First Person

by Richard Flanagan

  As well he wouldn’t.

  I was still trying to make them up in Hobart.

  Each time I read or heard something more about Heidl, I felt annoyed with Gene Paley for ensuring the media would not talk to me. For didn’t I alone know the truth? Shouldn’t I be the one to share it with the nation? And then vanity was abruptly overtaken by panic. The police, the police! It could only be a matter of time before they came for me—and what would I say? A brick caught in my throat. I ran a thousand different stories through my mind, and realised I had to stick to the simplest—the one I’d told Suzy, the latter part of which was true: that I’d spent my final day in Melbourne at Sully’s place working on the book, dropped the Skyline back at the publisher’s car park in the evening, taxied to the airport and flown home.

  You’ll have to call Gene Paley back and say something, Suzy said when I explained the situation to her, or at least some of it—the unsigned release, the unfinished manuscript, the unsolved death, almost certainly suicide, which she fully understood did not move me—as we had breakfast coffee, she relishing it for the first time since she was pregnant.

  The good thing about Suzy was that I didn’t need to lie to her except when I had to lie. I had meant to tell her. But time passed, time dammed, time eddied and formed deltas that blocked, time kept moving on as the truth, once urgent, receded and soon somehow seemed as unnecessary as it was pointless, lost far upriver. I wanted to tell her everything. But the longer I went not telling her, the more impossible that seemed. And, in any case, what was everything? What had happened? It was unclear. It was just…unclear.

  Out of habit rather than with purpose or hope I had gone upstairs to my narrow closet–study that seemed to grow smaller and more claustrophobic with each passing day. As far as Gene Paley and the world was concerned there was a book. As I climbed over my desk and eased down into my chair to start the work I had to finish as soon as possible, I realised the few days I had left to complete the final draft weren’t nearly enough to say all the things I wished to say. And yet what those things were that so needed saying became vaporous. When I tried to think of even one I couldn’t.

  I reached into my backpack. When I had fled the day before, I had grabbed all my papers from Heidl’s house to make sure nothing incriminating was left there. I took out the manuscript along with the book about dirty money he had given me. On top of the manuscript was the unsigned clearance form.

  Why had I been so stupid to deceive Gene Paley about Heidl having signed the clearance form? It made no sense. However much it might have pleased Gene Paley, it now doomed me. It had been a lie, and, worse, a stupid lie, an unnecessary lie. I had now also lied to Suzy, an even worse lie, a lie of omission. But around my lie to Gene Paley others would need to be quickly invented and, henceforth, lived, encrusting like salt crystals. For a short time it frightened me to the point of feeling physically sick.

  Yet I also felt an opposite emotion—almost a joy in doing something that felt both dangerous and liberating. And sitting there jammed between ever tighter, closer walls, this combination seemed to me strangely thrilling, offering the possibility of unknown freedoms—of a life differently lived, which, I suppose, must have been the appeal of such a life of lies to Heidl.

  Still, the manuscript in its oppressive pile looked too depressing to start work on. To divert myself I opened Heidl’s parting gift, the book on dirty money. On the right-hand top of the title page, handwritten in a slightly childish, clumpy-dumpy cursive, was his name. I leafed through the book but there was nothing of any interest or bearing in it. I returned to my manuscript.

  A few minutes later I reopened the book at its title page. There before me were the same two handwritten words. Except now they seemed illuminated by God. I picked up a pen. Beneath the slackjawed gaze of Caravaggio’s Goliath, copying the roly-poly script as best I could, I wrote—

  Siegfried Heidl

  My first attempt was a botched copy.

  Siegfried Heidl

  My second was better. I could almost feel something entering me. I thought of that voice, the pleasure of writing a name not your own—

  Siegfried Heidl

  —as your own. I pulled some matted cat hair off my coat sleeve, threw it away, and held the paper up to the light. It was beginning to look passable.

