The Hand that Signed the Paper Read online

  HELEN DALE

  THE HAND

  THAT SIGNED

  THE PAPER

  About Untapped

  Most Australian books ever written have fallen out of print and become unavailable for purchase or loan from libraries. This includes important local and national histories, biographies and memoirs, beloved children’s titles, and even winners of glittering literary prizes such as the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

  Supported by funding from state and territory libraries, philanthropists and the Australian Research Council, Untapped is identifying Australia’s culturally important lost books, digitising them, and promoting them to new generations of readers. As well as providing access to lost books and a new source of revenue for their writers, the Untapped collaboration is supporting new research into the economic value of authors’ reversion rights and book promotion by libraries, and the relationship between library lending and digital book sales. The results will feed into public policy discussions about how we can better support Australian authors, readers and culture.

  See untapped.org.au for more information, including a full list of project partners and rediscovered books.

  Readers are reminded that these books are products of their time. Some may contain language or reflect views that might now be found offensive or inappropriate.

  For my family, and for Melissa Richards

  Vox et praeterea nihil

  INTRODUCTION

  YHBT. YHL. HAND.

  Just over 20 years ago, The Hand that Signed the Paper won the Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s premier literary prize. This is an anniversary edition of sorts—although not quite. Had Ligature published it in 2015, it would have appeared while I was working as Senator David Leyonhjelm’s Senior Adviser, and provided an unwelcome distraction from my day-job (as well as a vector for more abusive letters and phone calls to make their way to David’s Sydney Electoral Office; both of us already got enough of those).

  However, Ligature explained that it wasn’t ideal to have a Miles Franklin Award winner out-of-print. I was unaware of the extent to which schools and universities were relying on second-hand copies. Worse, there was no electronic version available. I was effectively squatting on my own copyright.

  Hence this edition.

  The abbreviation above stands for ‘YOU HAVE BEEN TROLLED. YOU HAVE LOST. HAVE A NICE DAY’. It’s the Internet’s version of that ageless primary school taunt: SUCKED IN. If you predate the Internet, see Charlie Brown, Lucy, and the football for explanatory reference.

  When The Hand that Signed the Paper came out, I pretended to be someone I’m not: Helen Demidenko. In hindsight, trolling the literary establishment wasn’t the wisest thing I’ve ever done. However, like many trolls, I had a serious point to make: being imaginative is more important for a writer than being from the ‘right’ ethnic background or having the ‘right’ experience.

  The criticisms directed at me twenty years ago and, more recently, at Lionel Shriver, make two claims: ‘writers should be more representative of the population at large’ and ‘writers should not tell other people’s stories’.

  Both claims are incoherent. They are incoherent because literature is not a democracy, it’s an aristocracy—in the old, Aristotelian sense of ‘rule by the best’—and because novelists are in the business of telling other people’s stories.

  It would be nice if making fiction more representative of the population at large by imposing quotas or picking winners from all-women or all-ethnic lists made it better, but it doesn’t. It would be nice if there were a 1–1 relationship between lived experience and literary talent, but there isn’t.

  Writing is not the Commonwealth Parliament or a company’s Board of Directors. Improving its representativeness will not improve its quality qua literature. There is no guarantee that a novel written about racism by a black author will be better than one by a white author, because ‘better’ in fiction is not a matter of who tells the story but how the story is told.

  And just because it’s hard to define excellence doesn’t mean we should give up trying.

  For generations philosophers told us there was no such thing as objectivity, but they were wrong: they set the bar too high. No one can satisfy the philosophical definition of objectivity because to do so requires perfect knowledge. Nonetheless judges, counsel, and courts satisfy ‘the objective test’ at common law every day, because it is possible to be objective about the facts of the case at hand.

  For the same reason, it is possible to define literary excellence while acknowledging that any such definition is necessarily contingent.

  By contrast, making politics or corporate boards more representative does make them better (especially with respect to gender, for which there is substantial empirical evidence; there is little evidence that racial diversity improves either political or corporate governance). More women in legislatures mean more jaw-jaw and less war-war. More women on boards make listed companies in particular more profitable.

  Literature cannot be reduced to mere political representation: one of these things is not like the other.

  Making literature more representative will not lower domestic violence rates, or increase Aboriginal life expectancy. Those are political problems, and they require policy solutions. Demanding (and funding, as the Australia Council does) literary representativeness is an extreme example of ‘pissing in a wetsuit’ policy: it feels good, but it doesn’t show.

  Many people—particularly those on my side of the aisle—are fond of suggesting in response to all this politics that we abolish the Australia Council and let the market decide. However, just as literary excellence is not amenable to political logic, it also can’t be reduced to black ink on a bottom line. Free markets are wonderful, but they also mean bad writing can be popular (50 Shades of Grey) and good writing can languish. That’s why establishing an aristocracy of skill and accomplishment that is answerable to neither politics nor markets is valuable.

  The attempt to make literature representative—by making the writing profession more representative—also forgets what fiction does.

