If You're Reading This, I'm Already Dead

by Andrew Nicoll

  “None of this explains why you are teaching my daughter obscene dances.”

  “Professor, each must play his part. Witte will play the king and, I assume, you will be his wise vizier. Every king needs a body servant, faithful unto death, and Schlepsig seems ideally suited for the task so that leaves the ladies. I thought the king would need some dancing girls, and the thing about dancing girls is they have to dance.”

  “What’s wrong with secretaries?” said the Professor. “They could be secretaries.”

  “Really, Professor! Lady secretaries? That’s very modern of you. I don’t think the Albanians would find that at all believable and, anyway, lady secretaries would immediately be separated from the king. On the other hand, His Majesty will have ready access to his dancing girls at all times.”

  I saw a problem at once. “Can I marry a dancing girl?”

  “Once you are king, Witte, you can marry the damned camel, if you like.” Which was his kind way of saying that, since we would probably all be dead in a week, my marriage plans hardly mattered.

  “In that case,” I said, “it sounds like a fine idea.”

  “Good. Now let’s have a look in that dressing-up box of yours.”

  So we spent the rest of the afternoon dressing up, swapping clothes, cutting braid off a naval jacket left hanging in Varga’s closet, stitching it back on to something else, trimming, cutting, letting out and taking in. The girls sat round the saloon table sewing and sewing and Arbuthnot sat drilling me in how to say my prayers like a proper Turkish prince, how to stand, the best ways of ignoring people, everything that a real king has to know.

  Most important of all, we took the red felt cloth that once hung on a rope advertising Spindelleger’s Spectacular Equestrian Circus and Menagerie and, more recently, nestled Spindelleger’s cash box, picked the letters off and turned it into three passable fezzes..

  “You’ll do,” said Arbuthnot. “You might as well arrive naked as arrive without a fez.”

  I think we made a pretty convincing show, and I was particularly pleased with the trousers the girls made for me—very military-looking, tight on the shins and loose on the thighs—the sort of thing they wear in the cavalry. Tifty had been through her jewelry box for me and we broke a few cheap bits up and glued them together again to make a big gaudy star to pin on my breast pocket.

  “Every inch the king,” said Arbuthnot. He sounded a damned sight too proprietorial for my liking, as if he thought himself in charge of my adventure, but there wasn’t an awful lot I could do about that. I couldn’t get into port alone, and Arbuthnot was the only power on earth that could keep Mrs. MacLeod on the leash.

  “And what will you be wearing?” I said.

  “Me?” he said. “Me? Oh, don’t worry about me. Nobody will see me—unless I want them to. I will wear the air. I’ll be dressed in the sky and the houses and the trees.”

  “He’s good at that,” said Mrs. MacLeod.

  “I’m good at a lot of things.”

  “Oh, he is. He’s good at a lot of things.”

  The sun went down. By morning we were in Albania.

  I suppose you’ve seen through that, haven’t you? I suppose you’re sitting there, reading this and wondering how it is that I can spend page after page getting a ticket for the sleeper train or picking apart every detail of a camel’s natural functions like a veterinary encyclopedia and then, all of a sudden, we all wake up in Albania. Well, I’ve had a bit of a rethink about that. There’s no point telling this story unless I tell the truth. You’re never going to believe me unless I tell you the unbelievable parts and you’re never going to believe what a hero I was unless I tell you the unheroic bits too so, the fact is, between “the sun went down” and “by morning we were in Albania” there was Mrs. MacLeod. There. Now you know.

  Any farmer will tell you that if you want to get a really good look at your cows, the thing to do is ignore them. No, if you want to see a cow, there’s no point chasing it. The damned thing will lumber off to the other side of the county out of spite. But go in the field, pay them no heed, lie down and suck on a straw and, before you know it, every cow from miles around will come up and lick your ears. And if you’re in the mood to make new friends, the thing to do is to set up an easel. You might sit in a tavern all night and never have anybody speak to you, but take out a paintbox and start dabbling and that draws people like flies. They can’t seem to stay away. A man painting a picture is a kind of public entertainment second only to a hanging, and everybody else feels free to join in, either so they can ooh and ahh over how well he’s doing or snigger behind their hands because he’s making such a mess of it, although I don’t think it’s fair to make fun of anybody who is trying his best to do something difficult.

