Unlikely Stories Mostly

by Alasdair Gray

  I stood up and said drearily, “I will visit your master.”

  He lay on a rug in her room with his face to the wall. He was breathing loudly. I could see almost none of him for he still wore the ceremonial cape which was badly stained in places. My doctor knelt beside him and answered my glance by spreading the palms of his hands. The secretary, chef and two masseuses knelt near the door. I sighed and said, “Yesterday you told me I was your only friend, Tohu. I can say now that you are mine. I am sorry our training has stopped us showing it.”

  I don’t think he heard me for shortly after he stopped breathing. I then told my entourage that I had asked to die and expected a positive answer from the emperor on the following day. They were all very pale but my news made them paler still. When someone more than seven feet tall dies of unnatural causes the etiquette requires his entourage to die in the same way. This is unlucky, but I did not make this etiquette, this palace, this empire which I shall leave as soon as possible, with or without the emperor’s assistance. The hand of my secretary trembles as he writes these words. I pity him.

  To my dead parents in the ash of the old capital,

  From the immortal emperor’s supreme nothing, Their son,

  Bohu.

  DICTATED ON THE 10th LAST DAY OF THE OLD CALENDAR.

  FOURTH LETTER

  DEAR MOTHER, DEAR FATHER, I must always return to you, it seems. The love, the rage, the power which fills me now cannot rest until it has sent a stream of words in your direction. I have written my great poem but not the poem wanted. I will explain all this.

  On the evening of the third day my entourage were sitting round me when a common janitor brought the emperor’s reply in the unusual form of a letter. He gave it to the secretary, bowed and withdrew. The secretary is a good ventriloquist and read the emperor’s words in the appropriate voice.

  The emperor hears and respects his great poet’s request for death. The emperor grants Bohu permission to do anything he likes, write anything he likes, and die however, wherever, and whenever he chooses.

  I said to my doctor, “Choose the death you want for yourself and give it to me first.”

  He said, “Sir, may I tell you what that death is?”

  “Yes.”

  “It will take many words to do so. I cannot be brief on this matter.”

  “Speak. I will not interrupt.”

  He said, “Sir, my life has been a dreary and limited one, like your own. I speak for all your servants when I say this. We have all been, in a limited way, married to you, and our only happiness was being useful to a great poet. We understand why you cannot become one. Our own parents have died in the ancient capital, so death is the best thing for everyone, and I can make it painless. All I need is a closed room, the chef’s portable stove and a handful of prepared herbs which are always with me.

  “But sir, need we go rapidly to this death? The emperor’s letter suggests not, and that letter has the force of a passport. We can use it to visit any part of the palace we like. Give us permission to escort you to death by a flowery, roundabout path which touches on some commonplace experiences all men wish to enjoy. I ask this selfishly, for our own sakes, but also unselfishly, for yours. We love you sir.”

  Tears came to my eyes but I said firmly, “I cannot be seduced. My wish for death is an extension of my wish not to move, feel, think or see. I desire nothing with all my heart. But you are different. For a whole week you have my permission to glut yourself on anything the emperor’s letter permits.”

  The doctor said, “But sir, that letter has no force without your company. Allow yourself to be carried with us. We shall not plunge you into riot and disorder. All will be calm and harmonious, you need not walk, or stand, or even think. We know your needs. We can read the subtlest flicker of your eyebrow. Do not even say yes to this proposal of mine. Simply close your eyes in the tolerant smile which is so typical of you.”

  I was weary, and did so, and allowed them to wash, feed and prepare me for sleep as in the old days. And they did something new. The doctor wiped the wounds at the top of my thighs with something astringent and Adoda explored them, first with her tongue and then with her teeth. I felt a pain almost too fine to be noticed and looking down I saw her draw from each wound a quivering silver thread. Then the doctor bathed me again and Adoda embraced me and whispered, “May I share your throne?”

  I nodded. Everyone else went away and I slept deeply for the first time in four days.

