Without appearing to use force he raises Jimmy and accompanies him to the exit saying, “Fossil fuels should be exclusively used as fertilizer, and housewives when shopping should use net bags instead of the plastic sort which add to the price of what they buy. Goodbye Jimmy.”
“Nobody with wealth and power will believe me if I say that! They know the damage they are doing to the planet but they’re still extending motorways! Making and selling cars! Nobody owning one will change to a bicycle! Nobody who can fly will go by boat! Owners of companies wrecking the ecosphere are buying self-sustaining bunkers where they and their like can survive when everyone else is poisoned!”
“They won’t survive,” says the Head, chuckling. “Only folk who want to save others too have a chance. Perhaps.” Now he certainly propels Jimmy to the exit, adding with what sounds like mischievous encouragement, “Workers of the world unite! Remind them of co-operative Socialism! Owen, William Morris, James Connolly!”
“I’ll be laughed at,” moans Jimmy.
“Then all laughter will become screams of hysterical despair. Send me all the emails you like but don’t come here again for a millennium or two. Goodbye son.”
“Son!” says Jimmy on the threshold. “I’m glad you ... sometimes ... admit I’m in the family.”
“Goodbye son,” says the Head, quietly for once, “and good luck.”
“Which is not something you need, Dad,” says Jimmy, and leaves.
The Head returns to contemplate the crystalline models and formulae on his blackboard, seeming almost despondent. He is sorry that it is so hard to show his love for those who love him most. The rest are not so demanding. And why does Jimmy think he needs no luck? Is it because, as Headmaster of all, there is supposed to be no greater power? He hums a little song to himself, “I’ll give me one-o. What is my one-o? One is one and all alone and ever more shall be so.”
After a pause he sadly says, “One is one and all alone and ever more shall be so.”
In the place where he sits another presence becomes apparent, one that stands so much higher than he that its voice seems from above, a gentle, female, slightly amused voice saying, “You silly wee man.” “Mother?” he asks wistfully.
VOICES IN THE DARK
THE DARKNESS IS SO COMPLETE that only steady continual snoring suggests this is a bedroom. Then come muffled clicks, a sliding sound, thumps of someone coming stealthily through a window. A narrow beam of light pierces the dark from what can be dimly seen as a slit between curtains. The beam swings from side to side until it fixes on the foot of a big bed where the snorer lies, then explores sideways to light on a bedside table with many bottles on it. The source of the beam comes through the curtains. It is a torch in the hand of a black thin figure who advances carefully to the bedside table, crouches on the floor, then switches on a table lamp among the bottles before turning off and pocketing the torch. The light now, though not great, shows the head of the snorer half sunk in plump pillows. It is old and mostly bald, with clumps of white hair behind the ears. This man is called Rudi. Behind him is an elaborately carved bed head with a large letter F surrounded by a laurel wreath both under a layer of cracked gold leaf. The rest of the room also suggests palatial splendour down on its luck. The croucher at the bedside wears black canvas shoes, pants, anorak, woollen hood with eye slits and holds a gun pointed at the sleeper’s head. With the other hand she pulls the hood off, and now is a tiny, haggard, desperate woman of any age between thirty and fifty. She listens carefully for sounds outside the room, but only those from the sleeper’s nose are audible, so at last she reaches over with her free hand and pinches the nostrils shut.
His mouth opens and he starts breathing through it noisily. She whispers fiercely, “Wake up!”
He does not. Releasing his nose she slaps him lightly on the cheek saying, “Wake up! Wake up!”
Even this has no effect. She slaps him much harder, says, “Waken you old fool!”
Not opening his eyes he mutters, “Um. Eh?”
“I have told you to waken.”
“Impossible,” he murmurs drowsily. “The sleeping pills I am given no longer work, it is true, but I reinforce them with alcohol. What time is it?”
“Three a.m.”
“Well, before midnight, on top of my pills, I consumed a bottle of 90% proof absolute alcohol so you cannot possibly have wakened me at three a.m. Go away.”
