Collected Stories

Kristu-Du

The man who brings water shall be blessed.

He carrieth fat to the cattle,

ears to the corn.

The sound of such water can be likened

to the laughter of children.

(Traditional Deffala Song)

1.

While the architect’s wife carefully folded a pair of white slacks, five men were hanged. As she hunted through the drawer for her cosmetics and packed them neatly, one by one, in a small leather carrying case, an old man died of dehydration and starvation beside a dusty road. As she slipped the case shut and fiddled inexpertly with its lock, teams of imported builders laboured on the great domed building in the middle of the cruel rock-filled valley.

The architect sat on the edge of the neatly made bed and watched his wife. He was a slim tall man in his late forties. He had fine blue eyes, unusually large eyelids, and a high forehead made even higher by the receding crop of curling grey hair. His mouth was perhaps his best feature, containing as it did the continual promise of a smile. But now the promise was not honoured. His eyes were red-rimmed and tired. His long-fingered hands were clapsed on his lap and he watched his wife make her final preparations for her departure. She was leaving him and returning to Europe.

Now she was packed she sat on the bed beside him. They had entered those white corridors where there is neither shadow nor feeling.

He wished to say many things to her but he had said them all already. He said them badly and she had not listened in any case.

He wished to say: the building I have designed will last a thousand years and will endure beyond the tyrant who rules this place.

He would have added: you are only leaving because you saw a soldier shoot a dog, not because of anything else.

But all these things had been covered time and time again and she was returning to the civilization of Europe and he was to remain to build his masterpiece, the great dome of the desert, Kristu-Du, the meeting house of the tribes.

He picked up her two cases from the bed and took them out to the Land Rover. When he returned she was standing in the living room looking at an old book of his work. As he walked in she put it down on the coffee table.

Neither of them said anything.

On their way out she placed her front door key on top of the refrigerator. Then, hesitating, she opened her handbag and took out a small bottle of pills. These she placed beside the keys.

They were sleeping pills, difficult to come by.

The noise of the Land Rover always made conversation difficult, but now it made the lack of it somehow more bearable. Gravel rattled against the aluminium floor, the engine and the transmission were loud and unrelenting, rock samples in the back jumped and crashed on the tray with every bump. He saw now, as he had seen when he first arrived three years ago, the terrible bleakness of the town, a bleakness that did not even have the redeeming virtue of being exotic. The buildings constructed by the now departed Russians all looked like grey hospitals. They stood at the grand height of four storeys, towering over a collection of ugly shops and houses of white concrete blocks. In the unpaved streets stunted palm trees died from lack of water. He saw the terrible poverty of the people as they squatted on the footpath or walked aimlessly in groups along the broken streets. Tall Itos, Berehvas with pierced ears, Deffalas with the yellow eyes of desert people. It was nobody’s home, everyone’s exile. A city planned where no one had ever wished to live.

Only the soldiers seemed well fed. They lounged everywhere, these tall warriors of the president’s own tribe, clustering in doorways or patrolling in groups of two or three, machine-guns slung over their shoulders.

He saw the big white colonial building which he now recognized as a place to be feared, the detention centre, and behind it in the high-walled garden of the palace, a tasteless mock-Spanish edifice built on the president’s instruction to a photograph torn from a badly printed American newspaper.

From here the president ruled with a skilful and unique blend of violence and magic. The magic, of course, was not magic at all, but rather an array of technological tricks which were impressive to a primitive and unlettered people. Oongala was a giant of a man, half-educated, barely literate, but he understood his people all too well. Those who were too educated or enraged to be impressed by magic could be handled with simple violence, torture and murder. With the rest he reinforced his claim to be the Great Magician of tribal myth by utilizing a continual array of new tricks.

The great canal which would have brought water to the drought-stricken land had been abandoned when he came to power. The railway which would have joined its disparate peoples lay unfinished with two stations built and the rails lying on the parched soil like pick-up sticks abandoned by a bored child. This was not the technology Oongala preferred.