  Well, in just the same way as cows can’t stay away from a man lying down and gawkers can’t stay away from a man with an easel, there’s a certain kind of woman who wouldn’t give a certain kind of man the time of day unless she saw him happily settled with another woman. On his own, a man like that would never stand a chance with a woman like that. She’d be too grand for him, too beautiful. But let her once catch a whiff of another woman on him, let her sniff a little bit of happiness hanging in the air, and she’ll be on him like a terrier on a rat. It’s a matter of pride for a woman like that. She doesn’t want that man for herself. She just wants to prove that she could have him if she wanted.

  That’s what happened to me.

  I moved my bunk when Varga disappeared. With Arbuthnot and Mrs. MacLeod on board we had to shake things up a bit. As a lady, you might think that she would be entitled to the nice cabin, but she was not the only lady on board. Why should she have the captain’s cabin ahead of Tifty or Sarah? And I was damned if Arbuthnot was going to get it. Hell’s teeth, he had enough fancy ideas about who was in charge of the expedition without putting his feet up in that snug little hole, so I claimed it, as of right. Not that Varga lived like a prince or anything. His cabin was not much bigger than the closet where he hung his extra uniform, but he did have a door, which was something. I don’t know why, but somehow the boat seemed smaller than the train and, what with her father being so close by, it didn’t feel right for me and Sarah to be anything more than friendly, door or no door. But that didn’t hold Mrs. MacLeod back any. Somehow or other in the middle of the night, when it was as black as the inside of Professor von Mesmer’s spectacles, she managed to find her way into my room.

  God knows how she did it. The little brass catch on the door never even clicked, and I didn’t wake up until she was standing by my bed. And that was all she did. She just stood. I don’t know how long. She knew that, if you wait long enough, the electric current of another person in the room will wake anybody. If she had come to rifle my wallet, she would have been quick about it for just that reason. But Mrs. MacLeod wanted me to wake, so she stood still.

  There was a smear of starlight at the window and the shape of her head broke it in the corner and I knew—although I don’t know how I knew—that she wasn’t Sarah.

  And that was my chance. If I had spoken then, if I had yelled, if I had ordered her out, if I had even whispered it, she would have gone and her power over me would have been broken, but I said nothing and that made me guilty. Other people have done as much out of terror, because they hope that, by saying nothing, something will pass over them, some dreadful thing will happen to someone else and they will be spared, but I can’t make that excuse. I had seen her naked and I had heard that terrible laughter but, still, I was not afraid. I was greedy. She brushed me with her fingers and I let her. She curled them around me and gripped me and pulled something out of the heart of me and I let her. It was the first time in my life that such a thing had happened and I had no joy in it. But then, I had never been in love before.

  So now I can say it. By morning we were in Albania.

  I lay in my bunk that night and, when I looked out of the porthole in the morning, there was nothing to see but a harbor wall. We
were in dock.

  It came as a shock. There was a dreadful feeling of things not done and the sure knowledge that I was about to be badly caught out, the way it used to feel on a Monday morning when you’ve forgotten your homework and the school bell is ringing.

  I can still feel the flat sting of those boards on the soles of my feet as I ran up on deck. There was no sign of Arbuthnot, but the whole damned boat was strung from end to end with little flags and, hanging from the stern, a big red blanket with a double-headed eagle on it, looking very much like the country cousin of dear old Franz Josef’s eagle might look after a heavy night on the town followed by an unfortunate interview with a steamroller.

  Entertaining as that was, I was more interested in finding Arbuthnot. There was no sign of him on the harbor wall and no sign of him on board ship but, once I’d established that the cash box was still safely under Max’s feet, I was a good deal less concerned.

