The Tyrant's Novel (17 page)

The use of gas is a crime against the conventions of war. And yet some of my fellow citizens had taken the risk of removing one dangerous commodity, phosphorus, from these bombs, and replacing it with another volatile entity, mustard or nerve gas, or a blessed cocktail of both.

Our corporal called to Carter and me as we fed the mortar, Your masks! Put on your masks, for God's sake! The wind was sluggish from the west that dawn, but the profile of the granite mound behind us caused it to skitter in a little eddy there. Our corporal knew this. Intercessionists, being chiefly country people, understood these subtleties of breeze.

Get your masks on!

I put mine on. Mine's in the bunker, Hugo yelled—rather I half read his lips as saying that. Yet he could not go for it. An officer would see him as fleeing and would put a bullet in his head. Whatever was in the canisters our planes had dropped, it seemed to barely add to the weight of the air. There was screaming all over the battlefield, but that is quite normal. The corporal and I wore our gas masks, and I looked through the lenses at barefaced Carter and envied him the clearer air he breathed, the lack of obstruction.

It became apparent that the Others were withdrawing to the positions they had left that morning. What I was aware of was a curious noise in the new, hollow silence; human animals, having tested the M16 against the AK-47, the American 122-millimeter howitzer against the entrenched Russian T65 cannon, were now filling the sky with the same orphaned howl. My hands burned, and I lifted them to the eyepieces of my mask and saw that they were red and blistering, exactly as they felt. I saw then as I swept my masked head to left and right that our trench was an abattoir. There were dead and living horrors, the disemboweled complaining about the spillage of their organs, or reconciling themselves to it; the beheaded and delimbed who made no further complaint, and the defaced, a man whose visage was now bleeding steak containing perhaps one horrific amazed eye. Everywhere in the trench and for hundreds of miles beyond it, mewling and calls for rebirth were heard, screams and invocations to a God who had been asked for something cleaner and swifter than had been given.

My hands, I said. They itched crazily and I waved them in air to cool them.

What? asked Carter. He could not hear me distinctly through my mask. He was, however, distracted by the state of his own hands. He sat red-faced at the bottom of our trench, and began sneezing. He drew a bunched hand down the length of his nose, as if to clear the nostrils. Then he dragged the hand into the shadow of his left shoulder and hunched forward, shivering. Officers and NCOs ran along the trench telling those of us who had masks to keep them on. I saw a blister forming on Carter's cheek. I stopped rubbing my hands since it made skin come away. I got permission to go to the bunker a hundred yards back and fetch Carter's mask. I ran, cursing away at my hands, and looked in a pile of military gear for his mask.

When I skittered back with it in my smarting hands, the masked corporal was leaning over Hugo, swearing at him tenderly. Private Carter raised his welted face to me. His eyes had swollen closed. Flesh had begun to fall away like a beard from his blistered cheeks. I tried to put the mask on him but he shook his head with what I thought of as the irritable stubbornness of a man in temporary pain. When he persisted a while I realized he was not only blinded but had lost all reason. The corporal hammered me on the shoulder. Give it up, he told me. Carter vomited and began to convulse. An officer came up to me and said through his mouthpiece, Shoot him! I looked stupidly at the officer, mask to mask. Isn't he your friend? I heard the officer ask. It's a cocktail this time. Indeed, Carter seemed to be choking. Froth had formed on his lips. The officer leveled his pistol and thunderously shot Carter dead. The air was punctuated now with similar mercy shots, both sides of the line exercising the same compassion, though
they
would no doubt spare some of their treatable cases to ship them to hospital in Switzerland, and show the world how Great Uncle violated international agreements.

We were stood-to throughout the day, but there were no further attacks by the Others. In our section of line we treated our hands with soothing blister cream, donned white gloves, helped the wounded back to ambulances, buried the dead, and in a gully behind the line, beneath the small scarp for which the Others had been trying, we made a pile of the unsightly and unlucky dead whose nervous systems had been attacked by the nerve agent which had accidentally fallen amongst our regiment. The bodies we had removed to the gully, some seventy, were—and this was thoroughly understood—not to go home. A special team wearing white clothing appeared to attend to the ultimate total consumption of Carter's and the other bodies, burning them in a white-limed communal grave.

