Collected Stories

by Peter Carey

  The minister snapped forward in his chair and leant across the table. “I will speak to him,” he said with the air of a man who has made a reckless decision. “I will go to him this morning. The president is most anxious that the project be finished quickly. He feels that in the absence of rain,” and here he allowed the merest trace of treasonable sarcasm to enter his voice, “the people are in need of a boost in morale. He is relying on the Kristu-Du. He will be most eager to end the dispute.”

  “Which means?”

  “It means,” the minister winked slyly, “that I will speak on your behalf and that finally you need not worry. Your building will go ahead without serious delay. You have my word for it. You will not be unhappy with the result.” And the wink came again. Gerrard, who wondered if he had seen the first wink, had no doubts about the second.

  “And the men?” he asked.

  “The men,” said the minister, “will not leave, I promise you.”

  Gerrard stood, unsure of what he had done. He looked at the minister’s face and wondered if it was capable of winking. “You will be in touch?” he said.

  “Most definitely. And perhaps, when this little crisis is over, you might like to join my family for a luncheon. Next Sunday perhaps — the eleventh.”

  “Thank you. That would be delightful.”

  The minister held out his small hand. It clung to Gerrard’s hand, spreading a damp film of secret fear around it.

  6.

  When the Land Rover entered the site on the following morning he understood immediately the agreement he had made with the minister. As he turned off the engine he finally admitted that he had known all along. He had understood exactly and precisely what would happen but he had not allowed himself to look at it. The minister’s wink had produced a tightening in his stomach. The sweat he had felt in the handshake had been as much his as the minister’s. Their fears had met and smudged together between their two hands.

  As he walked between the big khaki trucks of Oongala’s army he felt shame and triumph, elation and despair. They mixed themselves together in the terrible porridge his emotions had become.

  All around him the work continued, watched by the keen arrogant eyes of Oongala’s elite force: the notorious 101s.

  The English doctor had seen the Land Rover approach and now he watched angrily as the tall man in the grey safari suit walked towards him. His walk did not belong here, amongst these harsh rocks and calloused hands. It was a city walk, the walk of a man who strolls boulevards and sips vermouth in side-walk cafés. The doctor detested the walk. “Like an evil little spider,” he thought, “who will soon proclaim his innocence.”

  Now the tall man stopped. Now he ran. He sprinted towards the doctor, jumping across a pile of piping. The doctor grimaced and transferred his attention to the young Danish worker who lay on the ground before him. The injection had at last eased the pain. Soon he’d be able to shift him to town. He heard rather than saw Gerrard squat beside him. He said nothing and busied himself repacking the syringe with exaggerated care. He picked up the two ampoules from the dusty ground, tossed them in his hand, and with a sudden expression of rage threw them against the wall of the building.

  “What’s up?”

  The architect smelt of expensive shampoo. The doctor couldn’t bear to look at him. He took the young man’s pulse and was surprised to find his own hand shaking. “I would have thought it was obvious.”

  “What may be obvious to you is not obvious to me. Kindly tell me what has happened.” There was a tremor in the architect’s voice, and the doctor, looking up, was astonished to see despair in the other’s eyes. “Kindly tell me what has happened.”

  “He was shot by your friends here. He told them he was a free man and didn’t have to work. He made quite a speech. It is a shame you missed it,” he smiled nastily, “all about freedom and democracy.”

  Gerrard looked down at the young man on the ground. He was no more than twenty. Someone had placed a shirt under his naked back. His left calf was heavily bandaged, but his clear blue eyes showed no trace of pain. It was a romantic face, Gerrard reflected, with its sparse blond beard, its tousled hair and those luminous eyes. As Gerrard watched he saw, on the young man’s face, the beginning of a smile. He knelt, bending hungrily towards the smile, hoping to kill his own pain with it. He saw the lips move. He bent further, reaching towards words. So he was only six inches from the young face when the lips parted and a hot stream of spittle issued from them with hateful speed, hitting Gerrard on the left cheek. He stood, as if stung, and turned on his heel towards the office. Then, changing his mind, he returned to his Land Rover.

  As he left the site in a cloud of dust the Kristu-Du continued its inexorable progress as inch by inch, pound by pound it moved towards its majestic finale.

  7.

  For two days Gerrard Haflinger remained in his house without going out. Each hour he stayed away from the site made it harder for him to return to it. The thought of a return was hateful to him. The thought of not returning was impossible to contemplate.

  Dirty clothes lay on the living room floor beside the sleeves of twenty recordings, not one of which had given any solace. The empty bottle of sleeping pills lay in the kitchen, its white plastic cap on the dining table.

  It was night and the black windows reflected his unshaven face as he stared out into the empty street.

  He sat down at the desk in the living room and began to type a letter, but he stopped every few characters, cocking his head and listening. He had become nervous, fearful of intruders, although he could not have explained who these intruders might be or why they would wish to enter his house.

  He loosened the tension of the typewriter roller so that the paper could be removed silently from it, flattened the sheet, and began to write by hand.

  As he wrote the letter to his son the only noises he heard were the loud scratching of the pen and the regular click of a digital clock.