  Siegfried Heidl

  Siegfried Heidl

  Siegfried Heidl

  I took the clearance form, set it down carefully on the desk, dated it two days earlier, and where it read Signature, I signed myself—

  Siegfried Heidl

  3

  I bundled up the manuscript, stowed it in my backpack, and walked down to Salamanca. The world felt quiet and glorious. I walked those streets marvelling at the beauty of gutters and trash. The people I passed seemed particularly kind to each other and there was about the day a wholly unexpected serenity and joy.

  I went into Knopwood’s tavern, empty as it mostly was at eleven in the morning, and ordered a beer. I drank it down, gratefully, feeling something leave me as something else found me. I ordered a second beer, sat at a table in the corner next to the sticky chess table, got out the manuscript, and put it to one side of the table in a neat stack.

  I opened a notebook in front of me. I re-ran my calculations. I had 30,000 useable words, and needed another 45,000 to have the minimum for a book. Allowing two days for final revisions, that left nine days, which, divided into 45,000, meant I had to write 5,000 words a day. And understanding what my job was and who I had become, I began.

  I skim-read what I had, making notes as I went. When it wasn’t just obviously contrived, or simply obvious, everything I had hitherto written seemed dull beyond reckoning. Once more, I began to despair. And with Heidl gone, I could see no way forward to finish it. All I could see were the questions I needed answered—from the matters of small detail to large story I needed Heidl to tell me what had happened. But he would never tell anyone anything now. I had none of the real information I needed, nor was there time to interview his wife or close friends who, in any case, probably only knew different lies.

  On top of these difficulties, what little I had didn’t neatly fit any of the conventional tropes that the memoirs I knew of dealt with. Heidl couldn’t be made over in the image of the Corporate Leader, the Con Man or the Redeemed Criminal. Nor was he the Guilty Good Man or the Wronged Prophet. He was none of these things yet at various times he seemed to be serially—or concurrently—each of them. My problem was my task: to create a single, plausible human being out of a man who on any given day could be Princess Di, Lee Iacocca, or Papillon. Or all three in one sentence.

  For Heidl wasn’t so much a self-made man as a man ceaselessly self-making. He had many births and many parents, and his origins were as mystical and protean as the gods of old. Each incarnation more mysterious than the last, Heidl begat Heidl who begat Heidl.

  Or was he—as I was to discover some years later in a TV documentary that may have been more or less accurate—always the same man but with different names and stories? The program was a story of perennial metamorphoses. It began with the Bavarian fraudster Heinrich Froderlin who, as a transport clerk in late 1960s Munich, defrauded the Bavarian department of main roads of several million deutschmarks, and vanished, only, it would seem, to beget the Viennese huckster Friedrich Tomek who, in turn, begat Tilman Frodek, who begat Karl Friedlson, who begat Siegfried Heidl. It was like Alien, only worse, and who knew out of whose chest—yours? mine?—the next incarnation of the monstrous parasite might burst and what and who it might look like?

  That Siegfried Heidl—who, at the point he became Siegfried Heidl to take up an appointment as a safety officer with the Australian Safety Organisation, a superannuated charity that had been staggering on since the 1930s urging the use of hairnets for lathe operators in a series of posters and (briefly) training films—that whoever he was might once more colonise one last identity and morph into someone else was at that time still inconceivable to me.


  The ASO’s total staff at the time of the arrival of Siegfried Heidl numbered five. Heidl’s job—in that era before the rise of obsessive work and safety rules—was to travel to factories and workshops where he would give short talks advising the safest ways of using stepladders, lifting heavy weights, and operating lathes. Prior to this documented existence of Heidl there was for Heidl no Heidl history, only his Heidl stories as he, Heidl, chose to tell them, reinterpret and reinvent them, week in and month out.

  Perhaps that’s how it is if you live in a state of constant transformation, but his utter lack of interest in even the few incontestable facts of his past was trying for me as his biographer. Life is permitted chaos, but books have to fake the idea life is order.

