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12. May Day

Of all the stories my mother told me about my father, the one which made the deepest impression on me, of course, was the story of May Day.

When the Russians finally decided to leave Twentyland, Colonel Ostrovsky came to see my father for the last time.

“I take it for granted, Comrade,” he said, “that your country will remain a loyal observer of the Warsaw Pact and fully co-operative with the fraternal economic and political initiatives of your allies. I just hope that now you’ve got the place, you can run it, because you won’t be getting any help – you understand that?”

He paused, sighed, and took off his hat.

“Good luck, Marki,” he said, “You’re going to need it. Lots of it. But you won’t fail through lack of cheek. Comrade, I salute you for the last time.”

He embraced my father and marched out of the Palace forever.

People assumed that once the Russians had gone there would be an adjustment: that Tretchin would be unceremoniously ejected and my father would take over as Prime Minister. Tretchin must have thought so, because he tried to leave the country and was intercepted at the airport. My father reassured him: there would be proper elections for a new Prime Minister in due course, in which he was welcome to stand if he wished: in the meantime my father would remain President.

What happened was that without any law being passed, or any appointments being made, the President somehow became the real leader of his country and the office of Prime Minister became a minor one. Perhaps it would be truer to say that people recognised openly now that my father had always been the leader, whatever the Russians thought about it.

Nevertheless, Ostrovsky’s references to my father needing luck were not idle. The people of Twentyland had soon got over their gratitude at being liberated, and they were not at all happy to find themselves in the Soviet orbit. In old Dubitania, there had been a somewhat unrealistic sense of being a leading Romance nation, one of the three pillars of European culture along with France and Italy. Dubitania looked first to the Mediterranean for its culture: and second, to Germany and Austria. The Twentylanders still regarded the Russians as very much their inferiors: to have Russian soldiers swaggering through the streets of Sescastri, helping themselves to any small items that took their fancy, seemed to them a deeply wounding humiliation, and to have their children taught Russian at school instead of French was quite unendurable. The departure of the Russians obviously did a great deal to dispel these tensions, but there was still some resentment against the Party and it was quite possible that this resentment would turn itself against my father. There was no doubt that certain clandestine groups had begun making plans for risings against his regime in favour of some variety of reactionary bourgeois social democracy, and even, farcically, in support of a restored monarchy. It must be remembered that at this stage, my father had not yet had the freedom to introduce his own distinctive policies, and that while he still commanded the support of the great majority of Twentylanders, he had not yet attained the unanimous popular backing which we now take for granted.

A key milestone would be the first grand May Day parade to be held in Sescastri following the departure of the Red Army. For several months beforehand, Commissar Ursin was forced to neglect his supervision of the police while he attempted to ensure that the armed forces of Twentyland would be able to put on a good show. This was no easy task; frankly, they were threadbare and suffered from low morale.

My father was uneasy about the whole thing, displaying an uncharacteristic quietness and passivity. It seemed as if for the time being he had lost his sense of direction. The one thing that rekindled his energy at that time was the intermittent efforts which were made by Ursin and others to get him to wear the uniform of a Field Marshal.

“I should rather wear a skirt.” he said, “And you know, if you don’t shut up about this, Juri, I really think I will.”

The process of planning seemed dogged by problems; my father said he thought we should set a precedent among the Communist nations of the world by delivering the May Day parade in July. But eventually everything was arranged. Early on the day of the parade, my father was sitting wearing his uncomfortable best suit in the upper room of the Café Napoleon, which had been reserved for his use, when Ursin strode in with a grim smile on his face.

“We’ve got an assassin, Marki.” he declared jubilantly, “Young fellow, standing in the crowd, carrying a big suitcase with a home-made bomb in it.”

“A suitcase?” asked my father, incredulously.

“Yes. An amateurish piece of work – he was lucky he didn’t blow himself up by accident. My men had him within three minutes of him showing up. I don’t think he had any detailed plan. He was just hoping that somehow he could get near you, and then I suppose he was either going to hurl it at you or blow himself up as well. Amateurs. If this is the best the opposition can do, you can sleep pretty easy.”

“You didn’t shoot him?”

“No, no. Took him clean as a whistle – hop! – the people standing next to him didn’t even know anything had happened. I thought you might want to talk to him. Shall I have him brought up?”

“No, no,” said my father, “I’ll come down.”

They had the boy handcuffed, standing in the open with a couple of Ursin’s men in black uniforms. Behind them, missile launchers and a couple of tanks were edging back and forth arthritically, making a thunderous noise and spewing out clouds of smoke. It was noticeable that the Twentyland markings were fresh and recent, in contrast to the obvious age of the vehicles, and the outline of the earlier Russian markings was still clearly visible.

The boy was tall and thin, rather unhealthy in appearance, about eighteen, pale, with a defiant look on his face. It seemed that the neatness of his extraction from the crowd had not precluded his being given a quick but thorough beating.

“It seemed a great relief to me, at first anyway, that he was fair-haired and looked upper-class somehow,” my father said, “If he had at all resembled Tibri, I’m not sure I could have spoken to him. Though perhaps that would have been better”

“Why did you want to kill me?” he asked the boy, “What have I done to you that would justify that?”

“You killed my father.” the boy replied defiantly.

“Your father?”

“Yes. You and your filthy Russians. He was betrayed, they set a trap and then you shot him down with machine guns. You didn’t even give him a chance.”

“I’m sorry, but I assure you I know nothing about it,” said my father, “I’m afraid it’s true that our Russian allies did not always behave well. Lots of decent men got killed; I did what I could at the time and I bitterly regret that I couldn’t do more, but I don’t think your father’s death was anything to do with me.”

“You deny it,” said the boy, “Like the coward you are. But when they came for him they told him they had come with a present from Comrade Larvartin.”

“What was your father’s name?” demanded my father.

The boy threw back his head in a sad attempt at haughtiness.

“Julio Cesare Obertin.” he said.

My father covered his face with his hands and stood in silence for a long time.

“Marki?” asked Ursin at last.

My father removed his hands and looked at the boy.

“They lied to you,” he said, “They lied atrociously. Your father was my friend. I should rather have died myself than caused his death. I wanted… I would have… He…” he tailed off, shook his head hopelessly and was silent again for several minutes.

“Let him go,” he said to Ursin at last, “He is not to be punished, He has every reason to kill me. He has the right to kill me, in fact. He has the right to kill me three times over if he could.”

“Very well.” said Ursin briskly, and beyond one small twitch of an eyebrow, he betrayed no surprise, “Lads, you heard the Chief. This gentleman is not to be punished. Take him back to the centre and let him clean up a bit, put something on those cuts. Then I want to see him before he goes, to apologise personally – understand? Make sure he waits till I come – alright?”

My father looked unwell and unsteady. They brought a chair and he sat with his face in his hands.

“Time to get ready for the parade, Marki,” said Ursin at last, “This is important, remember? We’ve got to put on a good show for the people.” He looked at my father with real concern. “Marki?” he asked, “Are you OK?” There was no answer. “Look, Marki,” he said, putting one hand on my father’s shoulder, “That was all nonsense. You know as well as I do that Obertin had no son. That story about the Russians is just some malicious nonsense. Chances are, Obertin’s living it up in Rio at this very moment. You know that.”

My father sat up.

“More bombs, more guns, Juri,” he said, “Always more guns.” He stared at the missile launchers which were still revving and shifting on the road nearby. “Tell them to put the bloody things away.” he said, hoarsely.

“What?”

“The guns. Put the bloody guns away. And the soldiers. No, wait – they can stay if they like, but no marching, and no guns. Otherwise they can go back to barracks. We don’t want that today. No more of that.”

“But Marki, they’ve been rehearsing all week. What am I going to say? What do you expect me to tell the commanders of the Twentyland Armed Forces?”

“Tell them to fuck off.” said my father.

* * *

At the dais where my father was due to make his speech, there was consternation. There were rumours that the whole parade had been called off. Then my father appeared, calm and apparently unruffled, although there was no sign of the troops who should have been waiting to salute him. In fact, for the first time, he was smiling in his old, confident way.

My father’s speech began along predictable lines. He expressed gratitude for the fraternal support of the Red Army over many years, and said that Twentyland was now entering on a new era.

“It is customary on these occasions, comrades,” he said, “To make a display of our most formidable weapons. I intend to adhere to that tradition, and I mean to show you the most powerful item in my armoury. With this weapon, I intend to seize, not territory or power, but the future itself. The strange thing about this potent apparatus is that it spreads, not death and destruction, but hope and joy. Comrades, join with me.”

