Collected Stories (4 page)

But he was forty-six years old and the Kristu-Du was all that stood between him and the terrifying abyss of the total and complete failure of his life’s ambition. To abandon the domed building would be to throw away everything he had ever worked for and join the faceless ranks of those clever men and women who had seen their dreams crash and splinter through lack of drive, charm, talent, or, as Gerrard saw this issue, courage.

His refusal to abandon his project had brought him to sit in this white sparse living room by himself. He felt like a man who comes to stand on the edge of a desert which stretches as far as the eye can see. He felt the cold wind already stinging him and was sorry that
he had come to stand here. Yet he felt also, in the midst of the jumbled emotions of fear, loneliness, and self-pity, a certain tingling of excitement that he did not know what to do with.

He walked to the bedroom and stared at the neatly made bed. The sight gave him a sharp and sudden pain and he turned quickly. In the kitchen he opened the refrigerator door and stood for some time staring into it. He was shutting its door when his eye lighted on the key and the bottle of sleeping tablets. He put the key in his pocket and walked to the sink, carefully reading the instructions on the label of the pills. He poured a glass of boiled water and returned to the living room where he made himself comfortable on the big black Italian couch. He took the two pills and waited for them to work.

It was seven o’clock at night.

It was just after eight o’clock in the morning and the air was still crisp and cold when he arrived at the small pass which opened onto Hi-Dahlian (the Valley of the Spirits). As he drove to the rise he waited impatiently, as he always did, for the moment when the poor dusty drought-stricken landscape would suddenly cease and there before him would lie the harsh boulder-strewn valley filled with dazzlingly white round rocks, a great basin of egg-smooth boulders that stretched to the mountains on every side. And there, in the middle, would stand his Kristu-Du, its soaring walls as smooth and white as the rocks themselves, its copper dome gleaming golden in the morning sun.

The Land Rover lumbered onto the pass, and there it was. He stopped, as he always stopped, and looked at it with pride and satisfaction. For now there was no doubting the greatness of the work, its perfect scale, its harmonious integration into the spectacular landscape. It was a glistening rock in a sea of shining pebbles, of them and yet apart from them. Only as one came very close did one appreciate the immense size of the building: 1,000 feet high, 850 feet in diameter, seven times the size of St Peter’s. In its glowing eggshell interior there was room for 100,000 tribesmen.

It had been designed to the brief of Oongala’s first victim, the late president, as a unifying symbol for the eight tribes, sited in the holiest place, a neutral ground where a new democracy would start to spread its fragile wings. Gerrard, in the early days when the plan
had been selected, had spoken of its function with a fierce obsessive poetry, likening it to a vast machine which would take an active role in the birth of a new democracy. It was not a symbol, he said. It was not a building. It was one of those rare pieces of architecture which would act on the future as well as exist in the present.

In those innocent days the plans provided for an extensive water system, with supplies for the watering of horses, mules and camels. There was to have been a small lake around which shade trees were to be planted, pleasant camping for those who had journeyed so far. But there was, of course, no water now. Oongala had stopped work on the great canal and the drought, the terrible drought, continued to kill the people and their livestock and to raise the very earth itself so that on some days the sun was blotted out by an endless ocean of flying dust.

As he drove down into the valley Gerrard looked at what he saw with a selective eye. He did not see the section of roof that was still missing. He eliminated the giant blue and red cranes, the bird’s-nest ugliness of scaffolding, the twisted piles of abandoned reinforcing mesh, the glistening corrugated-iron offices and the workers’ amenity blocks. He saw trees which would one day be planted and fountains that would burst spectacularly from fissured rock. But most of all he adjusted his vision to ignore the grey and white clusterings of figures that gathered around the west entrance of the building like swarms of virulent organisms which would destroy their host. Yet in this he was not wholly successful, so that as he entered the plain itself, winding along the carefully planned road between the giant rocks, lines of tension formed across his face and two small vertical lines appeared on his forehead, just to the left of his nose.

