Nanowrimo Winner

4. Uncle Tibri

I have before me a battered copy of the biography written by V.I. Mischkoff: Marki Larvartin: Father of his country! If this account is to be believed, my father was an exemplary socialist virtually from the cradle: there are stories of how at school he intervened in a discussion of the First World War in order to explain the class basis of the struggle and discountenance the royalist nonsense being peddled by his teachers. At one time it seems, if Mischkoff is to be believed, he actually led a small insurrection of the younger pupils which succeeded in redistributing the contents of the Headmaster’s private pantry to needy families in the poorer districts of Sescastri, and then by the sheer moral force of his gaze shamed the authorities out of caning him.

But none of that bears any relation to reality, and in my opinion the true story is much more interesting. The Larvartin family were not, as Mischkoff would have it, manual workers; my grandfather was a moderately prosperous technician who had a responsible supervisory job in the Sestenburg brewery, the same place where my father was for a time a clerk. Both boys went to a decent school, but it was my father’s elder brother Tibri who really displayed promise, working hard while my father played football, winning prizes for his essays and ultimately a scholarship to university. It was Tibri, also, who first espoused radical views, though he favoured Kropotkin and Proudhon over Marx and Lenin: some of my father’s old comrades say they detect traces of Tibri’s anarchism in my father’s later thinking, but I don’t know about that: my father was always an eclectic reader and liked to maintain friendly relations with the leading lights of all strands of radical opinion. Really I think his views have always been entirely his own.

At any rate, to begin with it was Tibri who got himself involved with dangerous friends. I have never been able to find out whether my grandparents had leftist sympathies, but they must surely have been concerned that their talented son, who had seemed likely to become a successful lawyer or civil servant, was turning into a dissident pursued by the custodes. Although Tibri somehow managed to sit his final exams and emerge once again with dazzling results, he was forced into hiding immediately afterwards.

In those days, my mother told me, Marki Larvartin used to reproach his brother with having had his head turned by too much book-learning; he, on the contrary, had a steady job in the brewery and knew what real life was all about. I’ve never heard anyone say that my father was ever a Royalist or even a supporter of one of the bourgeois parties, but at this stage of his life he seems to have disdained politics, and was more concerned, first with his progress as a promising goal-keeper in the local amateur team, and second with the business of brewing: his highest ambition in those days was to set up in the beer business on his own account, and he spent a good deal of time mastering the details of the process, learning about malting and fermentation and no doubt stealing a look at the supposedly secret recipe for Sestenburger Doppelbock.

At the time of my story, the government of King Francis was making one of its panicky short-lived lurches towards liberalisation; the Dubitanian Assembly had been brought out of mothballs and a middle-class figure from one of the bourgeois parties had been appointed as Chancellor with a mandate to reform the tax system along progressive lines, abolishing the oppressive feudal levies which had been a source of so much unrest, and removing the anomalous exemptions which effectively subsidised the aristocratic class.

Unusually, the Royal Council, or perhaps it really was the King himself, had chosen a man of real ability. Chancellor Lodovi Manumin was a decent, patriotic man: intelligent, resourceful, and flexible, and although he had accepted a limited remit and constrained powers, he certainly had in mind the progressive establishment of bourgeois democracy in the guise of a constitutional monarchy along Dutch lines.

His tax reforms were introduced adroitly, without provoking the confrontation with the upper classes which had doomed all previous attempts. By offering attractive temporary concessions as a quid pro quo, he beguiled the aristocracy into accepting the withdrawal of three of the four most damaging exemptions. Taking advantage of a favourable stage in the economic cycle, he also progressively mitigated the impact of the land levies, doing just enough to calm the unrest which had been developing without imperilling the stability of the government’s finances.

Tibri and his friends watched all this with concern. They were used to being able to rely on the idiocy of their Royalist enemies, and they did not relish the arrival of a Chancellor gifted with foresight and charm. It seemed all too likely that if Manumin could buy himself enough time, he would succeed in taking Dubitania through a peaceful transition to stable bourgeois democracy. They decided, accordingly, that Manumin must be assassinated.

