The Tyrant's Novel

  It seemed true that McCauley was a great character incarnated. One could at least think that someone else, a healthier man than me, a young literary tiger, could make something of him. That much I could agree with. What if I organized to take a trip with McCauley, and then simply boarded a ship, one hoped a Norwegian ship, and claimed asylum? But for what good purpose would I seek asylum and leave Sarah's remains behind? And how could such a journey be undertaken under the surveillance of Captain Chaddock's Overguard escort? I could see the Overguard limo behind us as we pulled over the crest of Beaumont and looked down on the city, fraught, beautiful, squalid, exposed on the banks of its great river.

  A sort of love for it all possessed me and a little nostalgia arose for the book which lay beside Sarah in the grave, merely because it had encapsulated this city as it was in its pain and vulnerability. Of course I did not regret the work's present destiny. What sort of husband would take it back, when it had already been consecrated to her, just to feed the G-7 fantasies of the President-for-Life?

  This book had gone well enough until Sarah's fatal episode. Towards finishing it I had felt some disappointment that technically it did not seem to be much advanced upon my much lauded book of short stories. It would, that is, be a reasonable follow-up. It would not quite make the West step back, or evoke comparisons to Gabriel García Márquez or Vargas Llosa. But it had been intimately crafted and imbued with all my passion. As for its significance as a gesture towards Sarah, my offering to my dead wife was an absolute one, even if my talent had limits. I did not give it to her as a means of opting out of the task of making it better. It was what it was. I gave it to her because it was the best I had to give, and was a sign that any idea of future literary excellence was rendered fatuous by her destruction. Or to put it in another way: there was really no sense to those or any other words I wanted to place on paper, in a world from which she had been removed.

  But a phantom literary impulse began to itch in my mind. If I had the manuscript with me, if all were normal, I could edit it in a few days, hand it to the tyrant, confirm McBrien in his career and sweet Sonia in her smile, and then vanish from the earth.

  Sometimes it seemed that some malign force had deprived me of Sarah precisely because I concentrated so much on women, even in the short stories—their vulnerability, and their risky hold on their lives. Their loves so thoroughgoing, whether it be for their husbands or their children. Yet all hope was so frequently thwarted by chance and politics and little invisible bugs in water or the air, or in the blood of friends. I had that sense of fragility from the death of my mother, I suppose, when I was sixteen. But as I've already said, I saw it too in Mrs. Carter.

  My novel had thus concerned, in some part, two women. You are good at women, my wife told me, flattering me. You can convey the sense of the sword above their heads.

  I shouldn't imply my book was exclusively about women—it wasn't. Though it had its beginning in the present miseries, it also described the period of the early military governments, which rose on nationalist rhetoric, but secretly assured the British, French, and Americans that that was all it was, hot air, and that it would be business on the normal preferential terms if only they would equip the national army. (Great Uncle, as a young Fusion Party apparatchik, had hated the shallowness of such governments, and disrupted their public events with demonstrations of dissent. But that's another story.)

  There are, in the novel's prologue, two lovely girls, educated by doting parents, both members of all-girl families. That is, what the Intercessionist peasantry and their clergy would consider a catastrophe of values—women of independent minds. (This was close to my mother's story too—she had only one brother, and she was adored and given a thorough education in music and the humanities by rather Anglophile parents.) So, these two girls from all-girl families. One marries a senior bureaucrat—the Mrs. Carter story again. The other marries a naval officer, and both of them bear sons, which bonds them even more. The bureaucrat's wife lives in a spacious, middle-class apartment by the river; the naval officer and his wife live in a smaller flat but well located to all the joys of a civilized life—the cafés and bookshops, the boutiques, the river restaurants which served our delicious, pink-fleshed river perch.