She prods his head with the gun saying sternly, “Open your eyes. This hard thing pressing your ear is the barrel of a revolver.”
“Ouch,” Rudi grunts, then adds thoughtfully, “Yes, it feels like one, but dreams sometimes contain strong sensations. I once dreamed I was eating a buttered roll, the loveliest experience of my life, a memory of the birthday present my mother gave me when I was two or three. That was during the German occupation. Everyone except the Germans were hungry then, even though the Jews and Gypsies had gone. My mother ...” (he sobs) “... my mother must have loved me a lot to have given me a whole buttered roll and not eaten half of it herself. Leave me alone.”
He turns away from the light, trying to bury his head in the pillow, but she slaps his cheek so hard that he cries, “Huh!”
“Was that not more real than the dream of your mother’s buttered roll?”
He says sulkily, “No. It was not.”
She slaps again much harder.
“Yes!” he says, sitting up a little. “Yes indeed, that would almost convince me that I’m awake if this house were not surrounded by guards and alarm systems and all kinds of clever devices installed by Americans, the best people in the world for such contraptions. My dear, I regret disappointing you but you must be a hallucination. Nobody real could penetrate the impregnable security fence protecting me from – ”
Loud knocking on the door is followed by a muffled voice saying, “Sir! Sir! Are you all right?”
Rudi sits up straight, showing he is unusually tall and unusually thin. He shouts, “Of course I’m all right! Can the President of Fredonia not enjoy a Shakespearean soliloquy and talk to himself without a God-damned bodyguard interfering? I have all the protection I need – in fact more than I want. Avaunt and quit my door. Vanish, abscond, absquatulate, begone. Shut up, pipe down, retreat and have a heart, as the Yanks say. Have peeety on your so-o-o-oul, as Dostoevsky would have said. Leave me in peace do you hear? Do you hear?”
The voice outside mutters, “Yes sir.”
“But I don’t want to hear you,” yells Rudi. “Eff off, as the English say!”
A little later he cries, “Have you gone?”, waits for half a minute, then chuckles and says, “Relax my dear. He’s gone.”
The visitor has been standing upright with legs apart, gun at arm’s length pointing at the door. She now pulls a chair to the bedside, sits down and tells him, “You’re a smart old bastard. You knew I’d have shot you if you’d called him in.”
Rudi sinks back on his pillows, sighs, says, “Why should you not shoot me? I’m useless. Useless to myself, useless to my nation, useless to the world.”
“But a tyrant to your people,” she coldly tells him.
“You do me too much honour, my dear. I drove that servile security guard away because I was enjoying our conversation about appearance and reality. Do you know that in Western Europe and the U.S.A. nowadays, postmodern philosophy teaches that all external realities are mere opinions, all different but all equally valid?”
“Decadent bourgeois obfuscation,” she says savagely. Delighted he cries out, “I love these old Marxist phrases! After the Russians drove out the Germans I became the most dedicated Communist medical student in Fredonia. My speeches denounced Capitalist Lackeys, Neo-Fascist Warmongers, Bourgeois Hyena Cannibals and even (God forgive me) Unproductive Social Elements Deserving Elimination. I hailed the coming day when the Revolution would be Complete and The State Would Wither Away. These stale phrases rang in my ears like trumpets in the ears of Crusaders galloping out to exterminate infidels. Please tell m
e your name.”
After a moment she says shortly, “You may call me Vera.” He begs softly, “Vera, join me in bed.”
Astonished she cries, “You dirty old sod.”
“Please don’t mistake me my dear. I’ve been completely impotent since the People’s Socialist Republic put electric currents through my testicles. The pressure of a friendly woman’s body can no longer excite me, but it would soothe me. Nobody has soothed me since my arrest by the old regime. Time for another drink. Have some too.”
She scornfully refuses. Rudi shrugs, grasps a bottle of vodka, fills a tumbler, sips, then says, “You must have a reason for breaking in. What is it, Vera?”
