The Tyrant's Novel (11 page)

Eat up, he said. You don't have to worry. They've been screened for radiation, insecticide, and toxins.

I took a mouthful. If it were a poisoned apple, hadn't I been seeking one? But it was succulent, and the juice lay on the tongue more like nectar than acid.

Great Uncle smiled across the desk at my obvious appreciation. You see? You see, Alan? Now, enough about apples! I believe you are contracted to an American publisher?

I told him that it was Random House.

Yes, he said. They were appreciative of us once, the Americans, weren't they? When we were fighting the Others for them. When my friend and cousin General Stark organized the Republican Guard and we drove our enemy and theirs out of the oil fields and back across the Hordern Straits. An enterprise in which you, Alan, took a brave part as an infantryman, I believe. Our existence as human beings meant something to the West then. Not now. Not with the sanctions. Which unit did you serve in, Alan?

I thought of Mrs. Carter and reddened. In the Fifty-third Infantry, Mr. President. I rose in the end to the grand rank of corporal.

He laughed. A rank not to be despised, he told me. General Stark was once a corporal, in the days when true nationalists were not likely to be promoted in an army full of Western lackeys.

I remembered that General Stark also introduced the summary shooting of soldiers who retreated, and then a return of their bodies home in a black coffin with the word
RENEGADE
painted on it. But then I found myself close to thinking, in Great Uncle's austere, murmuring presence, that perhaps such thorough methods were needed for the sake of sovereignty, for the survival of the nation with or without Great Uncle. Perhaps I owed my American dollars advance to General Stark's toughening of our army. Power, the sad habituality of it, shone in Great Uncle's eyes, and I was half intoxicated with that. What did one or two black coffins matter in those eyes, their immensity of reach?

And of course the refineries and the Hordern Straits had to be retained. I would like to say, thus the arse-licking sage began to assure me. But no, it was no separate entity, no independent savant who tried to persuade me. It was myself, my reaction to the depth of his eyes, the rustle of his voice, the utter authority of his words. It had taken a mere minute for Great Uncle to enter the room and alter my view of things. This enchantment was, however, about to be challenged.

Great Uncle said, I hear from Commissioner McBrien that your new novel concerns the home front, the impact of sanctions. And brave, ordinary folk.

I must have frowned, for Great Uncle went on in his measured voice, This is purely literary gossip, of course. Forgive me if I have it wrong.

Of course I did not want him to know the way in which the manuscript, virtually complete, had been placed as an offering to Sarah.

I'm afraid, Mr. President, that the novel has been abandoned. It led nowhere—artistically, I mean.

Do you have a typescript?

I knew I must return his stare, but I confess it was hard to do. He was sure he guarded the state. I was convinced I must guard the grave. An image of a desecrating mechanical digger came to my mind.

I burned it, sir, I said. By keeping my eyes directed at him, I hoped it would not seem the barefaced lie it was.

I said, When a book goes bad on you, it seems to be the only thing to do with it. West and East, there are many, many burned manuscripts.

Of course, said Great Uncle. I've read of many such cases myself. The artist wants to obliterate what he sees as his bad work. Sometimes, of course, he's being too hard on himself. Wouldn't you say that? That he's being too hard? Or perhaps too vain?

Not, if I might say so, Mr. President, when the work is in fact really bad.

Do you have any copies on computer disk?

I went to rather silly extremes, Mr. President, and threw them away in the garbage.

I hoped he did not get the idea of setting Overguards to work searching the hectares of waste on the northern edge of the city. My lies made me breathless, but I held the gaze.

Oh, you must have disliked it, Alan. But Andrew Kennedy tells me you've been getting your creative edge back by subtitling films. I believe your subtitling of
Casablanca
is better than the original.

As a mere side issue, I felt angry with Andrew—to know that such an informal and semiprivate arrangement had been brought to the attention of Great Uncle.

Andrew's too kind, I said formally.

No, Great Uncle insisted. We all have great faith in your talent. We are aware that it was interrupted by a severe trauma. But that it is there—Great Uncle waved his right hand—that it is there, no one doubts.

I despaired of argument. I simply sat still in dreadful anticipation.