  Next morning I dreamed my aunt was beside me, as young and lovely as in days when she looked like the white demon. I woke up clasping Adoda so insistently that we both cried aloud. The doors of the central hall were all wide open; so were the doors to the garden in the rooms beyond. Light flooded in on us from all sides. During breakfast I grew calm again but it was not my habitual calm. I felt adventurous under the waist. This feeling did not yet reach my head, which smiled cynically. But I was no longer exactly the same man.

  The rest of the entourage came in wearing bright clothes and garlands. They stowed my punt-shaped throne with food, wine, drugs and instruments. It is a big throne and when they climbed in themselves there was no overcrowding even though Tohu’s nurse was there too. Then a horde of janitors arrived with long poles which they fixed to the sides of the throne, and I and my entourage were lifted into the air and carried out to the garden. The secretary sat in the prow playing a mouth-organ while the chef and doctor accompanied him with zither and drum. The janitors almost danced as they trampled across the maze, and this was so surprising that I laughed aloud, staring freely up at the pigeon-flecked azure sky, the porcelain gables with their coloured flags, the crowded tops of markets, temples and manufactories. Perhaps when I was small I had gazed as greedily for the mere useless fun of it, but for years I had only used my eyes professionally, to collect poetical knowledge, or shielded them, as required by the etiquette. “Oh, Adoda!” I cried, warming my face in her hair, “All this new knowledge is useless and I love it.”

  She whispered, “The use of living is the taste it gives. The emperor has made you the only free man in the world. You can taste anything you like.”

  We entered a hall full of looms where thousands of women in coarse gowns were weaving rich tapestry. I was fascinated. The air was stifling, but not to me. Adoda and the chef plied their fans and the doctor refreshed me with a fine mist of cool water. I also had the benefit of janitors without kneebands, so our party was socially invisible; I could stare at whom I liked and they could not see me at all. I noticed a girl with pale brown hair toiling on one side. Adoda halted the janitors and whispered, “That lovely girl is your sister who was sold to the merchants. She became a skilled weaver so they resold her here.”

  I said, “That is untrue. My sister would be over forty now and that girl, though robust, is not yet sixteen.”

  “Would you like her to join us?”

  I closed my eyes in the tolerant smile and a janitor negotiated with an overseer. When we moved on, the girl was beside us. She was silent and frightened at first but we gave her garlands, food and wine and she soon became merry.

  We came into a narrow street with a gallery along one side on the level of my throne. Tall elegant women in the robes of the court strolled and leaned there. A voice squeaked, “Hullo, Bohu” and looking up I saw the emperor smiling from the arms of the most slender and disdainful. I stared at him. He said, “Bohu hates me but I must suffer that. He is too great a man to be ordered by a poor old emperor. This lady, Bohu, is your aunt, a very wonderful courtesan. Say hullo!”

  I laughed and said, “You are a liar, sir.”

  He said, “Nonetheless you mean to take her from me. Join the famous poet, my dear, he goes down to the floating world. Goodbye, Bohu. I do not just give people death. That is only half my job.”

  The emperor moved to a lady nearby, the slender one stepped among us and we all sailed on down the street.

  We reached a wide river and the janitors waded in until the throne
rested on the water. They withdrew the poles, laid them on the thwarts and we drifted out from shore. The doctor produced pipes and measured a careful dose into each bowl. We smoked and talked; the men played instruments, the women sang. The little weaver knew many popular songs, some sad, some funny. I suddenly wished Tohu was with us, and wept. They asked why. I told them and we all wept together. Twilight fell and a moon came out. The court lady stood up, lifted a pole and steered us expertly into a grove of willows growing in shallow water. Adoda hung lanterns in the branches. We ate, clasped each other, and slept.