And with that, he reached down and picked up – his three-year-old daughter Lucia! Yes! He held her up for the crowd to see; there was a moment of surprised silence, and then a roar of relief and applause. He set her on his shoulders and descended from the dais. It became clear that he meant to lead the procession himself. From streets on every side came columns of schoolchildren. A group of Ursin’s black-clad henchmen moved among them, handing out flags and balloons with varying degrees of embarrassment, and the whole peculiar cavalcade set off.

At first the crowds of people standing by were puzzled, then gradually they became amused, and finally charmed. The spectacle of my father, like Bacchus and Silenus rolled into one, leading a wild, disorderly procession of laughing children down the grand avenue was irresistible. Parents and other children left the crowds on the pavement to join in, and the procession swelled in size; the difference between procession and audience began to blur. The Sescastri People’s Guard Marching Band appeared, playing a jaunty march; they looked sheepish, but they too began to smile as the spirit of the day caught them up. Gradually the procession split up and turned into a general rout all through the streets of Sescastri; a huge children’s street festival.

“The effect was astonishing,” my mother told me; “Really, it was as though the sun had come out for the first time after a long, long winter. You could see the strain and fear leaving people’s faces. After that day, your father had nothing to fear from anyone.”

That is why, unlike all its allies, Twentyland has May Day parades without guns, composed mainly of children; and not orderly bands of Young Pioneers or carefully drilled gymnasts, but chaotic, joyful, promenading parties, that roam all over the town, where the soldiers are dressed as clowns or pixies, and no weapon more deadly than a balloon on a stick is ever to be seen.

This parade was of course the occasion depicted in the famous poster “Encarpa Futura!” which you can still see displayed in waiting rooms and other public spaces; it shows the famous piggy-back ride with the slogan in large letters in the background. My mother has often told me of the deep impression made by the figure of my father waltzing tirelessly through the streets.

“He laughed so much,” she said, “It was infectious. You couldn’t help joining in. He laughed and laughed until the tears were streaming down his face.”

*”Grasp the future!”

34,131 words

11. Aldo’s Legs

My father was embarrassed by the way people would put up plaques or even statues celebrating his contribution to some undertaking. Often enough the tribute was well-deserved, but he would never accept this. In his view the people who laid the bricks were far more deserving of credit for any new building: all he had done was talk. He could rarely be persuaded to cut ribbons or unveil things, even when he had played a crucial role in inspiring and directing the project. On the occasions when he could be made to attend this kind of event, he would often seize someone from the crowd and try to force them to wield the silver trowel or the golden scissors. He said he could not understand why people were so intent on putting him in a false position.

My mother found this attitude irritating, and told him frankly that in her view it was only another species of vanity.

“It’s as if you thought the people’s applause wasn’t good enough for you,” she said.

But at the same time she herself was not always particularly impressed by the monuments and occasions my father was asked to celebrate. She said that many of his best achievements went unnoticed because they had been delivered inconspicuously: some time spent with a factory manager here, a private conversation with a local official there, and something marvellous would happen for which my father would steadfastly deny responsibility.

Her favourite example of his unobserved influence was the famous story of Aldo’s legs. In Dubitania, sports had largely been the preserve of the upper classes, and the country had a poor record in almost everything but shooting, riding and croquet as a result. In this respect Twentyland at first resembled its predecessor; although new sporting opportunities now became available, few of the workers and even fewer of the former peasants felt much inclined to take them up. At the national athletics meeting which would in many cases finalise membership of the Olympic team, the majority of competitors were middle-class, and not a few were former aristocrats. This included one of our best hopes, the marathon runner Athanasi Dilagin, who was the grandson of a former Prince and the nephew of the Archbishop of Andra-Nipoli (who was still Archbishop, by the way, though his income was greatly reduced and he now inhabited only one wing of the archiepiscopal palace).

As Athanasi was warming up near the marathon start, which on this occasion had been set up on the road just outside the stadium, he noticed a young tea-seller whose urn, which he carried strapped to his back, was sticking out into the road slightly; he paused, put his hands on his hips, and shouted – rather curtly perhaps – at the tea-boy to move.

This unpromising opening led to a dialogue in which Athanasi was informed that his ears stuck out, that the country no longer belonged to him, and that his feet were taking up more room than the urn. In return the tea-boy he was told that he was a gipsy, a spiv*, and that he dealt in horse-piss. The interesting prospect of a fight between the two parties was dispelled by onlookers who separated them; they told the tea-seller that this was none other than Athanasi Dilagin the famous runner.

The tea-seller was dressed in traditional embroidered costume of Puttonyi Province, said to be based on a combination of Scythian trousers and the clothes and equipment of a Roman legionary (though to see the resemblance requires some imagination); and he had a dignified moustache which slightly disguised his youthfulness. He smirked and said that he himself was none other than Aldo Forobdin** the famous tea-seller. He observed that Athanasi ran like his mother the feral bitch, and said that if he liked, he, Aldo would show him how to run like a human being. Athanasi’s coach and most of the officials standing by took this as mere insolence, but the small crowd which had gathered was half-seriously on Aldo’s side, and began chanting his name. Athanasi said that if Aldo wanted to join the race, he was all for it.

So at length Aldo put down his urn and, without anything in the way of preparation, walked over to the starting line, where a large group of athletes was already gathered. It was now noticed that below the trousers which ended a few inches above his ankles, he was barefoot. The officials from the Twentyland Athletics Federation frowned and shrugged at each other, but they did not intervene.

Athanasi thoughtfully selected a place as far away as possible from his humble competitor. There was a pause; the gun was fired, and the race began. Knowledgeable onlookers expected Aldo, as a naïve runner, to dash off at an unrealistic pace – it seemed far from clear that he even knew how far he had undertaken to run – but in fact he stumped off stolidly, making no attempt to get to the front. He had promised to show how human beings ran, but he must have seen some strange examples of humanity; he ran with a straight, upright back and with his arms held up as though to elbow the other competitors aside.

Over the next hour or so the story of Aldo’s challenge spread like wildfire, and the crowd waiting around the finishing line grew steadily. Most of the idlers were vaguely on Aldo’s side, but it was no great surprise when after some two and a half hours it was Athanasi who appeared first, looking only a little stressed. He completed the course in good style, turning in a personal best and looking encouragingly as though he could easily have screwed a bit more speed out of his legs.

But then, not much more than five minutes behind, came Aldo. He was clearly suffering, and his peculiar gait had collapsed into a kind of shuffling amble, but as he crossed the line in second place, he got a tremendous ovation. When he had recovered, as the rest of the field were streaming in, Athanasi came forward and offered his hand. Aldo sniffed, and shook it.

“Well, tea-man,” said Athanasi, “You finished, at any rate – that was something. You’ve showed us you can run a bit.”

“You have shoes, and trainers, and money,” observed Aldo, “But I have one thing you will never have. Peasant legs!”

Athanasi laughed good-naturedly, but as Aldo was limping back to pick up his tea-urn, he shouted:

“Next time, keep the bloody urn out of the way!”

Aldo did not respond, but a dark look of anger flashed over his face.

This encounter obviously became well-known in Twentyland, and nearly everyone was full of praise for the plucky tea-boy who had, the papers suggested, exemplified the robust spirit of the nation. The newspapers all carried the story of how he had begun running at the age of twelve when his mother took to sending him off to deliver her home-made Emboustra cheese pie to his aunt’s house fifteen kilometres away every Saturday. Aldo found that if he ran both ways he could get the job done more quickly, and gradually running 30 kilometres without much of a pause became something he was quite used to.

“That extra twelve is no joke, though!” he said

Given the national enthusiasm, it was clear that Aldo would not be allowed to give up competitive running easily. He was quickly inducted into the Amateur Athletic Club of Vegamatrin (the Sescastri club, controversially, refused to have anything to do with him) and the rules were bent to allow him to compete in another marathon some two months later which was also on Athanasi’s schedule. A return contest was too attractive a prospect to be missed.

Athanasi himself made no protest, but his supporters were vocal. They pointed out that Athanasi Dilagin was Twentyland’s best, if not only, hope of a gold medal at the Olympic games. Aldo Forobdin might be a character and something of a prodigy, but was the nation going to put its best chance at risk by staging some meaningless populist rivalry? In any case, although Athanasi might be the descendant of aristocrats, he himself was a simple soldier, whereas Aldo was an entrepreneurial capitalist, albeit on a very small scale.