  If you’re an author, your job is to put yourself in the shoes of someone unlike you, someone with entirely different life experiences. People tend to elide authors and characters, but last time I looked, Thomas Harris was not a cannibal, and Bret Easton Ellis never murdered anyone.

  However, trolling the self-satisfied is akin to some of the scummier public interest litigation getting around, something I only understood after I qualified in law.

  There have been recent cases of this type. Gawker was a shitty magazine, and publishing Hulk Hogan’s sex tapes was wrong. PayPal’s Peter Thiel had a serious point to make about drawing a line between the right to speak and the right to privacy. So he spent millions funding Hogan’s legal action against Gawker, trolling the First Amendment. And he won. Gawker is no more. Problem is, troll law is a bit like being a vexatious litigant. And vexatious litigants are a pain in the legal system.

  What I did was, by analogy, ‘troll literature’, sibling under the skin to troll law. I made my point, but I blew things up in the process.

  To be fair, I was not alone in this. I’m still coming to grips with the 1990s calling and wanting their politics and popular culture back. Pokémon. Pauline Hanson in Parliament. Derryn Hinch famous again (as well as in Parliament).

  Part of this ‘everything old is new again’ phenomenon concerns section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, also a 90s product. And yes, I’m glad 18C wasn’t in force when The Hand that Signed the Paper was published (it was enacted in 1995, while my book was published i
n 1994). It may have been used against me: I was repeatedly accused of anti-Semitism. Indeed, this accusation was far more persistent than anything else thrown my way. And because of my trolling, the defences available in section 18D may not have saved me. A smart lawyer would argue for evidence of bad faith.

  Complaints about ‘cultural appropriation’ evince more than a simple wish for equal opportunity publication, however. Such complaints are also about how people are depicted in fiction, and how people would like to be depicted in fiction.

  The desire to control how one is portrayed, how one is thought of, is deeply human. It was pervasive when societies were founded on status, not contract. A hint of the past is still visible in those countries with lèse-majesté laws, which work to protect the sovereign’s ‘inherent dignity and honour’.

  Nearly all restrictions on speech—including the tort of defamation, section 18C, prohibitions on media reporting of Australia’s offshore detention centre regime, and controls on debating ASIO’s ‘special intelligence operations’—are a black-letter form of the yearning to be thought well of, to be viewed positively.

  No police force wants to be written up as the Keystone Cops, no ethnic minority wishes to have the activities of its worst members viewed as representative of the whole, no public figure wants his sexual peccadilloes foregrounded at the expense of everything else he’s ever done.

  Hence a willingness to reach for the lawyers.

  Unfortunately, law is a broadsword, not a scalpel, when it comes to managing public opinion. Lawyers will freely tell you defamation suits are legal blood sport. Inevitably, the libel finishes up better known thanks to the ensuing court case, while a victorious plaintiff has only money with which to console himself.

  Nonetheless, laws constraining how one speaks or writes about others are construed narrowly in liberal democracies, and for good reason: if we all get to protect our ‘inherent dignity and honour’, then speech becomes impossible.

  The Hand that Signed the Paper was my contribution to the 1990s.

  Would I have written it if I’d known the upshot? Probably not. Does it suck like an Electrolux? Probably not. Mind you, your mileage may vary. At least it doesn’t insult you, the reader, by telling you what to think. You have to do that on your own.

  Novels can do many things besides entertain, but they cannot make people better. Novelists can do many things beside tell stories, but they cannot make people equal. Those things are not what novels and writers are for.

  Those things, to use the common lawyer’s phrase, are ‘a matter for parliament’.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  What follows is a work of fiction. The Kovalenko family depicted in this novel has no counterpart in reality.

  In the writing of this novel, I am indebted to historical sources, particularly the oral history of I. Mariupilisky from S.O. Pidhainy, ed. The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: A White Book, Vol. 1, 1953, Ukrainian Association of Victims of Russian Communist Terror, Toronto; and Alexander Donat from Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust, A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War, 1985, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York.

  I would like to thank friends and family who talked with me, particularly Bronisław, who helped with translations and constructive criticism. I also wish to extend my thanks to Dr Con Castan, Department of English, University of Queensland, for his advice and support. Stories taken from many sources I have written, I hope, with love.

  There are many stories in the world. People speak; stories are passed on. Stories and words have a life of their own, but only if others listen.

  For the names of all places in Ukraine, I have used the more familiar Russian and Polish spellings. Below is an alphabetical list of key names found in this book and their correct Ukrainian spellings. For the names of people, I have used Ukrainian spellings. In Ukrainian, the letter ‘g’ is usually pronounced softly, as an ‘h’.

  Familiar usage · Ukrainian

  Berdichev · Berdychiv

  Dnieper · Dnipro

  Kharkov · Kharkiv

  Khmel’nik · Khmel’nyts’kyy

  Kiev · Kiyiv

  L’vóv · L’viv

  Tarnopol · Ternopil’

  Vinnitsa · Vynnytsya

  The hand that signed the paper felled a city;

  Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,

  Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;

  These five kings did a king to death.