The road was planned to be a continuous series of surprises, of opened vistas and closed canyons, of startling glimpses of the building, and veiled promises of what was to come. Now, at the last moment, he came round the rock he had named “Old Man Rock” and he was at the edge of the site itself and the great building towered above him in all its breathtaking beauty. And now he could eliminate things no more and the lines on his forehead deepened as the white and grey clusterings of figures revealed themselves to be a meeting of one hundred and fifty skilled European workers.

A strike.

He drove past them slowly, aware of the turned eyes but unable to acknowledge them in any natural way. He parked outside his office and went in to wait.

He sat on his swivel chair and played with some paperclips, his apprehension showing in the way he took them, one by one, and twisted them and bent them until they grew hot and snapped with fatigue. It was here that he was bad, here that he ruined things. It was here that his associates succeeded and he failed. For they were charming and persuasive men who could sway hard-headed businessmen in their own language, and overcome the problems of site disputes with their negotiators’ skills and hard-headed bargaining.

He no longer talked to the men who were building his dream. Even his assistants found him distant and cold. And he had so badly offended the engineers that they would barely speak to him. It was not as he wished it. He would have dearly loved to have taken them to town, to have bought them beers, to have gone whoring with them, to have shared the easy relaxed talk he had overheard between them. But there was something stiff in him, something that would not bend.

So he waited in his office for the deputation, breaking paperclips and throwing them into the rubbish bin.

He disapproved of bribes and so gave this one badly. Rather than speeding his interview with the minister it produced the opposite effect. The minister’s secretary, a uniformed sergeant from the 101, was now punishing him for such a tasteless and inelegant performance.

He had now waited an hour, his agitation becoming more and more pronounced. He crossed his long legs and then uncrossed them. He stared at a yellowed five-year-old copy of
Punch
and could find nothing funny in it. He stared at the bleak anteroom with a practised eye, observing a thousand defects in workmanship and finish, noting a wall that was not quite vertical, automatically relocating a window so that it was lower, wider, and placed on a wall where it might have collected some of the chilly winter sunshine.

He stood and examined the tasteless paintings on the walls.

He sat and looked at his fingernails, wondering if it was true that
the long curved shells indicated a propensity to lung disease as he had once been told.

As to how he would persuade the minister to make extra funds available to meet the men’s demands, he had no idea. If he had been Mr Meat he would not have bothered with the minister, he would have gone straight to Oongala, played polo with him and spent a night at the billiard table. He would have laughed at the dictator’s jokes and told even cruder ones of his own. But he was not Mr Meat and his grey formal reserve made the dictator uneasy, as if he were being secretly laughed at. Oongala would no longer see him.

What the men wanted was fair and reasonable. It was quite correct. But the correctness did not help. Everything in him wanted to say: “Give the money, find it, do anything, but let the work proceed.” But that, of course, was not an argument.

Finally the secretary had had enough of the agitated movements of his prisoner. He phoned through to the minister and told Gerrard he could go in.

Gerrard smiled at the secretary, thanking him.

The secretary stared at him, the merest flicker of a smile crossing his stony face.

The minister sat behind his large desk doing the
Times
crossword. He was, for this country, an unusually short man. He had a sensitive face and particularly nervous hands, which seemed to flutter through a conversation like lost butterflies. On occasions they had discussed Proust and the minister had talked dreamily of days at Oxford and invited the Haflingers to visit socially, an invitation that Gerrard, had he been a trifle more calculating, would have realized was an important one to accept. Yet he managed to neither accept nor decline and had left the minister with the feeling, correct as it happened, that Gerrard found his company unstimulating. The minister was a man of sensitive feelings and weak character, a failing that had kept him alive while stronger men had long since disappeared into jail.

“Good morning, Gerrard. What would you make of this — Ah! A cross pug leaps across funereal stone? It is eleven letters,” he smiled apologetically, “beginning with S.”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I.” He folded the delicate rice-paper pages of the airmail edition and plugged in a small electric jug which sat on the low filing cabinet beside him. “Coffee?”