  I cannot count the following days. They may have been two, or three, or many. Opium plays tricks with time but I did not smoke enough to stop me loving. I loved in many ways, some tender, some harsh, some utterly absent-minded. More than once I said to Adoda, “Shall we die now? Nothing can be sweeter than this” but she said, “Wait a little longer. You haven’t done all you want yet.”

  When at last my mind grew clear about the order of time the weaver and court lady had left us and we drifted down a tunnel to a bright arch at the end. We came into a lagoon on a lane of clear water between beds of rushes and lily-leaves. It led to an island covered with spires of marble and copper shining in the sun. My secretary said, “That is the poets’ pantheon. Would you like to land, sir?”

  I nodded.

  We disembarked and I strolled barefoot on warm moss between the spires. Each had an open door in the base with steps down to the tomb where the body would lie. Above each door was a white tablet where the poet’s great work would be painted. All the tombs and tablets were vacant, of course, for I am the first poet in the new palace and was meant to be the greatest, for the tallest spire in the centre was sheathed in gold with my name on the door. I entered. The room downstairs had space for us all with cushions for the entourage and a silver throne for me.

  “To deserve to lie here I must write a poem,” I thought, and looked into my mind. The poem was there, waiting to come out. I returned upstairs, went outside and told the secretary to fetch paint and brushes from his satchel and go to the tablet. I then dictated my poem in a slow firm voice.

  THE EMPEROR’S INJUSTICE

  Scattered buttons and silks, a broken kite in the mud,

  A child’s yellow clogs cracked by the horses hooves.

  A land weeps for the head city, lopped by sabre, cracked by hooves,

  The houses ash, the people meat for crows.

  A week ago wind rustled dust in the empty market.

  “Starve” said the moving dust, “Beg. Rebel. Starve. Beg. Rebel.”

  We do not do such things. We are peaceful people.

  We have food for six more days, let us wait.

  The emperor will accommodate us, underground.

  It is sad to be unnecessary.

  All the bright mothers, strong fathers, raffish aunts,

  Lost sisters and brothers, all the rude servants

  Are honoured guests of the emperor, underground.

  We sit in the tomb now. The door is closed, the only light is the red glow from the chef’s charcoal stove. My entourage dreamily puff their pipes, the doctor’s fingers sift the dried herbs, the secretary is ending my last letter. We are tired and happy. The emperor said I could write what I liked. Will my poem be broadcast? No. If that happened the common people would rise and destroy that evil little puppet and all the cunning, straightfaced, pompous men who use him. Nobody will read my words but a passing gardener, perhaps, who will paint them out to stop them reaching the emperor’s ear. But I have at last made the poem I was made to make. I lie down to sleep in perfect satisfaction.

  Goodbye. I still love you

  Your son,

  Bohu.

  DICTATED SOMETIME SHORTLY BEFORE THE LAST DAY OF THE OLD CALENDAR.

  LAST LETTER

  A CRITICAL APPRECIATION OF THE POEM BY THE LATE TRAGEDIAN BOHU ENTITLED

  THE EMPEROR’S INJUSTICE

  DELIVERED

  TO THE IMPERIAL COLLEGE OF HEADMASTERS, NEW PALACE UNIVERSITY

  My Dear Colleagues, This is exactly the poem we require. Our patience in waiting for it till the last possible moment has been rewarded. The work is shorter than we expected, but that makes distribution easier. It had a starkness unusual in government poetry, but this starkness satisfies the nation’s need much more than the work we hoped for. With a single tiny change the poem can be used at once. I know some of my colleagues will raise objections, but I will answer these in the course of my appreciation.

  A noble spirit of pity blows through this poem like a warm wind. The destroyed people are not mocked and calumniated, we identify with them, and the third line:

  A land cries for the head city, lopped by sabre, cracked by hooves, invites the whole empire to mourn. But does this wind of pity fan the flames of political protest? No. It presses the mind of the reader inexorably toward nothing, toward death. This is clearly shown in the poem’s treatment of rebellion:

  “Starve,” said the moving dust, “Beg. Rebel.