In later life, my father could not conceal his scorn for this reasoning. The anarchists had concluded that history was being determined by the actions of a single individual? Incredible. Did they not know that society had to pass through the bourgeois stage in order to move on from feudalism? If conditions required a Manumin, then Manumins would appear; if not, hundreds of Manumins would make no difference. They should have been taking everything he offered, supporting and hastening his programme in order to bring forward the inevitable economic crisis and the generation of pre-revolutionary conditions. Instead they thought the process of world historical development would be thwarted if one man died – and that they should therefore bring it about? My brilliant brother thought that? Thank God I never went to that University, but spent my time in proper empirical study of the material conditions of reality, he would conclude.

It may actually be the case that Tibri’s judgement was swayed by Manumin’s quiet modernisation of the Custodes Regin, which instead of a lazy cadre of corrupt and bribable aristocrats now became a blend of hard-working, ambitious, middle-class administrators and vicious gutter-fascist thugs, repellent but far more effective than their lordly predecessors. I believe it was Manumin’s reforms which gave Ursin his first promotions. At any rate the custodes began, as a result, to make life much harder for the anarchists. In the past, few of them had ever been arrested, and nothing worse than a few months in jail had followed: now, however, three of Tibri’s close associates were shot in the streets like dogs within the space of a couple of months.

At any rate, the plan the anarchists settled on was to strike while Manumin was presenting prizes at the annual Guild of St Luke art exhibition. Several of the anarchists had friends or relatives who were exhibiting paintings or sculpture, and it was relatively easy for them to obtain passes and smuggle equipment into the building during the Varnishing Day which preceded the opening.

They hired the upper room in the Grand Café nearby as their centre of operations, posing as a philately club. Three separate Infernal Machines were constructed, each sufficient to blow a large hole in the picture gallery: the first was to be installed in a strategic location and was timed to detonate when Manumin was making his speech: the second was to be placed further along the route in case the first one failed: it would catch Manumin as he paused for refreshments with selected guests; and the third would be carried by a volunteer, who if all else failed would throw himself on the Chancellor and blow both himself and his victim to pieces. All three were concealed in suitcases. The amateur chemist who had constructed them warned they were not as stable as he could have wished, and should not be subjected to violent movement before they were required to explode.

Unfortunately, the second Infernal Machine was installed in front of a large bronze figure of Andromeda. It was put there to make sure that the victim was not sheltered from the blast by Andromeda’s uncharacteristically beefy limbs, which she was holding out before her, presumably in fear of an approaching monster; but coming in early for a last check on the set-up, the sculptor resented the intrusion of the suitcase in front of his work and attempted to move the suitcase away, brusquely and imprudently heaving it into a corner.

Down the street in the upper room of the Café, the conspirators were startled by a thunderous bang which made the windows rattle. There was still half an hour before Manumin was due to appear. They looked at each other in consternation, and sent one of their number, a fellow called Tulli Forobdin, to check what had happened.

He returned fifteen minutes later to report that the second Infernal Machine had torn a huge hole in the gallery and destroyed several of the works of art, killing the unfortunate sculptor and one curator who had happened to be standing nearby. Andromeda had suffered only superficial damage. There was no trace of the anarchists’ suicide bomber; perhaps he had taken fright at the explosion and gone into hiding. However, Forobdin explained with pride, he personally had succeeded in retrieving the first Infernal Machine, still intact, and had brought it back with him. He held up the heavy suitcase to be admired.

The terrified anarchists dived under tables, shouting that he would kill them all; and swearing volubly Tibri told Forobdin to take his bomb back to the gallery. Manumin might still arrive there within the next few minutes.

Forobdin hurried away, but as soon as he had left a waiter appeared. There had been, he said, a most regrettable accident at the art gallery; an explosion of some kind. Chancellor Manumin and his guests had been diverted and wanted to go on with the prize ceremony they had been planning to hold, but needed an alternative location. They were waiting outside; would the loyal philatelists be willing to let them use the upper room in these special circumstances?