  The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,

  And famine grew, and locusts came;

  Great is the hand that holds dominion over

  Man by a scribbled name.

  Dylan Thomas, The Hand that Signed the Paper

  In such condition... there is no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death: And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.

  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

  ONE

  As I drive down the Pacific Highway, the French are busy dropping bombs into the waters in which my nieces swim, the Americans and Iraqis are engaged in a bizarre competition to see who can destroy the world many times over most, and my uncle will soon be on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity. I wonder casually, as I turn off the main road to fill up with petrol, if Eichmann had a daughter and if she felt the same way as I do now. It is an idle question, but I toy with it as the light and darkness at sunset plays over the glittering Ampol sign. This is one petrol station where they still serve you while you sit in your car. A pimply boy walks towards me across the asphalt and asks ‘how much?’ and I say ‘twenty dollars’. I sit in the cockpit of my car, and look at my watch. The boy takes my keys. The key ring has a cheap plastic figurine of ‘Expo Oz’ attached. I’ve had it for four years, and Expo Oz’s platypus bill now has very little paint left on it.

  Right now, I am missing my Set Theory and Logic lecture, and will soon miss my Modern Political Ideologies lecture. I left home earlier this morning, giving Cathe a week’s rent and telling her that I was ‘going to drive down the coast to see about my uncle’. Cathe—and a few other of my close friends—know that I am related to the Kovalenko who has recently been charged with war crimes. That in itself is no guarantee of a trial, but the fear is real. I have confirmed to Cathe that the charges are true, and that the family is in the process of engaging a lawyer.

  When news of the trials first began, I would sit beside the radio listening to ‘PM’ with the sort of focus I really needed for my university studies. Cathe would look worried and bring me cups of hot chocolate.

  ‘Is he in trouble?’ she asked once. ‘I mean, is it serious enough to send him to gaol?’

  ‘I don’t know. When uncle Vitaly first heard about the trials, he hid under the kitchen table. Staciya came home from the shops and found him hugging the table leg and yelling “the Israelis are coming to get me!”. It was funny, at the time. He could be in trouble, I suppose. I don’t know. No one in our family knows about the law, the legal system, anything like that. We’ve got two doctors, a builder and an architect. No lawyers.’

  Cathe laughed. ‘I hope Staciya got him out from under

  the table.’

  ‘He came out to eat, don’t worry.’

  Later that night, after Cathe had gone to bed, I thought about Vitaly and the trial. It seemed strangely distant; distant and silent. Silent. A silent movie. I felt angry in a vague, unspecific way. About the trials. About the furtiveness I was sure existed in my own family. I rolled a cigarette, lit it and sat out on the verandah. It was raining and the timber beneath my bare feet was cool and sloppy. The smoke and the damp kept the mosquitoes away. I watched the rain bead and collect in black puddles on the concrete footpath below. The legal system, I thought. It’s too big to deal with, too big to comprehend.
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  I did not tell Cathe that my father could be in as much ‘trouble’ as Vitaly. My father was just a boy, four years younger than Vitaly. I did not tell Cathe about the hate, or how the Ukrainian famine bled into the Holocaust and one fed the other. All the things I never told.

  The figures meant nothing. I needed to think of my great-aunt and her twelve children. My best friend at school whose grandmother died in Auschwitz. Only then did the statistics acquire faces, histories, personal likes and dislikes. By that stage my stomach usually took on a doughy, frightened feel. The news was full of Somalia and Bosnia; the colour images still flicker and haunt. Two Serbs wipe their feet on the Croatian flag. A sad little village nestled between soft green hills burns. Two lean black men drag the naked, punctured body of a US marine down a dusty street.

  I pull my legs up under my chin while the Ampol boy brings me my change. He gives me thirty dollars. ‘Going down to the Indy Car Grand Prix?’ he asks. I shake my head. ‘Don’t have enough money,’ I say. ‘I’m seeing rellies. I’m not into car racing, much.’

  My father is unhurried still in his movements, but he scowls and scratches his face. ‘I am an Australian citizen,’ he says. ‘I’m all Australian now. I’ve worked so hard to be Australian...’ I have spoken about this with him, but nothing argumentative has ever come of it. I ask him about these trials, about his brother, what he thinks. He shrugs his shoulders. He is ordinary and quiet. ‘You don’t know what it was like. It was a crazy time. People did things, and you... you can’t explain them now.’

  It is only when I see material evidence of events that I think of him differently. He is one of the unprosecuted; he was the youngest. He is my father.

  I look up into the sun, squinting. I am wearing tinted prescription John Lennon glasses, and I remember my uncle’s comment when I first wore them home from the optometrist. I was 15, and John Lennon was God. ‘Ha,’ he said, ‘if it wasn’t for John Lennon, those’d still be Heinrich Himmler glasses,’ I remember laughing.