A party of thirty or so was dispatched in pursuit down the valley path. The senior rebel leaders—several were nobles familiar to Darasa—stood in the palace doorway and addressed the crowd. Having flushed the king from his palace, they thrust forth one of their number, an aristocrat not of Rajasingha’s bloodline, but of one dispossessed of any royal standing centuries earlier. He emerged from behind them and stood before the throng, looking on timidly.
In the village that day, the rebels celebrated, chanting in the streets. Word was sent out to the rest of the country that Rajasingha’s reign was finished, that a historical wrong had been righted. In the evening, many of them were put up by residents. Others squatted in the courtyard.
The next morning, the new king did not come out from the royal quarters of the palace. Eventually the guards opened the doors. The room was empty. He was searched for but never found. Perhaps he feared a counterattack from the former king. Or he may have simply had no interest in ruling. What was certain was that he was not the driving force behind the revolt, but a pawn of the rebel leaders, who were nobles without claim, however slight, to the throne.
News of his absence spread to the courtyard. In short order pledges to Rajasingha began to resound, first a few here and there, but soon everywhere, in a torrent, as rebels smoothly mutated into loyalists. Most of them took to proving their allegiance by murdering the rebels around them, declaring them traitors. By nightfall, the courtyard was tiled in bodies, as was much of the town. A smaller group remained, several dozen, all rabid loyalists by now, many nursing wounds from the melee.
News of the rebel collapse reached Rajasingha. But he did not return to the palace in Nillemby, preferring the securer location, Digligy, he found himself in now. In his stead he sent his men. The crowd, smaller still, as the wisest had fled, greeted the men warmly, cheering the king’s reign. Every one of them was dispatched, as was any local suspected of conspiracy. Nillemby was made a ghost town, except for the temple, which, as usual, was left alone.
The comet passed; order returned.
■■■
These events weren’t likely to find a home in the Chronicle, not like this. Darasa anyway had the feeling that much of the Chronicle existed subterraneously. This must partly have been a practical matter. A more detailed history, one that included all the smaller events occurring during a king’s reign, would have run to many thousands of pages; and the monks, especially the less scholarly of them, could not be relied on to know it thoroughly. Since common knowledge is what bound them as an order, a universal frame of reference was vital. The two Chronicles covered two thousand years. Keeping them to a manageable size meant excluding much, or rather, he thought, leaving much of their substance to be inferred.
Some of the exclusions had more interesting reasons behind them. The canonical mode of the Chronicles was tributary, an exaltation of kings and the kingdom they’d shepherded through the ages. To inscribe in it a failed rebellion in support of a noble with only the most tenuous claim to the throne would be to disrupt the sense of inevitability. It might suggest the fragility of both a king’s rule and the people he led.
In the island’s history there were four successful rebellions against reigning kings, where a leap of succession had to be written into the text, there being no other choice. But they were remarkable, Darasa thought, for always being understood as restorations of some earlier ruling bloodline, from which the new, heretofore unrecognized king invariably descended. The succession was merely a correction, a redress. So the arc of destiny, of narrative, remained undisturbed and the paean proceeded without interruption.
Had the recruited man been the brother of Rajasingha, even this failed rebellion might have qualified for treatment in the record, sibling rivalries for the throne being common and accepted, as they offered no real challenge to fate. In fact it was rumored that one of his brothers was in hiding in India or the North Country. He too might have walked away from the burdens of kingship. No one could say.
Might any of the four successful revolts have been driven by the people and not by the king-to-be and his claims to the throne? In two of the four cases, once in 400, and again in 1543, the Chroniclers describe not the motive force of the revolt, but only the justice of the outcome, in terms of the rules of legitimate succession. If these were in fact populist disruptions, it took no fabrication on the part of the Chroniclers, only omission, to mask that.
Reading the Chronicle, Darasa couldn’t help but feel, by the way certain events were skeletally described (as here) and others were repetitiously overattended (a king too lavishly praised); or by how a train of events suddenly yet artfully veered contrary to the momentum it seemed initially to carry; or by how in certain periods the priesthood’s doings are dwelled on, with little attention to the broader kingdom, that the monks had succeeded in suggesting a deeply variegated historical unfolding, an unthinkably complex narrative. Sometimes it seemed as if a passage, simply in its cadences, contained reverberations of something that rubbed against the surface gloss, though—and this was remarkable—without tarnishing it. These reverberations complicated each other as well, while others synchronized in surprising ways, deep beneath the text. Sometimes it felt to him as if five or six versions of two thousand years on the island were intertwined, with only one accented at any point. The pattern of emphasis, the cycling between dominant motifs, it could occur at intervals as short as a paragraph, sometimes even just a sentence, and as long as several chapters.
He wondered how he might freight his portrait of Rajasingha’s reign with the pressures exerted on it by this stillborn rebellion. What would be his glowworm spark? Whatever thread it linked with—perhaps with more than one, or perhaps the various narratives could be taken as a single motley unit, a dissonant chord—it would have to be expressed through a pattern of muteness. But the means escaped him.