However, nothing they could say had any effect on the general desire to see Aldo race Athanasi again, and in due course they found themselves standing together on the starting line. Noting that although Aldo was now decked out in brand-new running kit he was still barefoot, Athanasi offered to lend him running shoes; a gesture which evoked only indignation.

“I understand you,” said Aldo, tensely, “You are trying to interfere with my style. You think that with those things flapping around my feet I could not run properly.”

At this Athanasi lost patience, and swore at the tea-seller. They edged apart again and when the whistle blew, Athanasi went well ahead. Aldo, cheered on enthusiastically by bystanders, plugged on in his characteristic style.

At the twenty kilometre mark, a young woman more enthusiastic than the rest leapt out and threw her arms round Aldo’s neck. For a moment he looked merely annoyed, but then spectators cried out in horror as they saw the young woman kick Aldo’s ankle. She was wearing heavy boots with steel toecaps, and poor Aldo immediately fell sideways and rolled on the ground in pain. The young woman disappeared into the crowd.

Aldo waved away the stretcher which had been brought, and after ten minutes’ respite hobbled away again. He had boasted of his legs, and it now seemed that his ankles must have some special strength: within a hundred yards he was running naturally again, or at any rate as naturally as he ever did. Soon, with a grim expression on his face, he was more than making up for lost time. The crowds along the way cheered him on.

In the final mile Aldo at last sighted Athanasi, and began to close the gap. His face was now screwed up into a furious expression, and it seemed that it was anger that was powering his legs up the final straight. Athanasi, somehow sensing the presence of his rival, glanced back and raised his eyebrows in surprise; summoning energy from some inner reserve, he put on a final sprint. He crossed the line just a yard ahead of Aldo.

The two of them jogged a little further together as if they were the best of friends.

“I’ve got to admit, Forobdin,” said Athanasi, “You’re pretty good at second place.”

“Although your sister is a whore,” responded Aldo, disdaining subtlety, “She kicks like a mule.”

“What?”

“She has the face of a mule too. Perhaps instead of running you could ride her – she is clearly well–used to being ridden…”

But Aldo was forced to break off and duck at that point. He easily dodged Athanasi’s fist, and retaliated with a haymaker to Athanasi’s ear. Before anyone could intervene, Dubitania’s leading athletes were engaged in a terrible, flailing fight. When Aldo was at length pulled away from Athanasi, he had a black eye and his fine moustache was twisted down at one side, but he was uninjured: when Athanasi was released, by contrast, he had an ominous limp.

“What the hell is the matter with you, peasant?” he demanded, “Why did you have to insult my sister?”

“She kicked my ankle,” said Aldo with dignity, “So now I have kicked yours.”

“My sister is in France.”

A short man in a straw hat plucked nervously at Aldo’s long sleeve.

“Mr Forobdin,” he said nervously, “The woman who kicked you – they have her. She got out of St Matthew’s Refuge – the lunatic asylum.”

Just for a moment a look of doubt and shame flitted across Aldo’s face.

“You have peasant’s legs alright,” observed Athanasi, “and peasant’s manners; and worst of all, peasant’s brains.”

Matters went from bad to worse over the next few months. It took several weeks before Athanasi’s ankle had recovered sufficiently for him to train again, which was the cause of bitter resentment among his supporters. When at last the Twentyland team marched around the Olympic stadium, it was observed that Aldo was wearing in his belt an opinelca, the traditional Dubitanian shepherd’s knife with a curved blade designed to slit the throats of wolves. People speculated half-seriously about whether he meant to stab Athanasi with it, or merely ward off any lunatics who assaulted him.

At this point my father decided matters had gone far enough. He went down to see the two runners together privately. No-one knows quite what he said to them, but he must surely have called on their patriotism and invoked the shining code of fraternity embodied in Marxist-Larvartism. No doubt he used more down-to-earth language, however: I think it is entirely possible that he simply sat down and said:

“Tell me your problems.”

On the starting line the next day, Athanasi and Aldo looked each other in the eye and solemnly shook hands. Aldo’s supporters were overjoyed when for the first time he was observed to be running just ahead of Athanasi: more sophisticated observers understood that this meant the tea-seller had agreed to help his rival, probably to the detriment of his own chances.

Today, though, it seemed Aldo had legs of iron and nothing could hold him back. Both runners drew slowly ahead of the field, and gradually built up a comfortable lead over a Kenyan runner in third place. But as they came into the last few hundred yards the worst possible disaster took place: Athanasi twisted his weakened ankle. He stopped at once, and Aldo, still a few paces ahead, stopped too.

“Go on, go on!” protested Athanasi, “I’ll be OK. One of us has got to win it.”

Aldo hesitated.

“For Twentyland!” said Athanasi.

Aldo smiled.

“You’re not thinking straight, comrade,” he said, “I don’t want to win a medal for Twentyland but make it into a place where a man runs off and leaves his countryman, do I?”

He stepped forward, turned his back, and suddenly hauled Athanasi up on his back as though he were a tea-urn.

“Aldo!” exclaimed Athanasi, “Put me down and run!”

Aldo tottered towards the finishing line; all at once the Kenyan appeared and swept past with no more than an incurious glance at the two of them. Slowly Aldo began to pick up speed, and he hit the line at a decent trot, only a few minutes behind the Kenyan and a few minutes ahead of a German, the next runner to arrive.

A puzzled official was standing by.

“Give him second place,” said Aldo, putting Athanasi down, “I’ve had enough of it.”

The German approached and said something to the official.

“I’m afraid,” said the official in German, “That your friend will be disqualified. It’s not for me to adjudicate, but this West German gentleman is also contending that you should be disqualified, on the grounds that there was an element of mutual assistance.”

Aldo could not follow this, but Athanasi, who spoke good German, translated for him.

“We don’t care about that,” said Athanasi to the official, “Aldo may not have been the first runner to cross the line today, but he ran the best race.”

The German spoke incomprehensibly to the official again, and gestured assertively at the Twentylanders.

“Oh, give him the medal,” said Athanasi, “Give him both. Give him six medals. Perhaps it will help him feel happy about his sad grey country where everyone must be better than everyone else. Tell him what Comrade Larvartin said; in our country we have one thing that he will never have: socialist legs.”

* ‘listofandi’; much more insulting than the nearest English equivalents, this is fighting talk whoever it is addressed to.
** No relation to any of the other Forobdins mentioned here. ‘Forobdin’ is one of the most common of Dubitanian names, as witness the traditional use of ‘Private Forobdin’ to designate a typical soldier, a sort of Dubitanian ‘Tommy Atkins’ figure.

32,028 words

10. Science

Although he absorbed history books avidly, and re-read certain political texts over and over again, my father was not an intellectual, and while advances in medicine and practical technology quickly kindled his enthusiasm, high theoretical science tended to leave him cold or even sceptical. This was sometimes a source of slight embarrassment when he was called on to hand out prizes or make speeches at some University. I particularly remember one visit to the People’s Observatory high in the Graupin mountains where he asked to be shown the eyepiece on the giant radio telescope, and accused the astronomers of looking into the bedroom windows of Sescastri in their spare time. The Head of the Observatory was a dignified old man in a grey three-piece suit; the smile on his face got more and more fixed as the visit proceeded. Of course my father was unabashed.

“Comrades,” he said, “No less a figure than V.I.Lenin himself was a keen amateur astronomer. On one occasion, while he was visiting the fields to examine the splendid surpluses which were being produced by the latest five-year plan, he came upon a worker leaning on a gate and staring into the evening sky. On being questioned, the worker explained that he was puzzled by the appearance of a bright star while the sun was still up – indeed, quite close to the sun. Lenin smiled, and explained that this was no star but the planet Venus. He discovered to his horror that the worker had no idea of astronomy and in fact had never heard that the Earth went round the Sun. Lenin was mortified to think that the Soviet education system had somehow left this man with an understanding little better than that of a peasant, and immediately gave him a quick extemporised description of the Solar System. The man seemed appreciative, so warming to his challenge, Lenin settled down and gave the lucky worker a splendidly concise and clear summary of modern cosmology, technically accurate throughout, but couched in simple everyday language which even an ordinary worker could easily follow. He mentioned a number of constellations and some of the main stars that made them up, giving details of their characteristics and the stages in their normal life-cycle. Was the worker not amazed, he asked finally, by the achievements of modern science in measuring the unfathomable depths of space and working out the composition of the stars themselves? The worker agreed, but said that the thing that surprised him most was not that anyone should have measured the stars from a distance, but that anyone should have been able to find out what their names were. Comrades, I beg you: consider yourselves today so many Lenins.”

