Collected Stories (3 page)

Against the advice of the tour organizers he devoted two concerts entirely to love and laughter. They were disasters. It was felt that love and laughter were not, in his case, as instructive as terror.

The next performance was quickly announced.

TWO HOURS OF REGRET.

Tickets sold quickly. He began with a brief interpretation of love, using it merely as a prelude to regret, which he elaborated on in a complex and moving performance which left the audience pale and shaken. In a final flourish he passed from regret to loneliness to terror. The audience devoured the terror like brave tourists eating the hottest curry in an Indian restaurant.

“What you are doing,” she said, “is capitalizing on your neuroses.
Personally I find it disgusting, like someone exhibiting their club foot, or Turkish beggars with strange deformities.”

He said nothing. He was mildly annoyed at her presumption: that he had not thought this many, many times before.

With perfect misunderstanding she interpreted his passivity as disdain.

Wishing to hurt him, she slapped his face.

Wishing to hurt her, he smiled brilliantly.

The story of the blue string touched the public imagination. Small brown paper packages were sold at the doors of his concerts.

Standing on the stage he could hear the packages being noisily unwrapped. He thought of American matrons buying Muslim prayer rugs.

Exhausted and weakened by the heavy schedule he fell prey to the doubts that had pricked at him insistently for years. He lost all sense of direction and spent many listless hours by himself, sitting in a motel room listening to the air-conditioner.

He had lost confidence in the social uses of controlled terror. He no longer understood the audience’s need to experience the very things he so desperately wished to escape from.

He emptied the ashtrays fastidiously.

He opened his brown paper parcel and threw the small pieces of string down the cistern. When the torrent of white water subsided they remained floating there like flotsam from a disaster at sea.

The Mime called a press conference to announce that there would be no more concerts. He seemed small and foreign and smelt of garlic. The press regarded him without enthusiasm. He watched their hovering pens anxiously, unsuccessfully willing them to write down his words.

Briefly he announced that he wished to throw his talent open to broader influences. His skills would be at the disposal of the people, who would be free to request his services for any purpose at any time.

His skin seemed sallow but his eyes seemed as bright as those on a nodding fur mascot on the back window ledge of an American car.

Asked to describe death he busied himself taking Polaroid photographs of his questioners.

Asked to describe marriage he handed out small cheap mirrors with MADE IN TUNISIA written on the back.

His popularity declined. It was felt that he had become obscure and beyond the understanding of ordinary people. In response he requested easier questions. He held back nothing of himself in his effort to please his audience.

Asked to describe an aeroplane he flew three times around the city, only injuring himself slightly on landing.

Asked to describe a river, he drowned himself.

It is unfortunate that this, his last and least typical performance, is the only one which has been recorded on film.

There is a small crowd by the river bank, no more than thirty people. A small, neat man dressed in a grey suit picks his way through some children who seem more interested in the large plastic toy dog they are playing with.

He steps into the river, which, at the bank, is already quite deep. His head is only visible above the water for a second or two. And then he is gone.

A policeman looks expectantly over the edge, as if waiting for him to reappear. Then the film stops.

Watching this last performance it is difficult to imagine how this man stirred such emotions in the hearts of those who saw him.

While the architect’s wife carefully folded a pair of white slacks, five men were hanged. As she hunted through the drawer for her cosmetics and packed them neatly, one by one, in a small leather carrying case, an old man died of dehydration and starvation beside a dusty road. As she slipped the case shut and fiddled inexpertly with its lock, teams of imported builders laboured on the great domed building in the middle of the cruel rock-filled valley.

The architect sat on the edge of the neatly made bed and watched his wife. He was a slim tall man in his late forties. He had fine blue eyes, unusually large eyelids, and a high forehead made even higher by the receding crop of curling grey hair. His mouth was perhaps his best feature, containing as it did the continual promise of a smile. But now the promise was not honoured. His eyes were red-rimmed and tired. His long-fingered hands were clapsed on his lap and he watched his wife make her final preparations for her departure. She was leaving him and returning to Europe.

Now she was packed she sat on the bed beside him. They had entered those white corridors where there is neither shadow nor feeling.

He wished to say many things to her but he had said them all already. He said them badly and she had not listened in any case.

He wished to say: the building I have designed will last a thousand years and will endure beyond the tyrant who rules this place.

He would have added: you are only leaving because you saw a soldier shoot a dog, not because of anything else.

But all these things had been covered time and time again and she was returning to the civilization of Europe and he was to remain to build his masterpiece, the great dome of the desert, Kristu-Du, the meeting house of the tribes.

He picked up her two cases from the bed and took them out to the Land Rover. When he returned she was standing in the living room looking at an old book of his work. As he walked in she put it down on the coffee table.

Neither of them said anything.

On their way out she placed her front door key on top of the refrigerator. Then, hesitating, she opened her handbag and took out a small bottle of pills. These she placed beside the keys.

They were sleeping pills, difficult to come by.

The noise of the Land Rover always made conversation difficult, but now it made the lack of it somehow more bearable. Gravel rattled against the aluminium floor, the engine and the transmission were loud and unrelenting, rock samples in the back jumped and crashed on the tray with every bump. He saw now, as he had seen when he first arrived three years ago, the terrible bleakness of the town, a bleakness that did not even have the redeeming virtue of being exotic. The buildings constructed by the now departed Russians all looked like grey hospitals. They stood at the grand height of four storeys, towering over a collection of ugly shops and houses of white concrete blocks. In the unpaved streets stunted palm trees died from lack of water. He saw the terrible poverty of the people as they squatted on the footpath or walked aimlessly in groups along the broken streets. Tall Itos, Berehvas with pierced ears, Deffalas with the yellow eyes of desert people. It was nobody’s home, everyone’s exile. A city planned where no one had ever wished to live.

