The Tyrant's Novel (9 page)

Because, no doubt, you pay them shit.

You wouldn't believe how low the budgets are. Except for the
Hour of Devotion,
of course.

Give me the job, I said. I'll work for nothing or close to it. For the time being, anyhow. Say I subtitle four classics for you. At least you'd have four films to show that aren't shit.

What about French films? Andrew asked.

I can handle French films, I assured him. I can read Camus in the original. But I somehow like the American stuff.

Andrew laughed. Like Great Uncle. What about finishing your novel?

I thought of it, keeping company as it was with unimaginable Sarah, underground. I began to weep.

I can't tell you what an armpit of a place Scarpdale is. Everyone's a drunk. And it's so damn cold. Don't worry about my novel. Let me do some films.

We'd be very honored, Alan. I'll see if I can get an extra pittance out of the board. Perhaps we could present them as the Alan Sheriff Quartet.

None of that shit, Andrew. I don't have a quartet. I don't want a quartet. I just want to watch films without needing to go to the university to strangle the stupid subtitler.

I heard Kennedy laugh. Grace will be pleased you're in such robust form, he said. By the way, did you know Peter Collins has made a hit appearance on the leading German talk and variety show? He's done a bit better than Stenhouse.

Even though I numbered myself, short of subtitling four films, amongst the dead, I had room to be depressed by this proof Collins was elsewhere. Stenhouse, by contrast to Collins, was a renowned biophysicist who fled to Paris. His body was found quartered and sectioned and enclosed in two suitcases, but no one knew if it was an exemplary project of the Overguard. It was said for a time to have prevented flight by other scientific specialists.

Kennedy said, Grace and I have missed you.

You haven't, I told him. And if you have, you shouldn't have.

But I could sense his humane warmth over the telephone.

I flew back to the city, with its vistas and larger sky and more sensible climate, and returned with some dread to my apartment. Before Sarah had died, I could not imagine being a person who went back to the house of the beloved dead. My instinct would have been to burn it down, either literally, as the poor Intercessionist farmers in the south do, to expunge and liberate the ghost, or else to go to a new place. I knew now, however, why people did return to the houses of the accidentally deceased, as if to find the terrible events revised and amended as they opened the door. And, in any case, there are no houses that do not belong to the dead.

So I returned home, and parted the air beyond the front door of my flat, and walked into the kitchen as if nothing had happened there, lighting a flame under the same kettle Sarah had died tending.

True to his promise, Andrew organized me a pass to the National Broadcasting Network, so that within a day of my arrival home I was met at reception at the television studio by one of Andrew's assistants and instructed before a video machine and a specially programmed computer. This apparatus allowed for the translation of dialogue directly onto the film, and permitted the obliteration of the inept dialogue others had imposed on splendid footage.

I had not realized how much dialogue there really is in a screenplay, but I worked long hours. My first film was the classic
Lawrence of Arabia,
which was always popular and ideologically defensible, since it portrayed the cynicism and opportunism with which the British and the French empires fished in alien waters such as ours. The former subtitler had not done too bad a job, but there were occasional howlers. For example, when the American journalist comes ashore and has an interview with Prince Feisal and warns him that General Allenby, the British general in Egypt, is a “slim customer.” Instead of being translated as a crafty or devious person, the subtitler had rendered it meaninglessly as “thin shopper.” I wondered what our audience had made of that. The truth probably was that they were so frequently amazed by television's irrationalities that they didn't even apply their minds to it. But Allenby
was
a devious man. His part in the slicing up of the region still caused grief and conflict, and he deserved to be called a sly character rather than a thin shopper.

