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14. Stilin’s Story

I don’t think Lucas Stilin can ever have been a man who looked healthy and vigorous, but now – I suppose he must have been in his seventies or even his eighties, it was hard to tell – he seemed half skeleton, half ghost.

He had a small office of his own, not in the Agraci Palace but in the ugly new glass-and-concrete Tabula House next door, where the administration of the country increasingly took place. It was a complete contrast to my father’s huge and luxuriously appointed room; Stilin’s office resembled a cell, and the furniture was all brand new, of low quality. I suppose the way he followed my father around meant that he was hardly ever in his own office, so perhaps it didn’t matter much to him what it was like. There was only one picture on the wall; not the ubiquitous portrait of my father, but one of Chou En-Lai.

He offered me a seat across the desk from him, carefully placed his cigarette in the ash tray, and sat fiddling with some papers for a long time. I had, with some reluctance, given him a copy of my little booklet about my father, and I could see it on his desk.

“Lucia… may I call you Lucia?”, he began, “Your father’s instructions have placed me in a difficult situation.”

“I don’t altogether see why, Comrade Stilin, He merely asked you to tell me the truth about him.”

“Yes, yes. That’s it, you see.” He frowned at me as if I had said something improper. “Let’s see if we can approach the issue by talking about your manuscript. Hm. I liked it very much. I believe you have some talent.”

“Thank you.”

“But of course, I would be bound to like it, since in a way I had a hand in writing it.”

“What?”

“You’ve written a nice account here, I like it very much, but you didn’t invent it, did you? No, of course not. You got it from your mother, and added the simple style which makes it so charming. But now. Your mother – she didn’t invent it either?”

“No, of course not,” I replied, a little indignantly.

“No, No, I know your mother a little, of course, Lucia, and I think I can safely say that she never invented anything, A woman of formidable intelligence, and no imagination whatsoever. In fact, if I may stop beating about the bush – I am the, the inventor of most of these stories.”

I stared at him in incomprehension.

“Did you ever wonder, Lucia, why your father kept me by him all the time? How it was that I was still alive and not in the cellars – but I forget, you wouldn’t wonder about that. The thing is, your father is a man of action, Lucia: he isn’t really very good with words, especially if they have to be written down. Since very early on, he has used me as the one to give him sonorous speeches, pithy sayings, and homely wisdom; rationalize his actions, and invent the uplifting story of his life.”

We gazed at each other in silence.

“Now, I think you have come to a place where you can slightly understand my problem. When your father sent you to me, he asked me to tell you the truth. But he did not mean the truth. He meant, Lucas, once again I want you to vindicate me, to provide an account that will make me look good, at least superficially. There are three problems for me.”

He sat back and sighed.

“One is that my ingenuity is limited, and frankly I don’t see how I can give you a sufficiently flattering account that will remain at all plausible when you begin to be able to look into the matter yourself. The second problem is that I should like to tell you the real truth, to take your father’s instruction literally. It’s time I told someone, I shall not live much longer. The third problem is… well in your own interests I think there are certain things you ought to know. We’ll come to that. So what are we to do? How about this? I propose to you an agreement, Lucia: I will tell you the truth, if you promise to try to continue to behave as if your father was the most wonderful man in the world. Is that acceptable?”

“No. No promises. I don’t even know why I’m listening to this nonsense.”

“Very well, in that case I don’t know what more I can say. We must take it that your booklet is the truth, and very well told: I do like what you have done with my inventions.”

He wriggled in his chair and stared at me owlishly. There was a lengthy silence. It was in reality perhaps no more than a few minutes, but a few minutes in these circumstances is a long time.

“Oh very well,” he said at last, “You insist that I sign my own death warrant, or rather something much worse. Of course, I knew you would. Very well: I am an old man, and very wicked; I cannot say that you are unjust. But you must promise me one thing at least. The whole story will take some time to tell. You don’t talk to your father at all, not about any of this, until I have finished. Is that much agreed?”

“Alright,” I said, with foreboding, And so it began.

“Let’s use your booklet to start with,” said Stilin, “Let’s see if we can correct a few things.”

Stilin said it was my mother’s scruples rather than my father’s that prevented my status being made public from the start. My father, he said, felt no shame about his additional families, and although he could not acknowledge them all formally was more than happy to have them known. He even took some of his children on public visits: Felicia often went on trips with him; she had opened a new library once, apparently, and no-one had thought anything of it.

“You know now, at any rate, why you did not live at the Palace,” he said, “And that your father did, some of the time at least. You know too, that there is no lunatic asylum – or mental hospital – in the cellars of the Agraci Palace?”

I shook my head mutely.

“Well there isn’t. At least, not unless we consider that anyone who attracts your father’s resentment is a lunatic. You’ve heard of the Morgin House, the old Royalist prison? All the torture equipment was brought from there, and has been considerably improved and developed since. Your father reserves the cellars for prisoners he likes to keep close and visit occasionally. Many of his old comrades are down there. Pavari, for example, what’s left of him. A couple of members of the original Twenty – Slavin, Noforin. Officially they’re dead, but in fact they were not so lucky. It’s something of a surprise that I’m not down there myself, but I’ve made it my business to survive, for some reason.” He chuckled in a dry, dusty way.