  There were some strands that seemed true—or, at least, not demonstrably false. For example, his claim that the year prior to joining the ASO he had worked as a book keeper on an Aboriginal reservation in the Kimberley seemed to be attested to by a photograph from the Northern Territory News (though the caption that might have revealed his name had been torn off) and some blurry Instamatic photos of him standing on red dirt roads bounded by low-riding saltbush, alongside solitary boabs, or amidst lush tropical rainforest leaning on his red and white 55 series LandCruiser.

  In any case, every story partly denied and partly complemented the last, only to be obliterated by a new story. All that remained was the dance of telling, the game of seeing how long he might get away with it. And in this, he recognised the gifts of others for self-deception and wishful thinking were infinitely greater than his own for lying.

  I am not even sure if he was that much of a liar. For his story was never his story, but manias he invited you to share—the ASO, Spaceportal, Nugan Hand. Heidl, the great story maker, like God, was everywhere present in his creations but nowhere visible. The desire for belief was what he had so assiduously cultivated in others. It was this that led to his theft of seven hundred million from the banks—or, viewed another way, their gift to him. And perhaps, I sometimes thought in my darker moments, worse crimes. He certainly alluded to murder, but I found it hard to believe.

  Still, he could surprise. About much he seemed ignorant, but occasionally he would give odd evidence that he wasn’t. When once he pressed me for details about Suzy and the impending birth of the twins, I had told him that was personal.

  I remember Heidl replying that the Latin root for person is persona, meaning mask.

  Is that what a person is, Kif? he asked. A mask?

  His own mask—when he could be bothered to invent it for me—was dreary beyond belief, a cloying tale of an average man who loved his family and worked hard helping others, a decent man who in the course of his labours built an empire on the back of selflessness, industry, and the common-sense insights of an ordinary man in a world of large-scale folly. For one who had created such spectacular lies for others, his own invention of himself as so dull a man was one of his most audacious achievements.

  4

  I bought a beer, necked the froth, wiped my lips, and, having no other idea what to do, began work. I took the first page, put it down in front of me, and in the margins started to rewrite the book. I worked as I had learnt as a brickies’ labourer, without pleasure or misery, without hope or despair, devoid of ambition. Though I had nothing to say, I had read enough Australian literature to know this wasn’t necessarily an impediment to authorship. As word was mortared up alongside word, as courses and walls and corners came into being, something unknown to me slowly began to arise, something formed that was not just a pile of meaningless sentences. Here some new words had to be cut and fitted; there, other words removed or reworked; yet others, more and more others, had to be invented and, in their invention, demand and summon into being even more words. In this way—in the odd dedication to industry—came the slow surfacing inspiration, strange and sweet, of simple labour.

  When I went up to the bar for another drink, the barman asked what I was up to. I told him.

  A writer, eh? the barman said. Never met a writer. I love Jez Dempster though. There’s a book I can read. That’s a book anyone can read.

  I worked as if in a rising fever at the pub table, stopping only for a counter lunch and an occasional beer, leaving only when the pub began filling with tradies late in the afternoon. I went home, cooked tea for Suzy, but she was feeling nauseated and couldn’t eat. I changed the twins, cleaned and washed one set of nappies, hung out some others, and read Bo her favourite bedtime story of the wolf and the woodcutter.

  That night I inserted some bright orange ear plugs I’d bought at the chemist to block out the junkies’ quarrels and took some of Ray’s speed. Withdrawn and wired, I stayed up late reworking the handwritten passages that now covered the printed manuscript into a new file on the Mac Plus, growing more excited as I began to see connections and patterns that had hitherto eluded me.

  The contract I felt I had with the truth and with the way Heidl wanted his story told was, it seemed to me, over. It had always been absurd anyway. The truth of him was unknowable. I resolved to act in the spirit of Heidl by simply making it up each day, as best I could.

  For the first time, I found myself free to write, and though the words came awkwardly, they came, and, after a time, they came more easily as I found within me a man without morals, who could pretend to any feeling that was necessary in order to gull others. Like Heidl, I tried on emotions, wore them for so long as they were useful, then changed into something fresh. And I was struck with the force of divine revelation by the simple understanding that to write about Heidl I had no need of Heidl. And finally freed of him, I felt I could at last tell his story honestly though every word was now invention. When I could work no more, I word-counted the chapter. I had written 6,452 new words.