The man who has known throughout the world as a comic-strip dictator, a clown, a buffoon and a mass murderer, chose to travel across his land in a hovercraft, to drop out of the sky in a white helicopter, or simply to star in one more badly made motion picture which he wrote, directed, produced and starred in. These films were the staple diet of his starving populace. They cheered him as he jumped thirty feet from ground to roof top to battle and destroy armed villains. They watched open-mouthed as he defeated bands of machine-gunning renegades. Bullets could not harm him, gravity hold him, or the engines of war overpower him.

And now they were treated to the works of the man whom Gerrard had privately named Mr Meat, the ex-arms dealer Wallis, who was now making a fortune from constructing holograms in the bigger villages. The work had barely begun but if the reaction to the one in the capital was any indication, it was a popular piece of magic. Inside a concrete building that had all the charm of a public urinal the faithful could see a three-dimensional image of their dictator levitating above the desk in his big office.

Now, as the Land Rover left the town and rattled down the track towards the airport, Gerrard looked across at his wife. She caught his eye for a moment and then looked hurriedly away, she who had once encouraged him with his plans, bolstered him in the face of failure and criticism, who had stood by him fiercely when his controversial works had been disbanded by one municipal authority because of cost, another because of a provincial sense of what was beautiful. And now, here, when a great building was near completion, she was leaving him, washing her hands of him, joining the ranks of the old associates who had publicly criticized his role in working for the glorification of a mass murderer.

The hypocrites, he thought now, they sit in their exquisite offices while their own governments torture and kill, and because there isn’t a scandalized headline in the newspapers they pretend these things don’t go on. They are so clean, so pure, and I am so terrible. They want me to say: no, I shall abandon this project, the greatest domed structure in the world. I should walk away from it and leave it unfinished or to be ruined by incompetent fools. Would they? Would his fine pure friends have walked away from such a triumph simply because a government had changed? A building seven times as big as St Peter’s in Rome? He smiled thinly.

The airport was almost empty. He checked in his wife’s baggage whilst she looked in the duty-free shop. When he came back he saw that she had bought perfume. He said nothing and gave her the ticket.

“There is no point in you waiting,” she said.

He looked at her: eyes that had once looked at him with love, now dull and lustreless, lips that had covered his body in soft passionate kisses, now thin and full of tension.

“I wanted to say …” he began.

“What?” she interrupted nervously, on the defensive, worried that he would ask anything of her, make any claim.

He had wanted to say that he would miss her dreadfully, that he would think of her continually, that he would endure his loneliness in the hope that the separation would not be permanent.

But instead, he merely smiled a wry smile and said, “I just wanted to say goodbye.”

“Goodbye,” she said. She kept her hands clutched around her perfume and handbag. She did not lean towards him. “Goodbye,” she said again.

“Goodbye,” he said, then turned on his heel.

She watched him walk away, casually throwing his keys up and down in his hand. It was the walk of a person who might have been on his way to an expensive lunch. She never forgave him for it.

2.

There were many who would have described Gerrard Haflinger as a solitary man. It is true that conversation did not come easily to him and he had a peculiar mixture of shyness and arrogance in his character that normally made him appear more than a little aloof. His dealings with governments, municipal authorities and the Medicis of modern business had always been made more difficult by his inability to unbend, to be anything other than the bristling defendant of the purity of his vision. But solitary he was not.

In an interview in a popular European magazine he had once been asked what was most precious to him in life and he had answered, without hesitation, that it was to be with true friends. And what was a true friend? A true friend, he had answered, was someone you could stand naked before, who would never judge you, whom you could share your darkest secrets with, and so on.

By this definition Gerrard Haflinger had no more friends. He had been judged and found guilty not only by the three men he respected and loved most, but also by his wife.

Gerrard Haflinger no longer remembered the interview but if he had he would have reflected that he had not answered truthfully: his work was the most precious thing in his life. For this, this one project, he had been prepared to give up everything else. Possibly if his other work had proceeded properly, if the theatre complex had not been bungled, if the state library had ever gone ahead, he might have abandoned the Kristu-Du on the day Oongala took power and parliamentary democracy was abolished, or, if not then, at least in the following months when it became clear to everyone what sort of a leader Oongala would be.

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.

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.

“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.

“Most definitely. And perhaps, when this little crisis is over, you might like to join my family for a luncheon. Next Sunday perhaps — the eleventh.”

