The Tyrant's Novel

by Thomas Keneally

  He approached me. An impressive young woman, he remarked.

  I said, I knew her at university. She offered me a job at some Texas college.

  He looked at me dolefully.

  We all get those offers.

  Circus work, I said.

  Well-intended gestures, he murmured. He shrugged. One day we might all go off together. But there's something to be said for staying here. In the end, you know what really happened. The expatriate merely thinks he does.

  Our voices were descending further and further. We were becoming more and more discreet. Andrew whispered, I shouldn't even refer to what you said earlier. But, I thought you had a book as good as finished.

  As good as, I said.

  Then . . . he asked.

  I wouldn't give it to Great Uncle.

  Why not? It would get everyone out of trouble.

  It doesn't belong to me. It certainly doesn't belong to him.

  How so?

  I put it in the grave with Sarah.

  At this admission, alcoholic tears came unbidden and stung my eyes.

  My God, he said. Don't you have a copy?

  I buried the disks and printout with her. I deleted it from the hard disk. Then I took a walk over the Republic Bridge and gave my laptop to the river as a propitiation. These are excellent funerary rites.

  Hell! said Andrew. Forgive me, but given this is such a desperate time . . . could you perhaps exhume the novel?

  I treated the idea with silence and contempt.

  Come on, said Andrew. Sarah wouldn't want to see you in this mess.

  Sarah is entitled to the gifts I gave her, I told him. Sarah thought it wasn't bad.

  Andrew murmured, You're destroying yourself.

  I won't give that bastard Sarah's book.

  That bastard? asked Andrew. McBrien?

  No. I shook my head in irritation. That bastard! I won't give him Sarah's book. It would be . . . I gestured helplessly with a hand to indicate the enormity of such a choice.

  Will you finish in time, though? asked Andrew.

  I shrugged. I think the thing is finishing me, I admitted.

  Andrew said, That's not good enough. Sarah would say that that's not good enough.

  I shook my head.

  He said, You don't make a habit of telling people this story you've told me, do you?

  I only told you because you're my father figure.

  You'd better give up the booze. Have another drink tonight. But I mean from now on. Next time you feel the appetite, think that the bastard has driven you to this. Then you'll stay dry out of pure bloody-mindedness.

  A good suggestion, I drunkenly told him.

  And be nice to Louise, he advised me. Nothing is her fault. Let me take you to breakfast tomorrow. I won't take up much of your time.

  When I woke next morning, the first message from my stinging brain was that indeed I was not to drink again. I dressed hurriedly and went to meet Andrew at a café on the corner. He already had a half-empty cup of coffee before him, and gestured me crisply to the seat not opposite but beside him.

  I can't stay long, he told me. How far are you along with your melodrama?

  I told him thirty-seven thousand desperate words.

  You see, you and McBrien have made a mistake. You think Great Uncle wants something like he would write. He wants something like you would write. Didn't he make that clear?

  I shook my head.

  He spoke in mysteries, I told Andrew. He spoke like an oracle. Maybe he made that clear. But he says the PR company in New York can make a success of anything.

  By the light of the morning, is there any room for sentimentality, Alan? I can get an exhumation order, very easily.

  I was appalled, but later I would remember that my first words were, On what grounds? That I might have poisoned her?

  And then I thought further and asked, What would my Overguard companions think of that?

  I know a pathologist who did a television series for us. Dr. Prentice. You probably remember him. He studies sudden death in healthy young people, and he could make some reason . . . he might mistrust the coroner's finding. We could have people in white coats there. They might just take a fragment of flesh, and then she could be put to rest again, forever.

  Naturally enough, I began to shudder and weep. I could have tried to reproduce the material, perhaps, I pleaded, if I wanted to do what you say. But I don't want this story to end in the bastard's hands. It's too good for that.

  Look, Alan, said Andrew. Great Uncle never makes an amendment to the clock. As his TV man I know that better than most. It's July twenty-seventh now. Less than two weeks left.

  He paused. It's a horrifying period, Alan. But you'll have peace at the end of it.

  The idea he had suggested terrified me, making me question my profoundly placed markers as to who I was in the first place. Yet, because Andrew had raised it and even given me a doctor's name, it seemed apparent, too, as the very best solution. If only it were not sacrilege.

  I can't do it, Andrew. I can't give the tyrant anything so important. All I can do is hack out this soap opera. If it's not good enough, he and his PR people mightn't have the taste to know.

  Think about it, though! urged Andrew. More than think about it! Get the damned thing back!

  Like a sage uncle who had taught me the squalor of the earth, he walked me back to the apartment so that I could resume the dreary task.

  And there, about noon, was McBrien calling. How's it going, comrade? he asked.

  I had polished off fifteen hundred words, and—with Andrew's alternative in mind—had found it as close to painless as one possibly could. How is Sonia? I asked.

  She's vomiting quite a bit, he declared proudly. This child is going to give us a lot of trouble! Now, Louise James has applied to the Ministry of Culture to interview you. They spoke to Chaddock. There's a consensus a refusal might create a level of suspicion, but you know how to answer most public questions. Do you think you could do it? I'll be present.