  I finally understood what Gene Paley had meant when he had said to see the lack of Heidl’s life story as an advantage. His death was a liberation, allowing me to make something singular and recognisable of a man who was neither.

  5

  In the days that followed in a blur of coffee, heartburn, and a strange flow of words I knew was finite but which for a short time seemed unlimited, I simply let one word join the next. It wasn’t in the large aspiration but the small detail that I found the book danced; not in the overwhelming ambition but in the simple determination to have the sentences good and strong that a story sang.

  And with each passing day I found myself with more of the book written. I didn’t think it great or even good. And I didn’t care—I couldn’t care. If I had lost ambition, that didn’t worry me. It was a book, something far greater than I had ever achieved. What worried me was only this: that things worked, or, if they did not, how I might fix them so that they did. That was all. That was, I discovered, everything.

  I don’t wish to make too much of this. It was not life as Borges or Kafka. It wasn’t Joyce poking at offal at the Polidor or Tebbe tebbeing or doing whatever Tebbe did when life rose beyond alliterative aphorism. It was life as life; the full catastrophe. As well as writing at an impossible pace I was rebuilding broken cots, scouring second-hand shops for twin strollers and bassinets, answering ads for baby capsules, and trying to ease Suzy’s situation by taking over the cooking and cleaning.

  I slept when and where I could—a few hours of a night with Suzy before the twins, who tag-teamed with their crying, took over the bed; on an air mattress next to the bed after eviction; head on my desk or lying beneath it of a day when I was too exhausted to write another word. Suzy tried to care for the kids while I worked but in practice it wasn’t possible, and with a rising panic, sensing every minute lost to writing with terror and resentment, I helped. People asked in wonder how we did it. The answer was badly, but there was no other way, and do it we did.

  I could take no pleasure in what should have been the supreme pleasure. I found myself irritated by Suzy’s talking about the baby boys and even more ashamed for being irritated. Her face was drawn, she wasn’t sleeping, and sh
e had lost weight feeding both boys. She was exhausted beyond measure, but other things filled my mind, obsessed me if you like, visions of ants crawling, birds circling, the smell of damp earth and bark. Much as I wanted them gone, these things excluded all others. And the more pleasant Suzy was with me, the more she tried to humour me, or to ask where I was with the book, the more she took on the burdens of the home and the babies to help me with my writing, the more sullen and spiteful I became, because I could not tell her what it was I was thinking. There was not, in any case, even words for it.

  We fought—under such circumstances how could we not? And then we just had to go on, washing, cleaning, feeding, and in my case writing all day and long into the night and, when I could, into the early morning, cranked hard on speed and desperation and overriding it all our dire need for money, until it was hard to know exactly what it was that drove me on.

  Ray rang late one night from a public phone in Port Douglas to say he’d got work on a prawn trawler and I might not hear from him for a while. The line was bad and sounded the thousands of kilometres away that it was. He told me the cops had interviewed him twice, that he had said nothing about the Glock, or Heidl’s desire to be killed. The cops had seemed happy with his story, so hopefully that was that.

  And in between all this I waited for a phone call that never came. I was a little shocked by what I took to be the laxness of the police. My anxiety was terrible. At times it took an almost superhuman act of will to overcome my terror and type another word. But I was never called, never questioned, the matter of my being there at Heidl’s home that day of his death never raised, because—as I had to constantly reassure myself—no one knew I was there.

  Still, not an hour would pass without my worrying that the police would call. And to forestall what seemed inevitable, to get ahead of the game, I found myself several times picking up the phone to dial the police to tell them…something. To say I was there but…what? To say that I wasn’t there but…why? And I would put the phone down. I must have done that a dozen times. Picked it up and put it down. Thinking I had some truth to share. But what was the truth anyway? And other things would return to me and I would return to them, relieved. There was almost a joy in the escape.