Only the soldiers seemed well fed. They lounged everywhere, these tall warriors of the president’s own tribe, clustering in doorways or patrolling in groups of two or three, machine-guns slung over their shoulders.

He saw the big white colonial building which he now recognized as a place to be feared, the detention centre, and behind it in the high-walled garden of the palace, a tasteless mock-Spanish edifice built on the president’s instruction to a photograph torn from a badly printed American newspaper.

From here the president ruled with a skilful and unique blend of
violence and magic. The magic, of course, was not magic at all, but rather an array of technological tricks which were impressive to a primitive and unlettered people. Oongala was a giant of a man, half-educated, barely literate, but he understood his people all too well. Those who were too educated or enraged to be impressed by magic could be handled with simple violence, torture and murder. With the rest he reinforced his claim to be the Great Magician of tribal myth by utilizing a continual array of new tricks.

The great canal which would have brought water to the drought-stricken land had been abandoned when he came to power. The railway which would have joined its disparate peoples lay unfinished with two stations built and the rails lying on the parched soil like pick-up sticks abandoned by a bored child. This was not the technology Oongala preferred.

The man who has known throughout the world as a comic-strip dictator, a clown, a buffoon and a mass murderer, chose to travel across his land in a hovercraft, to drop out of the sky in a white helicopter, or simply to star in one more badly made motion picture which he wrote, directed, produced and starred in. These films were the staple diet of his starving populace. They cheered him as he jumped thirty feet from ground to roof top to battle and destroy armed villains. They watched open-mouthed as he defeated bands of machine-gunning renegades. Bullets could not harm him, gravity hold him, or the engines of war overpower him.

And now they were treated to the works of the man whom Gerrard had privately named Mr Meat, the ex-arms dealer Wallis, who was now making a fortune from constructing holograms in the bigger villages. The work had barely begun but if the reaction to the one in the capital was any indication, it was a popular piece of magic. Inside a concrete building that had all the charm of a public urinal the faithful could see a three-dimensional image of their dictator levitating above the desk in his big office.

Now, as the Land Rover left the town and rattled down the track towards the airport, Gerrard looked across at his wife. She caught his eye for a moment and then looked hurriedly away, she who had once encouraged him with his plans, bolstered him in the face of failure and criticism, who had stood by him fiercely when his controversial works had been disbanded by one municipal authority because of cost, another because of a provincial sense of what was
beautiful. And now, here, when a great building was near completion, she was leaving him, washing her hands of him, joining the ranks of the old associates who had publicly criticized his role in working for the glorification of a mass murderer.

The hypocrites, he thought now, they sit in their exquisite offices while their own governments torture and kill, and because there isn’t a scandalized headline in the newspapers they pretend these things don’t go on. They are so clean, so pure, and I am so terrible. They want me to say: no, I shall abandon this project, the greatest domed structure in the world. I should walk away from it and leave it unfinished or to be ruined by incompetent fools. Would they? Would his fine pure friends have walked away from such a triumph simply because a government had changed? A building seven times as big as St Peter’s in Rome? He smiled thinly.

The airport was almost empty. He checked in his wife’s baggage whilst she looked in the duty-free shop. When he came back he saw that she had bought perfume. He said nothing and gave her the ticket.

“There is no point in you waiting,” she said.

He looked at her: eyes that had once looked at him with love, now dull and lustreless, lips that had covered his body in soft passionate kisses, now thin and full of tension.

“I wanted to say …” he began.

“What?” she interrupted nervously, on the defensive, worried that he would ask anything of her, make any claim.

He had wanted to say that he would miss her dreadfully, that he would think of her continually, that he would endure his loneliness in the hope that the separation would not be permanent.

But instead, he merely smiled a wry smile and said, “I just wanted to say goodbye.”

“Goodbye,” she said. She kept her hands clutched around her perfume and handbag. She did not lean towards him. “Goodbye,” she said again.

“Goodbye,” he said, then turned on his heel.

She watched him walk away, casually throwing his keys up and down in his hand. It was the walk of a person who might have been on his way to an expensive lunch. She never forgave him for it.

There were many who would have described Gerrard Haflinger as a solitary man. It is true that conversation did not come easily to him and he had a peculiar mixture of shyness and arrogance in his character that normally made him appear more than a little aloof. His dealings with governments, municipal authorities and the Medicis of modern business had always been made more difficult by his inability to unbend, to be anything other than the bristling defendant of the purity of his vision. But solitary he was not.

In an interview in a popular European magazine he had once been asked what was most precious to him in life and he had answered, without hesitation, that it was to be with true friends. And what was a true friend? A true friend, he had answered, was someone you could stand naked before, who would never judge you, whom you could share your darkest secrets with, and so on.

By this definition Gerrard Haflinger had no more friends. He had been judged and found guilty not only by the three men he respected and loved most, but also by his wife.

Gerrard Haflinger no longer remembered the interview but if he had he would have reflected that he had not answered truthfully: his work was the most precious thing in his life. For this, this one project, he had been prepared to give up everything else. Possibly if his other work had proceeded properly, if the theatre complex had not been bungled, if the state library had ever gone ahead, he might have abandoned the Kristu-Du on the day Oongala took power and parliamentary democracy was abolished, or, if not then, at least in the following months when it became clear to everyone what sort of a leader Oongala would be.