Overall, he told me, there were currently about 200 special prisoners in the cellars of the Agraci Palace. My father would visit them from time to time, force new confessions from them, invented crimes, make them swear to ludicrous things, for no other reason than his own amusement. He would try out new tortures, and for certain prisoners he had special ‘projects’ which had been specially devised for them. I’m afraid I told Stilin not to tell me about these; it was too much.

On my father’s sex life there was much more. Stilin confirmed, at least, that the horrid story about my father approving new recruits to the trade of prostitution in Sescastri was exaggerated; however, at one stage my father and certain close cronies took to making ‘research trips’ to the city’s many brothels, during which they would compete to see how many girls they could ‘reform’ in the course of a night. The larger and more prosperous of the Sescastri houses of ill repute accepted these visits as an unavoidable overhead, and would try to ensure that experienced staff who were ready to cater to my father’s particular tastes were the only ones on duty at the time; but sometimes in the case of smaller or newer enterprises my father’s sudden appearance had led to regrettable misunderstandings, uncontrolled violence, and even fatalities.

My father, Stilin said, did not confine his attentions to prostitutes and his several mistresses and concubines.

“That time we came to your classroom?” he said, pointing a finger at me, “Of course I was not in a position to hear, but I think I can guess what it was he whispered to your teacher. A time, an address, a room number. She was a fairly attractive young woman, as I recall. Perhaps, forgive me, that was the real reason for the visit.”

According to Stilin, it seemed that there was only one member of the current Council of Twenty whose wife or daughter had not been ravished by my father, and that was Jakoubian, whose sole female relation was his mother, a revolting hag of well over ninety. My father apparently used this as one of his jokes at meetings of the Council; when the options for solving some problem were running out, he would say it looked as if he might be forced to visit Jakoubian’s mother after all.

“But these are powerful men, surely?” I asked, “Why is it that they allow themselves to be humiliated like that?”

“You must remember that your father is in complete control of the police and the armed forces,” said Stilin, “These Twenty Council men may be running the country, but a misplaced word from any of them, even at the formal Council meetings themselves, and they would be dragged from their chairs and shot. They always try to stop your father meeting any members of their families. Do you know Georgia Faratrin? She would only be a few years older than you.”

I shook my head.

“She was the daughter of Grigori Faratrin, Minister of Social Policy, and a member of the Council. A beautiful young girl, no more than fifteen at the time. Unluckily your father came across her one day and invited the Faratrin family to a dinner. When it became clear what he wanted, the girl’s mother Sophia begged and pleaded with him to leave the girl alone, all to no avail; finally, in desperation, she offered herself as a substitute on condition he would spare her daughter. Well, Sophia was only in her thirties, and still an attractive woman; your father agreed and took her immediately into a private chamber, which led directly off the dining room – just like that. Georgia and her father sat in frozen silence at the cold dinner table for half an hour, armed guards all around them, and then they heard your father’s voice shouting from inside the chamber. Cautiously they went to the door. Inside, Sophia Faratrin was lying unconscious on a couch, naked, bruised, and bleeding from the head. Your father, also stark naked, was sitting in an armchair with a glass of brandy. ‘Good, but not good enough,’ he said: ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to have the daughter after all.’ ”

“She was only fifteen?”

“I believe so. I’m sorry to shock you, but please believe that I think frankness about all this is in your own best interest at the moment.”

He told me that many years ago now, my father took Glauci Vespin, the Minister for Education, to visit the famous Armenian girls’ school in Livorin. When they got there, he felt that the Minister seemed glum.

“It’s your wife, isn’t it, Glauci?” said my father, “You need a young woman to cheer you up – like one of these.”

“These are too young for me, Marki,” said the terrified Minister.

“Nonsense. I tell you what, let’s see how low you can go. Pick one out, go on. They’d be honoured, I’m sure. I’ll ask the headmistress to get you a room.” and then with sudden freezing menace, he demanded “Or are you disdaining my hospitality?”

I told Stilin I could not believe these revolting stories; they must be apocryphal.

“I was there,” he said, calmly “I was always there. You know that. These eyes, these ears.”

“I can’t believe, at any rate, that my mother was aware of all this.”

“No,” agreed Stilin, “Not all of it. There’s plenty more if you want to hear it, Lucia, more and worse.”

“Worse?”

“Oh yes. Things that made Ursin himself cover his eyes, though in his way he was as bad as your father. Wicked, but not so mad.”

“You think my father is insane?”

“Yes. I would call it mad. He hides it well, but not from me. We’ll come to that later on, and you can form your own opinion. Do you still want to go on?”

I hesitated.

“Yes,” I said, “Yes, go on. But no more about the… the sex.”

“Very well,” said Stilin, “So let us move on the second chapter of your booklet, and now is the time to speak more of Controller Ursin, who has played such a large and important part in your father’s remarkable achievements.”

“No more now,” I protested, “No more.”

There was another long silence. Stilin took out a new cigarette and lit it.

“Will you come back tomorrow?” he asked.

“Yes. Yes.”

“And you remember, do not speak to your father. It’s probably best you don’t see him at all. Otherwise I shall be in the cellars before I can finish the story.”

He smiled without a trace of genuine mirth, stood and came round the desk: I had not noticed that the door had been locked behind me, but now he opened it again, and let me out.

38,858 words