Nanowrimo Winner

6. The Dacsvillin Rising

The picturesque walled city of Dacsvillin in the western plains of Dubitania was predominantly German-speaking, and indeed was more commonly known to most of its inhabitants as Dachsenfeld. Though the architecture was medieval, attitudes were modern and the socialist movement there had a particularly strong hold on the majority community. The surrounding province, by contrast, was thickly covered with small villages full of peasants of lukewarm Royalist sympathies who spoke Latio, an old Dubitanian dialect said to have its roots in the common speech of ancient Roman soldiers. There had been a degree of tension between the communities for many years, and this was exacerbated when the growing population of the Latio quarter of the city began to spill over into traditionally German districts.

In response to the threat which they felt this posed, the German Socialists now set up a volunteer militia, and began to stockpile rifles and other armaments. This provoked some concern, and there were a few small incidents: some windows broken, some bruises and black eyes; but the socialist militia acted with restraint, no-one was shot, complaints were given a hearing, and after a few weeks things seemed to be calming down.

At this least opportune moment, the government decided that it was losing control of the city, and that the militia should be disbanded and its arsenal seized, by force if necessary. Having made a proclamation to this effect, the government waited another month before sending a detachment of soldiers to enforce it.

The militia was not prepared to surrender its arms so easily, however; it mobilised and the ancient city gates were closed for the first time in three hundred years. Meeting in the Gästhaus Hoffmann, the excited committee issued a thirty-four point declaration calling, among other things, for the abolition of the monarchy, comprehensive land reform, the introduction of income tax, and the recognition of German and (an afterthought) Latio as official languages.

Unexpectedly, the Latio population of the city rallied to the cause, and the earlier hostilities were put completely aside for the time being. Meanwhile, the Royal forces were taken aback to find the city gates closed and armed men on the mouldering battlements. Uncertain of how to proceed, they left the city to its own devices for the time being, and fell back on a neighbouring town to await further orders. Emboldened by this timorous and indecisive behaviour, the socialist committee sent out a general call to arms, inviting the whole of Dubitania to rally to their standard and depose King Francis forthwith.

According to Mischkoff’s account, my father was actually in Dacsvillin at this time (drawn there by some mysterious revolutionary sixth sense, presumably) and was largely responsible for the drafting of the Hoffmann Declaration (though why German-speaking socialists would have entrusted a Dubitanian-speaking Communist with this task is hard to conjecture).

In fact, when the Dubitanian party debated the Dacsvillin situation, my father was against getting involved in any way.

“This is not the revolution,” he insisted, “This is an incident. Conditions are not yet right. The militia should be told to hide its arms and go underground. This is a time for keeping their powder dry, not for insurrection.”

“Comrade Larvartin makes many good points,” said Pavari from the chair, twisting his wrinkled face into a malicious grimace, “He observes that these people are Germans, nothing to us. He counsels that we keep ourselves safe. I respect these sentiments, but they are not revolutionary sentiments. On the contrary I believe it is up to us to display leadership in this crisis, and I therefore call for a show of solidarity with the emergent struggle in Dacsvillin. We must seize the moment, comrades.”

“I think we should consult Moscow before taking any precipitate action.” suggested Stilin, with an edge of sarcasm – it was normally Pavari who insisted on taking instructions from Moscow at every turn.

“Moscow is ready for us to send a fraternal delegation to Dacsvillin.” said Pavari, untruthfully. “The Committee and I have already discussed the matter and decided to give Comrade Larvartin the honour of leading our party.

In fact Pavari had received instructions from Moscow saying that the Dubitanian party was on no account to soil its hands by supporting the misguided adventurism of the Dacsvillin socialists. But he thought that if he could get my father embroiled, the outcome could only be good. Ideally, my father would be killed or imprisoned. Alternatively, he could be represented to the Russian Party authorities as having rashly embarked on a forbidden venture. At worst, if the revolt was a success, and the Russians decided they approved of it after all, Pavari himself could claim the credit

My father shook his head, but he was obliged to go along with the majority of his comrades, who supported Pavari’s line. The communists made arrangements to arm themselves and discussed what their strategy should be.

“We should bring in supplies as fast as we can, but stay out of the city and remain mobile,” said my father, “We can do far more good harassing the Royalists than sitting in Dacsvillin eating the socialists’ food.”

“That would be good reasoning if there were to be a siege, comrade,” said Pavari, “But the flame lit in Dacsvillin will soon spread across the land. Within a few weeks there will be a general uprising, spreading far beyond the walls of Dacsvillin. You will be back in Sescastri within a month, I promise you.”

So my father and his small band of revolutionaries made their way west; at first, rather absurdly, on a train, with guns carried more or less openly in their luggage. At the village of Neudorfli, they disembarked, took out their rifles and continued on foot. They met no opposition of any kind, but passed many groups of Dacsvilliners going in the opposite direction, taking the opportunity to escape from the conflict before the army came back: monarchists, rightists, and many apolitical citizens. They reached the city walls without incident and identified themselves at the great Marien Gate, a famous work featuring a magnificent carved representation of the twelve apostles. Inside they were warmly welcomed, and found that the reduction in the number of people within the city caused by those who had fled had been more than made up by the incoming supporters of the Declaration: there were representatives of every radical party and faction in Dubitania. Not many of these people shared my father’s realism; most of them felt an excited optimism that this, at last, could truly be the beginning of a proper revolution. My father said it was like some huge party at first, with lively debates, old friendships renewed and enmities healed, and prodigious amounts of drinking. And talking.

“My God, they talked.” he told me, “As if their tongues were being cut out tomorrow, as my grandmother used to say. Hardly anything was done to repair the city walls or bring in supplies and ammunition while we still had chance, but every point of the socialist programme was debated to the point of exhaustion and beyond. Most of them were University types, of course, like my poor brother. A dozen common workers would have been more use, in my opinion, but of course the common workers had more sense than to get involved.”

Now the army, having been told to get on with it, reappeared. The commander, a weary old general named Cavallin, posted guards on each of the city gates and attempted to negotiate a surrender. He pointed out that the rising had no support in the rest of the country and would get no help: meanwhile he was prepared to wait for as long as it took to starve them out. He wanted to avoid bloodshed if possible, but weapons must be surrendered and the militia must disband. He hinted that he did not really care whether all the weapons were surrendered so long as a reasonable show of compliance was made. The members of the Socialist Committee must be surrendered to him, but he undertook to ensure that they would be exiled, not killed.

My father thought the terms were reasonable – or at least a basis for discussion – but he was in a minority of one. Porfri Essedrin, who had been caught up by the general revolutionary fervour, told him that to hand comrades over to the reactionary forces was unthinkable. When it came to it, he declared, he knew my father would have been unable to do it, and he, Porfri, would rather die himself than contemplate such a thing.

There now followed two weeks of dull inaction. One day, a sentry on the eastern battlements shouted down that a party of men was approaching rapidly along the main road. At first the confused defenders thought that this might be some kind of surprise attack; but then the group of men approaching along the road unfurled a large red banner. At this point Cavallin’s idle guards, eyeing the approaching party with alarm, picked up their guns and bolted. The defenders were reluctant to open the gates at first, fearing a trick, but Porfri Essedrin, who had been peering carefully down the road, shouted to the gatekeeper that these were friends.

It was none other than Pavari, with the remainder of the Sescastri communists. Shortly after my father’s departure, a message from Moscow had arrived reversing the earlier directive about Dacsvillin; more decisively, Pavari had read three newspaper articles which all described my father as ‘leader’ of the Dubitanian communists. Pavari had decided at once that he must take charge of events personally.