  And, as well as leaving us the cash box, he left us Mrs. MacLeod too. She clapped her hands lightly and ran about on tiptoe. “Overture and beginners, everybody! Eyes and teeth, eyes and teeth! Five minutes to curtain up!”

  But she stopped rushing when she saw me coming down the passage in my nightshirt. “Good morning, Otto.” She gripped my collar, finger and thumb, a pinch to stop me in my tracks. “I hope you slept well. You must be at your best today, Majesty. Now hurry along and get dressed.”

  It just took a moment and then she let me go and went back to yelling at everybody else as they fumbled with buttons and hopped about on one leg hauling on their socks and boots. “Five minutes! Five minutes!”

  Just a moment, but Sarah spotted it and she gave me a long look.

  Like a fool, I looked back at her. “What?”

  “I don’t know, Otto. What?”

  I went into my cabin and pinned on my jeweled star, pretending that it made me a king, pretending that I was true to my word—and I had been. “No more Tifty”—that’s what I said. But any man who ever had a mother worth the name of “mother” knows the difference between right and wrong, and I was wrong.

  That was neither here nor there. I straightened my fez in the mirror and I went ashore.

  I don’t know what it was I was expecting but, I have to say, it was more than what I got. The harbor wall was adequate, I suppose, and Max got the camel straight off the yacht and right on to the quay with no trouble at all, but the boats in the dock were nothing special and the town didn’t look like much. There was a bit of a hill at the back of it with a sort of a castle on top, but the rest of the place could have done with a good shave and a brush of the hair.

  “Looks rough,” I said.

  “It’s hardly surprising,” said the Professor. “The Serbs knocked it about a bit in the war. Don’t you ever read the papers, my boy?”

  “Yes,” said Sarah. “Don’t you ever read the papers?”

  “My dear, remember you are addressing a king,” said Mrs. MacLeod.

  And Sarah said. “Yes. That’s what I used to think too.”

  She was within her rights, I suppose.

  The place was dead. I don’t think I counted three smoking chimneys in the whole faraway town and there was nothing to see in the harbor but gulls.

  There was a broken fish box lying on the quayside with the dried husk of a starfish glued to the planks and bleached in the sun. I kicked at it with the toe of my boot and a bit of old crab shell fell out, the bony plate from underneath, all ridged like a tin roof and two huge claws clasped together, a thing torn apart, holding hands with itself, saying farewell to itself, consoling itself in its death agony, locked into the shape of a crown. It was an unhappy omen.

  Sarah had a handful of little pebbles. She was chucking them into the water one at a time. “So much for, ‘Eyes and teeth, everybody.’ So much for ‘Overtures and beginners.’”

  Tifty agreed. “So much for ‘Five minutes everybody.’ You’d think there would be somebody to meet us. A town like this—well, a strange boat arriving should be frontpage news.”

  Max said, “No brass band, so far as I can see. Do you want me to go into town and have a scout about?”

  “Brass bands will be provided,” said Mrs. MacLeod. “All things will be provided for those who can pay.” And, with that, she set light to the biggest, fattest sky rocket I have ever seen, before or since. Don’t ask me where she got it from. She might have kept it in her handbag, she might have had it down her drawers for all I know. All I can tell you is that there, on the end of the pier, she had a big, fat rocket standing on a metal frame and she took out a match and sent it fizzing up into the empty sky.

  It was daytime so, as fireworks go, it was a disappointment. It climbed and it climbed and it seemed to be heading right for the castle on the hill and then it sort of lost interest and painted itself into an ugly brown inkblot beside a small, bored cloud. It didn’t look like much but, by God, it made a noise like the Last Trump and I don’t know about the others, but I damn near wet my pants and the camel reacted in the usual way.

  Mrs. MacLeod was hopping about from foot to foot, clapping her little hands with delight. “Your presence is announced, Majesty. Brass bands will be provided shortly.”

  I looked back to the ugly little town, and all the way up the hill I caught the glint of opening windows. It seemed we were noticed.