Great Uncle said, I ask you to loan the state the great benefit of your talent, Alan.

I was reckless enough to lower my head. These days, you don't find me at my best, Mr. President, I'm afraid.

You simply need a project, he told me, cheerily. You were on the right line. The impact of the sanctions on the people, on the families of war veterans. This is a great story. Men and women who smuggle oil west to the Mediterranean, and down the straits in barges, are the new heroes. The weight of their deeds, Alan, will render the frippery of sanctions irrelevant.

Frippery?
I thought.

Great Uncle fixed me with his eyes and told me evenly, I realize my own past novels have been dismissed in the West as pure melodrama. They were fables, of course, and all fables are melodramatic. But because they portrayed the relationship between myself as bridegroom and the state as bride, they were derided by foreigners.

The Americans are not used to fables, I told him.

I really shouldn't have. I knew his books to be utter shit, ghostwritten by hacks at the Cultural Commission. I would have liked to argue that I was being polite for McBrien's sake, and his fashionable wife, Sonia's. On the other hand, I might simply have been genuflecting, despite myself. Most human beings can be brave only in snatches. And nobody knows, unless they have been there, with a god, in his office, within reach of his army cot. Nobody can forejudge how they'll behave.

Great Uncle leaned forward, and I heard his boots squeak like those of a recruit.

I have a great favor to ask you.

I knew that he began commands in that fashion.

In four months, he said, the Group of Seven, or so-called G-7, those self-congratulatory controllers of the goods of the earth, those judges of seemly weapons, will meet in Montreal. I have it on some authority that the sanctions which affect your fellow citizens will come up for consideration. Some of the G-7 are uneasy about them. Canada, France, Italy.

It does them some honor, I said.

Great Uncle laughed. They are conditioned to think that way. The French helped the Americans found their tiny republic. What do they think now? Now that the Americans so far outstrip the power of Napoleon? What do the Canadians think, living cheek by jowl with the monster? They support the sanctions at least in the sense that they go along with America and give silent assent in spite of moral unease. But they are also willing to believe the worst of them. Pearson Dysart, our PR company, places in the Canadian and European press little items about our people which would make any heart bleed.

Yes, I could but say. But they are right to do so. The sanctions are the main issue.

Exactly, whispered Great Uncle, lightly clapping his hands. A man of such restrained gestures, unlike his coke-inhaling offspring. Now, he confided, our young friend McBrien is a fine fellow, and a splendid writer, but he'd rather write about our past, about intellectuals persecuted by the monarchy in the early 1930s. That's the trouble with our writers. They find it easier, both creatively and, I think, politically, to dwell on historic wrong.

Perhaps so, Mr. President, I conceded with a lackey politeness.

Whereas your stories, Alan, they're always in the present. Real soldiers, womenfolk everyone knows . . .

The serpent of literary vanity, slick and seething, moved within me, as Great Uncle spoke as if the worst that could befall a writer who wrote the wrong things about the present world would be the mildest of rebukes. I thought of Mrs. Douglas's nephew, who had composed the chemical balance of the water wrongly. Had he had his death announced to him in this softness of tone? In this quiet, chiding atmosphere?

Great Uncle said again, I want you to do me a favor, Alan. I want you to do, that is, the state a favor. I don't pretend it won't be demanding. The situation is this. In four months the G-7 meet, as I say, in Montreal. My plan is to release a book in New York at that time, published by a bona fide publisher, bearing my name, which displays to the world the suffering of my people, and their patriotic inventiveness in the face of sanctions. You can put it better than that, I know. I want it to be a subtle novel, with heroes and some villains. I want it to be a book an American would enjoy reading. I want some of the villains—exploitative people—punished in the book, for the punishment they inflict, but I want the central characters to be honest people. Write about what you yourself have seen, Alan. I'm afraid that the deadline is a short one—Pearson Dysart in New York have the publisher primed, but they insist they need three months to get the word of this extraordinary literary coup into the market and to attend to producing the book. And, of course, to let it leak into the market that they have signed a contract with the notorious Great Uncle, and that the manuscript of the novel is very good.