After this brief distraction, the uneventful course of the siege resumed. The excitement had dissipated, the wine was all drunk. At first the main threat had appeared to be boredom, but it now became clear that even if a system of rationing was belatedly introduced, the food supplies would not last much more than two weeks more. As morale began to sink, the German-speakers began to complain again about their Latio allies and their hungry Dubitanian friends.

Inevitably a meeting was called to air these issues. First it had to be clarified that although this appeared to be a meeting of the socialist committee with non-voting fraternal delegates, it was in fact a meeting of the Ad Hoc Co-ordinating Committee of the Front for Defence of the Declaration. Then, once a skeleton constitution had been summarily ratified, a report from the protocol sub-committee received, a digression on the true nature of socialist pragmatism been suppressed, and three challenges to the Chairman’s interpretation of correct procedure overturned, substantive business could be attended to.

Hausser, in the chair, gave a lengthy introduction in heavily accented Dubitanian, explaining eventually that in response to certain criticisms which had been levelled at the fraternal supporters in solidarity with the Hoffmann Declaration, the Communists had come forward with a proposal. He looked around rather vaguely for Pavari, but instead my father stood up and raised one hand. Hausser looked slightly puzzled but offered no objection.

This was a challenging situation for my father: he had to try to win round people with whom he had little real sympathy, who in turn harboured suspicions and resentments against him and his comrades, and do it in what was to most of them a foreign language. He kept his words simple, which was always his inclination anyway. He began by giving a stirring commendation of the blow which had been struck against monarchy and oppression by everyone present; he flattered the socialists in particular extravagantly. His audience settled down. But now, he said, they needed to consolidate and strengthen their position, and they needed to prepare frustration for the forces of reaction.

First they needed to reduce the population by finding a way for the remaining women, children, and other non-combatants to escape. He had identified a couple of routes by which it might be possible for small parties to get past the surrounding army in relative safety, and he recommended active pursuit of this possibility. Second, they must pool their resources and institute proper egalitarian rationing. To start matters off, he and his comrades had a warehouse which they had stuffed full of dry and preserved food while the army was still loitering elsewhere: this he put unreservedly in the hands of the Committee. Thirdly, a team should be appointed to inspect the walls, organise repairs where necessary, and consider how best to exploit the fortifications.

All this was well received, especially the donation. There was actually a deeper purpose behind my father’s proposals. He had come to the conclusion that the most promising way to end the whole affair was for the besieged to gradually escape in small numbers until the city was effectively evacuated. He thought it likely that Cavallin might turn a blind eye to this process; the problem was persuading the defenders to adopt so anti-climactic a solution. My father thought that no-one would object to the idea of establishing an escape route for the remaining women and children; and once it was available, others would gradually choose to use it as things got worse, so that his solution would be implemented in practice without ever being agreed in principle.

The meeting was settling down to debate the details of the rationing system when Pavari, furious and red-faced, appeared. It seemed he had somehow been locked in his bedroom, and was enraged to find that my father had usurped his item on the agenda.

My father apologised with a smile: what else could he have done in Pavari’s absence?

“I simply asked myself – what would Comrade Pavari have said in these circumstances,” he remarked, “You were my guide and model, comrade, as always.”

Pavari took the floor and declared that on behalf of the Party he withdrew everything Comrade Larvartin had said. This caused immediate confusion, but ploughing ahead regardless, Pavari now made the proposal he had intended to put forward in the first place: in response to the concerns which had been expressed, the Communists would demonstrate their value by leading a sortie from the Marien Gate and lifting the siege.

This did not go down as well as he had expected. One reason was the manner of its delivery, which made it seem more aggressive than conciliatory; another was that certain members of his audience were trying to work out whether Pavari had just withdrawn my father’s food supplies (of which Pavari knew nothing) as well as his words; but the main reason was that everyone knew an attack on the army without external support was completely futile. The meeting broke up in disorder, with nothing formally agreed.

Nevertheless, over the course of the next few days my father’s proposals were gradually implemented. Pavari at first opposed the introduction of rationing on some obscure point of principle, but was forced into grudging acquiescence. At the same time, he prepared his own adventure. He had a few volunteers from among the more hot-headed socialists, in addition to which all of the communists were to take part except my father and his two close friends. They had agreed instead to create a diversion on the western walls and then help cover the retreat of Pavari and his band.

“What retreat?” demanded Pavari.

Porfri Essedrin was not altogether happy about being excluded from the sortie, but my father told him he would certainly find a way for him to die gloriously on the walls.

Finally the chosen day arrived. My father and his friends began the operation by firing burning arrows into the two large bell-tents occupied by the besiegers in the fortified outpost which had been set up to command the western gates: then when the enemy were swarming around attempting to deal with the fires they opened the gates and fired an ancient cannon they had dragged into position and loaded with pieces of scrap iron. The effect was devastating, and the remaining soldiers on the western road abruptly ran away.

“It seems Comrade Pavari was correct after all,” remarked my father drily to Lucas Stilin, “it looks as if the three of us have defeated the Royalists and lifted the siege already.”

The three heroes ventured cautiously out to the deserted outpost where the remains of the two tents were still burning and found to their surprise that the heavy machine gun mounted there to cover the gates had been left behind. They called for help and succeeded in bringing it, together with several boxes of ammunition, back within the walls. They were just returning with the last of the boxes when Stilin spotted Royalist cavalry in the distance. As the Royalists charged towards the gates, the ancient cannon was fired once more: again the attack was halted with tremendous destruction and the remaining cavalry limped away.

“Gentlemen,” said my father, “One more venture?”

Pausing only to reload the cannon, they ventured out a third time to the Royalist outpost; Porfri Essedrin thought they should go further, but my father thought their time could be better spent. In the distance a full column of infantry was visible advancing towards them, and they fell back quickly to the gate.

The column of infantry paused at the outpost to regroup, and was taken by surprise when the explosives set up by my father and his friends exploded. Half the earth wall which formed the main part of the fortifications was destroyed, and many of the soldiers were killed or wounded. Their commander could see that the city gates were standing open, and thirsting for revenge, he rallied his men and charged. The old cannon fired once again, mowing down the royalist soldiers in great numbers; but this time they persisted. Stilin was hit in the left arm by a rifle shot before the gates could be closed once more.

“Perhaps now we could try out the machine gun they so kindly left for us?” suggested my father, “I really think we could keep this up a little longer, gentlemen.”

But at that moment a messenger arrived to say that their help was needed to reinforce the eastern defences.

Pavari’s attack in the East, intended to be the main event, had not gone so well. His small force simply opened the gate and charged the fortified Royalist position, very similar to the one on the other side of the city. If the soldiers had stood their ground and returned fire, Pavari and his men would surely have been decimated immediately; but luckily they were cowardly and taken by surprise and they retreated down the road. Vastly encouraged, Pavari’s force charged after them, firing occasional shots from the miscellaneous armaments in their possession.

Half a mile down the road, this peculiar chase came suddenly up against the main Royalist camp; here the soldiers scrambled raggedly into order and began to fire on the approaching Communists, who now realised quite how heavily they were outnumbered. Turning tail. they began running back to the city, but they found that a small party of soldiers from the Ansperren Gate to the north, coming along to check on what had happened, had taken over the original encampment at the Marien Gate and were cutting off their retreat; moreover they had swung the machine gun there round away from the walls to face the advancing Communists. The only thing that saved Pavari and his men from immediate destruction was the sight of the soldiers in pursuit behind them; the machine gunners could not shoot at Pavari without hitting them too.

