The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

by Tom Rachman

  Tooly followed, passing a door to a somber library, then a burgundy dining room, down five steps into a rustic kitchen with wood-beam ceilings, a vast open hearth, and a cottage window overlooking parkland.

  “You know, I don’t even know who you are,” the woman exclaimed, sitting on a long bench in the kitchen, placing the baby on the table before her. Popping a grape into her mouth, she offered the bowl to Tooly. “So busy with the christening, I’m not even thinking straight. Please, take one. Take a bunch. Take them all, if you like.”

  They exchanged names, Tooly describing herself as an old friend of Xavier’s, saying she’d been passing through the area.

  “Well, I’m relieved we didn’t know you were coming,” Harriet said. “Was going to have to get quite cross with the brute. He has a habit of keeping guests waiting. And so, Tooly, ought I to know who you are? Sorry, that sounded rude. Of course I should.” She scratched her hair, said, “Far too little sleep.”

  “You expect him back soon?”

  “Yes, yes. As soon as he’s finished his murders.” She gathered that this required explanation. “Ferrets,” she added. “I’m not fussed myself—leave them alone, don’t you think? But my ghastly husband unearthed a nest of them in an abandoned warren and has been on the verge of pumping car exhaust down there for days. Far as I’m concerned, ferrets are sweet. It’s like having foxes dashing about the garden. He’s of another mind. Probably right—they are considered pests. Still.”

  The infant gaped at Tooly, who looked back, eyebrows raised. Harriet considered the two considering each other. “Babies stare like that. I am sorry.”

  “I don’t mind. Don’t often get the chance to just stare at another person. Long as he doesn’t mind if—”

  “She.”

  “Long as she doesn’t mind me staring back.”

  But the baby lost interest in grown-up noises, and her abrupt inattention stifled them.

  Harriet said, “An angel passes.”

  “What?”

  “It’s that thing French people say when a conversation goes quiet. Speaking of angels, c’est le diable qui s’approche. Hello, darling.” She stood to greet her husband.

  His four dogs scampered through the scullery, each different in size and color, from an ankle-nipping Scottie to a hip-high Old English sheepdog, with a Jack Russell and a bull terrier in between, each sniffing, leaping, barking, racing through the house. “Not on the furniture, boys!” she cried. “Nor you,” she told her husband as he kicked off his rubber boots by the washing machine.

  He leaned over and kissed his wife. A gentleman farmer, he appeared, in waxed Barbour coat and tweed cap, which he tossed onto the table. Harriet placed the hat on the baby’s head, swallowing the infant up to her wobbly neck, prompting a terrified Waaaaaa! “Oh, you silly!” Harriet responded, removing the cap. Seeing its mother again, the child burbled, and Harriet swooped in to smooch her cheek. “Only one angel here! Isn’t there, darling!” The baby chortled.

  Harriet insisted—and her husband seconded it, brushing aside Tooly’s objections—that she stay overnight in the guesthouse, just the other side of the stable yards. He fetched her shoulder bag from the Micra, led her past a dozen stalls, three horses harrumphing in there, toward her lodgings around back.

  “I knew,” she said. “I knew this was going to be you.”

  They walked for a minute, neither speaking, she closing her eyes for a few seconds, electrified and tranquillized at his proximity. “This place is amazing,” she said. “How much land do you have here?”

  “If I told you in acres,” Venn asked, “would that mean something to you?”

  “Probably not.”

  “In that case, about a hundred and forty acres.”

  “Is that half the size of Texas?”

  “Not quite. But respectable for South Tipperary.” He opened the door to the guesthouse, slid her bag in.

  “You don’t seem surprised that I just turned up.”

  “I’m never surprised, duck, never surprised.”

  “You don’t mind that I came, do you?”

  “Tooly, Tooly, Tooly,” he said, putting his arm around her. “A bit late to ask that.”

  They reentered the main house via the scullery and found Harriet tapping at her iPad, the baby mesmerized by the screen.

  “I’m going to show our young friend the property,” he informed his wife, not yet having informed Tooly.