“Thank you. That would be delightful.”

The minister held out his small hand. It clung to Gerrard’s hand, spreading a damp film of secret fear around it.

6.

When the Land Rover entered the site on the following morning he understood immediately the agreement he had made with the minister. As he turned off the engine he finally admitted that he had known all along. He had understood exactly and precisely what would happen but he had not allowed himself to look at it. The minister’s wink had produced a tightening in his stomach. The sweat he had felt in the handshake had been as much his as the minister’s. Their fears had met and smudged together between their two hands.

As he walked between the big khaki trucks of Oongala’s army he felt shame and triumph, elation and despair. They mixed themselves together in the terrible porridge his emotions had become.

All around him the work continued, watched by the keen arrogant eyes of Oongala’s elite force: the notorious 101s.

The English doctor had seen the Land Rover approach and now he watched angrily as the tall man in the grey safari suit walked towards him. His walk did not belong here, amongst these harsh rocks and calloused hands. It was a city walk, the walk of a man who strolls boulevards and sips vermouth in side-walk cafés. The doctor detested the walk. “Like an evil little spider,” he thought, “who will soon proclaim his innocence.”

Now the tall man stopped. Now he ran. He sprinted towards the doctor, jumping across a pile of piping. The doctor grimaced and transferred his attention to the young Danish worker who lay on the ground before him. The injection had at last eased the pain. Soon he’d be able to shift him to town. He heard rather than saw Gerrard squat beside him. He said nothing and busied himself repacking the syringe with exaggerated care. He picked up the two ampoules from the dusty ground, tossed them in his hand, and with a sudden expression of rage threw them against the wall of the building.

“What’s up?”

The architect smelt of expensive shampoo. The doctor couldn’t bear to look at him. He took the young man’s pulse and was surprised to find his own hand shaking. “I would have thought it was obvious.”

“What may be obvious to you is not obvious to me. Kindly tell me what has happened.” There was a tremor in the architect’s voice, and the doctor, looking up, was astonished to see despair in the other’s eyes. “Kindly tell me what has happened.”

“He was shot by your friends here. He told them he was a free man and didn’t have to work. He made quite a speech. It is a shame you missed it,” he smiled nastily, “all about freedom and democracy.”

Gerrard looked down at the young man on the ground. He was no more than twenty. Someone had placed a shirt under his naked back. His left calf was heavily bandaged, but his clear blue eyes showed no trace of pain. It was a romantic face, Gerrard reflected, with its sparse blond beard, its tousled hair and those luminous eyes. As Gerrard watched he saw, on the young man’s face, the beginning of a smile. He knelt, bending hungrily towards the smile, hoping to kill his own pain with it. He saw the lips move. He bent further, reaching towards words. So he was only six inches from the young face when the lips parted and a hot stream of spittle issued from them with hateful speed, hitting Gerrard on the left cheek. He stood, as if stung, and turned on his heel towards the office. Then, changing his mind, he returned to his Land Rover.

As he left the site in a cloud of dust the Kristu-Du continued its inexorable progress as inch by inch, pound by pound it moved towards its majestic finale.

7.

For two days Gerrard Haflinger remained in his house without going out. Each hour he stayed away from the site made it harder for him to return to it. The thought of a return was hateful to him. The thought of not returning was impossible to contemplate.

Dirty clothes lay on the living room floor beside the sleeves of twenty recordings, not one of which had given any solace. The empty bottle of sleeping pills lay in the kitchen, its white plastic cap on the dining table.

It was night and the black windows reflected his unshaven face as he stared out into the empty street.

He sat down at the desk in the living room and began to type a letter, but he stopped every few characters, cocking his head and listening. He had become nervous, fearful of intruders, although he could not have explained who these intruders might be or why they would wish to enter his house.

He loosened the tension of the typewriter roller so that the paper could be removed silently from it, flattened the sheet, and began to write by hand.

As he wrote the letter to his son the only noises he heard were the loud scratching of the pen and the regular click of a digital clock.