While I was reforming the subtitles of
Lawrence,
Andrew asked me to bend my skills to
Casablanca
as well. The previous subtitling had been done when television began transmission here in the early 1960s. They really didn't make films like this anymore. As a narrative device, I liked the good old-fashioned maps after the credits, upon which the lines by which refugees were escaping the Nazis were marked. I was for a time engrossed in translating the film's opening statement about tortuous, indirect refugee trails—Paris to Marseilles, across the Mediterranean to Oran, then by train or auto or foot across the shoulder of North Africa, to Casablanca in French Morocco.
Here the fortunate ones, through money or influence or luck, might obtain exit visas and scurry to Lisbon, and from Lisbon to the New World. But the others wait in Casablanca, and wait and wait and wait.
Modern directors would consider this too much geographic information for an audience to absorb.

Then the descent of the camera from the minaret of the mosque down into the fascinating squalor of Vichy-run Casablanca. I flew through this film—in one day I got from the start, full of its desperate refugees and the undercurrents of varied allegiance, to the scene where Peter Lorre—Guillermo Ugarte—is defending his practice of selling questionable exit visas, and Rick's line comes up:
I don't mind a parasite, I object to a cut-rate one.
Later in the week, I had to admit that the person who had done the first subtitling had not done a bad job with the comic challenge of the scene in which two potential refugees are practicing the English language.
What watch?
asks the husband.
Ten watch,
says the wife.
Such much?
he responds.

I allowed myself to be taken home each night by Andrew, fed and liquored, and returned to the flat, where I lay imagining myself held and cosseted, at secure anchor with Sarah.

My third film was
North by Northwest.
According to a film theorist I had heard at the university, it displayed the trivial evil which lay behind the classic visages of American presidents on Mount Rushmore. But it also had a remarkable blonde, Eva Marie Saint, and blondes were always very popular with the cabinet and senior bureaucracy; indeed with all our generally swarthy nation.

That editing room, where I sat before the oleaginous Cary Grant and the even more oiled James Mason, with Eva Marie Saint's near-albino beauty as unanswerable as a glacier, sometimes seemed so like my home that it came to me: I could write a screenplay. So many of them had been written in Hollywood by exiles. But since I reminded myself I lacked a future, I began work on my fourth classic,
On the Waterfront,
another Eva Marie Saint vehicle. This one Elia Kazan's work. Eva Marie Saint poignant and maidenly in this, where she had been seductive in
North by Northwest.
She was the face of working-class dignity and innocence, the common woman to Brando's common man. In a way, the same types could have been found in our Eastside markets. I relished the waterfront bar where Big Mac, James Westerfield, the man who makes and destroys waterside workers by hiring one and not another, brings the sinisterly well-tailored Johnny Friendly the rake-off from that day's hiring.
Here's the cut on the shape-up,
he tells Johnny Friendly. I was particularly pleased with the way I was able to translate the subtext of
A banana boat's in at forty-six tomorrow. If we could pull a walkout, it might mean a few bucks from the shippers. Them bananas go bad in a hurry.
This had been clumsily translated by some English speaker at the
Gazette
office, twenty-five years past, doing a quick job for extra cash with inadequate tools. I concluded there was in fact no need to censor ideas from films in our country, because some scenes that had the strongest political undercurrents were routinely mistranslated. Thus our people, in their living rooms or around the community center's television set, accepted the film and made what they could of its textual mystifications. The speech of Karl Malden's character, the priest or mullah who tells the stevedores that God is with them in the employment melee and in the holds of ships, had been so mangled, no doubt out of fear of outcries from the Intercessionist clergy of the south, that Malden might as well have been reciting a menu.

A frightful demand was about to make its way to me, down the corridors of the National Network, a demand which was the fulcrum of this saddest and silliest story, and so I should at this stage try to tell you what I think was happening in my soul. I believed neither the oaf nor the sage in me—the parts that were below, on the one hand, and above, on the other, the small screen of knowing which was my conscious life—wanted me to take them with me when I went. The sudden fury of energy to produce subtitles before I finished myself was probably the sage doing his best to make a case that there were still worthwhile mental challenges for the bereaved husband to apply himself to. And the brute, from below, screamed, Hear, hear! The beast in his cave liked nothing so much as breathing and an occasional good meal. The sage liked nothing so much as filling the cosmic vacancy with little jobs, such as translating
Such much?
in terms which retained the joke. They were both about to be rescued from my conscious intention to end things. I could hear footsteps in the rather underused corridor which led to my subtitling hutch. There came a polite knock on the door, a knock which acknowledged there was an artist at work within.

