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13. A Conversation with Marki Larvartin

The secretary gazed disapprovingly at the young woman over the top of his glasses. It was clear that in his view she had no right to be sitting in the spacious anteroom, once perhaps the dressing room of a Grand Duchess or a Princess; still full of large and rather uninspired oil paintings depicting scenes from classical mythology, but now also fitted with rows of filing cabinets in battleship grey, and three or four desks. This was a room for senior bureaucrats to cool their heels in, hoping nervously that their briefing papers would be deemed satisfactory, or possibly wondering in fear why they were about to be rebuked.

The young woman, about seventeen or eighteen, was dressed well; that is to say, in the style of someone who enjoyed access to Sescastri’s foreign currency shops, and perhaps even to foreign shops. But she lacked the bovine confidence that normally went with being the daughter of a high official; she seemed angry and nervous.

All at once the door of the President’s office opened with a bang; the secretary flinched in shock. There he stood on the threshold, Marki Larvartin himself, greyer and a little more florid than the framed picture on the secretary’s desk, but unmistakably the Hero of the Twenty.

“Lucia!” he exclaimed, “What are you waiting there for? Anton, you fool,” he turned to the secretary, “Why didn’t you show her in immediately? Get us tea, please. Come in Lucia.”

The girl’s face went through a rapid change when Larvartin appeared. First, an unthinking brilliant smile flashed into view, an expression which transformed her whole appearance for a moment, then it was at once replaced by a more considered scowl. She stood and followed the President into his office.

The President of Twentyland had old-fashioned taste, or perhaps he merely deferred to the overwhelming grandeur of the Agraci Palace. His office was a huge room, richly carpeted and hung with long velvet curtains. Over by one wall, on which hung a painting of the Oath of the Horatii , clearly but distantly inspired by the work of David, was a long mahogany desk with orderly piles of paper ranged across it. On the other side of the room there were chairs and a low marble topped table: on the wall hung an eighteenth-century Bohemian tapestry depicting in fanciful detail the Defenestration of Prague.

“Lucia!” said her father, enfolding her in a bear hug which she did not resist, and leading her to an ornate armchair, “So good to see you. How is your mother?”

“She… she is well,” said Lucia hesitantly, “Although of course things are not so easy as they were. Was it really necessary to take away her job and her flat?”

“Listen,” said Larvartin at once, in a conciliatory tone, “I didn’t do that. Your mother was one of my private secretaries. When she lost her temper with me, when she left me, she never wanted to see me again, much less carry my bags around to meetings all day. She asked for a transfer. The job she got, I know it’s a long way off and it’s dull compared to working in the Palace, and also she doesn’t get special allowances any more. But it was the job the system assigned her. It’s what she asked for. With the flat, it’s the same thing; the old place was my place; she didn’t want it, she didn’t want anything from me, you understand. It was not by my wish that she moved out: I asked her to stay – don’t you believe me?”

“Hm,” said Lucia, the wind slightly taken out of her sails by this different perspective.

There was a knock at the door and a maid carrying a tray came in with tea. Smiling brilliantly first at Larvartin and then with scarcely diminished enthusiasm at Lucia, she set out cups and saucers and withdrew.

“Would you…?” asked Larvartin, and with bad grace Lucia poured the tea.

“You know,” she resumed at last, “I always thought when I was small that we lived in an ordinary worker’s apartment. I thought everyone had a place like that, or better. Now I realise it was a flat big enough for twelve people, it was near the Castelveci; it was furnished with antiques and modern electrical appliances and it had central heating. When we moved, I though we were going to a similar place, but we went far away to a mildewed concrete box scarcely big enough for a rabbit, where the stairs smell of urine and there are power cuts every day. And I realised that there were hundreds, thousands just like it, that this is normal in Twentyland, that in fact there are many people who live in worse conditions.”

“Listen, Lucia,” said her father, “If you want, I will call Anton in here; if your mother will only consent, you and she can move back into the old place tomorrow, and she can have a job as a personal secretary in the Foreign Relations Service; she won’t need to see me, only nice people. She can work for that young fellow Leo Asmodin, he’s very handsome, the one the secretaries call the film star, she can correct his ideology, it will do him good. Or not if she doesn’t want to. Shall I do that? What do you think your mother will say? Will it be thank you very much, or will she spit in my eye and refuse everything? You know your mother, you know how she will behave, but seriously if you think it is worth trying I will do it now. OK?”

Lucia grimaced. She knew, unfortunately, that he was essentially right.

“Why did you lie to me so much?” she demanded, “Why didn’t you just explain how things were, instead of leaving me to find out?”

“Well, it’s true our housing in the capital here is not yet as good as we should like…”

“Not that!” she exclaimed, furiously, “Not about that! About you, and her, and me. You let me go on thinking we were a perfect family. You let me make an idiot of myself telling people you weren’t married because of my mother’s feminist principles. You just treated me…”

“Like a child? Oh. I’m sorry, Lucia, it was bad, I know. But put yourself in my place. Do you explain these things to a four-year old? Or next year? Or when is the good time when you tell them everything?”