  The difficulty with both of us is that we were raised to believe that we were somehow special. In my case this has resulted in my coming to this: to build a grand building for a murderer because it is the only path left to me to realize my sense of “specialness” (an ugly inelegant word but it is late at night and I can think of no other). You, for your part, could find nothing in the world that corresponded with your sense of who you were, or rather who we had taught you you were. I now understand as I never did before how very painful and disappointing this must have been for you.

  Yet tonight, sitting in an empty room and thinking about you in America and your mother in Paris, I envy you the good luck or misfortune in avoiding the trap we laid so lovingly for you.

  For now I recognize this sense of specialness as the curse and conceit that it is and I would rather be without it.

  Yesterday I was responsible for a man being wounded. The same man spat in my face when I bent to speak to him. And it is this thing, a small thing when compared with the great charges that have been laid against me, that has brought me to toy (flirt is a better word) with the idea of abandoning the project totally. My mind is not made up either way, but I have come to the position of recognizing the possibility. The final straw for your mother was the sight of a dog being machine-gunned by a drunk soldier. I thought that ridiculous, a piece of dishonest sentimentality. But now I understand that too. It is not the wounding of the man that brings me to my present state, but the fact that he spat in my face.

  It is too late for me to be forgiven by my self-righteous colleagues (architects are surely the most hypocritical group on earth) but possibly not too late for me to forgive myself.

  When we last heard from you you were just starting the vegetable shop. Please write and tell me if the venture has proven successful.

  What is your life like?

  Love, Father

  When he had finished the letter he folded it hastily, placed it inside an envelope, and, having consulted a small notebook, addressed it. Then he sat with his head in
his hands while the digital clock clicked through four minutes. His thoughts were slippery, elusive, tangled strands of wet white spaghetti which he could neither grasp nor leave alone.

  He stood up then and went to the bathroom where he looked for pills in the little cabinet above the basin. There were none, but he found instead a small bottle of nail polish which he considered with interest.

  He shut the door.

  First he washed his arm with soapy water. Then he methodically worked up some shaving cream into a thick, creamy lather. Sitting on the small stool in front of the mirror, he brushed the lather into the dense black hair along his left arm. When he was done, he took a safety razor and, very carefully, shaved the arm until it was perfectly smooth.

  He washed his arm and examined it in the mirror: a slender tanned arm with long delicate fingers.

  Seeing hair on the knuckles he also lathered these and, being careful not to knick himself, shaved them.

  Now he picked up the nail polish and applied it carefully. It took him three attempts to get it right.

  When the nail polish had dried he undressed completely, folding his white trousers carefully and placing them on the carpeted floor in the passage outside.

  He shut the door again and sat on the basin and watched in the mirror as the red fingernailed hand of a beautiful woman crept across his stomach and took his penis, stroking it slowly.

  “I’ve missed you,” said the voice, a quiet, shy, tentative voice that seemed afraid of derision or rejection, and then, gathering confidence: “I love you, my darling.”

  In the street outside a man laughed.

  At the detention centre a young shopkeeper was being given the merest touch of an electric cattle prod.

  At the Merlin Hotel, Wallis, alias Mr Meat, the man who sold holograms, picked up his telephone and dialled Gerrard’s number.

  When the number finally rang Gerrard Haflinger grabbed a bathrobe and ran to answer it. He stood in the living room accepting a dinner invitation, semen dripping down his stomach like spittle.

  8.

  In a minute or two Mr Meat would change Gerrard’s mind entirely about the whole question of his involvement with the building. He would do it quite unintentionally. In a minute or two he would give Gerrard his scenario. In fact it was one of four such scenarios that he considered to be possible, but he would insist on the veracity of this one because it was the most likely, in his calculation, to frighten Gerrard, to undo a little of his arrogance and moral superiority.

  Mr Meat thought Gerrard was a pompous pain in the arse, but he was bored and lonely and wished to fill in one last night before he escaped this dung hole of a country and went back to more predictable and respectable work selling armaments.

  So he was not aware that the ascetic man who sat opposite him in the deserted dining room of the Merlin Hotel was more than a little unhinged with guilt and despair, that he was on the point of renouncing his life’s work, and entering the cold empty landscape he had always feared.

  But first they had to sit through this circus that was going on at the bar, all because Haflinger had ordered a Campari and the waiters didn’t know what in the hell a Campari was, even though it was sitting on the shelf in the bar, practically biting their silly snub noses.

  “You’re going to have to help them,” Wallis said, “or we’ll never get a bloody drink.”

  The architect turned in his seat to look at the embarrassed conference of white-coated waiters. “Oh,” he said, “they’ll work it out.”

  Wallis sighed. “You’re about to get a Drambuie.”

  Gerrard began to get up but sat down again as the Drambuie was returned to the shelf.

  “Oh Christ, I can’t stand it.” Mr Meat pushed his chair back and Gerrard watched him as he strode across to the bar, this big beefy-faced man with the arrogant aggressive walk of a military policeman. He saw the waiters’ mortified faces. He saw the big impatient hand haul the Campari from the shelf, snatch a glass, and pour an unmeasured quantity into it. He couldn’t bear to watch any more and looked instead at the bleak empty tables of the dining room, too depressed to be amused by the fake Doric columns.