  “Wonderful,” Harriet said, raising the baby to her husband. “Kiss.”

  To Tooly’s surprise, he dutifully did so, stooping to the baby’s pudgy cheek.

  Overnight rain had softened the turf beyond the stable yards, and she and Venn squelched toward the trees, the four dogs hurrying along. All this sploshing rendered their outing distinctly ridiculous—she started laughing, looked over, found him grinning back. Onward they went, mud thickening on her shoes. “So,” she observed, “you are the proud owner of a bog. Congratulations. And where the hell are you taking me?”

  They reached an open-topped wartime jeep, which he used for zipping around the grounds. To the yapping mutts, he said, “Those of you that are coming, get in now.” All four leaped in, followed by Tooly.

  Venn gunned the jeep down the dirt road, kicking up mud, the dogs thrusting their muzzles into the wind. With his elbow, he guided the wheel, noting sights as they went: where Harriet went riding, where they held hunts, the apiary down the hill. He wore no seatbelt, so neither did Tooly, gripping the door handle, wind chapping her face. Venn pulled up at a score of cedar-box hives misted with bee clouds. He cut the engine, its growl replaced by the buzz of the insects. He hopped out and inspected a honeycomb frame swarming with bees.

  “Shouldn’t you wear protective garb?” Tooly called over, she and the dogs remaining a safe distance behind. “Don’t they bite?”

  He returned, held up his hand, lumpy from stings, and revved the engine.

  “You idiot,” she said.

  Off they went, the vehicle rattling on rutted cattle guards, his arm shuddering as he made a sweeping motion over the windscreen to indicate the land before them. “It’s all her people’s,” Venn said. “They’re Anglo-Irish. The family goes way back.” During the Irish War of Independence, he explained, her ancestors handed over the manor against their will, when nationalists held a match to the place. Long after, the Beenblossoms had made annual pilgrimages to visit the family graveyard—Harriet used to come with her grandparents. Then, two years ago, Venn earned their undying gratitude when he restored the estate to Beenblossom ownership, persuading the existing owners, who’d been ruined in the property crash, to accept a risibly low bid.

  “The recession has been terrible in Ireland, hasn’t it,” Tooly said.

  “Only as bad as most places,” he replied. “The same old story: unregulated property market, wild mortgages, the obvious crash.” Conifers brushed past the jeep on either side. “Supposedly, it was the history of poverty in Ireland that made them lose their minds.” He paused, reflecting. “Actually, history was to blame for a lot of this crash. Certainly what’s destroying Europe.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, trying to staple all these different countries together,” he said. “This whole European Union idea, getting sworn enemies invested together so they’d stop slitting each other’s throats—and with the Germans to finance it all out of war guilt. Only now the Germans are asked to pay the debts of Greece, Spain, Italy, and every other country that stuck its hands in the public pocket. What they’re really saying is ‘How historical do you feel?’ They’re asking, ‘Will you still pay for what your grandparents did seventy years ago?’ ” He turned off-road, driving through high grass, and parked before a wired-off pasture occupied by foraging chickens. “History is the issue,” he continued. “People, it turns out, aren’t a product of their own time. They’re a product of the time before theirs.” Keys swinging in the ignition, he hopped from the jeep, splatting into mud. “Need a hand?”
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  “If Europe is such a mess, why are you in it?” she said, stepping out.

  “I came because things were a mess. I used to think you needed to go where places were flourishing. But you have to follow chaos. That’s where the dynamism is. As the poet said, ‘In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!’ ”

  “Which poet said that?”

  “I’ve done well in Ireland,” he continued. “But I’ll be out of here soon.”

  “Where to?”