  The first woman's husband is killed along with his crooked minister by well-meaning but overly zealous agents of the Fusion Party. Friends of the dead husband in the department, however, out of a sense that an injustice has been done, maintain the widow's pension under the new regime. The pension is considerable and permits her to live in comfort. But her son is killed in the battles for the refineries, and she is rendered a scarecrow, confined to her apartment, barely going out, barely using the generous pension which inflation gradually erodes. This was ominously close to Mrs. Carter's story, but these considerations don't necessarily prevent a writer from exploiting people he knows, and I had put in sufficient points of difference between my character's tale and Mrs. Carter's life to mount a plausible defense that this character was not her.

  The husband of the other educated woman, the woman who is actually central to the story, Rose Clancy, is captured early in the war by the Others when his patrol boat is sunk in the straits, and he receives a shrapnel wound in his hip. Due to his capture, his rank remains fixed at a junior level. When repatriated he accuses a well-connected senior officer of having collaborated. Though the senior officer is ultimately imprisoned on his return home, Clancy is maneuvered into retiring and taking his pension.

  It is through the decline of the Clancys that the reader encounters the increasingly cruel terms of existence under which our people live.

  It sounds vain for me to say it, but I was working on more than the old Dickens proposition that a modest sufficiency is happiness, and a sufficiency that just fails to pay the bills is tragedy. I was trying to work with much more even than the idea that those rewarded with affluence often are not as noble as those who aren't. The book was, in its way, overtly political, insofar as all my characters were aware of being held in a vise of politics.

  Clancy, the man! I loved him authorially as much as the women characters, and he was based explicitly on a man I met three years ago on one of my visits to the Eastside markets. For the writing of the book I had in mind, the Eastside markets were essential research. The man was in early middle age, selling black-market European and American cigarettes. He approached me and said, Sir, I have Virginia and Turkish cigarettes. Would you care for one at a mere thirty U?

  He made this offer in the remains of a good serge suit, and though when he walked he did so crookedly, he had the unsurrendered remnants of an old-fashioned bearing, military or bureaucratic.

  Like any bourgeois in territory difficult to understand as a mere visitor, I grasped onto him as my guide and mediator, and spent two afternoons with him in the markets. He did not work there in the mornings, since he had to put in time at the water plant. I bought all his cigarettes for 850 U, the equivalent of fourteen dollars, nearly five times what he made a week as a water engineer. He had not been a naval man, as Clancy was in the novel, but a former sapper lieutenant who had spent time under the care of the Others, and his military pension of twenty U, set in more plenteous times, was now, through inflation, the equivalent of sixteen American cents.

  I was very conscious that without my inheritance from both parents and a deceased uncle, and without the added good fortune of my U.S. dollar advance, I would become this man. And what also stood between us were Sarah's considerable earnings from television residuals and—sometimes in foreign exchange—film royalties, either from Europe or from countries of our region. Even so, in the company of this urbane man, the filament of chance seemed as thin as silk between us.

  So he agreed to walk me around the markets. He told me incidentally that he was his street leader, and that he intended to spend the largesse I'd brought his way on the neighboring school, which had nothing, not even chalk. It was easy to believe him, with his canting walk and air of uprightnes
s.

  We visited the furniture stalls. There was, of course, rubbish—vinyl-covered lounges in garish colors. But one could see excellent pieces—ageless paintings of ideal riverbank gardens, or of ancestors in procession or engaged in battle with swords and shields, and the chardri, the sort of knife-cum-bayonet with which Great Uncle had operated on me. Presses hundreds of years old, carrying the intense demeanor of retained clan history, stood in an extraordinary jumble and under a coating of dust with pieces that looked Victorian or Sheratonesque. Under the monarchy, such pieces had been much prized by the ruling and middle classes. People of some quality had in recent times, impoverished by inflation, given up these pieces cheaply, and someone with a sudden windfall like the one I'd paid the water engineer could similarly buy them for a song. What every dealer hoped for, my friend told me, was that one of the parvenus and big-time black marketeers would drive over from town and buy a good piece at close to its true value. By and large, my friend said, the furniture of the nation, like its citizens, had been deflated by sanctions.

  And by Great Uncle and his friends too? I asked.

  Yes. But best not to talk of that. Otherwise despair could begin.