Nevertheless, the position seemed hopeless. Pavari and his men stopped short, looking desperately around for some other means of escape. They dropped their weapons and raised their hands in surrender; but at that moment, there was a thunderous outbreak of machine gun fire: finding themselves unexpectedly alive, Pavari’s men opened their eyes to see that it was the soldiers blocking their path who had been mown down: my father and his friends had succeeded in mounting their captured machine gun in a half-ruined bastion nearby and were now able to spray the approach to the gates with stolen ammunition.

The pursuing soldiers, only yards from their prey, hesitated: Pavari and the survivors of his force lowered their hands again and dashed for the gates, leaving their guns behind. After a panicky few seconds, they were able to squeeze through the small gap which had grudgingly been opened for them by the defenders inside, leaving the pursuing soldiers staring warily at my father’s machine gun.

“I had hoped to be reconciled with Comrade Pavari,” remarked my father afterwards, “But now that I have saved his life, he will never forgive me.”

The main result of this imbroglio was that Cavallin was recalled and another general sent to take charge. The defenders called a parley to see whether the new commander would offer better terms, but he told them flatly that he would accept nothing, not even their unconditional surrender.

“I’ll make you this offer, gentlemen, and this one only,” he said “how many of you are there? No, let me guess. Five hundred now? Then I offer you five hundred bullets, maybe a few more to make sure. I’ll deliver.”

The new commander had called for tanks to help him storm the city, but they were slow in arriving, and his assault was not launched until two weeks later. All the gates were attacked simultaneously and broken down without difficulty (the priceless carving on the Marien Gate being destroyed in the process), in fact without resistance; when the soldiers poured through and into the city, they found it deserted. Using my father’s escape route, the defenders had gradually evacuated Dacsvillin over the course of the preceding nights, just as he had planned.

My father’s standing was distinctly improved by his conduct during the rising, and it was perhaps from this point that he gradually began to take on the status of informal leader of the wider revolutionary cause. But that cause was greatly damaged; most of the leading radicals had effectively identified themselves by coming out of hiding to support the uprising: a number had already been killed, and the government had been severely alarmed. There followed years of vigorous repression when the remnant of the Communist Party and its allies went into hiding, years which only really came to an end with the advent of the War.

18,589 words total

5. Ten Denari

A better set of nicknames for my father and his two inseparable friends in those early days might have been Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis. Before he came along, Porfri and Lucas were famous for their unresolved arguments.

“Socialism is inseparable from democracy,” Porfri would proclaim, “If property is not directly in the control of the workers, where are we?”

“I fully agree, Comrade,” said Lucas, “But the question is, what form shall this democracy take? If every little factory votes on its own affairs, you end up with some benighted co-operative, or with syndicalism, both deficient not only in productivity and effectiveness, but also in truly meeting the wishes of the people. In communism, socialism is inseparable from democracy, yes, but so is democratic centralism. You should understand this.”

My father always seemed to be able to produce a view which both sides were able to endorse, but it was a remarkable achievement. Stilin was a quiet man, who rarely offered a view in public debate; but when he did speak, a sharp, rather cold intellect and a store of reading and deep thought became apparent. If he had had more presence, and more inclination to it, he could perhaps have been a persuasive orator. But in practice he preferred to sit listening with a black cigarette burning down to nothing in the corner of his mouth; almost the only thing that could draw him into open argument was when Essedrin started to lay down the law.

Porfri, a broad-set, red-faced man with an habitual smile and a habit of clutching his head in moments of stress which left his hair perpetually ruffled, had an intellect which was not, perhaps, especially distinguished; but his proletarian credentials were impeccable. It was a source of slight embarrassment to the Dubitanian party, and its Sescastri branch in particular, that most members were from a middle or upper-class background. Porfri, however, was not just a worker, but a manual factory worker to boot, and he had developed a tendency to explain to his comrades what the real working class thought and felt, in a way which wasn’t always as welcome as he imagined. All too frequently he would stand up in the middle of some heated debate and say:

“Comrades, comrades. Let me assure you, the working people of Sescastri would have no idea what you are all talking about. They would say…”

My father used to say that Porfri was very wedded to the concept of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, but that unfortunately his interpretation of it was not quite correct.

The trio were nevertheless well-liked in the local Party, and my father, with his natural common sense and gift for rhetoric, was always heard with enthusiasm. This, I’m afraid, began to attract the envy of the party Chairman, Pavari, a man whose face was so corrugated with deeply-scored lines he always looked worried. My father began to find that sub-committees were stacked against him and business arranged in such a way that his motions were not debated. The growing tension came briefly to the surface in one stormy meeting about the correct tactics for the Party, in which my father was finally accused of being an objective Menshevik. That wounding accusation does not, of course, feature anywhere in Mischkoff’s account, which has my father actually founding the local party and then instructing a circle of adoring members and disciples.

It was never my father’s way to harbour grudges over such matters, however; whenever he found himself frustrated in one direction, he simply redirected his energies. So instead of continuing to sit on committees and discuss ideological principles, he and his friends began to travel around the factories and farms of Dubitania. Here they soon found problems enough to keep them busy.

The sporadic reforms of the Dubitanian government had finally led to the legal abolition of feudal land tenure some years before, but this had not been followed up by any systematic land reform, and in many parts of the country the former peasants were still very largely at the mercy of their aristocratic landlords. Quite a few of these gentlemen continued to run their estates in the same old way as if nothing had happened. Generally worse than them, however, were the ones who now embarked on programmes of modernisation. Sometimes this involved overturning the rights of the former peasants and clearing them off the land altogether, but more frequently the drive for new profits led to inflation of rents and a relentless attempt to pare wages down.

Following a large-scale beer fraud a few years before, the Sestenburg brewery had developed the practice of sending a clerk out to take careful account of all its deliveries. My father was able to take advantage of this practice and his position in the brewery by going out with deliveries all over Sescastri province and beyond; he used to say that Doppelbock went everywhere. While the barrels were being unloaded, and frequently while the driver and his assistant were refreshing themselves afterwards, he had time to talk to local people, and he could not help becoming aware of the growing poverty among agricultural workers.

He told me how in the dim back room of a traditional tavern he had encountered a wizened old peasant, a man who looked at least a hundred years old, scorched brown by the sun and bent over with long years of hard labour, clutching a small glass of mild beer. He bought the old man a jug of Doppelbock, which he greeted with a look that combined gratification with frank doubt about my father’s sanity. They had a friendly conversation during which it emerged to my father’s utter amazement that far from enjoying a well-earned retirement, the old man was merely taking a morning break before returning to work in the fields. The old man, amused by his surprise, explained that this was only his day job; in the evenings he loaded trucks at the local cement works: no-one these days could afford to rely on a single job if they had a young wife and six children, he said.

My father was highly amused: in his view, he said, the old man was a true son of Dubitania. But not everyone could match this Stakhanovite standard of energy and resilience, and many families were gradually sliding down into worsening poverty. There had always been poverty among the peasants, of course, but now formerly prosperous workers , while working harder than ever, were having to think seriously about where next week’s meals were coming from. My father decided that something had to be done, and on quarter-day in the leafy little market town of Belparica, which stands in the wheat fields to the west of Sescastri, he stood up, supported by Stilin and Essedrin and made a speech proposing the establishment of an association to protect the workers’ interests and enable them to give each other support. The crowd that gathered around him attracted the attention of the landowners and the local police were eventually despatched to break things up, but not before my father had succeeded in establishing a nucleus of members for his new association. The Mutual Association of Agricultural Workers of Western Sescastri Province had its inaugural meeting in secret a week later.