  “Why? Do you want to warn them?” He pinched her arm fondly. “There’s opportunity wherever there’s distress, little duck. Obviously, I’d prefer that no place fell into ruin and no one suffered. But success requires failure, sadly. Success is relative: you make a billion while everyone else makes a billion and one, then you just got poorer. Individuals don’t rise together. That’s a great lie of our time, like this myth of meritocracy: ‘Work hard enough and you will make it! Just want it enough!’ Everyone does want it enough. But only a few can win and nearly all will lose. People can’t accept this, so they convince themselves that, secretly, privately, in their own terms, they’re not failures. But, ah well,” he concluded, smiling, “the individual ego, like the national ego, is wonderfully impervious to fact.”

  He led Tooly into an aluminum shed, its corrugated walls lined by nest boxes with hens peeking out, each of which he checked in turn.

  “I’m annoyed that you’re not more shocked I found you,” she said. “Aren’t you a little bit impressed?”

  “The name gave me away,” he guessed. He had been gathering names, and other information about people, for years. At the Brain Trust, for example, each applicant for membership had filled out detailed forms with personal data that they would never have disclosed in other settings but that they surrendered unthinkingly on an official-looking form. Long after the demise of the Brain Trust, several former applicants had the same strange experience, a growing sense that their lives were haunted: strange charges on their iTunes accounts; a failure to receive mail; businesses calling them about products they’d never bought. It was as if a double operated under their names. Xavi had visited the Brain Trust once on Tooly’s recommendation, had met with Venn, and he’d filled out those forms. When he died, his identity became all the more valuable—no Xavier Karamage to interfere with the actions of “Xavier Karamage.”

  “But that photo online, the guy with a red mustache?” Tooly asked.

  “Who knows,” Venn answered. “Just a picture sucked from cyberspace by the computer geek who set up that website. My whole company, as I’m sure you realize, is somewhat of a shell operation.”

  “Your receptionist hasn’t even met you.”

  “She gave out this address? Can’t say I’m too impressed with that.”

  “Not her fault. It was my cunning that pried it from her!”

  “Of course it was.”

  “How long have you been here, Venn?” she asked, with an unexpected surge of emotion. “I’ve been wondering for ages what happened to you. Thought you were going to be in touch. Where were you?”

  “Where? There aren’t places anymore, duck,” he responded. “No locations now, just individuals. You didn’t hear? Everyone’s their own nation, with their own blog. Because everybody has something important to say; everybody’s putting out press releases on what they ate for breakfast. It’s the era of self-importance. Everyone’s their own world. Doesn’t matter where people are. Or where I was.”

  “Nicely dodged,” she said. “And, for the record, this isn’t supposed to be ‘the age of self-importance.’ Everyone’s busy fighting for causes on social media, aren’t they? The whole Occupy Wall Street movement.”

  “Clowns of no consequence,” he retorted, taking a brown egg from a hutch, turning it over appraisingly. “Long after their tents are gone, Wall Street will still occupy. Not the other way around. Was there ever any doubt?”

  “The protests in Greece and France and Italy?”

  “Those aren’t for a social cause. They’re riots for self-interest. It’s Greek statisticians and Italian taxi drivers and French bureaucrats all saying, ‘How dare anyone threaten our entitlements?,’ while their countrymen starve. You have to admire the gumption.”

  “The Arab Spring stuff isn’t all self-interest,” she countered. “And they’re doing it through social-media stuff.”

  “The Arabs rebelled because of Facebook? They rebelled because they’re not on Facebook. Because they’re not installed in their hardware like the West is. Don’t imagine that digital code topples generals. It’s analog human beings. Not tweets and viral videos. That’s just the sideshow of our times.”

  “You’ve become another declinist,” she said. “Everywhere I go! I was with this old friend in Connecticut—you remember that law student, Duncan? All he talks about now is doom and collapse. But there were way worse times than this. People used to suffer famines in Ireland, right? You can’t imagine that today.”

  “I agree with you,” Venn said. “The West isn’t collapsing. Empires don’t crumble like they used to. Westerners are just in a bad mood. Suddenly, they don’t have their way, and they won’t stand for it. A bunch of spoilt children. (Then again, the difference between spoilt brats and successful adults is never that large, is it.) But anyone who frets about the fall of empires is missing the point. You have no West or East now. Like the poet said, ‘No such things as societies anymore, just individual people.’ ”

  “Who’s this poet you keep quoting?”

