

  Good. Why did you go and see Mrs. Carter?

  You're not supposed to know that I went and saw Mrs. Carter.

  Don't be ridiculous, said McBrien. I get the reports. You're the artist, I'm the bureaucrat.

  I explained, I was writing the war scenes. They put me in mind of her son. Her son was with me on Summer Island.

  I suppose you have to have a break, McBrien admitted.

  Believe me, I said.

  Two mornings after my painful scene with Mrs. Carter, I was limping on anyhow with my melodrama when I heard an insistent knocking and answered the door to Captain Chaddock and an army officer who held a pistol in his hand. Both their faces were somewhat flushed, and Chaddock made fraternal eye contact with me over the shoulder of the army officer. The latter asked me my name, while Chaddock muttered, Come on! You know!

  The officer told me I was under arrest. My plan for deliverance had come to fruition, and suddenly it did not seem to be the shining scheme I had at first thought it. Chaddock clearly lacked the authority to oppose my arrest, and the officer called down the stairs a little way where two of his men waited to handle me on the way to street level. I was permitted to grab my coat from its hook.

  Chaddock said, I called division, Mr. Sheriff. They said they'd sort this out.

  I began to feel half pleased at the prospect.

  Under the eyes of the Overguard, whom Chaddock had clearly ordered to show jurisdictional restraint, the soldiers loaded me into the back of a military police wagon from the Army Historical Corps—believe me, they called it that, and possessed their own police—drawn up outside my apartment block. I could see through a grille at the back of the small truck Chaddock standing exasperated on the pavement. The guardians of history drove off with me to an army barracks in the suburbs, and my heart leapt ambiguously, with welcome and terror, when we entered the gate and I could see the barbed wire atop the walls. I was giv
en a cell—plain but ample. Two young officers visited me, files in their hands, and sat me down at a table. They did not seem as angry as, in my original plan, I imagined they would be. But then, I had always desired an exit, not necessarily bruises.

  One said, You claimed in a conversation with the mother of one of our heroes that he had been gassed by projectiles dropped by our own bombers.

  I saw it, I told them, my voice quaking, but partly with pride. I told them I was there, at the northern end of the line with the Fifty-third Battalion. I was fortunate in that I had my mask with me.

  The younger of the two officers said, You must be driven by seditious intent to claim that. We don't use chemical or biological agents. The idea that we do has been promoted by our enemies. Our records show that your friend, Private Hugo Carter, was captured during the battle.

  And you told Mrs. Carter that, I suppose?

  Of course.

  How could he be captured, I asked with some sort of delight, when the military historians show that our line was not breached by the opposition? To be captured he would have needed to stand up and present himself to the enemy. But they were already dealt with when it happened. I can assure you, I saw him buried in a pit, in mounds of white chemical. He was not taken prisoner.

  The officers communed and the elder one told me, I'm afraid I must give you some time to reconsider your position, Mr. Sheriff. It's a matter of fixed principle. We know and you know that our state does not use biological and chemical weapons, and we would not like to have one of the heroes of Summer Island, as you appear to be, spread a slander against our state. The official military history shows that the Others were very successful at your end of the line, and penetrated many of your battalion trenches.

  Triumphant in my expectation of punishment, I declared, I was in those same trenches as Carter. If he was a prisoner, I was a prisoner. In fact, I saw him slump at the bottom of the trench. I had a mask, he didn't. Even so, my hands were blistered.

  I showed them my furrowed and unaesthetic hands, given to redness and scaling. This is the result of mustard gas, I told them.

  Surely you are mistaken, the second young officer suggested, giving me every chance to recant.

  I refused every proffered lifeline. No, I insisted, an officer told me that the way Carter and the others convulsed meant it wasn't only mustard gas, but nerve gas mixed in. Everyone in the front line knew we could depend on such aid against the invaders. We were grateful, don't you see? Except the lines were so cramped at our end of the battle that our forces were stricken too. We absorbed the mustard gas and tabin intended for the enemy. It was proximity, and bad luck with geography—the escarpment made the wind whirl a little. That's what killed Private Carter.

  We can't let you go, said the more junior of the two. You seem to be a buffoon. Think about it! The state does not use biological or chemical weapons. This is one of the principles of the state. We suffer under the sanctions of those who think we do. Did you think we would let you go around backing up what liars like CNN and the BBC say? I don't know what's got into you.

  There was a notable lack of remonstration from them as they left the cell, leaving the table there but taking their chairs with them.

  Left to myself, I came to terms with my yellow-walled cell, its low cot with a blanket and a pillow, and the lidded bucket for my waste. I did not expect to be permitted to sleep and had a fear of some episode of degradation of the kind prisoners were subjected to, yet in some ways I felt happier than on any day since Sarah's death. I was tenuously proud of my heresy, for I fancied I felt her pride in me like an acute presence in the cell. I'd unburdened myself to Mrs. Carter, and altered her from a timid widow into a plate thrower. I had committed an ecstatic apostasy. I had said mustard gas. I had said tabin. I'd really put myself in it, and I felt both proud and terrified.

  Sometime later an orderly slid some stew and a jug of water under the flap by the base of the door. I ate it, but remained full of the anticipation of torture, or of its helpmeets, men with heavy fists and hobnailed boots. Yet I drifted off. About midnight, my cell door was opened with a vigorous gesture and I sat up, ready for an end. It was McBrien, wearing an evening suit, accompanied by Chaddock, and now it was the army officers' turn to be in the background.