  Where do you get the time to be a street leader? As well as the waterworks and this . . .

  He looked straight at me, a no-nonsense look. I'll tell you the truth. I'm attracted by the endurance of people there. They're a mixed bag, of course; I don't pretend otherwise. But my God, they endure perfectly! They bury too many of their kids. My fault. I'm supposed to be a water engineer. But they have the grace never to point a finger at me.

  He led me on to a large tent with open sides. A sign on its front pole said The Art Exchange, so I thought there would be paintings piled up inside. Instead, at long tables sat a number of artists of the capital, smoking butts and drinking their tea ration. They had little signs in front of them, offering art equipment for exchange. One had a huge, pristine tube of chrome yellow, a standby hue for traditional paintings, to exchange with anyone who had a spare six-feet-by-three-feet canvas. Another offered a palette knife. Having moved on from impasto work, he sought a thin brush.

  They might sit thus for some days, before the implement or paint they needed came in. I got talking to one artist, a man about my age, and of some reputation. He was the sort of fellow to whom the Cultural Commission, before we were declared a pariah state, gave free paints and equipment, and probably paid him a wage as well—possibly still did, but one which could not match inflation. I, not he, was the one who kept damning the limitations on his art. He persisted in remarks such as, Well, it makes the artist less precious. You value every line. And the finished painting—it means so much!

  The cigarette seller and I went for tea ourselves. What did you mean earlier? I asked him. About water engineers being to blame?

  Well, metaphorically, he told me.

  He savored the tea.

  What I can't get over, he said, is that one day soon the West will invade us over our chemical and germ weapons, and the sins of certain of our people. In the meantime we can't make enough chlorine to treat our drinking water. The sewerage works don't get any at all. All the chlorine we have goes to treat our reservoirs. They in turn are drawn from the river, where the unchlorinated sewage has already been dumped. The system's failing, our pumps are kept together with bits of wire, and there's very little to do, really, at the waterworks. All my fellow engineers put in an hour or two in the mornings and then sell black-market tobacco in the afternoons. And the children, thirsty from their play, drink the water direct from the pipe at the end of the street—even though we've told everyone to boil it before taking a sip.

  He shrugged. Typhoid, cholera, dysentery, he recited, ticking off the fingers of his left hand. What do children think of any of that? They know only about thirst.

  Sitting back in his chair, rubbing his jaws as if he had toothache, he answered my question about where vendors got their black-market cigarettes. A massive warehouse in Beaumont, it seemed.

  We check them out by the packet, and return what we don't sell. The warehouse management gets fifty percent of what we sell. God knows who's at the apex of it all, of all the warehouses in all the cities. Some friend of Sonny's, I'd imagine.

  I returned him all the cigarettes I had already bought. Look, I said, sell them again. You can realize a full hundred percent on them.

  He looked me in the eye. There was some reluctance there. Thank you, he said at last.

  I remember going home to Sarah, creatively excited by what I had seen, a typical scavenging writer. I relayed the sights, smell, dust, and tragedies of the Eastside markets. I took my contact with the cigarette vendor seriously: he was my guide in the netherworld where most of our people lived.

  But any illusion that he would continue in the role was destroyed on my next visit to the markets. I found him walking in the long broadway between the tents. I offered to buy his cigarettes in exchange for his guidance.

  He said, I'm sorry. I can't.

  I'm sorry too.

  He explained it to me. The thing about windfalls is that they're no solution. You go and write your book. It might do more good than a windfall. I don't look to chance to save me for a day or two. Actually, I deserve better than that.

  He was very pleasant about it, considering my earlier patronizing manner. He became, of course, my model for Clancy. You can see how much more noble a character he was than McCauley the oil smuggler.

  In a sense he remained my validation as I then sought out teachers in schools without books and chalk. Bare spaces. And their eleven-year-old students would tell them: I can earn more on the black market than you earn for trying to teach me.