  Now, if we were at the pictures, this is where a card would have come up on the screen saying, “In another part of the forest” or “Meanwhile, in the castle of the Count” because a lot of stuff is about to happen in this story which, by rights, I couldn’t possibly know anything about until a lot later. Also, I should point out here that, when the Albanoks were speaking, I couldn’t understand a blind word they had to say and the Professor had to fill in the blanks later on but, for your sake, I will translate as we go along.

  So, in another part of the forest, an elderly man with a gray beard and a gray suit and a high-collared shirt tied with a black tie heard his windows rattle in an unexpected blast, got up quietly from his desk and went to see what was happening. But before he’d even got to the window to find out, the door of his office burst open and a ratty little man with slicked-back hair and a mustache like cheesewire and a nose like a carrot stuck in the middle of his face came running into the room.

  “Take cover, Prime Minister. We must flee. The bloody Serbs have returned to finish the job.”

  “Calm yourself, Zogolli. Presently we will flee, squealing like women, but first let us look out of the window.”

  The old man did not say, “Shut up, you pathetic coward!” because he was kind and wise and because he had suffered terror before and he knew the mark it can make on a man’s soul. It does, always. For the most part the marks scab over and turn to scars. Some find that the marks never heal, the wounds stay open and ready to bleed at the slightest shock. Zogolli was one of those. The old man knew that and he was generous. Only those who have known fear can be brave. Courage is not courage if there is no fear to conquer. To praise a man for courage without fear, that would be like praising the Professor for staring at the sun without flinching. But courage is a kind of muscle, like love, and the more it is used, the stronger it gets. If it is not used, then it shrivels away.

  Prime Minister Ismail Kemali walked to his window on small feet and looked down into the harbor. He stood, holding his arm out behind himself. “Bring me my glass, Zogolli. There on the bookcase.”

  The little man scurried like a rat round the desk, grabbed the brass telescope that stood waiting, just where Kemali said it would be, and hurried across the room to give it to him.

  “There is a boat in the harbor, Zogolli. Quite a fine little yacht, bedecked with flags like a bride for her wedding and, unless I am much mistaken, she flies the eagle of Skanderbeg—our brave little eagle.” He snapped the telescope shut again. “But no sign of Serbs, my friend. Be of good cheer. Now, why don’t you go down to the harbor and find out what they want?”

  He said this because i
t was a simple task, with no danger attached, but one which would still require Zogolli to master a little nervousness. It would be exercise for his courage muscles, like the weights and medicine balls the doctors give to wounded men, but Zogolli was already thinking how he could avoid it.

  “I’ll go at once, Excellency,” he said, and slipped out the door.

  “Oh, Zogolli?”

  The door opened again.

  “Have you made any progress with those coded telegrams yet?”

  “Nothing, Excellency. It is impenetrable rubbish, all of it.”

  “Very good. Report back immediately.”

  We didn’t have long to wait on the quayside before we saw a boy on a bicycle come bouncing over the cobbles from town, rattling and squeaking all the way. He stopped halfway round the dock to adjust his hat and, when he got close, we could see it wasn’t much of a bicycle. The front mudguard was held on with string and the back one had gone completely which, to my way of thinking, was completely the wrong choice since it’s the back wheel that throws up the most spray, but the boy on the bicycle didn’t look like the sharpest tool in the box.

  Somebody had given him some kind of military cap to make him “official,” but apart from that he was dressed in ordinary street clothes. He left his bicycle propped up against the harbor wall, took the clips off his trouser cuffs, put them in his pocket, walked up to me and saluted.

  When he spoke to me I did my damnedest to ignore him. I looked down at the shiny toe of my boot. I flicked an imaginary spot off it with my riding crop. I looked up at the sky until long after he’d delivered his message and then, without saying anything, I turned my back on him and pointed vaguely in the direction of the Professor.

  The boy was either very dutiful or very used to being treated with contempt, because he trotted off without a word of complaint and started again.