The Tyrant's Novel by Thomas Keneally Read Free Book Online Page A

meet them, I said. I was almost ready in my panic, as her wide eyes grew wider still, to claim some problem arising from the war, some obscure wound of flesh or spirit.
    I'm very sorry, then, she told me through near-closed lips. Do you imagine to yourself you've got the power to break my heart? No one has that power.
    You're worthy of—
    Don't dare finish that sentence, she warned me.
    She imitated a male voice.
You're worthy of someone better than me.
All that means is, I've found someone I like more.
    There were tears in her eyes now, but she refused to dissolve. She would not be a weak woman.
    Go to hell, then! she told me, and she got up and gathered her things together without any of the urgency of a wronged woman, though with her considerable jaw set and her eyes blazing. Then she walked away. No scene. No thrown crockery. A warrior woman. I had given up someone admirable in the empty hope of someone transcendent.
    I would later see her around the campus, always busy, always genially vocal, though not in my direction. She did not lack for company, and she was said to be engaged to a young doctor. But then, for whatever reason, her family fled, and her esteemed father took a university job in America.
    But back now to Sarah. The short story I had told her about in the library, the one about to emerge, was one which Peter Collins would later call a classic—“The Women of Summer Island,” that is, the women who staffed the oil refineries, within range of enemy artillery. The story was in fact utter truth. Not as true as the story of Private Carter, which I dared not tell and thus covered with this other true tale.
    One evening during my military services, a medical orderly and myself—purely because I happened to be talking to him at the time—were ordered away from our company, supporting a battery of seventy-two-millimeter cannon, to help one of the women in one of the oil workers' dormitories give birth to a baby girl. I was to be the driver, and he was to show due regard for the midwife but intervene in the case of emergency. After all, the midwife would not have such resources as painkillers, muscle relaxants, and blood-clotting agents. The story dealt with the way the ultimate birth, and the drinking of tea with the other women later, brought out a frankness that was not the frankness of those who cower, but the honesty of those who generate life. Thus the orderly and myself talked with the women about the question of staying on the island or fleeing. The voices of children not born urged us all to get out, and the new baby had brought that impulse close to the surface of our skin. And then, as a truck came to take the mother away to suckle her baby in a rear area, various women laughingly proposed that the orderly and I provide them with a similar means of exit—even though we knew that an offensive from the other side would occur long before they could complete their pregnancies.
    This was extraordinary behavior in terms of the suburbs and rural towns they came from, but their closeness to the guns and their loss of men in war had altered them. And according to this comforting but un-acted-upon idea of fortuitous pregnancy, they sat on our laps. Even Intercessionist girls far from their clergy bounced around to simulate copulation. It was as if the tea had been gin. The medic was slightly shocked. Like me, he wished they would either behave themselves or that singular women from the crowd would take each of us by the hand to a more hidden place, if there was any such thing in the refinery complex of Summer Island. And then a woman of nearly sixty said, Well, girls, our shift starts in six hours. And we've all got to stay here for the oil.
    The orderly and I drank the lees of the tea, said good-bye, and drove back to our company, drained, and knowing we, like the women, had to stand to at first light.
    Why the oil? the medic asked me in real life and in the tale. Why do we live for it?
    This tale appeared in