  I was a rude bastard to her last night, I told him. I think I could manage it.

  Without, of course, telling her your secrets? he asked.

  I'd be too ashamed to tell her those, I said.

  All right. Keep working, for God's sake. I'll bring her round about four o'clock.

  I found the idea of visitors superficially attractive, and I resolved to be less aggressive this time. All her questions would be irrelevant to our situation, but I could answer them automatically, as if I were my own agent. I even ground out another thousand words of my soap opera before the hour arrived, and McBrien appeared at my door accompanied by an unexpectedly tentative Louise James.

  Occasionally during that afternoon, I had, despite my anticipation, found myself rehearsing angry speeches I might make if she asked the wrong question. At Andrew and Grace Kennedy's party she had behaved, I thought, like Lady Bountiful, holding out the chimera of a scholarly or creative post. Yet something, some stimulus connected with Louise, caused me to take down McBrien's gift, the bottle of Great Uncle–approved Tommy Hilfiger cologne, off the shelf where I had put it. I comforted my face and throat and temples with it before I sensed the obscenity of my behavior. Instantly, impatient for the scent to die away, I poured the stuff down the bathroom sink and emphatically hurled the bottle and its spray apparatus into the garbage.

  But when Louise arrived in McBrien's company, an impression of timidity was increased by the fact that since it was such a dusty day, with the wind flattening the river to a metallic sheen, and atoms of desert and the crumbling northeast suburbs filling the air, she was heavily shawled and thus, apart from a few telltale signs—a fine watch, a Dior scarf—might have been a woman visiting from the country.

  I invited them in, and where yesterday I might have offered them a drink so that I could stupefy myself along with them, I asked a cheery McBrien to put the kettle on.

  Thank you for seeing me, said Louise James as she unwound the shawl a
nd then the scarf, and shook out her hair. There was something unwelcome in this, because it was a gesture not exactly like, but too close to, a remembered gesture of my wife. It seemed a usurpation. Fortunately, the mannerism was restrained and of a momentary nature. When it was over she stood still, definitely herself. I wondered why the blood ran so merrily and orderly in her head when it had been unable to achieve the same daily and ordinary marvel beneath Sarah's skull.

  Please, I said. Take a seat. I gestured towards a chair near my desk. I moved to take a straight-backed one facing her.

  Okay if I set up the mike just here on the corner of your desk?

  Certainly, I said.

  As she worked and muttered into the mike and replayed the mutter on the tape recorder to ensure that it was working, she seemed edgy still, remarking that she had no interest in creating trouble by anything she ultimately broadcast, and so she would stop the tape whenever I said to. She wanted to talk about cultural matters, matters to do with society. She wanted to make an interesting program. But not at anyone's cost. The restrictions people were under in speaking on matters of politics had been well canvassed amongst her audience, and she did not want to endanger any old friend just for the sake of creating what she called a frisson amongst the motorists who listened to PBS current affairs broadcasts as they drove to and from work.

  Not that I don't believe in freedom of speech, she assured me with a frown, her huge dark eyes gleaming with conviction. But I know I'm treading a fine line here that I wouldn't have to tread anywhere else. If I were interviewing government ministers, of course, or Great Uncle, I wouldn't feel as constrained.

  Okay, I said.

  By now, McBrien, who knew my kitchen well, had emerged with a tray of pastries—he had brought it with him from a patisserie—and tea.

  As he placed these nearby, Louise James lowered her voice as if she did not want him to hear the next few words. We got off to a bad start, I feel. Like all those years ago. My fault.

  Rubbish, I told her. Mine. I'm guilty about Sarah, I'm guilty about you. It'd be pitiful if it weren't all so damned ridiculous.

  The tea was poured and after one more inquiry, we began. She read an introduction about my somewhat sketchy but fortunate literary career, and spoke of the extraordinary impact my debut had had in my country. I had recently lost my wife, she said, who had been a famous, classically trained stage, film, and television actress.

  We began talking about the tradition of the theater in the country, the fact that peasant theater had been common for fifteen hundred years or more amongst the Intercessionists, while a more stylized tradition was practiced in the old royal courts, just as in European countries. Only the most literally devout people had a bad opinion of it. Though Sarah had been trained as a small girl in ornate traditional costumes, there had been a flowering of cinema in our country from the 1920s onward, and we exported silent and then talking pictures throughout our region. Sarah had made her first film, Amongst the Clouds, about an orphaned city girl looking for her grandparents in the mountainous north, when she was thirteen.

  I found it delightful to speak of Sarah. I was lost in her career for a time. I brought out albums full of her pictures in the parts she had played: orphans, maidens—the latter especially. Only once a lover. Pictures of the production of The Women of Summer Island. I explained that she had the seriousness that sometimes accompanied great beauty. Of all her gifts as a person, her renowned capacity to allure the camera was the one she considered her least. She would have continued in film ultimately, I said, for she wanted to be a director.

  We can edit this question, said Louise James, but let's ask it first. Is it true that your wife refused to act in a soap opera devoted to propaganda?

  Oh, I asked, is there no propaganda in American soap operas?

