Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

BOOK 1

BOOK 2

Republic of Efica

In foreign countries, Bruder Mouse said, they put animals in cages and keep them locked up and kill them.

You cant frighten me, said Bruder Duck. Theres a great world out there and I plan to see it. Im going to fairs, and puppet shows, and Im going to cross oceans and have all sorts of adventures.

You want to be fat and rich, said Bruder Mouse. You want to find gold.

Its true, said Bruder Duck, that if I chanced to stumble over a nugget I would thank the Lord for my good fortune and if I found an object of value I might buy cheaply, I would not refuse the blessing.

But what of the issue? said Bruder Mouse.

What issue? said the Duck, who was busy eating the cheese pudding again.

That they have Sirkuses in foreign countries, where they put Gods creatures in cages. They have butcher shops where they sell our Bruders flesh.

If what you say is so, said the Bruder Duck, then I would change their minds.

How would you do this? asked the Mouse.

I would do doody and fall over, said the Duck. I would make them laugh.

From Bruder Ducks Travels, Badberg Edition

The Dog, the Duck, the Mouse

The Dog, the Duck, the Mouse
They lived their life in a tent
The Duck played the fiddle
The Dog had a piddle
The Mouse ran off with the rent.

Oh God we laughed till we cried
We sighed and wiped our eyes
We kissed the Dog we cuddled the Mouse
With the Duck right by our side.

The Dog, the Duck, the Mouse
Came in braces and baggy pants
They were no moles
But they purchased the holes
We had been left by chance.

Oh God we laughed till we cried
We sighed and wiped our eyes
We kissed the Dog we cuddled the Mouse
With the Duck right by our side.

Efican folk song circa 351 EC (Source: Doggerel and Jetsam: unheard voices in the Voorstand Imperium, Inchsmith Press, London)

My name is Tristan Smith. I was born in Chemin Rouge in Efica which is to say as much to you, I bet, as if I declared I was from the moon.

And yet if you are going to make much sense of me, you have to know a little of my country, a country so unimportant that you are already confusing the name with Ithaca or Africa, a name so unmemorable it could only have been born of a committee, although it remains, nonetheless, the home of nearly three million of the earths people, and they, like you, have no small opinion of themselves, have artists and poets who are pleased to criticize its shortcomings and celebrate its charms, who return home to the eighteen little islands between the tropic of Capricorn and the 30th parallel, convinced that their windswept coastline is the most beautiful on earth. Like 98 per cent of the planets population, we Eficans may be justly accused of being provincial, parochial, and these qualities are sometimes magnified by your habit of hearing Ithaca when we say Efica.

If I say Voorstand to you, that is a different story entirely. You are a citizen of Voorstand. You hold the red passport with the phases of the moon embossed in gold. You stand with your hand over your heart when the Great Song is played, you daily watch new images of your armies in the vids and zines. How can I make you know what it is like to be from Efica abandoned, self-doubting, yet so wilful that if you visit Chemin Rouge tomorrow morning we will tell you that the year is 426 and you must write your cheques accordingly.

If you were my students I would direct you to read Efica: from penal colony to welfare state, But you are not my students and I have no choice but to juggle and tap-dance before you, begging you please sit in your seats while I have you understand exactly why my heart is breaking.

426 by the Efican Calendar, sometimes written as 426 EC, but most commonly as 426. The calendar begins with the discovery of Neufasie (later Efica) by Captain Girard.

Nez Noir University Press, 343 EC.

Macmillan, London, 1923.

Artcraft Press, Chemin Rouge 299 EC.

My maman was one of you. She was born in Voorstand. She was able to trace her family back to the Settlers Free of the Great Song. Had things been different I might have been a Voorstander, like you, and then there would have been no trouble. But when my maman was eighteen she came to Chemin Rouge to be a model in a fashion advertisement.

She became famous, within Efica, for her role in a local soap opera, and then she was notorious as a founder of the Feu Follett Collective, a small radical theatre group which was always in trouble with our local authorities for its opposition to the country of her birth.

Let us say it straight Felicity Smith was very critical of her own people. It was because of this, she changed her name from Smutts to Smith: she did not want to be a Voorstander. She was outraged at the way Voorstand manipulated our elections, meddled with our currency, threaded all that shining cable we never understood, miles of it, great loops of it, through the dry granite caves which honeycombed our southern provinces. She did not like the way your country used us. If this is offensive, I am sorry, but it was her belief. It was honestly held. Indeed, it was passionately held. She was not reasonable or balanced or fair. Yet for all the