Free The Porcupine by Julian Barnes Page A

behave like dummies. What are these piddling charges? Who cares whether fifteen years agosome struggling actor was permitted to live in two rooms rather than one? If this is all you can find to accuse me of, then I cannot have done much wrong in thirty-three years as helmsman of the nation.’
    [‘ He said “helmsman” again. I think I’m going to choke.’ Instead, Atanas spat cigarette smoke over Stoyo Petkanov .]
    ‘You would rather be charged’, Solinsky felt free to suggest, ‘with the rape and pillage of this nation, with economic vandalism?’
    ‘I have no bank account in Switzerland.’
    [‘ It must be somewhere else then .’]
    ‘Answer the question.’
    ‘I have never taken anything out of this country. You talk about rape and pillage. Under Socialism we benefited from a rich supply of raw goods from our Soviet comrades. Now you invite the Americans and the Germans here to rape and pillage.’
    ‘They invest.’
    ‘Ha. They put a small amount of money into our country in order to take a larger amount out. That is the way of capitalism and imperialism and those who allow it are not only traitors but economic cretins.’
    ‘Thank you for your lecture. But you have not told us yet what you would prefer to be charged with. What crimes are you prepared to admit to?’
    ‘How easy it is for you to talk of crimes. I admit I made mistakes. Like millions of my fellow-countrymen, I worked and I erred. We worked and we erred, and the nation advanced. Isolated facts cannot be taken to charge the head of state out of the context of the age, the time. So I am here defending not just myself but also those millions of patriots who worked selflessly for all those years.’
    ‘Then perhaps you would tell the court about these “errors” which you deign to admit, but which are, it seems, conveniently less than crimes?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Petkanov, startling the prosecutor. He had thought the defendant incapable of such a simple word. ‘I take responsibility for the pre-October 12th crisis, and I am willing for my share of that responsibility to be clarified. I think, perhaps,’ he went on, in his most statesmanlike tone, ‘I think perhaps I should be tried for the nation’s foreign debt.’
    ‘Ah, you are at least responsible for something. You actually remember something and you are also responsible for it. And what do you think might be the appropriate sentence for someone who runs up the nation’s foreign debt in a final attempt to hold on to power, so that it now represents two years’ salary for every man, woman and child in the country?’
    ‘Much of that is your doing,’ replied Petkanov easily, ‘since the rate of inflation is I understand currently running at forty-five per cent, whereas under Socialism inflation did not exist, since we used scientific methods to combat it. Naturally at the time of the pre-October 12th crisis, I consulted the leading economic experts of the Party and the State, on whose written reports I relied, but I am willing for my share of the responsibility to be clarified. And then, of course,’ he went on with more evident complacency, ‘it would be a matter for the judgement of the people.’
    ‘Mr Prosecutor General,’ said the President of the Court, ‘I think it is time we returned to more immediate business.’
    ‘Very well. Now, Mr Petkanov, did you or did you not, on the 25th of June 1976, grant, or instruct to be granted, or permit to be granted, to the said Milan Todorov, athree-room apartment in the Gold section of the Sunrise complex?’
    Petkanov sat down and flapped a dismissive hand. ‘Do you have a nice apartment?’ he asked of no-one in particular. ‘Do you? And you? And you?’ He turned on his hard chair and addressed the motherly wardress standing behind him. ‘And you?’
    [ ‘I have a rotten apartment,’ said Dimiter. ‘I have twenty per cent of a really shitty apartment.’
    ‘What do you expect? You owe two years’ salary to President