The difficulty with both of us is that we were raised to believe that we were somehow special. In my case this has resulted in my coming to this: to build a grand building for a murderer because it is the only path left to me to realize my sense of “specialness” (an ugly inelegant word but it is late at night and I can think of no other). You, for your part, could find nothing in the world that corresponded with your sense of who you were, or rather who we had taught you you were. I now understand as I never did before how very painful and disappointing this must have been for you.

Yet tonight, sitting in an empty room and thinking about you in America and your mother in Paris, I envy you the good luck or misfortune in avoiding the trap we laid so lovingly for you.

For now I recognize this sense of specialness as the curse and conceit that it is and I would rather be without it.

Yesterday I was responsible for a man being wounded. The same man spat in my face when I bent to speak to him. And it is this thing, a small thing when compared with the great charges that have been laid against me, that has brought me to toy (flirt is a better word) with the idea of abandoning the project totally. My mind is not made up either way, but I have come to the position of recognizing the possibility. The final straw for your mother was the sight of a dog being machine-gunned by a drunk soldier. I thought that ridiculous, a piece of dishonest sentimentality. But now I understand that too. It is not the wounding of the man that brings me to my present state, but the fact that he spat in my face.

It is too late for me to be forgiven by my self-righteous colleagues (architects are surely the most hypocritical group on earth) but possibly not too late for me to forgive myself.

When we last heard from you you were just starting the vegetable shop. Please write and tell me if the venture has proven successful.

What is your life like?

Love, Father

When he had finished the letter he folded it hastily, placed it inside an envelope, and, having consulted a small notebook, addressed it. Then he sat with his head in his hands while the digital clock clicked through four minutes. His thoughts were slippery, elusive, tangled strands of wet white spaghetti which he could neither grasp nor leave alone.

He stood up then and went to the bathroom where he looked for pills in the little cabinet above the basin. There were none, but he found instead a small bottle of nail polish which he considered with interest.

He shut the door.

First he washed his arm with soapy water. Then he methodically worked up some shaving cream into a thick, creamy lather. Sitting on the small stool in front of the mirror, he brushed the lather into the dense black hair along his left arm. When he was done, he took a safety razor and, very carefully, shaved the arm until it was perfectly smooth.

He washed his arm and examined it in the mirror: a slender tanned arm with long delicate fingers.

Seeing hair on the knuckles he also lathered these and, being careful not to knick himself, shaved them.

Now he picked up the nail polish and applied it carefully. It took him three attempts to get it right.

When the nail polish had dried he undressed completely, folding his white trousers carefully and placing them on the carpeted floor in the passage outside.

He shut the door again and sat on the basin and watched in the mirror as the red fingernailed hand of a beautiful woman crept across his stomach and took his penis, stroking it slowly.

“I’ve missed you,” said the voice, a quiet, shy, tentative voice that seemed afraid of derision or rejection, and then, gathering confidence: “I love you, my darling.”

In the street outside a man laughed.

At the detention centre a young shopkeeper was being given the merest touch of an electric cattle prod.

At the Merlin Hotel, Wallis, alias Mr Meat, the man who sold holograms, picked up his telephone and dialled Gerrard’s number.

When the number finally rang Gerrard Haflinger grabbed a bathrobe and ran to answer it. He stood in the living room accepting a dinner invitation, semen dripping down his stomach like spittle.

8.

In a minute or two Mr Meat would change Gerrard’s mind entirely about the whole question of his involvement with the building. He would do it quite unintentionally. In a minute or two he would give Gerrard his scenario. In fact it was one of four such scenarios that he considered to be possible, but he would insist on the veracity of this one because it was the most likely, in his calculation, to frighten Gerrard, to undo a little of his arrogance and moral superiority.

Mr Meat thought Gerrard was a pompous pain in the arse, but he was bored and lonely and wished to fill in one last night before he escaped this dung hole of a country and went back to more predictable and respectable work selling armaments.

So he was not aware that the ascetic man who sat opposite him in the deserted dining room of the Merlin Hotel was more than a little unhinged with guilt and despair, that he was on the point of renouncing his life’s work, and entering the cold empty landscape he had always feared.

But first they had to sit through this circus that was going on at the bar, all because Haflinger had ordered a Campari and the waiters didn’t know what in the hell a Campari was, even though it was sitting on the shelf in the bar, practically biting their silly snub noses.