But I have fallen into the trap, like Mischkoff, of giving the impression that my father was always and everywhere the initiator and leader. In fact, these agricultural associations were springing up throughout the country at the time and if anything my father was belatedly climbing onto a bandwagon. But he and his colleagues had the advantage of a clear sense of direction and the backing of a strong organisation. At that stage many of the associations were little more than primitive mutual insurance societies, but once his own association was established my father was able to play a key role in drawing together a co-ordinating body, the National Board of Agricultural Workers Associations (CINDATA*) which began to give them a more coherent purpose. In nearly every town, using Stilin or Essedrin to back him up as the occasion demanded, he was able either to recruit for the Party one or more leading members of the local association, or to promote within the association some of his recruits. Communist party membership within Dubitania was doubled inside three months purely through these efforts, and a strong network of contacts in the emerging workers’ movement established.

Again, I must not give the impression that it was my father who originated the idea of the Ten Denari Stand – it came from a relatively obscure association which met in Andra-Nipoli – but I think it is probably fair to claim that it would never have assumed such formidable proportions without his efforts. The idea was simply that at the next quarter-day all the agricultural workers of Dubitania would refuse to work for anything less than ten denari per week. There was naturally a great deal of discussion about this, but the transparent reasonableness of the stance eventually won over all but a handful of the workers. Ten denari was not a great deal of money, even in those days.

You would think that all this ferment of organisation, debate, and preparation would attract some attention from the Dubitanian land-owners, but in fact when the quarter-day came round the discovery that they could not recruit or retain a single worker at the offered rate of seven denari struck the employers with all the force of a thunderbolt. It had been established between them that seven denari was to be the rate this quarter, and at first none of them knew what to do. Two weeks passed and the farms stood idle. The workers’ associations had accumulated enough reserve cash and supplies in kind to support their members for several months, so they were not disturbed, and held firm. One or two landlords began to settle at ten denari; but the majority held out for seven, or offered an intermediate amount. Unprecedentedly, the Court of Knights of Dubitania, the organisation of aristocratic landholders, agreed to open its special meeting on the issue to the rich commoners who by now were the proprietors of a substantial part of Dubitania’s farm land. My father contrived to attend this critical meeting as the representative of a friendly barley grower, one of the three who by tradition supplied all the brewery’s needs.

The meeting took place in the Gothic splendour of the Great Hall of the Candlemakers’ Guild, with its magnificent stained glass windows depicting the Seven High Kings of Dubitania : Dubito the legionary; Wilfred Magnus the Saxon king whose knights had carved out the boundaries of the land; Adalbert the Martyr, strapped to his horse after death so as to ride out once more against the paynim; Henri Lacktongue, named for his refusal to negotiate with the Holy Roman Emperor; Maximillian the First, with all twelve of the sons who after his death pursued a civil war of unfathomable complexity; Henri the Pious who signed the world-famous Treaty of Andra, a cornerstone of European liberties; and Ferdinandi the Traveller, depicted with a Chinese entourage, which somewhat overstates his actual venturesomeness.

The meeting took some time to come properly to order. It became clear at once, however, that the landowners were by no means unanimous. By my father’s estimation, there were three main camps. About a quarter of those present actually favoured accepting the workers’ demands, either outright or with some qualifications. This group was partly made up of aristocrats with liberal views and partly of middling landowners who felt they had more to lose from further delay than from paying the ten-denari rate. But there were also a number of owners of large modernised estates, set up on a more business-like basis than most of Dubitania’s farms. These concerns, efficient and partly mechanised, could easily afford a ten-denari rate, and were quite ready to pay it in order to help run their smaller competitors out of the market and appropriate their land holdings.

At the other extreme, nearly half the landowners were against any kind of concession. In this group were a few smaller feudal landholders who genuinely could not afford ten denari, or thought they couldn’t; middling landowners of a right-wing tendency, who feared that collective bargaining of any kind was the thin end of the socialist wedge, and some large landowners, mostly aristocrats, who thought that the loyalty of their peasants and their lack of debts or shareholders meant they could stand a long dispute better than most, and thought it would be worth it in the long run to teach the workers a lesson.

In the middle stood a group who favoured negotiation, either because they thought it was the quickest way to a resolution or simply because bargaining was their instinctive response to any situation.

The diehards opened the meeting; they made the mistake of putting forward Andri Postrin, a well-known right-wing politician with tremendous white side-whiskers, who happened to own a couple of farms. They reckoned his relative fame and oratorical gifts would give them an advantage, but many members felt that his appearance meant that his party was attempting to co-opt their cause for its own purposes. He proposed resolutions calling on the government to outlaw trade associations and put the police on standby to break up seditious meetings; but the diehards were unable to attract any support from other factions and consequently could not get a majority for any of their measures.

The liberals put forward a young aristocrat named Obertin, well-known because of his successful career in athletics, who made a speech which combined sarcastic wit with a sincere appeal to the sense of duty which, or so he said, the Dubitanian upper class had always displayed towards its tenants and dependents. He was more loudly applauded than Postrin, and many felt that the aristocrat had beaten the professional politician at his own rhetorical game; but it made no difference: the liberal faction had no majority either, and could not get agreement to a quick acceptance of ten denari. However, they backed a motion proposing negotiations which was now put forward by a less articulate landowner, and this motion was therefore carried . After several hours of further debate the meeting was unable to agree a remit for these negotiations, but decided they should be opened anyway on an exploratory basis.

The chief impression left on my father was of the absolute disunity of the landowners. After the vote, he spent time talking to some of them in the bar, and he was surprised to find that one of them, a man named Lodovi Molerin, was already paying 13 denari. This individual, with large gold rings on all his fingers, was clearly a self-educated former peasant.

“See, the workers are not all the same,” he explained, “At the bottom, the worst ten per centum, are useless or perhaps even harmful. But the top ten per centum, the very best workers, ah! I want no others, and by paying thirteen pieces I get my choice. It’s a good bargain for me, because my workers are twice as productive as anyone else’s, and far more skilled; moreover, I employ no overseers and only one supervisor, since these people supervise themselves, and are more zealous about my interests than I should be myself. All in all, it is a bargain for me to pay a few extra pieces.”

“”So you voted to agree the ten?”

“Not at all: I voted with Postrin. I shall pay thirteen myself in any case, but if these idiots all start paying ten, I might have to go to fourteen.” He took a deep draught from his beer glass. “Listen,” he said, “I want a word with you. A discreet word. I know who you are.”

“Who I am?” asked my father, as calmly as he could manage.

“Yes: you’ve been recognised. You’re no barley grower. Quite the reverse. You’re from the brewery, aren’t you? Now listen. I know Sestenburg, by tradition, only buys from certain areas, but I’d like some of that business and I think I can make it worth your while. I reckon that when I tell you the price of my barley and show you the quality, we can do a deal that’ll be very good for both of us…”

My father was encouraged by the way the discussions had gone. He reported back to his Party comrades that negotiations would in his view have a good chance of achieving the 10-denari rate, or something close to it. However, that was not the course he recommended. Instead, he proposed that they should do their best to ensure negotiations were refused. If this happened, he believed the fragile unity of the landowners would break up; many of them would start paying the 10 denari anyway; others would come under pressure to do the same, and the diehards would soon be isolated. Any action they tried to take without wider support would be a damaging failure. He thought this was the best available outcome.

Pavari was not interested in any of this. He did not believe that my father was acting out of concern for the workers; all he noticed was that my father had signed up a whole series of new members, who, if they voted together, would outnumber all of the existing Party, never mind Pavari’s own friends and followers. He denounced my father and his friends, claiming that the new Party members’ credentials and political soundness had not been properly tested. He announced that all the new memberships were summarily cancelled, and asked for a formal censure of my father to be recorded in the minutes.

