Collected Stories, Page 2

  “Yes,” I said, “I get what you mean.”

  “But do you?” my father insisted. “But do you really, I wonder.” He examined me seriously, musing on the possibilities of my understanding him. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty,” I said.

  “I knew, of course,” he said. “Do you understand the significance of the nether regions?”

  I sighed, a little too loudly, and my father narrowed his eyes. Quickly I said: “They are like everything else. They’re like the cities. The cities are deserts where people are alone and lonely. They don’t love one another.”

  “Don’t love one another,” intoned my father, also sighing. “We no longer love one another. When we realize that we need one another we will stop disappearing. This is a lesson to us. A hard lesson, but, I hope, an effective one.”

  My father continued to speak, but I watched him without listening. After a few minutes he stopped abruptly: “Are you listening to me?” he said. I was surprised to detect real concern in his voice. He looked at me questioningly. “I’ve always looked after you,” he said, “ever since you were little.”

  12. The Cartographers’ Fall

  I don’t know when it was that I noticed that my father had become depressed. It probably happened quite gradually without either my mother or me noticing it.

  Even when I did become aware of it I attributed it to a woman. My father had a number of lovers and his moods usually reflected the success or failure of these relationships.

  But I know now that he had heard already of Hurst and Jamov, the first two Cartographers to disappear. The news was suppressed for several weeks and then, somehow or other, leaked to the press. Certainly the Cartographers had enemies amongst the civil servants who regarded them as overproud and overpaid, and it was probably from one of these civil servants that the press heard the news.

  When the news finally broke I understood my father’s depression and felt sorry for him.

  I didn’t know how to help him. I wanted, badly, to make him happy. I had never ever been able to give him anything or do anything for him that he couldn’t do better himself. Now I wanted to help him, to show him I understood.

  I found him sitting in front of the television one night when I returned from my office and I sat quietly beside him. He seemed more kindly now and he placed his hand on my knee and patted it.

  I sat there for a while, overcome with the new warmth of this relationship, and then, unable to contain my emotion any more, I blurted out: “You could change your job.”

  My father stiffened and sat bolt upright. The pressure of his hand on my knee increased until I yelped with pain, and still he held on, hurting me terribly.

  “You are a fool,” he said, “you wouldn’t know if you were up yourself.”

  Through the pain in my leg, I felt the intensity of my father’s fear.

  13. Why the World Needs Cartographers

  My father woke me at 3.00 a.m. to tell me why the world needed Cartographers. He smelled of whisky and seemed, once again, to be very gentle.

  “The world needs Cartographers,” he said softly, “because if they didn’t have Cartographers the fools wouldn’t know where they were. They wouldn’t know if they were up themselves if they didn’t have a Cartographer to tell them what’s happening. The world needs Cartographers,” my father said, “it fucking well needs Cartographers.”

  14. One Final Scene

  Let me describe a final scene to you: I am sitting on the sofa my father brought home when I was five years old. I am watching television. My father is sitting in a leather armchair that once belonged to his father and which has always been exclusively his. My mother is sitting in the dining alcove with her cards spread across the table, playing one more interminable game of patience.

  I glance casually across at my father to see if he is doing anything more than stare into space, and notice, with a terrible shock, that he is showing the first signs of dematerializing.

  “What are you staring at?” My father, in fact, has been staring at me.

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, don’t.”

  Nervously I return my eyes to the inanity of the television. I don’t know what to do. Should I tell my father that he is dematerializing? If I don’t tell him will he notice? I feel I should do something but I can feel, already, the anger in his voice. His anger is nothing new. But this is possibly the beginning of a tide of uncontrollable rage. If he knows he is dematerializing, he will think I don’t love him. He will blame me. He will attack me. Old as he is, he is still considerably stronger than I am and he could hurt me badly. I stare determinedly at the television and feel my father’s eyes on me.

  I try to feel love for my father, I try very, very hard.

  I attempt to remember how I felt about him when I was little, in the days when he was still occasionally tender towards me.

  But it’s no good.

  Because I can only remember how he has hit me, hurt me, humiliated me and flirted with my girlfriends. I realize, with a flush of panic and guilt, that I don’t love him. In spite of which I say: “I love you.”

  My mother looks up sharply from her cards and lets out a surprised cry.

  I turn to my father. He has almost disappeared. I can see the leather of the chair through his stomach.

  I don’t know whether it is my unconvincing declaration of love or my mother’s exclamation that makes my father laugh. For whatever reason, he begins to laugh uncontrollably: “You bloody fools,” he gasps, “I wish you could see the looks on your bloody silly faces.”

  And then he is gone.

  My mother looks across at me nervously, a card still in her hand. “Do you love me?” she asks.

  The Last Days of a Famous Mime

  1.

  The Mime arrived on Alitalia with very little luggage: a brown paper parcel and what looked like a woman’s handbag.

  Asked the contents of the brown paper parcel he said, “String.”

  Asked what the string was for he replied: “Tying up bigger parcels.”

  It had not been intended as a joke, but the Mime was pleased when the reporters laughed. Inducing laughter was not his forte. He was famous for terror.

  Although his state of despair was famous throughout Europe, few guessed at his hope for the future. “The string,” he explained, “is a prayer that I am always praying.”

  Reluctantly he untied his parcel and showed them the string. It was blue and when extended measured exactly fifty-three metres.

  The Mime and the string appeared on the front pages of the evening papers.

  2.

  The first audiences panicked easily. They had not been prepared for his ability to mime terror. They fled their seats continually. Only to return again.

  Like snorkel divers they appeared at the doors outside the concert hall with red faces and were puzzled to find the world as they had left it.

  3.

  Books had been written about him. He was the subject of an award-winning film. But in his first morning in a provincial town he was distressed to find that his performance had not been liked by the one newspaper’s one critic.

  “I cannot see,” the critic wrote, “the use of invoking terror in an audience.”

  The Mime sat on his bed, pondering ways to make his performance more light-hearted.

  4.

  As usual he attracted women who wished to still the raging storms of his heart.

  They attended his bed like highly paid surgeons operating on a difficult case. They were both passionate and intelligent. They did not suffer defeat lightly.

  5.

  Wrongly accused of merely miming love in his private life he was somewhat surprised to be confronted with hatred.

  “Surely,” he said, “if you now hate me, it was you who were imitating love, not I.”

  “You always were a slimy bastard,” she said. “What’s in that parcel?”

  “I told you before,” he said helplessly, “string.” />
  “You’re a liar,” she said.

  But later when he untied the parcel he found that she had opened it to check on his story. Her understanding of the string had been perfect. She had cut it into small pieces like spaghetti in a lousy restaurant.

  6.

  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.

  7.

  “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.

  8.

  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.

  9.

  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.

  10.

  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.

  11.

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

  12.

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

  13.

  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.

  14.

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

  15.

  Asked to describe a river, he drowned himself.

  16.

  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.

  Kristu-Du

  The man who brings water shall be blessed.

  He carrieth fat to the cattle,

  ears to the corn.

  The sound of such water can be likened

  to the laughter of children.

  (Traditional Deffala Song)

  1.

  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 warr
iors 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.