Nanowrimo Winner

OK, the pace has slackened a bit (it isn’t Sunday any more) – but here’s chapter 2.

2. Ursin
This morning I came across that little piece I wrote last year about my father bursting into school, and read it again with warm nostalgic pleasure. It wasn’t really the truth that I saw my father at home every day, though. Often he had to go away on journeys, sometimes for weeks at a time. Frequently he slept at the Palace on a camp bed, or in some provincial town where he was making a flying visit. For long stretches of my early life, I saw him only about once a week on average. When he was away, instead of his stories about Robespierre and Lenin, my mother would tell me stories about him: about his own turbulent early life and his role in the Revolution that turned poor backward Dubitania into the Twentyland of today.

I enjoyed reading my little memoir again and I have decided to record here my own version of these stories, or at least my favourites from among them – they might make a little book to give to my father on his birthday. I might even be able to offer some corrective to the silly hagiographic nonsense which has been peddled by some authors, and show that my father was never infallible or superhuman; that in fact his characteristic genius lay specifically in his gift for carrying the generous, egalitarian impulses which motivated his socialism through into its implementation. In this he was always a stark contrast with so many of our otherwise admirable leaders, who love the people but whose golden love seems somehow to be transmuted into the lead of oppressive bureaucracy when they put it into practice, if indeed it does not end up being freely scattered through the barrel of a gun.

Speaking of guns reminds me that his great enemy in those early days was Ursin, the head of the Royal secret police, the so-called Custodes Regin. In my imagination this man was Sheriff of Nottingham to my father’s sprightly Robin Hood. There were many revolutionaries who were hunted by the custodes, but Ursin had picked out my father as the most dangerous of them all.

“There are many Lenins in that man.” he said.

Ursin was a tall man with close-cropped hair and a hooked nose with a black moustache underneath it: he wore big boots and a leather jacket, but in spite of this menacing appearance he was far from being a mere thug and he directed his organisation with diabolical energy and sharp intelligence. He personally supervised the pursuit of my father during the period following the abortive Dacsvillin uprising, when the revolutionary movements were in disorder and many progressive cells were destroyed or exposed. Ursin carried a big black pistol with which he personally executed anyone his agents captured, in flagrant disregard for the law, which even in the Royalist times did not run to summary murder. He seemed to have some sixth sense which told him where his prey had gone to ground, and one after another the leaders and chief members of the different factions were gradually eliminated. But although he came close on many occasions, he could never get my father.

On one occasion, Ursin actually had my father and his old friend Porfri Essedrin trapped in a farmyard with a high wall. They had ventured out into the country to see an old man who claimed to have a cellar full of guns and ammunition; but when they arrived it was clear that the old fellow was senile and had nothing to offer them but rambling monologues about his days in the old Citizen Militia. This was especially annoying as they had twice got lost on the journey and it had already taken them the best part of a day just to get to the old man’s cottage. As they headed back to the road, they caught sight of a black Zastra car which was unmistakably one of those belonging to the custodes (no Robodins for them). Somehow Ursin’s bloodhound nose had put him on their trail yet again.

They turned round at once and set off across country in the opposite direction through a gloomy grove of pine trees, but soon got lost once again. When they emerged from the trees they spotted a farm, a group of low buildings in the distance, and they made their way to it in the hope of finding help. In the trees, however gloomy, they had been out of sight, but now they were dreadfully exposed as they crossed the fields, and must have been seen. Moreover, when they arrived at the farm they found no-one at home and the door securely locked. As they stood irresolutely in the farmyard, surrounded by a high wall, Porfri caught sight of a group of people hurrying across the fields towards them: Ursin at the head of a gang of thugs. Porfri was a huge, muscular man, a true proletarian, who had already protected his comrade in many tight spots. At once he picked up my father and flung him bodily over the top of the wall. From the other side, my father heard the shots that ended poor Porfri’s life. My mother would say when recounting this episode;

“But the good Porfri had saved not only his friend, but his country.”

My father was able to get away back to the nearby woods, where the custodes lost his trail: he arrived back in Sescastri hours later on foot, exhausted, covered in mud, and grief-stricken by the loss of his stalwart comrade.