That night the enemy withdrew, in boats small and large, across the straits. We did not at once occupy the wing of the island they left vacant—it was vastly contaminated with mustard and tabin. The officers moved us to a safer part of the line, where, maskless and gloveless, we sat at ease, disbelieving all that had happened and still full of a grief which had not yet come to focus itself. Gentlemen, a colonel told us as we sat on the ground in a mass, we have survived, and not without the great help of certain agents dropped from planes. We have sustained lower casualties than the enemy. You have seen some of your more negligent comrades perish accidentally. You are, let me make it absolutely clear, to deny all knowledge of this. You did not see it happen. If you say otherwise, you will pay the penalty and your unpensioned body will be sent home in a black coffin. Be aware—you did not need to suffer death yourselves, but all because a merciful regime has separated you from it by the special application of these chemicals and other agents.

It has to be said that this point seemed perfectly reasonable to the regiment in the midst of which I sat, and to me as part of that multicelled unit.

So, said the colonel, your friends are all officially not dead but taken prisoner. You will comfort the parents of the men you were friendly with. Any mother or wife who turns up at the Ministry of Defense with a complaint that her missing son is dead will be traced straight back to the one who said so. You've been blessed, boys, under God. Stay blessed. I will interview you individually over the coming week and ensure you are willing to keep this compact.

Why would I not be willing, Mrs. Carter, to tell you that your son was a prisoner? What would you rather I had told you? That his flesh melted before my eyes?

It was as this true tale burst forth from me in what I saw as the last month of my life that I perceived the answer, there in the colonel's speech.

I had only to tell the truth to that serial nuisance of my life, Mrs. Carter, I had only to ask her pardon for the long, well-meaning, state-advised deceit. And it seemed so easy to say what had not been said before, and so wholesome not to take this pretense to the grave. A mercy to me, a mercy to her. The colonel had said it would take only a mother or a wife turning up at the Ministry of War, asking was the story true, to ensure that the source would be traced back, and the former soldier punished. It could not be counted McBrien's fault, or his wife's, that I became suddenly reckless with Mrs. Carter, loading her with the real news, saving the remnant of her life from the vigil she'd been keeping for the better part of six years.

I called Mrs. Carter, and she was so grateful and excited I almost hung up.

I'm so sorry I didn't get a chance to offer my condolences personally at the funeral of your dear wife, she said. I was waiting to do so, but they told me you had been overcome. I can understand that.

I told her I wanted to come and see her now. It was the first approach I had made since the one following my return home from the front, during which I told my consoling lie. I could hear the mounting excitement in her voice. I, the bereaved, who had survived the battle of Summer Island but had lost a wife, was coming as a peer to compare grief with her whose son was amongst the great unnamed of the POW camps over there. I, who had had all the luck and the beautiful actress wife and a fledging repute, would now approach her as an equal in loss. I feared, of course, that I would be greeted with a table groaning with pastries and biscotti. We would eat the feast of grief together—worse still, she would see me gorging myself for no purpose, the pain still there whatever the skill of the patissier.

I said to her, Please, no coffee, no cake. I'll be right over.

When I left the building—why should I not visit the mother of an army friend?—I saw the Toyota and limo in their usual place across the street. Though they no doubt wrote down the time of my exit, and the limo would probably follow me at a funeral-pace distance, there was no frantic reaction to my emergence.

I knew I would suffer a retribution from the old lady. She was not an old lady, of course, but had condemned herself to be one. She seemed to be bent on proving that the truest love is the love between mothers and sons. I remembered my mother, holding my hand and weeping, in her last week in the Republic Hospital. A mother who had been restrained and now, lucky enough to be a patient in a time of plenty before the sanctions, primed with the sort of painkillers that made one weak rather than kill the truest pain. She said, You were always my joy.