However, my father rightly considered himself a good judge of people, and when he first came across Raphaele Blumen he decided that this scientist, at least, was worth listening to. Blumen was a young man from Servinia province, the son of farm labourers. At the time of their first meeting he was more or less desperate. His seminal paper, On Cryptomorphosis, written at the age of 25, had been rejected out of hand everywhere and he was in trouble with the Professor of his Department for his continued attempts to have it discussed. Blumen was convinced that his rustic Latio-tinged accent and unpolished manners were making him the object of snobbery. It so happened that my father was due to make one of his rare visits to the Scholastic University of Lexandrin that month to open a new laboratory: Blumen decided on desperate measures. By begging the Professor’s secretary for her help, he managed to get himself added to the guest list for the reception which had been organised. At the door, however, he was turned back for being improperly dressed, having turned up unthinkingly in his stained old lab coat and clogs. Rousing himself with an effort from the depths of despair, he went back to his lodgings, managed somehow to borrow a half-decent suit, hurried back and was admitted. Without further ado, he charged forward through the startled guests and thrust a slightly dog-eared copy of his paper into my father’s hands.

My father, naturally, was startled: there he was, sinking gradually into torpor as Professor Vitalin plied him with Puttonyin wine and talked interminably about cyclotrons – he had a quite unrealistic hope that my father would agree to fund the construction of one at the University – when suddenly a skinny young man with a shock of curly hair thrust the Professor’s wife aside with an atrocious lack of manners, and pushed a sheaf of papers into my father’s hand. Blumen was pale and undernourished; his cheekbones stood out while his chin receded, and his red-rimmed eyes blazed with passion.

“Blumen!” Vitalin exclaimed, “Really, this is too much!”

“Will you, will you…?” said Blumen incoherently, never taking his eyes off my father. “It’s… it’s extremely important.”

“You want me to read this? I’m sorry young man, don’t think I don’t appreciate the compliment, but really I am no scientist. If this is a learned paper, you might as well give it to a bear in the forest as to me.” My father looked curiously at Blumen; the young man himself at least was legible and interesting, but even a quick glance showed that the paper was incomprehensible. My father held it out to Vitalin.

“I’m very sorry, Comrade President,” said Vitalin, “Please, you understand that in every institution there are disorderly elements who will not accept the judgement of their peers. Blumen here is a clever young man, and we value his enthusiasm, but he must learn to accept that his work is completely at odds with the established consensus of the scientific community. The occurrence of a few unusual correlations does not provide a reason to cut through the foundations of modern cellular biology.”

Dr Niardin, a balding man standing to Vitalin’s right, had been turning gradually red in the face as he listened to this.

“Vitalin, you are altogether too soft,” he exclaimed, “This young man has shown all too clearly that he has no place in any respectable place of learning. Originality and intelligence are worthless unless controlled by a proper respect for the orthodox consensus of the scientific community and the guidance of senior members of the field. Science is a discipline, not the free expression of an individual’s wilful curiosity. This intrusion is intolerable, and as for that – ” he gestured at the paper, which my father was still holding in mid-air “- that is a prime example of how the individualistic pursuit of strange and exotic data and the egotistical display of mere cleverness would overturn science as we know it if they were allowed to do so.”

My father blinked once, and said:

“Perhaps it is my duty to read the paper after all.” and he lowered his arm again.

Of course, my father had been right in the first place – there was absolutely no point in his reading the paper. He solemnly worked his way through it the following morning, but was entirely unable to make out even approximately what it was about, beyond gleaning the wholly false impression that it was something to do with the functioning of radio waves of some kind. Bearing in mind the reaction of the academic staff at Lexandrin, my father didn’t think it was worth referring the thing to another professor, but instead he sent it to Sergi Scalapin the surgeon and asked him to read it. Over the course of time, Scalapin and my father had developed a kind of respect for each other; in my father’s case he trusted Scalapin all the more because the old man made no secret of the fact that he continued to detest my father’s socialism. On this occasion, typically enough, Scalapin refused to come to my father’s office, saying he couldn’t spare the time, so my father went to the trouble of travelling to Oni-Litani to see him.

“I don’t know why you gave this to me, Larvartin,” said the old surgeon irritably, once they were settled in the room he used for his consultations. It was a well-proportioned room; rather sparsely furnished, but there was a splendid view of the lake and the celebrated pier of Oni-Litani. Scalapin, a stoutish old man with a severe expression, sat in a comfortable leather armchair, the only thing in the room which was not strictly utilitarian.

“I’m not a theoretical scientist,” he continued, “Oh I try to keep up, you know, but basically I’m a simple butcher. However, I know enough to be able to say that the young man who wrote this needs his arse kicked.”

“Really?” said my father, disappointedly.

“Yes. I’ve never read such a silly, pretentious paper. Look at this nonsensical passage about extra-sensory perception. I think it’s meant to be a joke, but I can tell you that any serious academic would drop the damned thing there without reading another word, and if this were submitted to a proper journal – well, if the academic staff at Lexandrin are any good it would never come near that. Frankly I think your boy is lucky he hasn’t been thrown out on his ear.”

“My boy?”

“Blumen, for heaven’s sake,” said Scalapin irritably, waving one hand, “I assume he’s one of your damned Communist Party blue-eyed boys, isn’t he? You see, Larvartin, you’ve got to learn to separate science from politics. If you start promoting the crackpot theories of young physicists simply because they’re good members of some Party committee, you’re going to do irreparable damage to the scientific reputation this damned country has somehow hung on to.”

“So the theory is worthless?”

“I expect you were hoping it was going to be some kind of brilliant breakthrough. Well, I’ll tell you about that,” said Scalapin, with a sly grin, “One point I keep in mind when reading papers like this is that the best scientists are not always the best at expressing themselves. Some people build a career on a facility with words while being mediocre researchers, while some good scientists never get the attention they deserve because they can’t write appealing prose.”

“So I decided to meet this Blumen myself. I got him over here. I couldn’t make out what his bloody paper was about – a lot of arrogant nonsense, mostly, but there was no denying that if you could penetrate the dreadful language, there were some sharp, elegant formulations in there, and some surprising connections. Well, he sat where you’re sitting and talked to me for half an hour, and it was no better than reading his paper. A fellow as young as that can’t afford to put on airs, he needs to express himself in simple, terms, with a proper degree of humility. After all, he’s out of his field altogether.”

“Is he?”

“Of course he is. Even you must have realised that. Blumen is a physicist, but he’s writing about biology – and on top of that most of what he says is pretty severely mathematical. I like to think I’m capable of a few advanced bits of maths, if it comes to it, but really this is a bit outside my range. At any rate, that’s half the problem with Blumen; he uses the wrong biological terms, he introduces new concepts of his own where they’re not needed, and he mixes in all sorts of stuff from physics and maths into some horrible kind of pudding.”

“Anyway, in the end I shut him up, told him he wasn’t dealing with his Lefty friends now, and made him work through the whole thing with me, step by step. He was pretty angry about it, I can tell you – quite red in the face with rage – but I’m quite used to keeping a firm rein on conceited young doctors. Now at first it was as bad as ever, but then all of a sudden when he was talking dismissively about Turing waves, I suddenly began to see what the hell he was getting at.”

“The point about it all is, Larvartin, that autopoietic morphogenesis is virtually a new field, and a pretty strange one. It’s almost as if someone wrote about the topological invariance of lyrical poetry. It’s such a different angle, I imagine it would have been impossible for his professor to take it in properly even if your boy had set it out clearly.”

He smiled.

“So, you think there’s something it in after all?” asked my father, “What… excuse me, but what actually is Blumen’s theory about?”

Scalapin opened his mouth and then looked keenly at my father and sighed.

“Let me offer you an analogy, Larvartin,” he said, “Now you know that our bodies, like all living things, are made up of cells? Yes alright, I’m just trying to keep it simple for you. Now in a human body, the different cells have to be controlled, so that they grow into the right kind of cells, muscle cells, say, or skin cells. They also have to have their growth controlled and so on, do I make myself clear? Well, the systems by which this control is exercised are quite complex. In fact, it might be better to speak of a principle rather than a system.”

He paused and sat staring at my father as if that was the end of the explanation.

“But what…” began my father and was immediately interrupted.