Smiling as best he could, Tibri agreed. As the distinguished party was filing into the upper room, he grabbed another accomplice and whispering fiercely in his ear told him to go and get Forobdin to bring the Infernal Machine back again. Too late: a moment later there was a second window-rattling explosion as another section of the gallery was destroyed, together with poor Forobdin and the three policemen who had just apprehended him.

Enraged now by the absurd sight of Chancellor Manumin himself approaching with outstretched hand and a grateful smile on his face, Tibri seized a carving knife from the table and fell on his target. Manumin, startled, defended himself with his ebony walking stick. He was attended on this ceremonial occasion, not by his usual efficient bodyguards but by Palace guardsmen in frogged uniforms and plumed shakoes. All of them were young aristocrats who were fit and expert at fencing; but they were taken by surprise and did not step forward to seize Tibri. Somehow the other anarchists were equally struck by irresolution and hung back passively; for several minutes both sides stood and watched the deadly struggle between the young anarchist and the middle-aged politician as if it were a prize fight. Tibri had the advantage of surprise, youth, and a deadly weapon; but the grey-haired Chancellor defended himself with agility and desperation. In the end the resolution of the situation was left to the Dowager Duchess Agrippinilla, a noted patron of the arts and former amateur tennis champion of Lexandrin province. Glancing in disgust at the useless men filling the room, she took up a brass table lamp and felled Tibri with a single vicious back-handed sweep to the head.

Poor Tibri regained consciousness as he was being bundled towards a police van outside; he could see the Chancellor and guests being ushered to safety. At that moment there was a third colossal bang, louder than ever, as the errant suicide bomber, returning the third suitcase to base, as he thought, was seized and thrown to the floor by the police in the upper room of the café . Pieces of glass and debris from the second storey of the building rained down everywhere, and in the ensuing confusion Tibri managed to escape and retreat to his parents’ house; unfortunately his head wound was serious, and too afraid to visit a hospital, he died a few days later.

This shambles nevertheless achieved its objective, inasmuch as the three explosions caused considerable alarm among the ruling class: pressure was brought to bear on the King and Manumin was removed from his post, to be replaced by a dim-witted General who prorogued the Assembly and brought in a new era of repression which would have been fully satisfactory to the anarchists if any had survived the explosion in the upper room of the Grand Café. One of the General’s first acts was to proscribe the pursuit of stamp-collecting, and imprison all of Dubitania’s leading philatelists, a setback from which the hobby, formerly in an admirably advanced condition in our country, has never really recovered.

This tragicomic incident, or perhaps simply his brother’s death, awakened my father’s interest in politics. He was shocked, and perhaps felt obscurely guilty. For the first time he entertained the idea that there might be a need to take Tibri’s principles seriously. He put back on the shelf his great tomes about wort and specific gravity, and began reading a different kind of work; first Tibri’s books, then more from the library. He was seduced by the beauty of Hegelian dialectic; he devoured The Communist Manifesto, and Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? Soon even the library was exhausted – its stock of political reading was meagre – and my father joined a Worker’s Reading Club, an organisation partly funded, as he was piqued to discover much later, by the Soviet Union.

Many of his fellow readers were already members of the small official Dubitanian Communist Party, and it was here that my father first fell in with Porfri Essedrin and Lucas Stilin. The two of them were already fast friends, although the contrast between the portly Essedrin and the stick-like Stilin had won them the nicknames ‘Latitude and Longitude’. Pavari, the wrinkled old Party Chairman, was not a slovenly man: his hair was always oiled and his pencil moustache neatly trimmed; but when my father began going round with Stilin and Essedrin in his incongruously smart clerk’s suit, the chairman remarked:

“So it seems we now have Latitude, Longitude – and Rectitude.”

I imagine my grandparents must have feared that their second son was going the way of the first, but for a long time Marki evaded the attention of the custodes, and remained outwardly an impeccably respectable brewery clerk. Within the Party, however, his stock rose rapidly; he was always an effective speaker, with a down-to-earth manner and a sense of humour that won him many allies and friends.

But it was not until the Dacsvillin rising that he really came to prominence, and at first he had many difficulties with his fellow Party members.

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