“I need to know why you betrayed us.”
“Betrayed who?”
“The people of Fredonia.”
He says mildly, “It is they who let me down – not the common people of course, who gained nothing from the collapse of the old regime but permission to say what they liked. But lawyers and businessmen, civil servants and local politicians, journalists and broadcasters seem happy with Grolsh in charge.”
“Grolsh? Who is Grolsh?”
The president stares at her, says, “The man who runs Fredonia.”
“Liar! The Mafia rules Fredonia.”
“It could not rule us without local help, Vera. Grolsh and the Sicilian Godfathers co-operate like lock and key. Like many sadists he is a good family man, and knows it is unwise to be a well-known public figure. He never let the old Party bosses promote him above the rank of privileged State Security thug, so when the Communist regime collapsed, only those he had personally tortured ... people like me knew how vile he is and – and – and ...” (he shudders) “...we hate recalling that.”
He tries to empty the glass down his throat, but his teeth chatter on the rim and half the drink spills on his pyjama jacket. Stretching a trembling hand to the nearest full bottle he begs in a whisper, “Please Vera. Please. Please.” She lays her gun on the table, lifts the bottle, sighs, takes the empty glass from his hand and pours in a small measure of vodka. Handing to him she says gloomily, “You should drink less.”
Her action does him good. He stops trembling, smiles at the glass in his hand, sips very little then says, “You care about politics so must belong to some little party or other. Which?”
“We call ourselves The Decembrists.”
“After the group who planned to assassinate the Russian Czar in 1825?”
She nods and explains, “We would have preferred a name recalling the great Soviet Revolutionaries of 1917, but their achievement went bad under Lenin, turned rotten under Stalin, collapsed under Gorbachev. So we chose the name of that earlier lot.”
“Who also failed.”
“Yes, but Pushkin nearly joined them and Tolstoy admired them.”
Chuckling he says, “So you broke in here to assassinate the Czar of Fredonia! You nearly succeeded. I might have died of a heart attack.”
“I did not want to kill you,” cries Vera, distressed. “I once loved you. You were my hero when I was a tiny girl.”
Seriously and sadly Rudi whispers, “O dear.”
She tells him, “You gave hope to so many of us with that speech you made in the seventies. My mother and father ...”
“Don’t remind me,” he begs but she raises her voice: “My mother and father listened to you on the radio with tears wetting their faces. You said the People’s Republic of Fredonia would now take her own unique path to Democratic Socialism. All censorship was now abolished. Everywhere we would be allowed to say what we thought about everything.”
She leans so far forward that her hair falls down to hide her face and she puts a hand on the bed to support herself. He pats it gently, quietly singing in a cracked voice a line of their national anthem: “Hail, hail Fredonia, land of the free”, then switches to another song once popular with Socialists: “For all that, and all that, it’s coming yet for all that, that man to man the wide world o’er shall brothers be for all that.”
Vera sits up and says abruptly, “I am a woman.”
“In a true democracy, women count as men.”
“Then count me out.”
“Why?”
“You retracted everything you said in that great speech.” “I was an idiot then, Vera,” he mourns, “not a liar. I believed every word of that speech. Under Communism from time to time many leaders announced that the old rules were softening to let freedom in. Even Chairman Mao announced that a thousand flowers would be allowed to contend. Fools who acted on these announcements soon learned their mistake. I was a simpleton who believed what Khrushchev said about a thaw ...”
“It was Brezhnev.”
“So it was. I was then the Commissar in charge of National Health, and at once ordered that every political dissenter who had been registered insane should be released from our lunatic asylums. I declared this over the radio as a reason for public rejoicing. An hour later I was strapped to an operating table with electric wires attached to parts of me that – that – that I will not embarrass an attractive young woman by mentioning.”
“You’ve already told me what parts.”