“You’re going to have to help them,” Wallis said, “or we’ll never get a bloody drink.”

The architect turned in his seat to look at the embarrassed conference of white-coated waiters. “Oh,” he said, “they’ll work it out.”

Wallis sighed. “You’re about to get a Drambuie.”

Gerrard began to get up but sat down again as the Drambuie was returned to the shelf.

“Oh Christ, I can’t stand it.” Mr Meat pushed his chair back and Gerrard watched him as he strode across to the bar, this big beefy-faced man with the arrogant aggressive walk of a military policeman. He saw the waiters’ mortified faces. He saw the big impatient hand haul the Campari from the shelf, snatch a glass, and pour an unmeasured quantity into it. He couldn’t bear to watch any more and looked instead at the bleak empty tables of the dining room, too depressed to be amused by the fake Doric columns.

Wallis brought back Campari, soda and a beer for himself. “Now you know why I stick to beer,” he said, “they can’t fuck it up.” He raised his glass, holding it with peculiar daintiness with thumb and middle finger. “Here’s to the drought.”

“You’ve made them embarrassed.”

“So they should be. Christ, it’s their job to know a Campari from a Drambuie. They bloody should be embarrassed.”

“Still …”

Wallis leant his bulk into the table, the beakish nose thrusting from the great florid face, his big index finger poking in the direction of the Campari. “Listen, old son, you’re too sensitive. People in our line of work can’t afford to be so sensitive. Skol.” He drank again.

“Our occupations are hardly similar.”

“Oh come on, tell me what the difference is.” Wallis smiled. He was starting to enjoy himself.

“I think there’s a difference.” Gerrard attempted a smile. It didn’t work out very well. “There is a difference between an important work of architecture and what you yourself describe as magic.” None of this exactly reflected Gerrard’s viewpoint but he had no intention of discussing anything so serious with Wallis.

“It’s all magic here, old son, so don’t look so superior. As a matter of fact I’ll lay you a thousand U.S. dollars that it’ll be your magic that brings Oongala undone. There is a limit to magic when people are starving. The holograms might be a big hit here, but they’re not very popular in the villages. In fact I’d say they were very counterproductive. I would say that Oongala is not a popular man with the tribes at the moment. I’d give him three months at the most. When will your great work” — he pronounced “Great Work” slowly and sarcastically — “be completed?”

“Four, five months.”

“Then it’ll be four or five months before Oongala gets kicked out and things get very nasty for you. Look, I can tell you exactly what’ll happen. And listen to me, because this is something I bloody well know about. I am an expert, old boy, in knowing when to leave a country. You can’t survive in my business without knowing that.”

Gerrard looked at the great red face with fascination. “Go on.”

But they were interrupted by the approach of a waiter and Wallis fell suddenly silent. They ordered the Merlin’s safest and most predictable dishes: pea soup followed by vegetable omelette. Wallis, in spite of his avowed dedication to beer, ordered Veuve Clicquot.

The food arrived too quickly and the champagne too slowly.

As he alternated sips of pea soup with Veuve Clicquot, Wallis continued: “Let me give you the exact scenario, as a little present, eh? Oongala will not know how unpopular he is. There is not a man left who is brave enough to tell him. However, he will know that things are not exactly rosy. People are dying. They are upset because there is no water and by now they all know about the canal and they know Oongala stopped it to spend money on your building. They’re angry about that, but Oongala can’t know how angry otherwise he’d drop your building like a hot cake and get stuck into the canal. However, he does know he needs a very powerful piece of magic and your building is about the only trick he has left up his sleeve. But,” Wallis smiled, delighting in the drama of his scenario, “but to impress everyone with the dear old Kristu-Du he’ll have to bring them to see it, eh? He will bloody well be forced to have the famous gathering of the tribes.” He laughed a strange dry cackle. “How about that, eh, isn’t that neat?”

“It was exactly what Daihusia asked me to design it for.”

“Sure.” Wallis brushed that aside like the misunderstanding of a rather dull pupil. “But Daihusia was smart enough to have never built it.”

Gerrard laughed indulgently. “You’re very cynical.”