“Suppose we had the traffic in a big city to control?” said Scalapin, “Now there are various ways we can control it. We can change the road signs. We can put policemen in, yes? We can make gates restricting what kind of vehicles are allowed into our city. All these things, these are the kind of things that researchers have studied, hoping to be able to control the traffic. Now you see, it’s as if Blumen comes along and offers them a radio. They don’t understand how a little black box is going to control the cars and trucks in their city. But Scalapin knows that all the vehicles in town have radios and they are talking to each other all the time, you see? And now we can talk to them too, we can make them do what we want.”

I don’t know what impelled Scalapin to adopt this extremely imprecise analogy – in fact Blumen’s theory centres on a set of algorithms which allow growing cells to organise themselves in exquisite detail without central guidance. But the choice of radio-controlled cars as a metaphor was unfortunate because it cemented in my father’s mind the impression that the whole thing was to do with radio waves, a view which could never afterwards be wholly eradicated, much to Blumen’s own frustration.

“This is an important discovery, then?” demanded my father.

“Does it matter? You’ll tell everybody it’s important anyway, won’t you? Can’t have the blue-eyed Party member a failure, can we? Yes, alright Larvartin, luckily it turns out that somehow or other your boy has come up with something of real substance – if it’s true. In fact, if it’s true, it might eventually turn out to be quite important. ”

“Scalapin, Blumen is not my boy and he’s not a Party member. So the theory does need to be followed up?”

“What you need to do now is get someone who is competent to rewrite this paper so people can understand it and it can be published. Then other people must replicate and extend the results. Much bigger tests, much, much bigger. Then if it’s all confirmed, there will be dozens of useful new avenues. But first, proper scientific peer review.”

“Would you be able to rewrite the paper?”

“Absolutely not. I’m a surgeon, not an editor. You’ve got a whole government department full of advisors and doctors, surely to God you can find someone to do it without dragging an old surgeon away from his work. But get it done properly.”

He stared balefully at my father in silence.

“Thank you, Scalapin,” said my father, “Excuse my ignorance, but I think it would help if you could give me a few further clues about the theory. What practical benefits we might get from all this, for example.”

“Ha! You mean what diseases will it cure. All that’s a long way off, Larvartin, this is theoretical stuff. Well, speculatively, off the top of my head, I’d think the main potential avenues would have to do with healing processes, the management of abnormal development, perhaps age-related problems. Oncology, very likely. Really at this high theoretical level there could be the widest imaginable implications, or virtually none. To be honest my guess is that the theory will ultimately produce a richer understanding but not many actual therapies. Perhaps that’s pessimistic, but I’ve seen a lot of good theoretical work which in the end merely helped us understand more clearly what we couldn’t do and why we couldn’t do it.” said Scalapin.

“Of course,” replied my father. “Look, Scalapin, there’s another side to all this. How was it that the significance of Blumen’s stuff was missed? Alright, he may not express himself well, but someone should have done what you did – taken him in hand. I wonder whether we’ve allowed the old structures to persist in our Universities? Should we be bringing the revolution into our laboratories?”

“I want nothing to do with that.” Said Scalapin shortly and emphatically. “Look, I accept that you mean well. I grant that some of the things you’ve done in Lavordin and elsewhere have worked better than I expected. But please God, if I have any influence with you at all, keep your damned revolution out of science.”

There was an awkward pause.

“You see,” said my father gently, “I don’t want to do anything to the professors. I’m not going to shoot them. I just want them to set themselves free from their own fears and prejudices; I want people to take control of their own work. That’s all it’s about. We’ve talked about this so many times.”

They sat in silence for a few moments and then my father rose to go.

“I’m very grateful for your help with this,” he said, “Please remember that if you ever need any help here…”

He turned to go.

“Oh, Larvartin,” exclaimed Scalapin, “Try plants.”

“Plants?” asked my father, turning back again.

“Yes. Plant growth. This morphogenesis – it might be possible to do something about plant growth with it. Worth asking somebody to look at it, once you’ve got the paper rewritten.”

“Thanks.” said my father, and so the seed of the Second Agrarian Revolution was planted.

29,397 words

8. Darkness

My pen cannot deal with that darkness.

There had been people in Dubitania who thought that the Germans would not be so bad. At least they were a civilised nation, unlike the barbaric Russians. Dubitania had always had a minority population of ethnic Germans who had made a valuable contribution to trade and culture, and it seemed reasonable to hope that however inglorious Dubitania’s fate, it need not involve too much suffering.

Within a month – within a week – even the most ardently pro-German of the Dubitanians realised what a terrible thing had happened. Some of the young German officers were reasonable people, perhaps, but many of the leading Nazis were not just wicked but insane, almost demonic. Everywhere their own progress was threatened by internecine strife and chaotic destruction, by vicious and irrational blows struck against their own allies and friends. It seemed these people could only just hold off from tearing at each other by contemplating the larger murder and destruction they could accomplish by working together.

People say the Nazis lost the war, that Hitler was defeated. Not true. My old history teacher said that if the Germans had not attacked Russia, if they had not attacked America, if they had been moderate, they could perhaps have created their thousand-year Reich. But that misses the point: they wanted no thousand years. The Nazis were not attempting to build anything, to achieve anything solid; all they wanted was to make Europe, the heart of civilisation, into a smoking, traumatised wreck, and they fully succeeded. The war was not a means, the war was the end, the war was what everything else was for. Their own destruction and death was just part of the wider pattern, a price they were, if unconsciously, quite ready to pay. What could they have done with peace? Instead, as the tide turned against them they held on to ensure that Germany itself was also utterly destroyed and rent apart, like every other country where they had set foot, as well as being tainted forever with the blackest of infamy.

My father spent most of the war in hiding, or organising small groups of partisans to undertake sabotage. Although his colleagues in the Twenty were all honourable citizens, most were middle-aged or elderly, and few had any experience in fighting. Most of the dangerous work of leadership in the field was left to my father and to Obertin, whose languid aristocratic manner belied the fit, hard-working, fearless man my father came to respect. It has been said that my father’s ideological convictions were softened by the experience of the war, and even that he became for a time a covert Christian. That is false, but it is true that he regarded the fight against the Nazis as a matter which over-rode the struggle for social justice. As he said in later life, one does not leave the house burning down in order to complete one’s accounts. But he had always been prepared to work with bourgeois and other forces in fomenting the revolution, and he had never been a man of narrow sympathies. It is true that at this stage he worked with agents of the British SOE, and even accepted funds and equipment from them; but these were pragmatic measures, not a sign of weakening conviction.

I cannot – I really cannot – describe in any just way all the horrors that the war brought; I feel the most I can do is to list here the heroic Twenty and mention their fates.