  Well, yes, I admit, the soap opera can be a vehicle for prevailing attitudes and even for prevailing hysteria. But, if I dare say so, you didn't quite answer the question.

  I thought this interview was to be sensitive?

  Everything in it is up for revision at your wish, Alan, she reminded me. I said that and I meant it.

  I think that I can put it like this, I told her. That my wife was not entirely happy with the direction some of the programming had taken. But then you have to realize that we have been subject to these terrible sanctions, which do not affect me directly because I'm one of the privileged. But they affect many ordinary people ruinously. The city is in ruins because of them, and the people live among the ruins, among the busted pipes, and the broken taps, the shattered curbs, the whole sad landscape. It's understandable enough that under those circumstances drama would be enlisted in an attempt, however naïve it might seem to the outsider, to help the people.

  I can see that, conceded Louise quite graciously.

  My wife suffered from acute migraines. If there had been replacements for the CT scan machine in city hospitals, her problem might have been picked up earlier. But of course, the policy of the West in taking hardly any of our oil means that even for the privileged, whom I've confessed to being—even for us, there is no adequate imaging service.

  But isn't it also true that the government makes the most of the sanctions, using them as an excuse for corruption?

  Corruption? I asked. She was turning into the woman of the cocktail party again. I wouldn't know about that, but surely you're not arguing that one evil justifies another? Indeed, if what you say were true, it would add to the reasons for ending sanctions.

  She switched off briefly. Very good answer, Mr. Sheriff.

  A very safe answer, I told her.

  She smiled.

  No one requires that someone of your talent should offer up his life for a radio station in Texas—mind you, syndicated through half the nation, including Washington.

  Then she switched on and resumed. Let's talk now about your book of short stories, which the New York Times called “a huge event. The emergence of a new Salinger!”

  In answer I found it easiest to talk about the famous production of The Women of Summer Island.

  She asked, How did you feel as a private soldier in a war largely about stretches of river and sandbanks and little rocky outcrops and oil wells?

  Do they fight about better things than that in the West? I inquired. Wasn't World War I about rivers and mud and outcrops?

  Okay, taking all that as read, how did you feel about the war?

  I explained that our soldiers were not as anxious to be killed as some of the other side seemed to be—it was a cultural difference. Because the other side had a very profound tradition of fundamentalism, they sent youths forward wearing purple bandannas to shatter themselves to meat on minefields. Again, the same thing happened in European wars, with the Russians. Hadn't these things happened, in effect, at the battle of the Somme?

  What made you willing to fight for that particular country down there in the south, then?

  I was conscripted. In any case, Louise, that area was part of our state from ancient times, and defined as such from the very first monarchy. Troops on the other side obviously believed the opposite.

  Now she raised the issue that some of my compatriots, notably Peter Collins, had gone to other countries. Was I ever tempted? I raised my eyebrows at that, and she bowed her head and smiled in a way that said, Do your best with it.

  Before my wife's death, I told her, I had felt bound to my community because they were, insofar as I have written anything, my brothers and sisters and my material. I'd had a curious vanity: to see how things turned out, and to be here when they turned out as they did. After my wife's death, I was bound here by the fact that it was this earth which accommodated her body.

  At last she turned off her machine. Gosh, she said. She looked at me, full gaze. Everything you said about staying. You actually mean it. She seemed, in a peculiar way, moved.

  I shrugged. Yes, I confirmed, checking what my real soul would have been had I not been under Great Uncle's edict. Yes.


  I went so far as to grin at her. I think I mean it. Especially about Sarah's burial place. I definitely mean that.

  She said, You'd lose that, that clarity, in the States. That would be the price.

  Perhaps, I told her. By the way, I hope I've made up for my gaucheries, both those long past and those committed at Andrew's.

  There were no gaucheries, she insisted.

  No, I said. I've been one of those mourners who think their grief exempts them from normal courtesy. I've been a pain in the arse, haven't I, McBrien?

  You've been a monumental pain in the exact center of the cosmic anus, affirmed McBrien.

  We smiled at each other.

  When I say I enjoyed her company, I mean just that. For an hour or so I had been lifted back into larger questions, into my life before Sarah died and before the task descended upon me. Everyone knows that the hunger for contact sometimes becomes greater than the hunger for love itself, and I had fraternally enjoyed the discussion I had had with this woman arisen both from our ancient river—as dark-eyed women of mythology did—and from Houston, Texas.

  I would love to know why you are so protected, she murmured, as she packed up her gear.

  Protected?

  Well, you have Mr. McBrien, my classmate from the university, to make your tea. And the Overguard. And then, the older woman who sits on the bench along the river looking at the apartment door while pretending to read a novel—I bet she's part of the setup too.

  Louise James raised both her hands. Fear not, I don't want to be told now. But perhaps, one day, one day . . .

  McBrien frowned. Older woman?

  Yes, said Louise James. But it doesn't matter, please!

  My apartment was at the back of the building, and lacked a view of the riverside park. Mrs. Douglas's flat faced the river, however.

  I suggested, Perhaps you could point her out, if we can find the right window.