Shantaram полностью

‘His name was Ned Kelly. He was a young guy who found himself on the wrong side of the local lawmen. He was tough, but he wasn’t really a hard man. He was young and wild. He was set up, mostly, by cops who had a grudge against him. A drunken cop had a crush on his sister, and tried to molest her. Ned stopped it, and that’s when his trouble started. But there was more to it than that. They hated him for a lot of reasons-mostly for what he represented, which was a kind of spirit of rebellion. And I related to him, because I was a revolutionary.’

‘They have revolutions, in Australia?’ she asked, with a puzzled laugh. ‘I never heard this.’

‘Not revolutions,’ I corrected her, ‘just revolutionaries. I was one of them. I was an anarchist. I learned how to shoot, and how to make bombs. We were ready to fight, when the revolution came-which it didn’t, of course. And we were trying to stop our government from fighting the Vietnam War.’

‘Australia was in the Vietnam War?’

It was my turn to laugh.

‘Yeah. Most people outside Australia don’t know it, but we were in the war, all the way with the USA. Australian soldiers died beside American soldiers in Vietnam, and Australian boys were drafted to fight. Some of us refused to go, just like the American draft resisters. A lot of guys went to jail because they wouldn’t fight. I didn’t go to jail. I made bombs, and organised marches, and fought the cops at the barricades, until the government changed and they pulled us out of the war.’

‘Are you still one?’

‘Still one what?’

‘Are you still an anarchist?’

It was a hard question to answer, because it forced me to compare the man I’d once been with the man I’d allowed myself to become.

‘Anarchists…’ I began and then faltered. ‘No political philosophy I ever heard of loves the human race as much as anarchism. Every other way of looking at the world says that people have to be controlled, and ordered around, and governed. Only the anarchists trust human beings enough to let them work it out for themselves. And I used to be that optimistic once. I used to believe and think like that. But I don’t, any more. So, no-I guess I’m not an anarchist now.’

‘And that hero-when you did the armed robberies, you identified with him?’

‘With Kelly, Ned Kelly, yeah. I think I did. He had a gang of young guys -his younger brother, and his two best friends-and they did these hold-ups, robbing people. The cops sent a hit squad after him, but he beat them, and a couple of cops got killed.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘They caught him. There was a shoot-out. The government declared war on him. They sent a trainload of cops after him, and they surrounded his gang, at a hotel in the bush.’

‘A hotel, in a bush?’

‘The bush-it’s what we call the countryside, in Australia. Anyway, Ned and his guys were surrounded by this army of cops. His best friend was shot in the throat, and killed. His kid brother, and another kid named Steve Hart, shot each other with their last bullets rather than let themselves be captured. They were nineteen years old. Ned had this armour made from steel-a helmet and a chest plate. He came at them, the army of cops, with both guns blazing. He frightened the shit out of them, at first, and they ran away. But their officers drove them back to the fight. They shot Ned’s legs out from under him. After a phoney trial, with false statements from witnesses, Ned Kelly was sentenced to death.’

‘Did they do it?’

‘Yeah. His last words were, Such is life. That was the last thing he said. They hanged him, and then cut off his head, and used it as a paperweight. Before he died, he told the judge who’d sentenced him that they’d meet, very soon, in a higher court. The judge died not long after.’

She was watching the story in my face as I told it. I reached out for a handful of sand, and let it run through my fingers. Two large bats passed over our heads. They were close enough for us to hear the dry-leaf rustle of their wings.

‘I loved the Ned Kelly story when I was a kid. I wasn’t the only one. Artists and writers and musicians and actors have all worked on the story, in one way or another. He put himself inside us, in the Australian psyche. He’s the nearest thing we’ve got to Che Guevara, or Emiliano Zapata. When my brain got scrambled on heroin, I think I started to drown in a fantasy of his life and mine. But it was a messed-up version of the story. He was a thief who became a revolutionary. I was a revolutionary who became a thief. Every time I did a robbery-and I did a lot of them-I was sure the cops would be there, and I’d be killed. I was hoping it would happen. I played it out in my mind. I could see them calling me to stop, and I’d reach for a gun, and they’d shoot me dead. I was hoping the cops would shoot me down in the street. I wanted to die that way…’

She reached out to put an arm around my shoulders. With her free hand, she held my chin, and turned my head to face her smile.