Had she lived, she would have been saying it when I was sixty.

Partway to Mrs. Carter's, I felt an urge to get things over and hailed a taxi. The limo easefully increased its pace as I made good speed towards the apartment of a woman whom half this city in my father's day had gasped for and declared unapproachable, but who had now become a hag for her son's sake.

My descriptions of her were, of course, cast up by my sense of being hunted by her. Now I was to liberate her back into the stream of womanhood, and liberate myself as well. I would hear the army's knock at my door and I would rejoice as I was taken away before the startled gaze of Captain Chaddock. After all, the Overguard was the Overguard, but the army was the army!

When Mrs. Carter opened the door, I could see she had not been able to help herself. There was not a set table of goodies, but there was coffee on the coffee table, and three or so plates full of various delicacies. She admitted me with a slight frown, in response to my own.

Dear Mrs. Carter, I said, finding the nearest chair to the door and sitting as soon as I could. You should sit down too.

She obeyed me, placing herself crookedly on a chair by the corner of the table. She was agog.

All right, I said. I have to tell you at last that you have been misled. The government version of what befell your son is not the truth of it. I regret the part I have had in sustaining the deception.

I told the story, a fraught smile appearing on her face each time I mentioned her son early in the tale. Whenever I paused, her coffeepot made a metallic ticking sound, as if to warn us it was getting cold, growing less and less drinkable. She listened with a careful, stricken quality, massaging the corners of her mouth with thumb and forefinger. When I had finished, she seemed very controlled. She leaned on her fist and released a few tears, and I rose from my seat and caressed her shoulders. For the first time, I was not frightened of her, and thought of all the times Sarah had helped nurse me towards meetings with this woman.

Sit down, she told me in a minute voice.

I sat again, like a man expecting punishment, my fists, indifferent to defense, spread on my knees. I heard her gasp once, silent tears fell from her eyes, and she straightened herself in the chair. Then she put her head back and emitted the most ghastly, high-pitched wail. I stood again, whimpering, spreading my hands like a man letting go of deceit. She rose too with a plate of honey pastry in her hands, and hurled it against the wall behind my head. It did not matter now, she clearly thought. She was not preserving a home decor for someone. She walked to me and drew back her hand and slapped me across the face, stingingly, twice. For the first time since the funeral I began to cry. Poor Hugo, poor Hugo! I howled. She returned to the coffee table and upended it. I could see in her stride some of her legendary force, revived.

She yelled, You say he did not have his gas mask?

I said, He was not good at all that stuff. He always left one or two items behind. He had a gift for poetic approximation.

This isn't the truth, she asserted, wild-eyed. I did not raise him that he'd vanish through a simple accident like that.

Did you notice how I came to your afternoon teas? Like a sullen teenager. That was because I was lying. Now . . .

Why didn't you stop him? Why didn't you stop that officer?

I knew I would have to do it if he didn't.

Why didn't you run with him, out of that trench? Out of that poisoned air? You stood and watched him vomit and froth?

Then a thought struck her. I know, she went on. You're punishing me for the death of your wife. You're punishing
me.
I was once as beautiful as your wife, and now she's gone, and you're punishing
me.

I saw your son die. Why would I tell you that if it were not true?

She fumbled in her mind awhile for possible reasons. Because you are a fabulist, she hissed, splendid and electric in fury, wanting to provoke me, wanting, and I swear to it, a blow so she could hit back.

I loved your son, Mrs. Carter. It was a heinous waste. There's no justice in these things. I wish he were here and bringing your grandchildren to visit you in some cranky old Saab.

Now she leveled a finger at me. I am going straight to the Ministry of War. I will tell them what you say, and they will tell me whether it is true or malicious.

It's true, I told her, though they'll tell you it isn't. They initiated the lie.

I watched her as she struggled to believe or disprove me. I meanly thought, I don't need to drink your coffee anymore.

I rose and went to the door. Is there a friend I can call to come and sit with you? I asked.

Where are my friends? she howled. They have all fallen away.