Wallis’s black eyebrows shot up and his small eyes narrowed and became dark and challenging. “You don’t believe me? You’re living in a dream world. It was a stunt. You, of all people, should have known that. It was a symbol. It was useful to Daihusia as an idea, but he was clever enough to know that the canal was more useful to him as a fact, and he couldn’t afford to have both. If he’d given them water he would have ruled until he was a hundred, a fact our present fellow doesn’t seem to have cottoned on to.”

“You really think so?”

“I know so. Dear fellow, you wouldn’t be building your great masterpiece if Daihusia was in power. Or, if you were, you’d still be buggering around with the foundations and not having money for anything else.”

“Go on with your scenario.”

Wallis looked at him sharply, aware of a new interest in the architect: the contempt had gone from his eyes and been replaced by a deep, quiet interest. “My scenario,” he said, “is that in order to control the tribes, Oongala is going to do what Daihusia would never have done: he is going to have to bring them here to see the Kristu-Du. And when he does that, when god knows how many thousands arrive to see this spectacle, they will be coming as very angry people. They will be angry enough to forget their differences. They may be superstitious and primitive, but they are not stupid.”

“The army, surely …”

Wallis waved his hand disdainfully, tidying up minor objections before he came to deliver his coup de grâce. “Apart from his beloved 101s, the rest of them are all tribally mixed. They’re not going to shoot their own people. The army, old son, will not be worth a pinch of shit.” And he brought thumb and index finger together as if offering Gerrard a pinch of it there and then. As he did so he noted the strange excited light in the architect’s eyes. He interpreted it, incorrectly, as fear. “When the day comes,” he said softly, “they will not love you.” And he drew his index finger across his throat.

He leant back and waited for this to sink in.

“Oh,” Gerrard smiled, “I’m staying if that’s what you mean.”

The smile irritated Wallis beyond belief. “Look.” He put his champagne glass down on the table and riveted Gerrard with his dark eyes. “Look, Mr Architect, you better listen to me. I know what I’m talking about. I’ve seen this sort of thing before. I have had conversations, almost identical conversations, with people like you before. You will be no different from the bastards who run the detention centre. No one who has helped Oongala will be safe. They won’t indulge in fine discussion about the history of architecture. If you stay, you’re as good as dead.”

“How do I know that what you say is true?”

Quietly, smugly, Wallis took out his wallet. From it he removed an airline ticket. He threw it across to Gerrard, who opened it and read it.

“Tomorrow,” Wallis said.

“But you haven’t finished.”

“I’ve finished everything I’m going to do.”

“Then you really think it’s true?”

“I know it.” He retrieved the ticket and returned it to the wallet.

Gerrard returned to his cold half-eaten omelette with a new enthusiasm. His mind was kindled again with the fierce hard poetry of his obsession: a structure whose very existence would create the society for which it was designed.

Wallis saw him smiling to himself and felt an almost uncontrollable desire to punch him in the face.

9.

Three months later the letter to his son lay forgotten in the top drawer of his desk, documentation of a temporary aberration, a momentary loss of faith.

In the spare white-walled house not an item was out of place, not a match, a piece of fluff, a suggestion of lint, an unwashed plate or a carelessly dropped magazine disturbed its pristine tidiness. The records were stacked neatly, the edge of each sleeve flush with the shelf, arranged in faultless alphabetical order.

The dirty clothes in the laundry basket were folded as fastidiously as the dresses in a bride’s suitcase.

Gerrard, sitting at the desk, continued work on the fourth draft of an ever lengthening article which he planned for world release. It had many titles. The current one was “A Machine Built for Freedom”. The title, of course, referred to the Kristu-Du. The treatise itself was gradually becoming less coherent and more obscure, as it attributed almost mystical power to the great domed building. What had begun as a simple analogy with a machine had long since ceased to be that. The building was a machine, an immense benevolent force capable of overthrowing tyrannies and welding tribes into nations.

Now he was speeding through a long and difficult section on the architecture of termites in relationship to their social structure. The handwriting became faster and faster as the pen jabbed at the paper and stretched small words into almost straight lines. There was little time, a week at most, and the more he wrote the more he thought of that he should include. For now, today, it seemed that his faith had been well placed: the scenario was going through its first movement. As the site had at last been tidied, as most of the workers had left, the rumours had begun about a gathering of the tribes, and now today it had been publicly proclaimed. Gerrard read the morning newspaper with the tense elation of a man who is three good shots away from winning a golf tournament. He knew he was not there yet. Not yet. Not yet.