1. Marki Larvartin; one of only two members of the official Communist Party to join the Twenty, responsible for its name and much of the organisation of early resistance to the Nazi occupation. My father, together with Obertin, directed the hopeless fight of the Free Dubitanian Army against the German tanks at Nivili, and had he not been physically dragged away by Obertin would have been killed by a shell.
2. Julio Cesare Obertin; the youngest of the Twenty, an Olympic pentathlete and a leading figure among the reformist Royalists. Tacitly accepted as the military leader of the resistance, and partner to my father as its political head.
3. Lodovi Manumin; a leading figure of the pre-war reform party, a man of great intelligence and resourcefulness who had always suffered frustration under the monarchy. He was already elderly when the Germans issued their ultimatum, and he died, anomalously, of old age not six months afterwards. There is a large statue of him in Larvartin (formerly Colomati) Square.
4. Hercule Agrica: a senior judge, whose scandalously reactionary judgements, including the notorious ruling that progressive taxation was an unconstitutional abuse of power, had made him one of the worst enemies of left-wing and liberal opinion alike. A huge, almost spherical man, Agrica was of little use in the fighting and found that his chief occupation was writing propaganda which only intermittently got published; but by his mere presence he guaranteed support from sections of society which were deeply suspicious of my father and his friends. Agrica was ultimately captured while defying an SS search party. In spite of all his atavistic judgements and the great harm he had done to the progress of Dubitania while in office, he proved when tested to be a man of courage and goodwill. He saved the lives of a fugitive family hidden in the house next door by coming out into the street and creating a great fuss. This was something he was well equipped to do, and he succeeded in distracting the search party, at the cost, as he must clearly have known, of his own life. He was taken away and never seen again. My father said he had not even realised until then that Agrica was Jewish.
5. Count Tulli Romanin; an elderly aristocrat who attempted with more valour than prudence to join in Obertin’s desperate defence of Morovin Castle. He was unable to escape with the other defenders and was taken prisoner. The Germans treated him as a prisoner of war, but he died of old age and the stresses of war after a year of captivity.
6. Septima Domenicin: a representative of the bourgeois parties who in joining the Twenty brought about an irreparable split with her pro-German husband, and was forced to abandon her family. Though already middle-aged, she led many sabotage missions, all successful. These were characterised by exceptional violence towards the enemy and a degree of overkill in the use of explosives; unfortunately, in more than one case a number of innocent Dubitanian bystanders were inadvertently slaughtered by the blast at the same time. Betrayed by an informer, she was captured and tortured, but miraculously found alive in a prison camp after the German retreat. Now white-haired and in poor health, she lived on for another twenty years, and regularly attended formal meetings of the Twenty. In spite of continued efforts she never succeeded in reclaiming her children, whose father had taken them to Switzerland.
7. Lodovi Sprentin; pre-war leader of the Dubitanian Baptist league; an inspiring speaker with remarkable organisational talents. Although the Baptists were a tiny and unpopular minority, Sprentin’s easy charm had made him a trusted national figure, and it was generally taken for granted that he would be the third voice of leadership within the resistance, if not something higher. He was shot and killed in a skirmish only a week after the arrival of the Germans in Sescastri.
8. Juri Hofstadt; general secretary of the Dubitanian Engineering Union, a man with a gift for improvisation which proved most valuable both in keeping up the resistance’s communications and in making up for its lack of weapons. Badly hurt at the battle of Nivili, he was wounded five times during the course of the war and lost three fingers from his left hand while putting together an improvised explosive device. Besides improvising weapons, Hofstadt made three dangerous journeys to collect supplies of ammunition and barely avoided being captured when his route was cut off by an avalanche. After the war he married Felicia Manzani the celebrated ‘Amazon’ of the Northern resistance.
9. Marki-Orelio Tabula; younger son of the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Perta; led a number of sabotage missions with varied success and because of his fluent English was chosen to act as liaison with British SoE agents, six of whom spent more than a year based in a cave on Mount Isidori. He emigrated after the war and spent a number years living quietly in Aldershot, but returned briefly at my father’s pressing invitation in 1966. My father named his new government offices after Tabula in pursuit of some private joke which has, alas, remained private.
10. Pio Ventarin; deputy leader of one of the bourgeois parties; fled to America three weeks after the arrival of the Germans. My father said he was carrying out important work in liaison and public relations, helping to keep the plight of Dubitania before the eyes of the wider world; but most of the surviving members of the Twenty would have little to do with him on his return.
11. Petri D’Issigny; an elderly, taciturn anarchist, one of few survivors of the Dacsvillin rising, a man who held himself somewhat apart from the rest of the Twenty and sponsored a campaign of assassination attempts against Nazi leaders until a series of bloody reprisals carried out against civilians by the Germans obliged him to stop. After the war, his opinions seemed to soften and moderate and he was for a time my father’s Minister of Health.
12. Lodovi Cenari; a moderate socialist, already sixty when the war began. All four of his sons were killed while fighting the Germans or attempting sabotage during the course of the war. Finally in despair Cenari himself began going on increasingly desperate raids, but although comrades died all around him he seemed to have a charmed life. He refused a post in my father’s government and never attended meetings of the Twenty during what remained of his life.
13. Rodolpho Bertani; a maverick of Communist sympathies. At first Bertani was not thought to be fully reliable, but he proved the reverse, leading a stalwart band of partisans and serving the resistance loyally. Three times wounded, he was put in an impossible position when the Germans identified several members of his family and took them hostage. My father persuaded him that it was useless to give himself up: the Germans could not be trusted to release the hostages afterwards. In the event his relations were not killed, but spent the rest of the war imprisoned and Bertani was haunted by guilt ever afterwards. He held a junior post in Tretchin’s government and was then advanced to be minister of Production for my father.
14. Maria Intaglin; Leftist politician who took to espionage during the war. Having spent many childhood years with her uncle in Vienna, she spoke German fluently and could pass as Austrian. Under the Russians her contribution to the war effort was questioned and she was accused of resorting to immorality in her cultivation of leading German officers. When already elderly and a respected member of the Twenty under my father’s government, she achieved a new career as a singer when her quavering but determined rendition of the traditional ballad Patri Neposin brought tears to the eyes of sentimental Twentylanders.
15. Umberti Slavin: a former junior Minister in the short-lived Christian Democrat/Socialist coalition government, Slavin was too old to fight or play much of a role in the sabotage missions which were led by other members of the Twenty, but he took charge of organising safe houses for the resistance and later set up escape routes by which Jews could escape through the Black Sea: unfortunately with only limited success. He survived the war and attended meetings of the Twenty, but was never offered a post in my father’s administration.
16. Juri Franconin: Social Democrat, best known for his espionage work. In the later stages of the conflict he broke cover and led a partisan band in Sescastri itself: he was killed in the terrible Battle of Sescastri when the Germans launched a counter-attack.
17. Liavetna Noforin: before the war, Noforin was a minor socialist politician active in Fergastri and the northern provinces: during the war she operated and supported covert radio communication without ever being caught, though on two occasions she saw comrades being led away by German soldiers as the approached supposedly safe houses. After the war she was out of favour with the Russians and relapsed into obscurity, living a secluded life on a farm near Porti.
18. Fr Grigori Forobdin, Archbishop of Lexandrin. His effectiveness was not much diminished by his alcoholism, but he was too old to take an active part in sabotage or fighting; nevertheless he was a valuable figure in galvanising conservative support. He took to the barricades at the Battle of Sescastri and was killed.
19. Cerna Colpin: a socialist, relatively young compared to most of the Twenty. Her fate is unknown. She disappeared in June 1941 on her way to the Eastern town of Amestria and may have been arrested or killed, but no certain information has ever come to light.
20. Lucas Stilin; having been elected to the Assembly, Stilin followed my father’s lead and became one of the immortal Twenty. Naturally his war was spent following closely behind my father; in fairness, following my father in those days was a strenuous and dangerous task. Stilin won some gratitude for his administrative work for the Twenty, but he remained by choice in my father’s shadow, enjoying mainly reflected glory. One odd thing is that the Germans seemed to have a particular hatred for Stilin; they pursued him with special energy and at one point offered a higher reward for his capture than for that of Obertin or my father. It seems that someone, an enemy of Stilin’s or perhaps a friend of my father or Obertin, had malevolently told them that the thin pale man was the real brains behind the resistance.

During the early part of the war, my father’s relations with Moscow were strained; but everything changed when the Germans invaded Russia. My father received an emotional message from Stalin himself commending his patriotic resistance, and from then on his leadership of the remaining communists was unquestioned.

Let me take up my story later, on a day when my father, his head roughly bandaged, and Obertin (who without modifying his royalist sympathies at all had also become fond of my father) were riding into the north-eastern city of Andra-Nipoli, sitting on the front of a Russian tank. It was safe to do so as the battered German forces were for the moment in full flight (the terrible Battle of Sescastri, when it seemed for twenty-four hours as if the Nazis would succeed in turning the tide of defeat was still a week away). My father wanted the Dubitanians to see that their liberation was coming, not just at the hands of the despised Russians, but also at the hands of their patriotic countrymen, gaunt and starved but undefeated.

“So, Washerwoman,” observed Obertin, “You are the coming man now. Stalin’s darling, the man who showed the true spirit of Communism while the feeble aristocracy was rushing to lick the jackboot of the oppressor, eh?” He smiled sarcastically.

“Lucky for you that I am your friend then,” my father returned, “Don’t worry, if the Russians let me I shall make you my Minister of Hunting. Whatever you want, Julio. I’m in your debt. You saved my life three times.”

“And there are days when I think that twice would have been enough. I don’t want to be Minister of anything in a Communist government,” said Obertin, “All I really want is my estate back.”

“Well, comrade, you are a communist now, whether you like it or not. But I’ll get you a nice house.”

“Can I put something to you, comrade?” asked Obertin, “I did not take up arms against the Germans in order to deliver Dubitania into the hands of the Russians. I’m not ungrateful, these people are liberating us. But the job must be finished. Dubitania must be restored. Our struggle is not finished. You and I should work together a little longer – and when the Royalist government is re-established, I like to think you might be a tolerable Minister of Finance.”

“We’re going to have to accept the help of our allies for a little longer,” said my father, smiling, “You must realise that. A degree of patience will be required. But national self-determination is an intrinsic part of the programme, comrade, it goes without saying.”