“I must be senile if I told you that, but yes, it happened. Two days later I announced that my previous speech had been the result of a mental breakdown, and that I was retiring from politics for the good of my health. That was certainly true. I remained under house arrest until the Soviet Union collapsed.”
“We all knew you had been coerced into taking back that announcement. And a man called Grolsh coerced you? And you handed power over to him when we elected you President?”
“Grolsh is not totally evil, Vera. He has more wives and children than he can support out of his private fortune, even with Mafia backing, so has not wholly dismantled our Welfare State. Single mothers still receive family benefits. Our health service is not wholly privatised. I am the doctor who mainly founded it in 1947. Surely some of it still functions, my little Decembrist?”
“Don’t change the subject!” cries Vera. “You were elected President in 1990 because you were the only politician who had tried to defend Democracy under the Communists. We still loved and trusted you then.”
“And rightly!” he cries, greatly excited. “I declared over the radio that Fredonia would become Europe’s first democratic Socialist nation. Shops and small businesses and collective farms would be given to the folk working them. Big state businesses would become co-operatives owned and managed by their employees. Water, mineral resources, energy, newspapers, education and, above all, justice would be maintained for the people’s benefit by the people working them with the support of their elected parliament. No wonder people cheered and cheered and cheered that speech.”
“Fraud. Hypocrite. Whited sepulchre,” says Vera. “Why did you go back on all that?”
“I never did. That is why they keep re-electing me.”
“You must know the election results are faked,” she states with huge contempt.
Sighing he says, “They must be, with old Grolsh in charge.”
“But why is he in charge? Why has nothing you promised to do happened? Everything in Fredonia now belongs to global corporations and the international Mafia. More and more young people nowadays are drug addicts and vandals. Disease, crime, deaths in police custody are always increasing. The streets are full of beggars and most of us are poorer than we were under the Communists.”
“True!” says Rudi nostalgically. “Under that regime there was widespread social equality for everyone who was not a Party member. It was equality of scarcity of course. Shoppers stood in queues for hours. Most folk had only four or five really satisfying meals per week. But we had no beggars and nobody starved because nobody was penniless. There was full employment because everyone without a productive job was paid by the state to spy on their neighbours.”
“Are you defending the regime that scorched your balls off?”
“No,” says Rudi, sighing.
“Then why h
as Fredonia got worse since you became our President?”
Rudi shakes his head in bewilderment and says, “I don’t know. I signed documents making it legal for plumbers to own their own shops and farmers to own their own fields, and in swarmed middle men – brokers – there is an unpronounceable French name for such people ...”
“Entrepreneurs,” Vera tells him.
“These entry-pruners swarmed in and asset-stripped the whole nation. I kept announcing that this should not be happening, but that did not stop them and nobody else I knew tried to. A President’s speeches cannot change history when his lawyers, judges, civil servants with everyone else in his government and official opposition are being bribed by global companies while being openly paid out of the public purse. So I became what I am – a hollow figurehead, more useless than a scarecrow. Scarecrows at least keep predatory birds away from grain that is needed for bread. I am a sham, Vera. You are right to despise me, but ...”
He is interrupted by music.
The opening chords of the Fredonian national anthem sound near, but muffled. Rudi says, “Excuse me a moment,” takes a phone from beneath his pillow, presses a button on it, says, “Yes?” and presses another button which makes the caller’s voice loud enough for Vera to hear. It says, “Rudi. Grolsh speaking.”
“Why?” asks Rudi.
“I want a word with you.”
“Say it.”
“I must say it to your face. Now. At once.”
“Why?”
“Rudi, there is a national emergency. Very serious. Very urgent.”
“Oho! Where exactly are you, Grolsh?”
“Outside your bedroom door.”
Vera, springing up, seizes her gun and again points it straight at the door. Rudi, amused, says, “At four in the morning? What a busy bee you are. But of course, that is the usual hour for security forces to grab a government’s political enemies. I hear that the British police now arrest asylum seekers at this hour.”
Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012 Page 73