But the gamble would pay off, it must pay off. It had not been an easy time and his faith in the scenario had been by no means constant, but a cautious inquiry here, a journey there, a piece of gossip from the minister, little odds and ends had confirmed the probability of the events the departed Wallis had predicted.

If three months ago he had been despised at the site, he had become openly hated. If he had once been distant, he had since become rude. If once he had been insensitive, he had become ruthless. He was anaesthetized, a man running over hot coals towards salvation. The second shooting barely touched him, the reported beatings had become technical difficulties to overcome. A list had been compiled by the staff and the workers containing serious allegations about him. Even as he wrote his treatise this list was being released to the world press. Had he known, he would have considered it part of the gamble. As he introduced Pericles into the termite society, he was afire with faith.

This time next week the Kristu-Du would have produced a new society. He prayed feverishly that it wouldn’t rain.

10.

It was happening.

It was said that Oongala skulked in his palace afraid. It was said openly in the streets.

Already the tribes had been gathered for four days. They camped around the Kristu-Du in their hundred thousands and inside it as well. Oongala’s army brought them water in trucks, and delivered food daily. Goats were slaughtered and fires lit.

The minister was no longer to be found in his office and Gerrard found only a chicken clicking down the tiled corridors of the state offices.

Tanks were in evidence in the town and helicopters hovered anxiously.

Gerrard remained in his house, waiting for the call that would tell him Oongala was on his way to the site. One visit to the site had convinced the architect that he had nothing to fear about the accuracy of Wallis’s scenario. The mood amongst the tribes was distinctly hostile. Soldiers of the army were spat on and dared not retaliate. Gerrard himself, an unknown white man, was bustled and shouted at. The hatred thrilled him. Each curse brought him closer to the realization of his dream. He saw Itos talking to Berehvas, Joflas to Lebuya, and in the midst of such violent concorde he felt an excitement of almost sexual dimensions.

Finally, on the fifth day, Oongala emerged from the palace, an uncertain parody of a triumphant smile on his huge cruel face. Gerrard, receiving his long-awaited phone call, followed the entourage in his Land Rover.

It was not a sensible thing to do, to associate himself publicly with the ruling party, but he followed it like a child following a circus parade.

The tribes waited sullenly, united beside and beneath the awesome dome.

In the four days Gerrard had been away from the site many words had been spoken. As tribe spoke with tribe, brother with brother, as they fired each other with their common anger, their breath rose high inside the great copper dome. So many people, each one breathing, speaking, some shouting, singing, and from each the breath rose and was held and contained by the copper cupola.

By the third day the roof of the dome was no longer visible to those who sat 1,000 feet below on the tiered steps. A fine mist, like a fog, hung there, a curious contradiction to the cold cloudless day outside.

By the fourth day the mist had turned to a definite cloud. And Gerrard, had he seen this, would have immediately understood the enormity of the mistake he had made. For the copper dome was acting as an enormous condenser and the breath of the people swirled in strange clouds inside the dome, regarded with fear and apprehension by the tribes.

Oongala entered the valley at precisely four o’clock on the fifth day, just as the weak sun disappeared behind the mountains and a sharp chill descended on the valley.

He drove through the crowd to the door, waving and smiling. Their mood was uncertain, and if there was a little cheering there was also much silence. Oongala entered the Kristu-Du in full military uniform, one large man going to meet death with more courage than many would have thought him capable of.

Gerrard Haflinger strode jauntily towards the building in a crisp white suit, not yet aware that he had built a machine that would keep these primitive people in Oongala’s murderous grip for another forty-three years.

For at this instant the great clouds inside the cupola could hold the water no more and rain fell inside the Kristu-Du, drenching the drought-stricken people in a heavy continuous drizzle.

Gerrard Haflinger had designed a prison, but he did not know this yet and for the eighty seconds that it took him to force his way through the hysterical crowd he still remained, more or less, sane.