I sat neutralized by conflicting terrors through all this.

Great Uncle began to think. Then he spoke, as he consulted a calendar on his desk. I think we can afford a full calendar month for the task, and this being July 8, you should deliver your book into the hands of Commissioner McBrien and your Overguard escort officer, Chaddock, by close of office hours on August 8. I should tell you Pearson Dysart have an old left-wing publishing house lined up, and they would be delighted to drive a stake through the American administration's embargoes on our oil and the imposed sanctions.

Flabbergasted, I came close, but not close enough, to suggesting he might as well use his pistol on me right now. A masterwork can't be written in a month, sir, I told him.

It's all the timetable permits us, he said with a shrug. Sorry. I know you like to translate your own work, but there won't be time. The top American translator is lined up. He'll work fast too. And the senior editor from the publishing house will work on it in regard to any revisions. You shouldn't let him change anything that's relevant to us, to what we are all going through.

I took yet another profound breath. I could not deal with the thinness of this air.

Mr. President, I said. I am very proud to be asked, of course. But I'm not well, sir. My subtitling was nearly remedial work, therapy. I am a shell. What you suggest is simply beyond my powers.

Great Uncle grasped his upper lip and thought. Then he leaned forward across the desk. You're arguing with destiny, aren't you, Alan? he said. And with so many people depending on you . . . me, Pearson Dysart, the publisher.
And
members of your own race. This is not an instance of vanity on my part. I want the hypocritical sanctions to be shown up, I want our oil without restriction to flow to the world. I want the world's goods to flow to us. I want a book whose humanity will achieve that, and be a reproach to the G-7. In the face of that, Alan, it's no good claiming personal fragility. It must be done. It will mean a great deal to the career of Cultural Commissioner McBrien, also.

So he assumes responsibility for me?

Great Uncle said, I can imagine the two of you swapping ideas in cafés at night. May I suggest you might try dictating? The Ministry of Information has a voice-recognition program on some of its computers, if you wanted to use one of them.

He had managed to make me giddy with a new kind of despair, a kind I never anticipated. I don't know what to say, Great Uncle, I confessed.

And indeed, despite my lapse of protocol, he nodded gently like a generous uncle. Did I mention that advance and royalties will very appropriately be paid by my office to you? You will have security for life, Alan. So get to work. On August 8, I'll accept the typescript from your hand.

There was a long silence in that soundless palace.

Oh, he said suddenly, I understand.

He chuckled—a noise like other men would make if preparing to sneeze.

You ask yourself, once the book is written, why would he not simply bury me away in some prison to make sure rumors of authorship don't start circulating? Or why wouldn't he perhaps be tempted to eliminate me?

There was another stutter of indulgent laughter, in the midst of which he drew a
chardri,
a regulation short bayonet dagger, traditionally curved, from his belt. He laid it on the surface of the table, and looked for something in his desk drawers and found it, a pack of surgical lint impregnated with some chemical or other.

I'll solve it by making you one of my Piedmontese. A kinsman. To show how I value your talent and your happiness. You see!

He extended his own right wrist, fingers upwards. There were five small ridges of scar like a little constellation there.

All right, he said, snapping his shirtsleeves back in place. Everyone knows how I value kinship. This will be a significant day for you and your progeny.

He took a square of lint and cleaned the point of his dagger with it. Surgical alcohol, he said. Give me your right hand.

I pushed forward my fairly effete urban hand and it was suddenly taken in his broad, harsh one. He had worked day after day with farm implements in his childhood. He had strength. With his free hand, he took another alcohol-impregnated cloth and frowned slightly as he reached across the table to wipe the wrist he held.

Many have tried to copy these marks, he told me, but they're like a secret handshake—hard for an outsider to reproduce.

He put the point of the thing deftly under the skin of my wrist, digging at an angle, then flipping the nugget of flesh he had purchase on so that it was doomed to heal in a distinctive nodule of scar. Naturally it hurt. But who was I to scream? In his terms, he was paying me a gesture of intense esteem, guaranteeing my safety, making me a five-dotter. Having produced the effect once, he did it immediately again, on the far side of my wrist.