24
“I like this,” kames said, holding stagg’s essay in his hand. He was standing on his balcony at the Wintry Institute in a cardigan and corduroys, a cigarette, a boutique brand, it looked like, burning down between his fingers. The sun silvered his gray hair as a light wind mussed it. “I like this but I wonder if it serves.”
Stagg held the wrought iron rail with both hands, the weight of his frame on them. Three stories down, eucalyptus and oak trees running along the eastern edge of the lawn brought shade to the pond, turning its water black.
Kames had taken no more than three drags of the cigarette. He might have taken just one. Mostly it sat between his fingers as he talked.
“You’d like to deliver this piece first,” he said. “It’s not that it isn’t interesting. But it’s almost a meditation—never mind the pun—on historiography. That will be good to get into, but it seems a complicated place to start. Better, I think, to give us some history to work with, before we confront how it becomes history.”
The wind sheared an inch of ash off the cigarette. “The other thing is that there is nothing much here of the struggle between the Europeans, your ancestors in particular, and the Sinhalese. Isn’t that the crux of the project?”
He let the butt fall from the ledge and re-entered the office. The door was made of thick glass but it took Stagg the merest swipe of the fingertips along its edge to close it behind him.
“Oh, let me just show you what the fellows’ offices are like. I said I would do that. And thank you again for coming so early. I’ve got to be elsewhere by ten, my wife needs me.”
They wound their way down the central staircase, marble, a soft white. The steps were deep and unusually broad, as if meant for the traffic of a major university library.
“I haven’t exactly used the monk’s methods,” Stagg said. The stairwell was also rock, a speckled gray granite, and his words boomed. He lowered his voice. “But the problems with history, his ones, my ones, aren’t totally unrelated. It’s not a correspondence—that’s too strong—but an affinity. Interpretation, evidence, expression, we’re both figuring out how to
do history. It would be one way of setting up the other lectures, since historiography itself is at issue. But there are other ways, yes.”
“Right, well,” Kames said as he reached the base of the stairs and led them out through a corridor of offices. They were each trimmed in dark wood on three sides and sheathed by a glass door, tinged blue, on the fourth. Only the last office on the right was in use. The man within, sleeves rolled loosely just below the elbows, clicked lazily at a mouse. Principia Ethica was open, facedown on the black desk, colored stickies poking out on the sides and bottom. “That’s Max. A philosopher too. But we are going to leave him alone this very early morning.”
The corridor merged with a wider walkway flanked by two larger offices with cherry doors ajar, both looking out onto courtyards through far walls of glass. Kames tapped the doorframe of one. “This just came open,” he said. “Better, I think.” Stagg peered in for his sake. Besides stacks of boxes not much could be seen, though there were the vaulted ceilings, and the walls were covered in a creamy paper that looked like cloth. “He’s returning to academe, Chicago. Nothing as nice as this. I think we may have spoiled him.”
They passed through to the atrium, which functioned as the central reading room. The ceiling, thirty feet up, was a single slab of glass, as were the walls to the left and right. Beyond one was the pond, still shaded. The water had more blue in it from here, and the surface, stirred by the wind, had more texture. The clouds shifted, redistributing the sunlight, and from the fringes of the pond a red cloud of rose finches ascended to the branches of the trees.
Beyond the other glass wall was a manicured lawn. Violets circled the bases of oaks. White rocks circled Japanese beeches. Fifty yards into the grass stood a high stone wall with a semicircular entrance cut into it, and farther back, at what Stagg assumed was the edge of the property, he could see, just above the wall, the tops of trees arranged like the pickets of a fence.
The two of them sat at a large circular table in the middle of the atrium, empty of all but rows and rows of books on all sides.
“Did you need coffee?” Kames asked.
“No.”
“Good. Well, the lecture. The approach to historiography.”
“I think there is an affinity,” Stagg said, “but that isn’t the only reason to start with it. It does get into the domestic politics. Whatever tensions were present there, they weren’t simply imported. There’s an internal tension that gets complicated by external forces. My thought had been to begin with that. The distribution of power between the priesthood—a lot of their authority came from being the minders of history—and the king and his court. Then there’s the warrior class, which overlaps with the court but isn’t always allied with it, sometimes siding with the priesthood. Some of the rebellions seem to be spearheaded by it.
“I get into the present-tense of that internal struggle, which happens in the midst of external pressures. But I leave those offstage until later. The complications. The Europeans. The interplay.”
Kames gave no response. He was waiting.
“There’s also the other lecture I showed you, just before, which starts with Rutland’s encounter with the monk. I just think… it’s not as if our own problems, today, are mostly like this, with insides and outsides. There’s no outside anymore. September 11, yes, then, maybe. And that jump-started something. Opened a door, as you put it.
“But now, no one now thinks these things in the news, the hall, the convention center, really have, or have to have, anything foreign about them. Maybe it’s more economic than cultural now.”
“Intra- rather than trans-. Right,” Kames said. “Wherever there are conditions for friendship, really. And its other half, enmity. I think Schmitt was right about that much. But we can’t assume economics is always the basis. We never could.”