  Alan, McBrien called pleasantly. What are you doing? Are you trying to kill yourself?

  It was too weighty a question for me to answer.

  I said to him, I was present at Summer Island at the sector held by the Fifty-third Battalion. A comrade of mine named Private Carter died from the effects of mustard and nerve gas.

  McBrien shook his head, half amused, in the direction of Chaddock and the officers in camouflage. He said, Not only is he a veteran, but he's a renowned writer and he's cracked up with overwork.

  An officer said, Can you get him to shut up though?

  Every time, said McBrien with practiced ease. He had become an accomplished bureaucrat already. He must have been shitting himself, but it did not seem so.

  I'll bend every endeavor, he announced. So will Captain Chaddock. But as serious an accusation as my friend here has made, I must remind you he has presidential immunity. Show them your wrist scars for a start, Alan.

  I refused to, but McBrien and Chaddock remained the authorities at the scene. You must let him go, McBrien told the officers, and we'll manage him our own way.

  It's all very well for you, said an officer. But what do we do with the crazy old woman?

  Chaddock groaned. Don't have to tell you. Next time shipments of dead POWs come back, give her a corpse to mourn over.

  We don't do that sort of thing, said the officer. We don't fake records.

  Well, said McBrien, at his best now. He's a novelist. You gentlemen can be novelists too, can't you?

  A senior officer kneaded his face. You can take him, he said at last. But we don't want to hear any more of this gas shit.

  I burst into laughter at the puniness of this threat. It was in such contrast with their martial bearing, their campaign ribbons, the glitter of their caps.

  McBrien would not let it go at that. He said like an advocate, Isn't it possible for a friend of Great Uncle's to have suffered from war trauma? But we can get him treatment.

  Mr. Sheriff, Chaddock invited me.

  Come on, Alan, McBrien ordered me, so smoothly that by now he had my admiration.

  I will die for my belief, I said, keeping my backside solidly on the cot.

  No stupid stuff, Alan, McBrien said, entering and wrestling me to my feet, with the sudden clattering help of many warders in ringing boots. Please, he said, looking in my eyes with such insistence. The situation's changed. Please.

  I retrieved my shoes and socks, and was frog-marched into the corridor even before I could get my jacket on. I shouted and wrestled but someone bludgeoned me, I suppose expertly, near my right ear.

  In McBrien's car, I revived and found myself sickened, as well as by the blow, with self-reproach of the bitterest and most deathly kind. I didn't think it would be so bad, since part of my being dreaded the punishment the history cops could have inflicted on me. But I was disappointed I had managed to make the whole incident into a comedic episode. I looked out the back window and could see Chaddock behind us in his limo. I was thus uninhibited in telling McBrien, That story came from me. The only decent thing I've written in the whole process. I can write and not write, and I don't give a damn anymore.

  McBrien gave me a soft answer, just to frustrate me. We have more than two and a half weeks, he said. Now that you know you are immune, doesn't that give you wings?

  Fuck you, I told him.

  By which, McBrien replied, I believe you mean: To hell with me! Does that mean into the pit with Sonia? Would you condemn her too?

  She's the normal bureaucrat's popsy, I said in concussed petulance. To hell with her too!

  McBrien said, shaking his head, Does that include her unborn child also?

  He picked up an envelope from the
backseat.

  Open it! he commanded me.

  He switched on the reading light behind my head.

  The envelope was unsealed and held two large sheets of film. It looked at first like an X ray of the brain or heart—a layman can never tell—and I wanted to peevishly demand he explain what these films were. When one examined them further, there were many images on each of a sac, and in some of them the darker image of a bean-shaped organ. Looking closely, I saw the bean shape had a head. These were ultrasound images, provided in the National Republic Hospital, one of two hospitals that held the necessary machine and open to senior bureaucrats and military officers and their spouses and children.

  Yes, Alan, said McBrien. She's pregnant. The newest citizen of our state lies under her heart, my dear friend. But also in your hands.

  I looked away from him and rubbed my ear and groaned.

  Would you condemn that along with me and my . . . what did you say? . . . popsy? I don't think so, Alan.

  Great Uncle might finish me anyhow, I argued. After tonight.

  Well, he seems omniscient but he's not quite. He doesn't know. Chaddock reported it as a case of mistaken identity. So Chaddock's in your hands, too.

  I hated these extensions of responsibility. Chaddock did it to cover his own backside, I claimed.

  But the unborn, who had earned no malice and whose snubbed features were visible on the film, who had planned no artillery strikes, who entered the world with an avid but innocent little mouth!

  What's its sex? I asked McBrien.

  They don't quite know yet. Next ultrasound they can tell us.

  I want to see an obstetrician's report, I said.

  McBrien said, All right. I'll bring it round by coffee time tomorrow morning. But get it clear, Alan. Until the eighth of next month, you are condemned to live a charmed life. Not even the military can touch you.

  The next morning, McBrien was at my apartment by eight-thirty, carrying a detailed obstetrical report declaring that the child, possibly female, was well advanced on its second trimester, and signed by a Dr. D. J. Wharton. McBrien was insistent that I read it, and call the doctor if I must. But by the morning's painfully clear light, I accepted the existence of the unborn McBrien. It struck me wearily that I now possessed more lives dependent on me than if I'd begotten a family of ten. So nature blindly extended the lines of responsibility. So the mute egg collaborated with light and tyranny both. Our lies, timidity, and vanity might have earned us Great Uncle. But no one could wish him on the McBrien unborn.