Another dangerous episode from my father’s earlier life began when he was betrayed by an alienated Party member named Hugo Pertari, whose young wife Anna had named my father at random as her partner in adultery, simply in order to shield her actual lover. The angry cuckold blew my father’s cover to the authorities and the custodes surrounded the house where he was hiding. Hoping to discourage the police from a thorough search of the house, which might reveal clues to the hiding places of more comrades, and knowing that he was surrounded on all sides, my father gave himself up. They handcuffed him and imprisoned him in the Morgin House, the terrible Royal prison made from a 13th century castle, from which no-one had ever escaped. My father had a cold stone cell in the dungeons with only a few handfuls of straw on the floor. But there was an unexpected hiatus. As it happened, Ursin was out of the country at the time: knowing his personal interest in this particular prisoner, the custodes decided to contact him before proceeding. Ursin, as they had foreseen, sent back orders that my father was to be kept alive until he could return to shoot him himself.

At this point, even my father’s dauntless optimism had begun to fade, and he wrote the eloquent little piece which has since been published as Testament, setting out in visionary terms the political journey of his life to that point and what he hoped his legacy might be. But all was not lost.

Anna Pertari, whose husband had now fled the country in fear of the wrath of his fellow Party members, was stricken with guilt at the way she had indirectly sent an innocent man to his death. She managed to make friends with some of the staff at the Morgin House and began helping them on a casual basis, going with some of them right inside the gates on deliveries of fresh laundry. Finally she persuaded the old woman who did most of the work to take a day off and let her handle a delivery alone: amongst the bed linen she smuggled a set of women’s clothes into the prison, and my father escaped under the noses of the negligent guards, dressed as the old woman. The guards were too negligent ever to have noticed that while one woman went in, two had come out, and in fact they were never able to guess how my father had escaped.

“The unfortunate consequence,” my mother would say, “Was that the false story of adultery with Anna Pertari was now taken to be true, since why would the young woman risk her life to save your father otherwise?”

At any rate, this picturesque tale was the origin of the joking toast to the washerwoman which old Dubitanian Communists used to drink (and sometimes they still do). At gatherings where there were others present of differing or uncertain loyalty, they delighted in remarking on the quality of the tablecloth or someone’s shirt, and then proposing “The washerwoman!”*. In Dubitania it was not uncommon for a prolonged series of toasts to degenerate into a more or less frivolous drinking game, so any Royalists, fascists, or bourgeois revisionists present were not especially surprised at this apparently silly toast, and would not hesitate to drink my father’s health unknowingly.

On another occasion, my father actually lost part of his left earlobe. Sitting in the old Café Rosenstrauss reading the newspaper, my father saw a noisy group of custodes approaching with dogs. They were making such a fuss and calling out in such a stagey way that it seemed clear that they wanted to be seen, so suspecting an ambush, my father went discreetly upstairs, crawled out of the toilet window and descended across the roof of an outhouse. Peering down, he was amused to see none other than his old enemy Ursin standing patiently in hiding behind a corner of the building, waiting for my father to come out of the back door. it was a trap, but clumsily set. My father crept around until he was behind a wall set back from the café. He could have got clean away, but some imp tempted him and he could not resist raising his head and shouting;

“The duck has flown!”

He had, he admitted, severely underestimated Ursin’s presence of mind: the agent whipped round so quickly and fired so accurately that he blew off my father’s earlobe, and my father had to run away streaming a trail of blood everywhere. Only by running down to the river and leaping on to a passing coal barge did he escape with his life.

“The shot was perfect,” my father said, “It was only because my head jerked to one side that it missed my brain. I truly think that if the word ‘duck’ had not been in my mind at the time, I should have stood still and been shot. I must put this to the People’s Psychological Institute – an interesting point for them to research. In the end, I found out that Ursin wasn’t even after me that day; he was looking for Grigori Asbertin the syndicalist, who as a matter of fact was lurking in the cellar in a state of suicidal panic. So I should have kept my egotistical mouth shut and slipped quietly away. What makes it worse is that when Asbertin heard the shooting he thought he was doomed; he put a rope through a hook and hanged himself down there in the cellar, among all the barrels, poor fellow.”

My father’s own favourite story, however, was about the time he went as a fraternal delegate to a meeting of the Democratic Socialist Union of Dubitania, in a side room off the old Town Hall of Merovia, a medieval suburb of Sescastri. Before the meeting had reached item two on the agenda, which is to say after about three hours, there was a heavy knocking on the door, and the session was interrupted by a detachment of the ordinary criminal police, who had somehow heard a garbled report that a seditious and disorderly meeting was in progress. As it happened, the socialists were prepared for this: they had an enormous picture of King Francis on the wall, and a false agenda written up on a board, and they succeeded in persuading the police that they were in fact a branch of the Dubitanian Royalist League.