  Wallis brought back Campari, soda and a beer for himself. “Now you know why I stick to beer,” he said, “they can’t fuck it up.” He raised his glass, holding it with peculiar daintiness with thumb and middle finger. “Here’s to the drought.”

  “You’ve made them embarrassed.”

  “So they should be. Christ, it’s their job to know a Campari from a Drambuie. They bloody should be embarrassed.”

  “Still …”

  Wallis leant his bulk into the table, the beakish nose thrusting from the great florid face, his big index finger poking in the direction of the Campari. “Listen, old son, you’re too sensitive. People in our line of work can’t afford to be so sensitive. Skol.” He drank again.

  “Our occupations are hardly similar.”

  “Oh come on, tell me what the difference is.” Wallis smiled. He was starting to enjoy himself.

  “I think there’s a difference.” Gerrard attempted a smile. It didn’t work out very well. “There is a difference between an important work of architecture and what you yourself describe as magic.” None of this exactly reflected Gerrard’s viewpoint but he had no intention of discussing anything so serious with Wallis.

  “It’s all magic here, old son, so don’t look so superior. As a matter of fact I’ll lay you a thousand U.S. dollars that it’ll be your magic that brings Oongala undone. There is a limit to magic when people are starving. The holograms might be a big hit here, but they’re not very popular in the villages. In fact I’d say they were very counterproductive. I would say that Oongala is not a popular man with the tribes at the moment. I’d give him three months at the most. When will your great work” — he pronounced “Great Work” slowly and sarcastically — “be completed?”

  “Four, five months.”

  “Then it’ll be four or five months before Oongala gets kicked out and things get very nasty for you. Look, I can tell you exactly what’ll happen. And listen to me, because this is something I bloody well know about. I am an expert, old boy, in knowing when to leave a country. You can’t survive in my business without knowing that.”

  Gerrard looked at the great red face with fascination. “Go on.”

  But they were interrupted by the approach of a waiter and Wallis fell suddenly silent. They ordered the Merlin’s safest and most predictable dishes: pea soup followed by vegetable omelette. Wallis, in spite of his avowed dedication to beer, ordered Veuve Clicquot.

  The food arrived too quickly and the champagne too slowly.

  As he alternated sips of pea soup with Veuve Clicquot, Wallis continued: “Let me give you the exact scenario, as a little present, eh? Oongala will not know how unpopular he is. There is not a man left who is brave enough to tell him. However, he will know that things are not exactly rosy. People are dying. They are upset because there is no water and by now they all know about the canal and they know Oongala stopped it to spend money on your building. They’re angry about that, but Oongala can’t know how angry otherwise he’d drop your building like a hot cake and get stuck into the canal. However, he does know he needs a very powerful piece of magic and your building is about the only trick he has left up his sleeve. But,” Wallis smiled, delighting in the drama of his scenario, “but to impress everyone with the dear old Kristu-Du he’ll have to bring them to see it, eh? He will bloody well be forced to have the famous gathering of the tribes.” He laughed a strange dry cackle. “How about that, eh, isn’t that neat?”

  “It was exactly what Daihusia asked me to design it for.”

  “Sure.” Wallis brushed that aside like the misunderstanding of a rather dull pupil. “But Daihusia was smart enough to have never built it.”

  Gerrard laughed indulgently. “You’re very cynical.”

  Wallis’s black eyebrows shot up and his small eyes narrowed and became dark and challenging. �
��You don’t believe me? You’re living in a dream world. It was a stunt. You, of all people, should have known that. It was a symbol. It was useful to Daihusia as an idea, but he was clever enough to know that the canal was more useful to him as a fact, and he couldn’t afford to have both. If he’d given them water he would have ruled until he was a hundred, a fact our present fellow doesn’t seem to have cottoned on to.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I know so. Dear fellow, you wouldn’t be building your great masterpiece if Daihusia was in power. Or, if you were, you’d still be buggering around with the foundations and not having money for anything else.”

  “Go on with your scenario.”

  Wallis looked at him sharply, aware of a new interest in the architect: the contempt had gone from his eyes and been replaced by a deep, quiet interest. “My scenario,” he said, “is that in order to control the tribes, Oongala is going to do what Daihusia would never have done: he is going to have to bring them here to see the Kristu-Du. And when he does that, when god knows how many thousands arrive to see this spectacle, they will be coming as very angry people. They will be angry enough to forget their differences. They may be superstitious and primitive, but they are not stupid.”

  “The army, surely …”

  Wallis waved his hand disdainfully, tidying up minor objections before he came to deliver his coup de grâce. “Apart from his beloved 101s, the rest of them are all tribally mixed. They’re not going to shoot their own people. The army, old son, will not be worth a pinch of shit.” And he brought thumb and index finger together as if offering Gerrard a pinch of it there and then. As he did so he noted the strange excited light in the architect’s eyes. He interpreted it, incorrectly, as fear. “When the day comes,” he said softly, “they will not love you.” And he drew his index finger across his throat.