This naturally led to a bitter and inconclusive argument; the censure of my father was not agreed, but letters revoking the membership of my father’s contacts had already been sent. This naturally made my father’s position much more difficult, and he was temporarily unable to exert much influence. As a result, or so I believe, the governing committee of CINDATA agreed to negotiate with the landowners.

At this point the Royalist government suddenly decided it should make one of its clumsy interventions. Seven ringleaders of the association movement, five of them cancelled communists, were arrested on the charge of having sworn a mutinous oath. The charge was absurd: it was framed under a law which clearly applied only to members of the armed forces; and there was in any case, no evidence whatever. Nevertheless, all seven were immediately found guilty and sentenced to exile.

The first result was inevitably that the negotiations between landowners and the associations, which had barely begun, were broken off. In this way the government had inadvertently achieved the situation which my father had wanted, and it soon became clear that his insight was sound. Several large landowners and many middling ones announced that they would pay ten denari a week forthwith.

In the meantime the government was faced with the task it had set itself of exiling the seven workers. They were put into a prison wagon which set off for the Hungarian border: a huge procession of agricultural workers formed up behind the wagon and marched behind it in protest as it slowly trundled across the country. It took a week to get there, and a whole series of panicky reports from local officials were sent back to the central government, forecasting a general uprising and warning of their inability to do anything about it.

Pavari now said he had instructions from the Moscow party that the Russians were about to strike a special economic deal with the Dubitanian government and they did not wish the current administration to be destabilised: he instructed my father to use his contacts to bring about a resumption of negotiations, but my father said he could do nothing.

“It’s not as if they were Party members,” he explained.

At the border, the embarrassing procession was halted; the Hungarian authorities, always eager for an opportunity to humiliate the Dubitanian government, refused to allow it to enter their country. After a day’s hesitation, the prison wagon was turned around and began crawling back towards Sescastri. This was too much; the King, who had been watching the situation with increasing nervousness, dismissed his council, declared a state of emergency, and appointed Franki Millarin, a leading liberal, as special Chancellor with dictatorial powers for one year. Millarin at once released the seven workers, paid compensation, and issued an edict establishing CINDATA as a recognised guild with a royal charter. My father thought this last measure was absurd, and it is certainly true that the legislation was swept away again as soon as Millarin left office.

Pavari, needless to say, thought my father had been working against him in secret. He pointed out that my father’s contacts, the ‘cancelled communists’ coincided to a remarkable degree with the organisers of the great workers’ procession which had followed the prison wagon to the Hungarian border, and accused my father of having re-established his network and fomented the whole thing.

“Those fellows would never have listened to me, comrade:” said my father, “to be honest, they’re a bunch of objective Mensheviks.”

*Consilla Infedera Nacionala Dubitanin Asocicine Travalorine Agricoles

14,846 words

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.

11,295 words

3. Lavordin Hospital

Reading some of those old stories I realised for the first time that my mother had perhaps embroidered and tidied them up a little. And in spite of my good resolutions, I realised that in places I was just as adulatory as my father’s official biography. So let me leap forward now many years to the happy days when my father was finally the President of a newly free country, but had not yet managed to introduce all of his reforms and regenerations and tell another story which illustrates in more sober terms the merits of his approach. This is the tale, much quoted, of Lavordin hospital.

Lavordin was a dark old building in the southern lakeside town of Oni-Litani. It had been a private sanatorium when the place enjoyed a brief spell of popularity as a spa, in the early part of the nineteenth century. Later, under Royal patronage, it had been converted into a charity public hospital but allowed to fall into disrepair; but when the modern hospital in the suburbs was hit by a bomb, it became the only place the local people could go for serious medical treatment. Overcrowded and lacking drugs and equipment it soon began to suffer severe problems. Finally an indiscreet surgeon who visited as part of an international research delegation issued a scathing statement to an Italian newspaper, describing the conditions as ‘Stone Age’ and contrasting the hospital’s performance with the grand speeches of Party officials.

My father was very upset by this, my mother said; not because of the bad light it shone on him and his regime, but because he had not been aware of how the patients at Lavordin were suffering. He immediately went and visited the hospital himself. The bureaucrats and doctors were in mortal fear, but my father seemed calm, asked questions, and criticised no-one.

“The problem, beloved leader,” ventured a doctor at last, “Is that this is not a real hospital. It was never a properly equipped hospital and now we’re simply improvising.”

“I understand, Doctor,” said my father, with a light in his eye, “But we must not focus our thoughts on what Lavordin is now, but on what it might become. That patient – “ he pointed to a grey-faced man in a bed across the way, “What would we do for him if we could?”

The doctor looked grave.

“That patient has a serious heart problem,” he replied, “There is little we can do. It needs some very advanced surgery, of a kind we have yet to perform in Twentyland. As it is, we do not even have a satisfactory operating theatre.”

“Where could we put such a theatre?” my father asked.

The doctor smiled, “Really, there is nowhere. We have no room as it is. We should have to build a completely new surgical wing.”

“Bring me a spade,” said my father, “and I’ll get the cement and the bricks.”

He called the staff together and made an impassioned speech. Here and there, especially among the younger nurses and doctors, he could see a gleam of hope returning.

“Tell me your problems.” he said.

This was no empty rhetoric. He asked what they needed, what they would do if they could, and wrote down a list on a blackboard.

“Comrades,” he said, “You talk of these things as though they were dreams, Christmas presents that St Nicholas might bring if we believe in him, which of course, being good materialists, we do not. No-one is coming to do these things for us. This is our hospital, it is in our hands entirely. But there is our hope, too; no one will help us, but no-one can stop us, either. No-one can stop us here. We can do whatever we will. We can make our hospital whatever we want. Listen to me. Believe me. I tell you these things on this board will happen. They will be done. They will be done here. Now. And what is more the point perhaps, by us.”

He spent most of a month at Lavordin, in the hospital and in the town: he made an appeal to the nation. People did, in fact, come to help; local people brought in some money and helped with the work; my father managed to transfer in some additional doctors. The building of the new surgical wing became a celebrated cause, and volunteers began to appear from all over the country. One day, to my father’s great amusement and gratification, the celebrated poet Georgi Versantin appeared, a pale, undernourished young aesthete with a beautiful silk scarf. Taking off his coat and casting it aside, Georgi shouted in a trembling voice:

“Comrades; the new slogan – Bring me a spade!”

“My God, comrades, if Georgi is going to dig our foundations, what will Carl Mustin have to do to save his face?” asked my father with a grin. Carl Mustin was the obese head of the Twentyland Miners Union.

A year later, my mother was sitting at a typewriter in the Palace when she overheard a French doctor speaking to the colleague who had come out to replace him on a long-term study of the Twentyland healthcare system.

“You must go out to Lavordin,” said the first doctor, “It’s an extraordinary place. I remember my first visit there: as I approached, by the line of poplars at the edge of the lake, I heard voices singing, like a rustic choir. Not at all sophisticated, not by any means great music, a simple folk song; half of them out of tune, some of them hoarse and old and cracked; but none the worse for that; perhaps more beautiful, more affecting. Human voices, very human; honest and full of the simple joy of singing. Coming through the trees on a sunny day by the lake, the effect was almost heavenly, like stumbling on some blessed Elysian field. It was the patients, of course. I asked whether the hospital organised this singing, but apparently it had begun quite spontaneously and was now an established feature of hospital life. I’ve never been anywhere that had such an atmosphere of serene confidence, such indomitable optimism. The way the younger doctors work there, such energy, such enthusiasm. All the time I was there, they were asking me questions about what we do in Paris, what techniques could I teach them, could I tell them about new research; anything they could learn from or copy. They were so quick to learn, so ready to try anything new that I could suggest, and so skilled at making it work. They begged me to stay, they insisted I come back as soon as I could.”