  I met the shoe-shine children who shared half their fifteen-hour-a-day earnings at the bus terminal with café loungers who rented them their shoe-shine boxes. I saw the swollen-gutted children in hospitals I was admitted to by doctors for whom I'd bought coffee. The physicians told stories about grandfathers who died for lack of spare parts for the defibrillator equipment. There was a pact amongst all physicians to share the available pharmaceuticals equally amongst all admitted children, as diminished an impact as that would have. The doctors and nurses I invited to coffeehouses for interviews gave me a potent sense of the pyramid of infant corpses our nation had become.

  One woman said, Our society is meant to be more than a refugee camp. In a refugee camp people eat aid food, and sleep. But what about visions and science? What about clean water, for that matter? What about the arts?

  She told me her boyfriend, an aficionado of the piano, had to go to the university, to one of the country's rare pianos, and line up behind others to practice.

  And so I had my Clancy, and I thus imagined Mrs. Clancy, who is the core of the novel, living in a tumbledown house in Beaumont, having been a young woman of hope and cafés, with her daughter, son-in-law, and their three children, and with her son, one of war's many amputees.

  As the widow Mrs. Clancy knew in adolescence and early marriage shrinks—in the manner of Mrs. Carter—to a wraith behind the shuttered windows of her apartment, venturing forth to spend her money only if someone who served with her son deigns to visit, Mrs. Clancy fights a truer battle. She stands up to the black marketeers who adulterate pharmaceuticals in a manner likely to create damage to the brain and other organs, tries to save her grandchildren from prostitution, and—a vital woman still—is pursued by a whimsical black-market trader, a brave McCauley type. The book was intended as a paean and an elegy for the valor of those who maintain the dignity of their hunger in the face of crazy international measures, aimed to undermine Great Uncle, but cutting like a buzz saw through less elevated people, whose chief politics were—as the water engineer told me—endurance.

  That was my book, now in Sarah's hands. It had taken me three years. It could not be pressed into ready service on the tyrant's behalf.

  Poor Matt McBrien, who was now the chief matter for my concern, kindly dropped by later with a bottle
of vodka, and I set to work on it. He refused to understand that the problem really was my mental capacity—I did not have the sinew to write a book even if I could think of one. For McBrien to suggest material to me was a little like a healthy man rallying a starving one by himself devouring a meal.

  I woke late next day, and with a headache, but got up to go to a café. I had in my mind the sole concept of a large glass of iced orange juice. I saw the postman at the letterboxes though, and with a smile which I later thought might have been prescient, he placed an air letter in my hands. It had German stamps, and a Frankfurt postmark. I put it in my jacket pocket, for I did not necessarily want to be seen reading it by those who might be observing my movements on the street. From the doorstep I surveyed the pavements and the narrow string of traffic, and could see the limousine and white Toyota of the Overguard. When I got to my regular café down the street and ordered my orange juice, my coffee, my boiled eggs, I opened the letter. I had already half recognized the writing on the envelope—I had suspected it was Peter Collins's writing from Frankfurt, and it proved to be.

  Dear Alan,

  I hope you're in a good state to receive these greetings from Frankfurt. From the heart of my winter of exile.

  That was typical of him . . . winter of exile . . . He'd heard that Sarah had died unexpectedly and he sent the normal commiserations. In a sane country, he said, she would never have lacked fulfillment or employment. He almost implied that Great Uncle's unconscious thwarting of her acting career had somehow brought on her death—a suspicion I found unwelcome, since there might be truth to it. He hoped that I was as well as I could be in the circumstances.

  I should tell you what we have heard through the ages, from the famous exiles of the Roman Empire onwards. Exile is not a happy condition, whether chosen or imposed.

  But he had done, he told me, a few feature articles for Frankfurter Zeitung. He was singing songs in a Tuesday evening cabaret each week, and had done a little television, and some radio interviews. But he feared his career would be limited chiefly to that of an academic, almost anthropological curiosity. He'd always liked the fact that his songs and tales were organic to the people, his people. He had never wanted them to be museum pieces. But if you chose exile, you had to expect that, he said.