  Starve. Beg. Rebel.”

  We do not do such things. We are peaceful people.

  We have food for six more days, let us wait.

  The poem assumes that a modern population will find the prospect of destruction by their own government less alarming than action against it. The truth of this is shown in today’s police report from the old capital. It describes crowds of people muttering at street corners and completely uncertain of what action to take. They have a little food left. They fear the worst, yet hope, if they stay docile, the emperor will not destroy them immediately. This state of things was described by Bohu yesterday in the belief that it had happened a fortnight ago! A poet’s intuitive grasp of reality was never more clearly demonstrated.

  At this point the headmaster of civil peace will remind me that the job of the poem is not to describe reality but to encourage our friends, frighten our enemies, and reconcile the middling people to the destruction of the old capital. The headmaster of moral philosophy will also remind me of our decision that people will most readily accept the destruction of the old capital if we accuse it of rebellion. That was certainly the main idea in the original order-to-write, but I would remind the college of what we had to do to the poet who obeyed that order. Tohu knew exactly what we wanted and gave it to us. His poem described the emperor as wise, witty, venerable, patient, loving and omnipotent. He described the citizens of the old capital as stupid, childish, greedy, absurd, yet inspired by a vast communal lunacy which endangered the empire. He obediently wrote a popular melodrama which could not convince a single intelligent man and would only over-excite stupid ones, who are fascinated by criminal lunatics who attack the established order.

  The problem is this. If we describe the people we kill as dangerous rebels they look glamorous; if we describe them as weak and silly we seem unjust. Tohu could not solve that problem. Bohu has done with startling simplicity.

  He presents the destruction as a simple, stunning, inevitable fact. The child, mother and common people in the poem exist passively, doing nothing but weep, gossip, and wait. The active agents of hoof, sabre, and (by extension) crow, belong to the emperor, who is named at the end of the middle verse:

  The emperor will accommodate us, underground. and at the end of the last:

  Bright mothers, strong fathers … all the rude servants

  Are honoured guests of the emperor, underground. Consider the weight this poem gives to our immortal emperor! He is not described or analysed, he is presented as a final, competent, all-embracing force, as unarguable as the weather, as inevitable as death. This is how all governments should appear to people who are not in them.

  To sum up, THE EMPEROR’S INJUSTICE will delight our friends, depress our enemies, and fill middling people with nameless awe. The only change required is the elimination of the first syllable in the last word of the title. I advise that the poem be sent today to every village, town and city in the land. At the same time Fieldmarshal Ko should be
ordered to destroy the old capital. When the poem appears over doors of public buildings the readers will read of an event which is occurring simultaneously. In this way the literary and military sides of the attack will reinforce each other with unusual thoroughness. Fieldmarshal Ko should take special care that the poet’s parents do not escape the general massacre, as a rumour to that effect will lessen the poignancy of the official biography, which I will complete in the coming year.

  I remain your affectionate colleague,

  Gigadib,

  Headmaster of modern and classical literature.

  SIR THOMAS’S LOGOPANDOCY

  The

  Secret and Apcryphal Diurnal

  of

  SIR THOMAS URQUHART OF CROMARTIE Knight

  Recently Discovered and Published

  Against the Author’s Expressed Will & Command

  for the

  Instruction and Reformation

  of the

  Brittanic League of Commonwealths;

  Wherein is recorded a dialogue with the late Protector Cromwell’s Latin secretary, which neatly unfolds a scheme to repair the divided Nature of Man by rationally reintegering God’s Gift of Tongues to Adam by a verboradical appliancing of Neper’s logarythms to the grammar of an Asiatick people, thought to be the lost tribe of Israel, whose language predates the Babylonic Cataclysm;

  With auxiliary matter vindicating the grandeur of SCOTLAND from the foul Infamy whereinto the Rigid Presbyterian party of that nation, out of their covetousness and their overweening ambition, hath most dissembledly involved it.