Peter Carey - Collected Stories

It was seven o’clock at night.

3.

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.

4.

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.

5.

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.