The Porcupine by Julian Barnes Read Free Book Online

obedience to his parents’ wishes even led him to get engaged on his twentieth birthday to their neighbours’ daughter Pavlina. Three months later he had jilted her for Maria, and insisted on marrying at once, with so much sudden obstinate zeal that his parents had naturally examined the girl’s belly. They were puzzled when the next months did not bear out their suspicions.
    After that, for many years, he had been a loyal party member and good husband – or was it a good party member and loyal husband? Sometimes the two conditions seemed muddlingly close in his mind. Then, one evening, he announced that he had joined the Green Party at a time when, as Maria vigorously pointed out, it contained very few professors of law married to the daughters of anti-fascist heroes. Worse, Peter had not simply gone along to a few meetings on the sly; he had sent back his party card with an openly provocative letter which a few years earlier would have brought men in leather coats to the door at an unsocial hour.
    Now, according to his wife, he was indulging his vanity again. His colleagues simply judged his appointment an enviable career move, one revealing in the courteous and enclosed lawyer a secret wish for television stardom. But then such people saw only Solinsky’s outer life, and tended to assume that his inner existence must be equally well ordered. In fact, he oscillated constantly between different levels of anxiety, and his intermittent thrusts of decisiveness were intended to allay the fret and stew within him. If nations can behave like individuals, he was anindividual who behaved like a nation: enduring decades of edgy submissiveness, then bursting into revolt, eager for fresh rhetoric and a renewed image of himself.
    In prosecuting the former Head of State, Peter Solinsky was embarking on his most public form of self-definition. To newspaper columnists and TV commentators he represented the new order against the old, the future against the past, virtue against vice; and when he spoke to the media he customarily invoked the national conscience, moral duty, his plan of easing truth like a dandelion leaf from between the teeth of lies. But in the background lay feelings he did not care to inspect very closely. They were to do with cleanliness, personal rather than symbolic; with the knowledge that his father was dying; and with the desire to force upon himself a maturity which mere time was failing to supply.
    The post of prosecutor general had only become available after extensive public debate. Many had argued against a trial. Surely it was better for the nation to let bygones be bygones, and focus its energy on reconstruction? This would also be more prudent, as no-one could claim that Petkanov was the only guilty person in the country. How far through the nomenklatura, the Party, the security police, the regular police, the civilian informers, the magistracy and the military was guilt held to run? If there was to be justice, some argued, then it should be full justice, a proper accounting, since the select punishment of a few, let alone a single individual, was obvious injustice. Yet how far was ‘full justice’ distinguishable from mere revenge?
    Others pressed for what they called a ‘moral trial’, but as no nation in the history of the world had ever held one before, it was unclear what the thing might consist of, or what sort of evidence might be adduced. Besides, who hadthe right to judge, and did not the assertion of that right imply a sinister self-elevation? Surely God was the only person capable of presiding over a moral trial. Terrestrials were better off concerning themselves with who stole what from whom.
    All solutions were flawed, but the most flawed was to do nothing, and to do nothing slowly. They must do something quickly. A Special Parliamentary Committee therefore appointed a Special Investigatory Office with the understanding that while all its enquiries were to be conducted with an even