When I opened up I saw Andrew Kennedy in slacks and shirt and Mr. Cultural Commissioner Matt McBrien in a gray suit and silk tie and the badge of the Cultural Commission on his lapel. There was a note of deference in the way Andrew stood. He had once told me, It's not necessary to respect the man in power, but essential to respect the power in the man.

Hello, I said. But I did not want them inside the editing room, my refuge.

McBrien asked me how I was and then said, like a man who had acquired new rights to be acquainted with everything others were up to, Andrew's been telling me about the splendid work you've been doing. It sounds as if you're back in creative nick, and we're all pleased for that.

But however transformed by his new economic eminence, he looked a little flushed.

You and I are going to a meeting, Alan, he told me. Do you have a suit?

I have a black suit, I told him. Jimmy Manners had fitted me out with it for the funeral.

Pure black? asked McBrien.

I'm afraid so. This meeting . . .

McBrien said, It's nothing to worry about. More a cause for delight. I'm sure you'll be welcome in a black suit. Do you have a subdued tie to wear with it?

I told him that I could find one.

He pulled out a mobile phone, a rare implement still in our society. Excuse me, he said, I'll just tell the Overguard to collect us at your place.

The Overguard?

McBrien assured me, You're about to be introduced to a great opportunity, Alan.

I looked at Andrew Kennedy, who shrugged philosophically while nodding agreement, as if I should take the same attitude. McBrien had stepped aside and was already on his phone. He seemed to be giving the Overguard my address and proposing a pickup there at eleven o'clock, an hour's time.

An anger stirred in me. I didn't want to leave my subtitling room. What if I don't go? I asked.

Don't be a silly bastard, Alan, McBrien urged me. But he looked feverish. Please. You and I don't actually have a choice in this.

The Ministry of Culture, I said as a certainty, and Andrew looked at me dolefully, as if I hadn't guessed high enough. He said, Sorry, Alan, but you can't leave Matt in this situation. He's been ordered to take you somewhere.

To hell with him, I said. I didn't ask him to take his ridiculous job. I didn't ask him to become a junior Old Billy.

McBrien looked frantically at Andrew, who said, Yes, but he does have the job, and he's a friend.

Fuck him, I said.

We don't have a lot of time, pleaded McBrien.

I felt desperate. A quarter of an hour ago I could have finished myself without regard to anyone. Now Andrew and McBrien had sewn me back into the patchwork of responsibility and friendship.

I turned to Matt McBrien. Go and tell them that I'm a man on the edge of nothing.

I gestured to my little subtitling suite. This, I said, is doodling on the edge of the grave. I've got nothing to contribute to anything.

McBrien shook his head and again looked to our mentor, Andrew.

Andrew in turn surveyed me calmly. You can't say that, sorry, Alan. You've been conscripted. I've had the experience, and Matt's just going through it. And now it's your turn. And I'm afraid we're all mutually dependent. Remember Charlie McKay?

I had heard a rumor of the disappearance of Mr. McKay, a longtime Deputy Cultural Commissioner who had had responsibility for Peter Collins's file at the commission, and who had gloried in that association, achieving a celebrity of his own on its basis. Now he was missing. He had not turned up at the office, he had not been seen at home. There were rumors that he might have been obliterated for permitting Collins to defect.

Matt McBrien didn't want McKay used as an argument, and yet the question thoroughly sidetracked us. I don't believe the gossip that he's been punished by someone, said Matt. He had debts and a difficult marriage.

Kennedy said, Perhaps that's so. He's just done a runner. Maybe.

Besides, many a man disappears. That isn't any sort of punishment. It isn't exemplary enough.

I asked McBrien, Exemplary?

Yes, if you want to make an example of a man, you do something that readily becomes known.

Kennedy seemed to agree with this. Like shooting a football manager, he suggested.