  “There is no poet,” he confessed. “They’re just lines I pick up. When I go, ‘The poet said,’ people lean in close and listen. Which makes me laugh. Especially since nobody listens to actual poets anymore.”

  “But you, at least, are not predicting the end of the world.”

  “Definitely not. Things are changing, but I don’t mind that. Look at what everyone’s so upset about: pollution and corporate greed and obesity. It’s all just forms of gluttony. Even this global-warming farce. Horrific. It is. But inevitable, too. Nobody can stop it now. All that happens if you quit consuming is someone else eats your lunch.” He smiled. “Remember all that nonsense about globalization—how the world was a village, how free-market democracy was going to unite the world? There are only individual operators, some pretending to belong to a group, others so naïve that they really believe a group exists.

  “And your lawyer friend,” Venn continued, “for all his moaning, is he really acting like life is under threat? Or is he just sitting there, grumbling on his blog? Underneath it all, people trust in progress. Scientists will cure their lifestyle diseases; the Internet will fix their love lives; technology will solve the oil crisis. Because technology is progress, and progress goes on forever. But progress played a trick. It presented the ultimate gluttony of all: those double clicks that turned everyone into rodents pressing buttons for the next sugar pellet. People who used to deride the losers for watching ten hours of TV a day won’t hesitate to click a mouse for longer. ‘Did she answer my email yet?’ That’s the new obesity. And nobody admits it even happened,” he said. “The sci-fi movies got it wrong. No robots marched in to enslave humanity. What happened was far more ingenious: the servants became masters by their perfect affability. No microchip was implanted in any human head. People just handed over their brains. The real clash of civilizations wasn’t between Islam and the West, or China and America. It was between what people had been and what they’ve become.”

  “You make it sound nightmarish.”

  “Not really.” He tossed the egg, caught it. “Just like it’s always been. A huge majority of fools; a tiny minority that runs the show.”

  “If that’s what you think, why aren’t you worried?”

  “Because I’m
not part of any of this. I just watch.”

  “Me, too.”

  He shook his head. “You joined in. As you should, duck, as you should. It’s exhausting standing outside forever. I’ve been working at it my whole life. You can’t blame yourself for having been swallowed by your times. They eat nearly everyone.”

  “Except you’re not outside society anymore,” she said. “You’ve got a family. The very fact that you married and had a kid is amazing to me, given what you always used to say about cutting ties.”

  He sidearmed the egg at her. All she could do was dodge. But instead of exploding on the wall it bounced off intact, rolled along the chicken-wire flooring, stopping at the toe of his rubber boot. Niftily, he kicked it up into the air, caught it, peeled the shell. “I always keep boiled ones in my pocket,” he said, biting down. “Care to try?”

  She nodded uncertainly.

  He underarmed a second to her, and she snatched it from the air. It burst in her hand, raw egg dripping. He laughed, threw his arm around her, cleaning her off with a linen handkerchief, and continued with their tour of the grounds.

  As they drove through the estate, Tooly told him about Humphrey, how they were back in touch and how she’d been caring for him. “It’s bizarre,” she said. “But he doesn’t even sound Russian anymore.”

  “Why would he?”

  “Well,” she responded, even more confused now. “Because he is one.”

  Venn did a three-point turn, heading back toward the house. “That man is as Russian as we are.” Humphrey had indeed been born in one of those places in Central Europe they’d erased, Venn said, but he left as a small boy and was raised in safety in South Africa. He’d trained as a pharmacist there, owned a couple of shops, looked after his father, never married. When his father died, Humphrey went traveling. But the world proved a lonelier destination than predicted: all these people and none approached his café table. Even the waiters found him a bore. So he’d concocted a fresh self, the Russian exile, mimicking how his father spoke. People caught him out early on, so he kept moving cities, refining the act. “He wanted to stop for years, but was petrified you’d be upset with him! He got stuck, the old fool.”