“And the things they do. It’s not a well-equipped place, you know, but you’ve heard how they put up a surgical theatre with their own hands, staff, local people, even some of the patients, working overtime; and they’re doing operations there I wouldn’t like to try back at home. Yet with tremendous results; it’s as if the optimism of the staff buoys the patients up, carries them on to recovery: when one of them gets better, there’s a feeling of shared triumph between staff and patients, as though they’d won a gold medal together, or something. I saw people who had left the hospital six months before, so excited by it that they still came back every day and helped in any way they could. I’ve never seen a hospital where I’d be happier to be a patient – but what a place to be a doctor!”

“You know,” he said wistfully, “Over the years you become cynical, and I’ve drifted into being more of an administrator than a practitioner. But those young doctors and nurses; being among them, I felt ashamed. I felt like a renegade. That place made me feel, more strongly than I had ever felt before, that it’s a high honour to be a doctor, one I had not valued enough; that there is nothing more wonderful than the practice of medicine; the gift of mending broken people. Those young doctors are so excited at what they’re doing, they can hardly bear to leave the hospital, and they hurry back as soon as they can. I was within an ace of throwing all these execrable papers away and promising to stay and help.”

“Lavordin?” said the other doctor, “I’ve heard some strange stories about that place. Huge death rate, people just being killed by the treatment. Something like that. Wasn’t that the ‘Stone Age’ hospital?”

“Yes, it was: but if you could see it now I really think you’d call it Golden Age.” said the first doctor, and then looked a little embarrassed at how his enthusiasm had carried him away.

Lavordin had that effect on others, however, notably on Sergi Scalapin, a respectable surgeon who had been a prominent member of one of the bourgeois parties, and had opted to retire from practice under my father’s regime. The stories which circulated about Lavordin became so extravagant – and it must be admitted that some of them were exaggerated – they annoyed him so much that he came to see for himself, determined to prove that it was all nonsense.

Once there, however, he fell under the spell of the place in much the same way as the French doctor; he took a job and went back into surgical practice. Not only that; in spite of his bourgeois sympathies, he was an innovative scientist and he soon collected around him a group of young doctors who began to create a radical new system of treatment which became known as the Lavordin Regime. One element in the Regime was a new approach to anaesthesia and palliative care based on techniques developed out of research into acupuncture. A visiting fraternal delegation from China had demonstrated acupuncture at Lavordin; Scalapin and his team took it up with enthusiasm, refining the method and replacing needles with a new technique of pulsed electrical charges. Not only was this a more effective way of dealing with pain; there were no side-effects or complications and recovery times were shortened by as much as 23%, according to Scalapin’s own report.

Of course, my father was often invited to visit the hospital, whenever they had a new ward to open, or were celebrating an anniversary. But for a long time he refused all these invitations.

“Why don’t you go?” asked my mother, eventually, “It seems as if you don’t like the place.”

“I don’t want them to give me credit for what the hospital has achieved,” said my father, “You know how it goes. They’ll make long speeches and say it is all owing to me. I don’t want that. I want them to realise it was all in their own hands, all the time. That is the whole point.”

“You have such a monstrous ego,” said my mother, sternly, “Who is going to say it is owing to you? Nobody remembers you ever went there, Nobody is going to give you the credit for anything. It’s just that as an internationally famous hospital, they think maybe it’s the President’s duty to come and cut some ribbons for them. But don’t trouble yourself.”

“Well, if you put it like that.” conceded my father wearily. So at last he accepted an invitation and went along to a grand gala dinner.

Unfortunately it proved exactly as he had said: every detail of his original visit was recounted, all the old stories were told again, and speaker after speaker rose to declare with emotion that all the hospital’s glittering achievements were the result of Marki Larvartin’s intervention. They had even found the hopeless heart patient, the grey-faced man about whom my father had asked; he had been the first to undergo open-heart surgery in the new theatre, had made a complete recovery, and was now back at work in the marble quarries. To my father’s dismay, he stood up in front of the dinner table and pulled open his shirt to show the great scar across his chest.

“Comrades,” said my father, responding at last to all the speeches which had been made, “Truly I am proud of what you have made of this hospital. All across the world the name of Lavordin is known; in our sister republics with pride, and in the capitalist countries with envy. But it is important that you understand how this has happened. It is because you took the hospital as your own. As a result, you were able to make of it whatever you chose. Remember that the hospital is entirely in your hands. And so, it seems, am I.”

This was typical of the way my father never shirked his obligations, although they soon became extremely onerous. On one occasion he arrived very late at our flat; the dinner my mother had prepared was long since spoilt.

“What on earth happened?” she demanded, “As if you weren’t away from us enough, now you’re late even when you’re here.”

My father explained that he had put in a long, gruelling day working through piles of administrative papers and proposals, and sitting through a three-hour meeting of the Council of the Twenty, the supreme Government body, always an arduous affair. He locked up his office and he and his shadow Lucas Stilin, cigarette always in the corner of his mouth, walked out to the waiting car. At that moment, an old woman seized his arm. The guard at the door stepped forward, but my father waved him away.

She had, it emerged, a long and complicated story of a problem concerning her son, and she was seeking my father’s personal intervention.

“Granny, I’m sorry, but I have had a long day, I am late already, and I cannot attend to this matter for you.” said my father, as patiently as he could, “Please speak to the Citizens’ Office tomorrow.”

“Is it not the President’s job to right injustices?” demanded the old woman, angrily.

“Yes, of course it is,” said my father,

“Are you going to right this injustice I have been telling you about?”

“Personally? Here and now? No,” admitted my father, becoming a little impatient with this rhetorical outburst.

“Then stop being President, personally, here and now, Marki Larvartin!” said the old woman.

So my father had gritted his teeth, gone wearily back into the building, heard her out, made some enquiries and after two hours succeeded in sending her away, if not satisfied, at least mollified.

“Stilin told me he would have had the guard kick her scrawny old arse into jail,” said my father, with weary amusement, “I told him that was obviously why he wasn’t President.”

I make that 8,753 words.

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.

OK, folks, here is chapter one of Twentyland…

1. School

The other children would not believe that my father was also the Father of Our Country. His face, stern but gentle, square and manly with gently greying temples, smiled down from our classroom wall – from every classroom wall – and from the big framed picture in the hall, and from posters on every street. To my fellow-pupils our beloved leader President Marki Larvartin was a legendary figure, like someone from a story, and I’m not sure they believed in his real existence in quite the way they believed in their own fathers. The idea that I might be his daughter was to them an obvious lie, and not even an amusing one, but a silly, tedious one, an attempt on my part to add some status to my own mousy indeterminate dullness.

I had not meant to say anything about it. My mother had always warned me sternly against mentioning my father’s name: I wasn’t quite sure why. It hardly seemed something to be ashamed of. But she succeeded in impressing on me that it was effectively a secret, and that she would be angry if ever I betrayed it.

But then little Stephia started goading me, saying I was a bastard. I had rather liked Stephi before this, but this accusation was particularly galling because it was technically true, and therefore could not be rebutted. My mother, I knew, considered marriage an oppressive, bourgeois institution, more a defacement of an honest relationship than its natural fulfilment. She would no more have agreed to marry my father than to walk around in a set of chains. I always understood that my father tacitly agreed, at least in a more lukewarm manner. though he would never condemn marriage publicly and always lent his strong moral support to the institution of the family.