“The independence of Dubitania will be respected by the Reds? You really think so? The Russians have always wanted to dominate us and now they have their chance.”

“We are the founding citizens of Twentyland, comrade, and the principles on which the development of the state shall be built are in our own hands.”

“I fear that if the principles of Twentyland are to be developed under Russian supervision they will leave no room for people like me, Washerwoman.”

“Nonsense, Julio, I should abjure any principles which would make a man ignore his debt to a friend. For me, you can live in a stately mansion once again, I have no objection. And if you want, you can be President for all I care.”

I don’t know whether Obertin distrusted my father, but he must reasonably have doubted his ability to keep his promise. I suspect that for him Twentyland represented a future, while what he wanted, not altogether shamefully, was to return to the past. At any rate, that night he disappeared with a group of like-minded partisans. It was apparently largely at his instigation and under his leadership that the Royalists, rallying to Carol, the supposed son of Francis I, raised a rebellion against the floundering Germans in the province of Servinia.

This was not the only example of opportunistic risings; groups espousing Christianity, Social Democracy, and simple nationalism rose in several of the major cities of Dubitania as the grip of the occupiers was loosened. Some of these groups, including the Royalists, received arms and other support from the Americans, intended to help them keep the communists out.

I asked my father once, at the time of the trade embargo, why the Americans felt such unreasonable hatred and opposition towards us. Was it envy? Why should a nation born out of opposition to monarchy have lent its support to the gimcrack regime of the supposed Carol II rather than to Twentyland, a Republic and a Democracy, the two causes the state-controlled parties of the USA were notionally supposed to champion?

The Americans were not evil, he told me. They had been captured by a system which enslaved them and drove them to devote every moment of their lives to a grinding pursuit of money, while filling them with a paranoid fear that all foreigners and many of their fellow citizens were just waiting for an opportunity to steal their pitiful treasures. If that burden could be lifted from their minds, if they could be brought to see money as servant and not as master, then all would be well.

He told me the story of Andrew Carnegie, who as a poor young boy had been allowed to use the library of the rich man living nearby. His gratitude for this was such that when he himself became an immensely wealthy man, he used his money to build free libraries all across America and in other countries. He said a rich man should be ashamed of leaving his wealth to his children, unused.

“Now that is Larvartism for you, Lucia,” said my father, “Although unfortunately poor Carnegie did not have the advantage of knowing that he was a Larvartist. But think what the USA might have become if all its tycoons had been Carnegies? Can you imagine Ford descending into the ghetto and putting his wealth and his gifts into organising good housing for everyone? Rockefeller building free hospitals across the land? Hearst ensuring that every poor boy and girl had the best of schools and the money to make a start in life? Truly I think that country would have been a friend and example to the world, and that world itself would have been a happier one. As it is, we have to bear it in patience when they strike out at us in their fear-filled madness. But don’t worry, Lucia; one day we shall bring the revolution there too.”

As we all know, Obertin had over-estimated the gratitude of the Russians. They found my father a little too popular for their liking; they made him President with no powers and installed their own lackey, Tretchin, as Prime Minister and leader of the Twentyland Communists, although he himself was a figure of the utmost obscurity, being in exile in Russia at the time of the Nazi invasion, and remaining there throughout the war. But for practical purposes the Russians were more than happy to make use of my father’s services and advice. The greatest challenge for him during this period was in fact to manage the Russian reaction to non-Communists and those they perceived as collaborators with the Nazis. He told Stilin, thinner and more ghost-like than ever, that their minds should now be fixed, not on the winning of the war, but on preserving as much as possible for the peace to follow. To this end he was often prepared to tell the Russians, sometimes in flagrant contradiction of the facts, that someone he considered valuable was a known secret communist and covert supporter of the cause.

“Comrade Larvartin,” said one of the Russian officers on one occasion, “There are so many communists in your country I really ask myself how the Germans managed to hold on for so long.” But he smiled as he said it. The Russians were broadly prepared to let my father have his way so long as they could see sufficient Nazis being purged – and there were plenty. Unfortunately there were people who would not accept my father’s help, who would rather the Russians considered them Nazis than Communists, and for these of course he could do nothing.

After the terrible battle for Sescastri was over and people were trying to clear the piles of bodies which littered the streets, my father was told that a Royalist force had attacked Red Army units in a village to the west, and were being pursued.

“Is Obertin with them?” my father asked “He must not be killed.”

“Another communist?” asked Captain Ostrovsky, the young Russian who acted as translator, general assistant and minder for my father, “Comrade Larvartin, these people attacked our soldiers when we are engaged in a struggle with the Nazis. Objectively, they are traitors and fascist renegades. They deserve all they get.”

“I must go there,” insisted my father.

The Russians reluctantly agreed. However, by the time my father arrived, the Royalists, poorly equipped and suffering from bad morale, had all been killed or captured. Obertin was not among them, though some said he had been there. This was no good to my father, since it was one of Obertin’s tactics to spread misleading information about his own whereabouts; his supporters invariably said that he had been with them and escaped only minutes beforehand, as a way of misleading their enemies into time-wasting searches..

On this occasion, though, the Russians had found someone who was possibly even more important than Obertin. A young Russian approached and spoke to Captain Ostrovsky. They conferred for a moment and then the Captain turned to my father.

“Comrade Larvartin,” he said with a smile, “Would you be willing to talk to one of the prisoners? We have a translator, but in this case a native speaker, and one with your background knowledge, will be more helpful.

My father was a little puzzled, but he agreed, and was shown into a small room where a young boy sat, surrounded by Russians. The boy was about fourteen, clearly terrified, and he was wearing a battered uniform. As soon as he heard my father’s Dubitanian accent, he fell on him and begged him to intercede on his behalf.

This, then, was Carol II, or rather, it was the boy the Royalists had been passing off as Carol II. He was, he said, an honest peasant boy named Lambertin; one day while he was working in the fields he had been summoned by the greedy overseer, who had taken him to see a group of well-dressed men standing around two cars on the road nearby. The men had approached him, studied his face closely, and told him to go with them. He had been told that if he behaved himself he could live in a Palace, eat all he wanted, and never have to work. But he had never meant to pretend to be anyone he wasn’t; he meant no harm, and please could my father tell the Russians not to shoot him?

My father questioned the boy and it became clear his story was true. The Royalist party was nothing without a King, and it seemed in their desperation they had seized on a farm boy with a superficial resemblance to pictures of the young Carol II, who himself had almost certainly been dead since the early days of the war. My father was amazed, amused, and astonished. He could not believe that Obertin would ever stoop so low, and he concluded that in spite of the rumours of his presence everywhere his old colleague must have left the country and gone into exile some time ago. At any rate, he managed to persuade the Russians that the boy was no danger; and in later years he employed him as a waiter at the Agraci Palace. Whenever the American ambassador was being entertained, my father would have the drinks served by ‘Carol II’.

“Really, Ambassador,” he would say, “This is the person you wanted to make our King? I shall never understand capitalism. But if you would like him for your ruler, please tell the American people I should be happy to send him over.”

7. The Destruction of Dubitania

In spite of a widespread belief that he had Nazi sympathies, King Francis attempted to keep Dubitania neutral as the second World War began. His Government studiously avoided the expression of any view, and luckily had no treaty obligations which could not be harmlessly disavowed. However, it soon became clear that neutrality would not be possible to sustain. The Germans would insist that Dubitania was an ally or an enemy, and the fate of Bessarabia showed that if we did not yield to them, we should merely become the slaves of a different master, or else the country would be torn apart. Most Dubitanians at that time, and certainly the King, thought that German domination would be more tolerable than Russian intervention, but Francis wanted if possible to avoid the opprobrium of having tamely submitted. After prolonged and agonised discussions, his counsellors suggested that he could perhaps at least spread the blame for the inevitable concession. He therefore took the extraordinary step of issuing a general amnesty to all political activists and called elections to a special Grand Assembly which would decide the nation’s fate.

My father, of course, could scarcely believe that this amnesty applied to him, or that it would be honoured, but having consulted his friends and allies, he decided to test it. He and a number of other leading Communists put forward nominations as candidates for the Assembly, and amazingly, found they were accepted as a matter of course. The pleasure my father felt in being able to come forward and campaign openly almost compensated for the fearful situation of his country.

