The Tyrant's Novel by Thomas Keneally

at her door, and sullen as a teenager visiting an aunt I stepped across the threshold. You both look so well, said Mrs. Carter, but to me that sounded like a reproach.
    Leading us into her living room, she chattered about the honey cake she had bought at the market, and the fig pie. There was enthusiasm in her voice, as if she had hopes of sweetening the entire earth. Then, stepping back from the table set for afternoon coffee, she examined me head to toe. When I see you, she told me, I feel as if Hugo is closer to home than ever.
    I could only nod and accept that role.
    I feel it can't go on forever, she said. They're holding our men out of pure spite. But please, you must be so thirsty and hungry.
    That was one of the poor thing's tricks—to build up the weight of this reunion by pretending that it was such a trek from our place to hers. In a psychological sense, she was right. It was too much of a journey there and back for me. Maybe it had been my earlier tension which had given Sarah her spasm of headache. It had certainly made me a sot for the day.
    Mrs. Carter indicated we should sit at the table, with its tablecloth, cakes, oranges. My gorge rose when I faced this little feast. Mrs. Carter lived on the pension of her late husband and, a victim of inflation, no longer had unlimited means. Yet all this was painfully and expensively assembled. Faced with the imminent duty of tasting it all, my throat was stung by the returning acid of vodka.
    She sat us down and mercilessly plied us with good things, and poured hot coffee from a silver pot, and stared, feeding on us, devouring our presence. I was sure that she daydreamed it was her thin son, returned from imprisonment and ready now for life's full flow, whom she was feeding in feeding us—that was her fantasy, an understandable one which nonetheless filled me with panic.
    Let me show you, she said.
    We were already chewing sweet things, and she had not had a mouthful of anything, or even a sip of coffee. This seemed to me unjust. I would have crossed to the other side of the table and urged a plate of pastries on her, except she was away too quickly. She went to a drawer in a cabinet, opened it, and took out a familiar file, one I knew well. I had been shown it many times. It was years old, brown and worn, and full of her letters of hope—to the Secretary General of the United Nations, to the Ministry of War of the Others, to the Secretary of State of Sweden, and ministers from every honest-broker government on earth. The Scandinavians and Canadians in particular seemed to be the world's honest brokers—at least, Mrs. Carter had spent a long time writing to them.
    She opened the file and brought a fresh, obviously cherished page to me. I wiped my hands on a table napkin in preparation to receive her latest attempt to liberate Private Hugo Carter. It was a copy of a letter addressed to the Director of Prisoner of War Repatriation, International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva.
    Dear Sir,
    I ask as a mother for the considerate attention of the Director to the case of Private Hugo Carter, 53rd Infantry Battalion, captured in the Summer Island battles in the Hordern Straits. Private Carter has now been held prisoner for six years, since the spring of 1992.
    It had come to her knowledge, she continued, that the repatriation of prisoners of war was supervised by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and she had heard that it was sometimes possible for them to bring the attention of the holding nation to the case of a particular captive, and to seek his repatriation on compassionate grounds. She had been told by her own ministry that her son was held in a prison somewhere in Dona Province. As a sufferer of osteoporosis and hip-joint impairment, doctor's certificates regarding which she attached, she referred her earnest request to him that he would do everything he could . . .
    She signed the letter,
Yours sincerely, Emma Carter.
    I looked up to see that haunted