“That would be pleasant, thank you,” Gerrard was trying to be pleasant, to unbend, to relax, to be patient enough to discuss all ten volumes of
Recherche du Temps Perdu
if it was necessary. He sat in the low visitor’s chair and they both waited for the jug to boil.

“How is Mrs Haflinger?”

“Gone, I’m afraid.”

The eyebrows raised and the tongue clucking sympathetically. “Our country is not to everybody’s taste,” he picked up
The Times,
weighed it, and let it fall to the desk, “as I read every day.”

“Unfortunately it isn’t.” Gerrard attempted to match the sad ironical smile on the other’s face.

“Black with two?”

“Thank you.” Gerrard watched as the minister fussed over the coffee and thought how much he hated the metallic taste of Nescafé.

“Excuse me,” said the minister, “I seem to have spilled some into the saucer. Now what is the problem? I take it the visit isn’t social.” And he allowed the merest glint of malice to enter his voice.

“I have a strike.”

“And the particular matter of the dispute? Ah,” he smiled, “if only our industrial relations laws were in a more advanced stage. But,” the smile again, “I’m sure you understand that as well as I.”

“There is no particular matter. It is a question of conditions generally. The shortage of water, the absence of power in their quarters, the quarters themselves.” Gerrard thought of the old army barracks where his men were quartered: squalid rows of huts with no partitions and a complete lack of privacy for even the most basic matters.

The minister nodded sympathetically: “Oh, I know, I know. The latrines, I imagine, are also a problem. One cannot blame them. I would be upset myself.”

“There is a list.” Gerrard was beginning to hope. Against his best sense he hoped that this man might actually have the guts to do something. He gave the minister the list of the men’s complaints. It contained ten points.

“What do they ask?”

“Either that matters be upgraded or they be paid at a special penalty rate.”

“And,” the minister blew into the steaming coffee, “if that is not possible, and I mean ‘if’?”

“They will leave, en masse.”

“Oh dear.”

“Yes.”

“And you think they will carry out the threat?”

In his blind anxiety it had never occurred to Gerrard that they wouldn’t, but he said simply: “They will carry it out.”

“Oh dear.”

“Quite,” said Gerrard. “What shall we do, what can we do?”

“For me,” the minister held his pale palms upwards, “my hands are tied. I myself can do nothing.” The hands came together in an attitude of prayer and the index fingers plucked nervously at the pendulous lower lip. “My department’s funds are already over-committed. It would take the president himself to approve a special allowance.”

“And the president,” Gerrard smiled thinly, “is not likely to be sympathetic.”

“As you know,” the minister clasped his hands across his breast and leant back dolefully in his big squeaking chair, “as you know, the president is of the view that they are being paid far too much as it is. It was only after my most earnest plea …”

“For which I am most grateful.” The minister was lying. Gerrard lied in return. He had never spoken in these terms to the minister before. He was finding it repulsive. He felt vaguely ill. “But if there were anything …”

The minister snapped forward in his chair and leant across the table. “I will speak to him,” he said with the air of a man who has made a reckless decision. “I will go to him this morning. The president is most anxious that the project be finished quickly. He feels that in the absence of rain,” and here he allowed the merest trace of treasonable sarcasm to enter his voice, “the people are in need of a boost in morale. He is relying on the Kristu-Du. He will be most eager to end the dispute.”

“Which means?”

“It means,” the minister winked slyly, “that I will speak on your behalf and that finally you need not worry. Your building will go
ahead without serious delay. You have my word for it. You will not be unhappy with the result.” And the wink came again. Gerrard, who wondered if he had seen the first wink, had no doubts about the second.

“And the men?” he asked.

“The men,” said the minister, “will not leave, I promise you.”

Gerrard stood, unsure of what he had done. He looked at the minister’s face and wondered if it was capable of winking. “You will be in touch?” he said.