Things had reached this happy stage, with the police tendering genial apologies, and the supposed Royalists competing to see who could push obsequious deference closest to the limit of plausibility, when it occurred to my father that if the simple police had got to know about the meeting, it could hardly have failed to reach the ears of Ursin. So he drew the commanding officer of the police squad aside and confided in him. Having conferred amongst themselves, he explained, the Royalists, feared that the story the police had heard meant that their arch enemy Marki Larvartin and his gang of thugs were coming to attack them. They thought it was best to close the meeting and evacuate at once, and he would advise the police to leave, too. Naturally, the police declared that they were not going to run away, but would be only to pleased to encounter these ferocious insurgents, of whom they had all heard. My father praised their boldness. Larvartin, he said, was easily recognised by his close-cropped hair, his black moustache and the leather jacket he invariably wore.

So, the supposed Royalists deferred the rest of their meeting and made their way uneventfully to safety. But from the security of the roof of a neighbouring inn, my father then watched the entertaining spectacle of the Dubitanian police attempting to arrest Ursin, who had arrived less than twenty minutes after the socialists’ retreat. Ursin had only a few of his men with him, which left his side heavily outnumbered; and he was obviously taken by surprise at first, but he and his men were bigger and more capable fighters than the policemen, so all in all it was a well-matched contest.

The tale of Ursin has, as everyone knows, an instructive twist. Some years later, after the war, it was Ursin who found himself in the Morgin House, which was used for a time by the triumphant Red Army to hold prisoners of special importance. My father, of course, went to see him; Ursin refused to speak to him at first.

But my father was not easily thwarted.

“You have been after me for some time now, Juri Ursin,” he remarked, “You have killed many of my best friends and very nearly killed me. I think you personally have held back the revolution in Dubitania for many years. How would you deal with an enemy like that? I think we must find a suitable way for you to pay your debt.”

Ursin merely grunted. My father reached into his pocket and took out Ursin’s own big black pistol, which had been confiscated on his arrest.

“You know,” my father said, “I heard the story of you in the trench at Porti. You and six young soldiers were cut off there and besieged for fourteen days with scarcely any food. On the fifteenth day, one of the soldiers somehow caught a mouse: they butchered it with an opinelca,* boiled it up in a can and brought it loyally to you as their commander. But you said – is this true? You said: there are no officers in this trench, only brothers and Dubitanians. I will not eat until everyone eats, and I don’t mean to die until everyone dies either. Is this true?”

“Yes, it’s true, damn you. Any one of those boys was worth ten of you.”

“Maybe – though you’ve surely heard that I too fought the invaders of our country, and alongside Royalists, too. In a different way and another place, of course. I’m glad the story of the trench is true, anyway. I thought that was the true spirit of our country, that history had somehow made a hero of you after all.”

“Don’t mock what you don’t understand.”

“No mockery, Comrade. You had it dead right. No officers, only brothers. I don’t eat until everyone eats. That’s what Communism means to me, Ursin no more and no less. We must build our country on those principles. You were a true Communist in that trench, although you didn’t have the advantage of knowing it.”

“What?”

My father stood up for a moment and looked Ursin in the eye.

“I can’t make a country if all I have with me are my old comrades, Ursin. I want you too. I want you to be my Controller of Police. If you won’t do it, if people like you can’t recapture the patriotic spirit of that trench, then the land is doomed, and you might as well shoot me. One way or another the chase ends here. But think first. Think what we might make of this country if we work together.”

With that, he handed over the pistol.

Ursin held it for a while, staring at it as though he couldn’t understand what it was any more. Then he softly put it down on the table.

So you see, my mother would conclude when she related this tale, your father’s silly ideas about Louis XVI in a clockmaker’s shop – the man wasn’t fit to sweep the streets, let alone mend clocks – are not idle words. When it came to it, he was prepared to put his principles into action, even if it meant overlooking the murder of his best friend and many attempts on his own life. I must tell you honestly, Lucia, that I should not have done it; I should have had Ursin put away for the rest of his life. But your father saw something in him and was able to draw it out. Controller Ursin was reclaimed; he became a decent servant of the state, efficient and tenacious, but fair and even merciful at times. To this day he is among your father’s most valued administrators, she would insist.

But you know, I don’t suppose there were any bullets in that pistol.

* There is a pun of sorts here: in Dubitanian, ‘Lavratina’ = washerwoman
* The opinelca is a traditional Dubitanian shepherd’s knife, supposedly designed for fighting wolves.

Total to date: 6,353 words. Just a bit ahead of schedule.