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But there’s more, there’s more…

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

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.