But then Stephi began to say I had no father, did not know who my father was.

“I have a father!” I shouted indignantly, “I have a father I see every day at home! And he’s more important than your father!”

“What’s his name, then?”

“I’m not telling you.”

“Why not? Because you don’t know it?”

“No, because it’s none of your business.”

“Ooh! Lucia’s father is secret! He’s better than mine, he’s better than yours, only he daren’t tell anyone his name.”

“My father,” I said furiously, unleashing what I took to be the equivalent of a nuclear strike, “is Marki Larvartin.”

The effect was far worse than I could have imagined. It was roughly as if I had said my father was Napoleon Bonaparte, or Charlie Chaplin. There was a stunned moment of silence, briefly gratifying, and they all broke out in sincere, uncontrollable laughter. Even those who had looked ready to defend me now instantly switched sides. I had gone too far, I had been too stupid, I had let them down and no longer deserved any sympathy. No, now I deserved all I got, they made it clear.

Over the next few weeks, some of them took to mocking me and even, in a desultory way, bullying me. I found myself penned into a corner of the playground by the leaking drainpipe which was covered in moss, the only place which was securely out of view of the teachers, where I was subjected to a lazy inquisition. If I hit you will the army come and get me then? Why doesn’t your father come and rescue you? One serious little girl got a more dangerous glint in her eye and told me that she feared this disrespectful appropriation of our Leader’s name showed false consciousness. I might be in need of re-education to prevent my becoming, in objective terms, a reactionary element. I might need to be sent to an ‘Explanation Camp’. She attempted to start the process by giving me a Chinese burn. I despised all my antagonists, but I viewed her and her supposed Camps (there were in real life Reading Camps and Number Camps where children who had failed to make good progress might go in the summer if their parents wished) with particular contempt. My father was not Chairman Mao, and the threat of compulsory re-education did not exist in our happy Republic; if anyone needed their perceptions amended, it was her. All the same I felt wounded to be placed in the role of the traitor, the heretic, when I knew I was the daughter of the absolute wellspring of orthodoxy.

In fairness, there was absolutely no reason for them to believe me. I went to an ordinary school, and because my parents were not married, I did not use my father’s surname: I was Lucia Fabrin, not Lucia Larvartin. We lived in an ordinary apartment in an ordinary part of the city, and my father would come home from the Agraci Palace in an ordinary green Robodin car, his only concessions to his elevated status being the uniformed soldier who drove it (it was one of my father’s quirks that he never learned to drive) and the pale secretary Stilin in the passenger seat, a black cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Lucas Stilin, who had been with my father since the early days, since my father first joined the Party, accompanied him everywhere, even up the door of our block before turning and getting back into the car. I never felt quite comfortable in Stilin’s presence. It wasn’t that his gaunt appearance was so terrifying – he really only looked like an elderly teacher or clerk of some kind, it was my imagination that made him seem so cadaverous – but somehow I felt there was a danger about him, like some poisonous creature which, without any malice on its part, would one day do me or my father some terrible harm. However, my father seemed to find him indispensable, and he certainly appeared to be dedicated.

My mother told me my father wanted me to have an ordinary working-class Twentyland education, not to have me treated as the privileged offspring of a politician. He would have been untrue to his principles if he had allowed me to use my unearned status to win the respect of my little peers. Once again it was made clear that she would be furious if she ever found out that I had even mentioned who my father was. But one day I could not help bursting out:

“If you are the President, Daddy, why don’t we live at the Palace?”

He looked up from his newspaper and raised his greying eyebrows at me. He threw my mother, standing at the sink, a sly look.

“What’s this? Our little girl wants to be a princess, it seems, Marica.”

“But you work at the Palace. You go there every day, even Sundays. Wouldn’t it be easier if we lived there?”

He sighed. My mother was giving me black looks which threatened a bad time later on. But my father was not angry. In fact I never remember him being angry with me. He put aside his paper and held out his arms; I skipped across to the battered old armchair he always settled into (like some old bear easing itself wearily into a pile of leaves for its winter sleep); worn thin in places, leaking stuffing at one side, and with one broken spring, but still his favourite; he wouldn’t hear of replacing it. I sat on his knee. Resting my head on his chest (I wasn’t too old to do that yet) I caught a faint but definite whiff of pipe tobacco. He was supposed to have given up a year ago; if my mother caught him there’d be a bad time for him too.

He began by reminding me of the bedtime stories he had always told me; stories about the French Revolution, the Russian revolution. He had always told me, he said gently, that our Revolution was to be better than those, fine as they were. When the leaders of past revolutions had got into the King’s palace, they found it suited them very well. They began to live in the King’s house and wear kingly clothes. in the end they became kings, as Napoleon had done. There was an English writer, he told me, a terrible reactionary, but one who had written a good, clever story about this, a story about the revolution of the farm animals; I should read it when I was older…

My mother rolled her eyes up disrespectfully. My father often tried her patience; she had a far sharper sense of propriety than he did. She did not think there was anything a good Marxist-Larvartist could learn from English literature, not even from Charles Dickens’ harrowing documentary works on the cruelty and contradictions of capitalism, about the only English books she was prepared to countenance at all.

My father reminded me how the French had cut off the heads of their King and Queen. But you cannot dispel the institution of monarchy merely by executing the individual who happens to occupy the position of monarch, he said: like bad magic it lingers in the air until it can inhabit a new human form. Louis was not a bad man in himself, perhaps; it was not his wickedness that made him a king, but the impartial processes of historical dialectic. Perhaps he did not even like being king; instead he wished he had been a clock-maker. How would it have been, now, if the revolutionaries had not killed him and his silly wife, but given him a little shop, and her a flock of real sheep? How would it have been, if instead of spilling the blood of all those aristocrats, many of them decent individuals at heart, people who could have worked for France, they had simply been told that they should all be ordinary people now, or at least, that they should be ordinary until they did something remarkable, something good for their fellow citizens that made everyone open their eyes. Wouldn’t that have been better? Mightn’t some of those guillotined people have turned out to be worth having? Wouldn’t the French Republic have lived and grown? Mightn’t it have become the example which other countries strove to emulate, a land that lived out the true meaning of its own creed as a place of loving fraternity just as much as one of freedom and equality, a nation of comfort, sympathy and kindliness instead of the birthplace of a ravaging Imperial army?

When the Chinese captured the last of their Emperors, my father said, they didn’t cut off his head; no, even though he had most atrociously betrayed them by collaborating with the Japanese occupation, even though he was responsible for the cruel deaths of many innocent Chinese citizens. Instead they made him a gardener, and allowed him to live a decent useful life, free from the institutions which had oppressed him as well as the workers. He turned out to be a simple fellow, no more than a tool in the hands of ruthless politicians in his earlier life, but a decent and honest gardener at the end. Now that was the way a Communist regime should behave: that was exemplary; that was Marxist-Larvartism, though of course the poor Chinese didn’t have the advantage of understanding the illustrious theory they were exemplifying.

“And so, Lucia,” he concluded, “that is why we must be ordinary people if we are to keep faith with our special Twentyland Revolution. You know, it suits me anyway: ordinary life is congenial to me. I’m sure you prefer it too, don’t you? Think of having to wear stiff clothes all day and never get them dirty; think of always having to eat properly with a knife and fork while lots of horrid servants in wigs stared at you. You would not like to sleep in that Palace, in a huge bed with horrid musty curtains around you, wide dark spaces full of ghosts, the sound of strange people creeping down the corridors all night; no, no.”