“Yeah. But money does make friends. Enemies too. Think about the museum—”
“Well that’s certainly the way it’s being set up in the press. It misses the mark, and pretty badly.” He turned sharply to Stagg and stood. “You might be interested in something I’ve just written on this. I have it in the office.”
“I am. And I read it yesterday.”
Kames stayed on his feet. “So?”
Finches continued to ascend from the pond, not in groups now but singly.
“Shall we walk?” Kames said. “It is cold. The garden you haven’t seen. It will bring back England. Cambridge. I remember Caius had something very like this, for the fellows. Here, though, we are all and only fellows. And you can walk on the grass if you want. Do you miss England?”
Stagg only smiled. He followed Kames past the shelves of books, through the automatic doors and onto the pink pebble path cleaving the lawn. He wrapped his hands in the wool of his pockets as a high gust lashed his eyes.
“So you disagree with my little editorial,” Kames said.
“Only about excluding the economics, in that case.” Fog trailed from Stagg’s mouth as he spoke. “But you don’t really do that.”
“No, that’s right. But I make room for the possibility, even the probability, that it’s not strictly relevant in this instance.”
“That Celano is idle.”
Kames paused on the path and Stagg did too. “That’s more possible than it seems,” Kames said. “I do think that, yes. Why shouldn’t he be? He’s very clever, I understand.”
“But he would have a reason to retaliate.”
“Well you haven’t read very carefully it looks like. He and I and you have so many reasons.”
“But after the pool hall—”
“It’s their force that matters, when we talk about reasons, Carl. Their felt force really, how they appear to the parties involved at the moment of decision, under whatever circumstances prevail. It’s got nothing to do with how rationally compelling they are in fact, how persuasive they ought to be found by them, given their interests. As if we even know, reliably know, what our own interests are. And that’s putting aside how willing we are to reveal them to others. Do you see what I mean?”
They started to walk again.
“This is all very hard to calculate,” Kames said. “So, in the face of this, we simplify. We abstract. We assume likenesses between parties, and in doing that steal all the nuance, the eccentricity, from them. From whatever’s actually driven them to act, I mean, which is often many-faced and not infrequently touched by some element of delusion or self-deception. Even then, though, knowing how un-illuminating it is, we’ll insist on the formulas: ‘Certain sorts of actors are likely to find reasons of such-and-such a kind persuasive.’”
“That the sorts of people Celano backs are just the sorts you’d want disenfranchised, you mean?”
“That’s one assumption we can count on people to make, yes. But it tidies us up, perfects us in a certain way. Celano too. I mean it falsifies us. Grounds, even very good grounds, for hatred don’t guarantee hatred. That you’ve every right to draw a distinction doesn’t mean you will. Political economy can make us mean if we’re not careful, whether it’s Smith or Marx or any of their descendants. We may be prejudiced. We certainly are, actually, and that’s not always a bad thing. But we needn’t be simple too. We’re more interesting than that. I think Celano may be as well, and not just him. All ingeniously discriminating, in enmity, in friendship.”
He stepped through the semicircle and into the open-air chamber, thirty yards square: a private garden, composed only of vines with blue flowers climbing along the trellises on the high stone walls. In the center, a ring of burnished wooden chairs faced out. Tightly clipped grass and a wide, heavily built well sat within the ring.
“Simple, right? The well produces very good water, though it isn’t used much. It was here before the Institute was built, sealed over. So I thought we’d build the garden around it. The superstructure is a bit well-like, isn’t it. That was Zirilella’s idea, the architect. You get this changing configuration of light because of the gaps, like windows, cut into the
east and west walls.”
Brilliant blue patches capped thick pipes of light coming in through the gaps. They sat down in the ring of chairs, facing off in different directions, as the configuration didn’t allow sight-lines to cross. The chairs were immovable and so wide that their arms didn’t reach the rests. Only a race twice the size could have comfortably occupied them.
“But yes,” Kames continued, “it’s not necessarily untrue that Celano’s constituency ought to be discounted, given what they are now. But why should they remain as they are? Why should they want to? Wisdom is mostly acquirable. And if they transform themselves, well… You know, many of those rich old men at the fundraiser, giving their own money, they would be discounted too. Their problem is worse, in some ways. Commerce has deformed some of them, probably permanently. Character is flexible only up to a point. And some of those men are old dogs now. So, yes, they too have misconceptions about who they are. Who will disenchant them I don’t know.” Kames shook his head. “And all these simple lines. Between Celano and I. And Jenko. Must he also stand on the other side?”
“But they’re being drawn all the same,” Stagg said.
“Yes.”
“And that will bring attention.”
“It has.”
“And you’re prepared for that? A wrong impression made on the right people—”
“You know, I’ve always found it funny, the way you can draw all the wrong lines and still the picture you end up with is right in a way,” Kames said. “And not just as a matter of chance. It’s managed to catch something along the way. But it’s a kind of rightness that can leave you casting about when it comes time to figure out what to do.” He rubbed the blood back into his fingers. “No one is wrong to think there is passionate intensity around. Even among the best now. Yeats would be surprised.”
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