“Neither of you ever explained.” she went on, “And no-one else dared talk to me about you. It wasn’t until you broke up. Then I was walking through the streets one day, and there was a big crowd heading for the Palace. They said you were making a speech, and they all had to go. I thought it was funny that they didn’t know who I was, and I went along with them. I thought you might see me and wave back. Anyway I went along, and there you were on the balcony, waving – and there was some awful fat woman like an opera singer, covered in jewels. They told me it was your wife. They thought I must be stupid, or a foreigner or something, not to know. Do you think that was a good way to find out that you were married, had always been married – just not to my mother?”

“Ah.” said Larvartin, frowning, “You know I haven’t slept with Esmeralda since 1952. We are just keeping up appearances, really, it’s stupid I know but she insists, and she has her rights, you know.”

“Keeping up appearances? That’s a good one. All the time I thought you were living with us, you were living at the Palace with your wife and four children. And also you were living in another flat with the junior Minister of Trade. And God knows how many casual mistresses you had besides. There was a man in the crowd who took pleasure in telling me all about your masculine prowess. I think he could see I was shocked, though he had no idea… He told me… he told me that every time a new prostitute is registered in Sescastri, she has to be personally “approved” by you. I didn’t think we even had prostitutes since the revolution.”

“Oh, that’s nonsense, Lucia,” he protested, “I’m not as good a man as I should have been, but I don’t believe I’m as bad as you think, either… You must understand, a man in my position, it’s not that I go after women, they come after me, all the time. Really, I’m under pressure at all times from women hardly older than you. You know I said to your mother once, isn’t she glad she never has to queue for anything the way everyone else does, and she said – it was a little coarse, I’m sorry, she was angry – she said, oh, I queue alright comrade, in Sescastri they call it horizontal queuing. You know, Lucia there are plenty of women who want to shove into that queue. And I’m only human. I try to do my best, you know, it’s not always easy. ”

“I was such a fool,” she complained, “I thought you were so wonderful. I wrote a little booklet about your wonderful life. I thought I was telling the real truth, instead of that ridiculous official biography.”

“Oh, Mischkoff? You know that was done by the Russians, he never even came here. It was one of a series on Leaders of the Communist Nations. Then they translated it into Dubitanian, and what was I to do? People started buying it; I couldn’t ban it, exactly, could I?”

“But why couldn’t you have been just a little more honest? It was such a shock. I thought I was the beloved daughter of our great leader, and then I find I’m just the last and least of the bastards of some horrible old lecher.” She had been speaking with her eyes lowered, but now she couldn’t quite help glancing up at him to see whether she had gone too far.

“You’re not the least, Lucia, you’re the best. I’m sorry you found out the way you did, but you are my beloved daughter; what’s more you’re the only one of my children with any brains. The rest, you know, I love them too, but somehow they all have brains of solid Servinian oak. Sometimes I think I must be extremely stupid myself, to have such children. My daughter Felicia Pertari, she was the best at school apart from you, but if she were here, do you know what she would say? She would say ‘Uh?’ and she would carry on chewing gum. That’s what she always says. As for the boys, well, I think we must have some Neanderthal genes in the family somewhere, truly if they could learn to bang rocks together it would be a triumph for the socialist educational system.”

“It’s no good.” said Lucia, “It’s no good trying to be funny, it’s no good trying to flatter and tempt me. You don’t understand what you’ve done to me. It’s not just something to be swept away with a few stupid promises. I didn’t come here for that. All I want you to do is give permission for me to leave the country. I want to go and study abroad. In Italy. In Padua. I may not come back. That’s all I want from you.”

Her father pulled a face.

“That’s a lot, Lucia,” he said, seeming genuinely shaken, “To let my own daughter go, like that? I need someone to help me, to carry on my work, Lucia. I thought it would be you. Can’t we work things out?”

She shook her head without speaking. Larvartin frowned and his face darkened.

“The truth, that was all I needed!” she burst out suddenly, “Is that so much to ask?”

Larvartin stared at her.

“Listen, Lucia,” he said, “I’ll do a deal here. You think I let you down, I lied so badly? OK, you want the truth. I’d like you to know the truth. Take it from me, you don’t know it yet. First you take that booklet of yours and show it to Lucas Stilin. He knows everything, that’s why he’s here. I’ll tell him he’s to tell you the story as it really was. The whole truth. Then you can go if you want, but for three years only. But also you should go to Paris, I think, not Padua.”

Lucia stood up uncertainly, and while she hesitated Larvartin seized her again in a crushing embrace. He seemed to have cheered up again.

“Lucas will be glad to have someone to tell all that stuff to at last” he said, “And if you’re going to be President one day, you need to know, eh?”

After the door had closed behind her he stood for a moment staring after her. He shook his head, turned and sat behind his desk. .

“Stilin?” he shouted, “Stilin! Take those headphones off and come in here.”

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