Free The Tyrant's Novel by Thomas Keneally

suit and a new bureaucratic dignity. He regarded me across the room as if weighing how much like me he might become should his Sonia drop down dead.
    Mrs. Manners, reasonably enough, still spoke of the congenital flaw which had deprived her of a husband and her daughter, two of the finest people she had ever known. Then, towards eleven, there was at last a knock on the door—the undertaker's men were here. Her mother kissed her a last time, Jimmy, the aunts and uncles, Grace Kennedy. Then they left me alone with her for a final time. The undertaker called softly, Just tell us when, Mr. Sheriff, and closed the door behind everybody, leaving me within.
    I gazed at Sarah, but whatever they had done to her, it had removed the girlish look of surprise from her face. In a funerary sense she was now a statue, an artifact, and yet the only artifact I owed anything to. I went to my desk in the living area and packed up what had been until then my life as defined in the public sense, the printout of my novel in the original and in English and the two disks on which it was stored. Then I called up the ten files of the novel on the hard drive and obliterated them one by one as a funerary tribute. Later that night, I thought, I would drop the laptop in the river so that nothing could tempt me to retrieve the cyber ghost of my work. I had barely begun to think that I might owe the publisher the advance. If the publisher wanted it, I would pay it back perhaps. And I would not receive the further payments for delivery and publication. That did not matter against the fact that I already intended to end my life too. If not, I would be a lifelong laborer to repay Random House. But the manuscript did not belong to them anymore. Only Sarah had heard and read this tale of the tyranny of sanctions, and the cruel jokes of the black market under the broader tyranny of Great Uncle. I put the whole thing and the disks in a huge envelope and took it to Sarah's capacious white coffin, which I had doubted, at the point of purchase, would fit her, but within which she was a waif. I owed her my work, plain as it might be, to fill out the space, and, of course, I owed her myself.
    Now I went to the door and invited the undertaker and his men in, and they clamped down the coffin lid over Sarah, removing her and my banal offerings to her from the world's light. The mourners on the stairs made way and then followed the white sepulchre, jolting on the bulky shoulders of balding but experienced men, down the stairs. Mrs. Douglas joined us meekly on her level, muttering condolences to me. She was so beautiful, she looked so young. And such an actress!
    We passed through the lobby, sobbing, and piled into cars, myself and the family into the undertaker's limousines. But before we reached the gates of the cemetery, according to the gracious custom, we all got out, appropriately for a species so flawed that its most dazzling member could be obliterated by a little venous defect, and so we walked the last quarter mile, the sun burning the bared scalps of the men of the party, behind the pallbearers and into the cemetery gates, where the Reverend Cooper and, a little more distantly, the white tent set up for the funeral feast waited.
    When I was a student I predictably thought that clergymen invoked our helplessness chiefly as a means of keeping us in our place. But this was the right morning for me to hear that all our splendors were accidental ones, and could be so easily erased, leaving only God remaining in a universe in which all other voices had been quenched. I could almost imagine myself a believer. Later, at the funeral repast in the tents on the edge of the cemetery, I saw Dr. Colless give Grace a prescription, and she came up to me and said, Now it's final, Alan, you must take something. You must sleep.
    For I had been wide-eyed and mute for days, held in insomniac suspension between disbelief in and the certainty of this hour we had now reached. I would