“But then why do you work there every day?”

“I wish I didn’t, to tell you the truth. You know I have to entertain foreign leaders, Lucia, and my advisors tell me that such people are impressed and rendered more amenable if they come to a palace to see me. And when I present awards to our workers and scientists, they feel honoured all the more if the presentation is in a palace. Perhaps they should not feel like that, perhaps one day they won’t, but at the moment, I’m afraid they do. Anyway, I should not like to demolish the place; it is a fine building in its way, a valuable reminder of our history, too, and it is better that we put it to ordinary use. Do you know that we only use a small part of it for my offices? We made the rest of it into a lunatic asylum.”

My mother frowned.

“It is not a lunatic asylum; it is a mental hospital.” she reproved him.

“I’m sorry. But you know, Marica, there is some excuse for me. They call themselves the lunatics. You know that they belong to St Matthew’s Refuge for Lunatics – that is the official name. But there is also St Matthew’s Hospital of Genito-Urinary Medicine, and when people asked which one they were from the patients always used to say very quickly that they were the lunatics. They got used to it. In any case, it is a good use for a palace, don’t you think? You know that when they first moved in, they were very pleased with their new accommodation. When I came out of my office one evening, there was a lunatic – excuse me, a female mental patient I should say – standing by. She saluted me and thanked me for moving them all into the Agraci Palace, and then, as I was getting into the car she shouted at the top of her voice; ‘Don’t worry, Marki Larvartin, the people may think you’re a scoundrel, but the lunatics will always support you!’”

He paused, and then raised one finger thoughtfully.

“But you know what? I think your criticism is a good one in a way, after all, Lucia. She is right, isn’t she, Marica? You think, Lucia, that I should not be ashamed to bring these foreigners, and these deserving workers, to an ordinary home, and you are right; your approach is impeccable. Tomorrow you shall live in a palace, because this flat will become the Palace – will you be ready, Marica? I look forward to seeing the reactions. I think the face of the British ambassador, Sir John Beauchamp-Tollemache, will be particularly worth seeing. I shall offer him this chair as a mark of my special regard for the English aristocracy.”

My mother was not amused. She told me my father must not show me any special favour, since that would betray his principles, and that I should not ask it.

“I’m afraid your mother is right, Lucia, said my father, if we begin to bend the rules for ourselves, we shall be setting off on a bad road.”

I moaned in frustration, and he looked at me in surprise.

“Is there something else behind all this? Tell me your problems.”

I hesitated – this was going to make my mother even angrier – and then I told him about the other children and how they wouldn’t believe me. He listened carefully – it was one of the things he was good at: no-one else paid attention to my views, but he seemed to think they were as important as my mother’s, or the Controller of Police’s, or anyone’s. People trusted him for the simple reason that he listened to them properly, and he seemed for his part to find people unendingly interesting, not always a quality a politician can afford, I should have thought.

When I had finished my mother intervened.

“This is your own fault, Lucia,” she declared icily, “If you had done as you were told, there would be no problem. I will speak to your teacher about this, but you must say no more about your father. Understood? In time this will blow over.”

Over the next week at school I found this hard to believe, but I was a dutiful girl and I did my best. When I was teased, I clamped my lips shut and would not say who my father was – or anything at all.

Then, after ten days or so, in the middle of a lesson, when we were settling down to a spelling test, the classroom door flew open and my father, entirely unannounced, strode in, looking older, greyer and fatter than in the picture on the wall, but far nicer and instantly recognisable. I felt as if I were soaring out of the top of my own head on a surge of joy and excitement. He looked around the classroom, came over to my desk, and seized me in a great bear-hug, all in an astonished silence; put me down again, strode over to the teacher’s desk and whispered inaudibly in her ear. I don’t know what he said to her – I supposed he was trying to put her at her ease; she certainly looked as if she needed it, poor woman. Then he went back to the door where his driver was standing grinning beside the ghost-like figure of Stilin the secretary, waved at the children and disappeared.

The teacher was completely flummoxed by this. She sat in silence for a while, staring straight ahead with her eyes wide open. Then suddenly, as if she had woken up, she began to applaud frantically. The children joined in gradually; for about a minute we all clapped vigorously, and then faltered and stopped again, feeling slightly ridiculous.

My life at school was different after that; not better in every respect, since some of my former friends now shunned me while a few of the worse kind of people began to toady and follow me around; but no-one doubted my word any more.

My mother was furious when she found out what had happened.

“After all those lectures about being an ordinary man, you do this!” she exclaimed, “So she must be the President’s daughter for the rest of her life after all! Her life must revolve around yours! For the sake of a cheap gesture you sacrifice your daughter’s privacy and freedom forever! You understand what you’ve done? Now no-one will look at her without thinking of you. Damn you. You should be ashamed of yourself. So much for Marxist-Larvartism!”

My father took it all with patience, as he always did.

“I’m a simple man, Marica,” he replied, “I don’t understand ideology. I never went to college like you. But if this Marxist-Larvartism of yours says that a man can’t hug his daughter, then frankly, I say to hell with it.”

“What did you say to the teacher?” I asked.

“I apologised for disrupting her lesson. I said I was so delighted by your marks recently that I felt I must come at once and congratulate her on your achievements… Er… I said the visit was informal, strictly informal, just a parent dropping in. I asked her not to tell the head teacher that I had come, or she would be sure to get out the committee and ask me to make a speech, and then I would be late and Stilin would begin fidgeting and we should all be in terrible trouble. And I asked her to remove the picture. My picture, I mean, the one on the wall. In Twentyland, we don’t have the cult of personality, I said: if I should come back another time with the Minister of Education, I should be embarrassed that my picture was on the wall. Not that I’m not flattered, I said, please don’t think I don’t appreciate the warm sentiment, but you know another thing about that picture is that I don’t like the way the eyes follow you around the room.”

“You couldn’t have said all that. You didn’t have time.”

“No, I suppose not.” he answered slyly. “Perhaps I just said ‘Excuse me, Miss’.”

I threw my arms around the President and gave him the biggest hug I could manage.

3,391 words. Woo hoo!

I put ‘Nanowrimo Winner’ in for the ‘Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award’, not because I thought it would win but because it was all I’d got.

I didn’t really expect any reaction beyond a possible sales pitch for Amazon’s self-publishing service, but I’ve just had a couple of pieces of feedback from ‘ABNA Expert Reviewers’. A bit good cop, bad cop, really.

First Reviewer
I enjoyed reading this “novel.” I gave it 4 stars for originality, but not 5 because it really doesn’t really seem like a novel. It seems more like a humorous treatise about writing a 50,000 word novel for the ABNA contest or of the author’s chances of winning, perhaps. It certainly seems to be a tongue-in-cheek effort to sort of poke fun at the contest.

I want to add-I think it is important to add-that this author has potential, and I wish he would of “had a go” at writing the detective novel he enticingly described, instead of a “novel” about writing a novel for an actual contest. Would any publisher be interested in this “spoof”? Well, maybe.

Second Reviewer
Though I really wanted to like this excerpt based on the premise, I simply wasn’t able to in the end. What I thought would be a tongue-in-cheek look at the novel writing process turned into a pedantic novel about a pedantic novel-writer. It was not at all amusing and certainly did not inspire a desire to continue reading.

The narrator of this novel is not at all a sympathetic character, and his snide approach to novel-writing seemed a touch bitter for a writing competition. When read aloud, the dialogue is clunky and does not flow naturally. If I read this excerpt in a bookstore, I would not purchase the full novel.

I’m afraid the net effect on me is one of mild encouragement…