The cause of anti-Nazism rejuvenated my father’s enthusiasm, at any rate. I think the long years of unavailing struggle must have had some erosive effect even on his unquenchable optimism, but now he threw himself into the campaign, bursting with energy and conviction.

According to Mischkoff, my father was in constant danger of being shot by Royalist soldiers, and his life was only saved by the scores of honest Dubitanians who would flock to hear him wherever he went; in fact the amnesty was fully honoured and my father was treated with unexpected respect. He says he thinks that at times of crisis, people turn to familiar figures, and that he had now been around long enough to be viewed with a degree of affection even by his enemies. It is true that his climactic speech in Colomati Square, which now bears his own name, was attended, if not heard, by a crowd which packed the space tight; but he also faced hecklers and hostility, especially at the beginning of his campaign.

500 deputies were elected to the Assembly in a national vote; Mischkoff says my father got the highest vote of any candidate, but my understanding is that in fact he was merely the leading communist candidate; moderate nationalist figures were in reality the most popular. We really do not need to pretend that even under Francis I Dubitania was already a communist country. At any rate, my father and several other Party members were duly elected and the Assembly met in the grand Hall of St George.

After some ceremonial preliminaries and a series of inconsequential debates about the national constitution, the King now explained that he had received an ultimatum from the Nazi government; he must sign a treaty of alliance committing the Dubitanian army to fight alongside the Germans, and providing full access to Dubitanian territory and resources, or be considered an enemy, with all that that implied. The Dubitanian army, whose equipment and training had barely changed since the last century, could not realistically hope to hold out against Hitler without international help, and the chances of material assistance from any other country were clearly negligible. The King therefore felt he had no alternative but to accede. He asked the deputies to endorse the signing of a treaty which would give the Germans what they wanted. He tried to present it as essentially a non-aggression pact, similar to the one signed by the Russians, but everyone knew the truth.

There was a lengthy discussion. Although they were slow to admit it, most of the deputies accepted the King’s reasoning. Indeed, a majority of my father’s comrades felt that since Hitler had signed a pact with Stalin, the communists should favour a pragmatic deal with the Nazis.

My father, however, was among the minority of deputies who regarded a deal with the Nazis as inconceivable. He told the Assembly that the question history had presented to them was not whether to resist the Nazis, but how; he said, with tears in his eyes that he had spent long miserable years underground, but that he would infinitely rather return to being a fugitive forever than hand his country to the Germans. There is no safety in such a course in any case, he insisted; you cannot deal with a rabid wolf by taking it into your bed.

All the accounts agree that my father’s rhetoric made a deep impression, and for once I think they are probably accurate; but when the final vote was taken only twenty deputies voted with him – and one of those was Lucas Stilin, who afterwards confessed that only personal loyalty had made him do so.

“It was the first time I ever thought that in purely rational terms Comrade Larvartin was mistaken, he said, “But fortunately I followed my instincts and not my brain.”

My father felt, at least, that his twenty deputies were the best of the lot, even though a number were members of the bourgeois parties, and there were even aristocrats among them, notably the famous Julio Cesare Obertin – while the other communists had voted against him. Lodovi Manumin, the former Chancellor who had almost been killed by Uncle Tibri, white-haired now, was among the twenty, and so was that notorious chauvinist reactionary, the immensely fat old judge Hercule Agrica. The Assembly went into recess and my father called the twenty together: they conferred, cautiously at first but with growing goodwill, about what could be done in this emergency. Then an extraordinary thing happened – my father was summoned to the Agraci Palace for a personal audience with King Francis and his Chief Minister. He consulted his new-found colleagues, who agreed that the summons must be answered.

My father was, of course, in fear of his life as he approached the Palace for the first time – little did he suspect that one day he would have his office there, and fill the ballroom and reception rooms with lunatics – it seemed quite likely that this was simply a crude ruse to capture or kill him; or perhaps even hand him over to the Germans. Every curtain – and there were lots of curtains –seemed to him to be harbouring an assassin or a spy.

My father had vaguely expected to be led to the throne room itself, where he had confused ideas of Francis wearing the Crown of St Hortense and the full Royal regalia, surrounded by courtiers. Instead, a footman took him along thickly-carpeted corridors to a small room with oil paintings on the walls – my father thought he recognised the Oath of the Horatii – and an elegant Hepplewhite table in the middle where the King and his Chief Minister were already sitting. My father felt a strange residual sense of unease as he approached; he says he actually found himself wondering whether he was supposed to bow. Instead he held out his hand, and after a slight pause, the King stood up and shook it.

Francis I was a thin man, with white hair and whiskers, beneath which a suggestion of a Hapsburg chin could be seen. He wore the white dress uniform of a Dubitanian Field Marshal. He began, in a soft, refined voice, by praising my father’s speech; he could tell, he said, that in my father’s breast there beat the heart of a true Dubitanian, and that was why, in spite of everything, he had thought it was worthwhile to speak to him. In the interests of their common mother country, would my father consider withdrawing his vote, and persuading the twenty deputies to do the same?

My father was puzzled. His side had only twenty votes, whereas the King had 463 (there were some abstentions, some calculated absences, and one deputy had died of a heart attack just before the vote was taken). Surely that was enough?

The King explained that he thought the Germans would be happier if the vote could be considered unanimous. Anything less might suggest to them that their new allies were half-hearted, and that could have consequences. While my father sat in astonished silence, the Chief Minister leaned forward and added that it would not, though, be necessary to vote for the treaty; simple abstention would be sufficient.

My father lowered his eyes and sat in silence for a few minutes. The strange thing, he told the King at length, is that I feel great sympathy for you. I should hate you and despise what you are trying to do, but I don’t. But of course I cannot do what you ask. Let me ask you in turn, don’t you realise that this will never work? You see how the Nazis are humiliating you before they have even arrived, making you go on your knees to some scurvy red who spent most of his life trying to have you deposed? You can’t think they will let you remain here, even as a figurehead. Please, if you won’t fight with us, go into exile while you still can. Go to Argentina, or Switzerland. Retire. Withdraw with honour. Don’t let your time end in disgrace. Don’t make your heirs ashamed that your dynasty ended so badly.

There was a long silence, and then the King’s face fell, and he lowered his eyes. The audience was over. The next day my father returned to the Assembly and made a new speech, that speech, the speech which changed the land forever.

He was, he said, a patriot. He loved Dubitania with all his heart. And there before him, in the deputies sitting in the hall, he could see Dubitania, the true image of his homeland. And yet that homeland had decided to submit to, no, to join forces with an unmeasurable evil. What is a man to do when his country joins with Satan? He must part from her. That was what he had come to do; to give up his country. Yet if this is truly Dubitania, then I feel I am an exile already, he said. Since yesterday I have been eating the bread of a strange land. My country is no longer Dubitania. He looked at the twenty deputies who had arranged themselves around him and concluded;

“From today I am no longer a subject of the King of Dubitania, but a citizen of the land of the Twenty, a free country which we founded yesterday with the best that could be recovered from the wreck of Dubitania.”

He and the Twenty went off to prepare what defence they could. They found that they had far more support in the real Dubitania than they had had in the Assembly. A great many citizens, perhaps the majority, were prepared to fight for the freedom and independence of their country. My father said that he felt the same way as he had felt in the Assembly, that the country was being passed through a sieve; all the gold remained with him in Twentyland, while the dross fell through to King Francis in the shell of Dubitania.

Francis I submitted to the Nazis and within two weeks, the streets of Sescastri were full of German tanks. His reign lasted for only a few further weeks of humiliation before he was deposed in favour of a Dubitanian fascist nonentity. This led to a group of Royalists with some members of the armed forces breaking away; but instead of joining my father, they took refuge in the northern Graupin mountains, only to be winkled out gradually by the Germans.

In the eastern provinces, the Twenty set up a provisional government, and a large part of what was left of the Dubitanian army rallied to them. It made little difference. They say that when the General Reinhardt, the Nazi commander, heard that the anti-Nazi part of Dubitania was being called ‘Twentyland’, he said it was well named: a country which would last twenty days. The German armoured divisions, with overwhelming air superiority, could not be stopped, but Reinhardt was proved wrong: there was bitter, street-by street fighting for a month before the Twentyland government became merely the underground national Resistance movement and a terrible darkness settled on Dubitania.

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

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, 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’m not ready. Last year at this stage I had a full outline with notes about what was going to happen in each chapter; this year, all I have is the general idea. Last year it felt exciting, this year it has a definite tinge of getting out of bed at 6.00 on a cold, wet morning.

Still, what the heck.