After Zenda

by John Spurling

  ‘Well played!’ he said, eating with his fork in his left hand, since his right now rested permanently on my arm. ‘But we cannot, no, we cannot in any circumstances crown you Karl Marx the First - or would it have to be Second? So I think Charles is altogether preferable, don’t you?’

  ‘Except that Charles the First sounds unlucky to an Englishman,’ I said, ‘and if I came on to begin with as Prince Charles, there might be some confusion.’

  It was arranged before we parted that I should spend next weekend at the Count’s castle.

  ‘Expect no comforts, Karl Marx!’ he said. ‘It was turned into a prison by your namesake’s Utopian followers and I have only just repossessed it. But the scenery is magnificent, there will be some rough shooting and plenty to eat and drink. We shall also be able to talk quite freely and call a king a king. My car will come for you on Friday morning. It will take much of the day to get there, I’m afraid, because the roads in our poor homeland would disgrace a colony of apes.’

  Like the remark about talking freely, this was a parting jab at Grabenau. He certainly looked as if it put the finishing touch to a bad evening, but then his whole face and manner spoke of a life of bad evenings. In fact he reminded me slightly of Dad - not to look at, but because of the disillusionment he gave off like the smell of exhaust from a worn-out engine. No doubt he’d been a genuine socialist too in his day and that was why he couldn’t see any fun at all in royalism.

  The Palace of Youth, where I went next morning with Vladek, was a warehouse pretending to be a Greek temple, with pillars and long steps all round it. The exhibition devoted to my great-grandmother’s life and times was on the first floor, sparsely attended, mostly by grannies. There were family photos of Flavia as a girl - chubby, then thinner and prettier as she got into her teens, then distinctly dishy at about the time she met my great-grandfather. There were pictures from The Illustrated London News of the Coronation at which he impersonated King Rudolf V; and nearby a small scale-model of the Castle of Zenda, in which you could see the real king sitting with his head in his hands and a chain attached to his ankle in his moat-level dungeon. An oil-portrait of the villainous, black-bearded Duke Michael in a blue uniform hung behind that and then there were photos and an official portrait of the restored King Rudolf and an artist’s impression of his marriage to Flavia in the cathedral. But it was difficult to tell whether the king and his double really looked exactly alike, since the only photos of Rudolf Rassendyll were in family groups of the Burlesdons taken before he ever visited Ruritania, with a self-portrait or two as the artist-photographer Edwin Fenton, which were mostly hat and beard. Rupert of Hentzau never seemed to have had himself either photographed or painted - no time, I suppose, between screwing ladies and executing evil deeds. The best the exhibition could do to evoke him was a glass case containing a hussar’s uniform and a pair of rapiers purporting to be those used by Hentzau and Rassendyll in their final duel. I wasn’t surprised the exhibition hadn’t switched on the customers - it was just adequate if you knew the story, but dead and distant if you didn’t.

  And then round a corner we came into a screened-off area which was all dark except for a rectangular box in the centre lit from the ceiling. We walked up to the railing round the box and found ourselves peering down through a sheet of glass at a man lying in an open coffin. He was dressed in black boots and a white military uniform with a red sash diagonally across the chest and although his eyes were closed he looked almost alive. It was my great-grandfather, Rudolf Rassendyll - or rather his waxwork - with thick, dark-red hair and a long nose. I could see we had points in common but I didn’t mistake it for myself - perhaps it looked too noble and self-conscious, the face of somebody used to being looked at, like an actor’s or a politician’s. Vladek evidently saw things differently. He, of course, had had a hand in mounting the exhibition, so he wasn’t surprised by the waxwork itself, but he kept looking from it to me and back and murmuring excitedly to himself.

  ‘If it were not for the shaved head,’ he said finally, ‘you would be almost identical. The jaw, the cheek-bone, the temples, the upper-lip - the mouth is perhaps a little fuller and more pouting in your case -but even the ears are the same and, above all, the nose. I could almost believe in Reincarnation or - God forgive me! - Resurrection.’

  His eyes damp, he seized my hand and, with a little dip of the knee, kissed it.

  ‘I was a Doubting Thomas,’ he said. ‘Receiving you at the airport looking like a Nazi, driving in Grabenau’s proletarian car, encountering so many mundane circumstances of our shabby life here, I was a supporter of monarchy, but not a real believer. Now I understand that Colonel Danzing made no mistake. We have found our rightful king.’

  ‘Well, good,’ I said. ‘Thanks, Vladek. But the problem is whether anybody much wants their rightful king. The visitors to this exhibition would just about fill a minibus and most of them couldn’t get into it without assistance.’

  Two or three bunched-up old women came in at that moment and Vladek pulled me quickly into a corner. They stared down in silence at the coffin, then one of them crossed herself. As they hobbled out and before we had time to move, a girl in school uniform entered. She was perhaps fifteen or sixteen and seemed uncertain, even furtive, her hands clasped tensely behind her back. Not seeing us in our dark corner, she relaxed and brought her hands into view, revealing a small bunch of red roses - the tight sort favoured by Mr Kinnock and despised by Colonel Danzing, but at least they weren’t wrapped in cellophane. She stared down for a while at the waxwork, then dropped the roses on the glass at the foot of the coffin and glancing round guiltily, spotted us. She froze, seemed about to faint with terror, then moved as if to pick up the flowers again.

  ‘It’s all right. Why not? He was a good man,’ said Vladek soothingly. She left the flowers and hurried out past us, eyes down.

  ‘You see, you see, Karl,’ said Vladek eagerly, ‘the feelings are there, but people are still half-ashamed of them.’

  The rest of the exhibition dealt with Flavia’s reign as Queen in her own right and was mostly photos of royal occasions before and after the First War. Apart from the very noticeable change in Flavia herself - turning after the death of Rudolf Rassendyll into a gaunt witch with staring eyes and hair tied up tightly in a scarf - it was routine footage of military parades, carriage processions, state visits and PR stunts with miners, factory-workers, villagers, municipal trees, etc. The final item was a large, badly-drawn painting of the queen going down under the Nazi tank in front of the royal palace. The scale was all wrong and it looked more like a bulldozer knocking down a telegraph-post (the oversize crown added to that impression). There was something familiar about the technique and I turned towards Vladek.

  ‘Yes,’ he said proudly, ‘I am responsible. Of course there is no photographic record, but I found it quite easy to imagine.’

  I searched for something neutral to say.

  ‘What’s the palace used for now?’

  ‘The President lives there.’

  ‘Can he be got out?’

  ‘It’s one of our problems, of course.’

  ‘I hope it won’t need tanks.’

  Vladek laughed uneasily.

  ‘The President is a philosopher,’ he said. ‘A professional philosopher, I mean. He has written serious books. He will not be so unwise as to hold on to his office if the country shows its desire for a king.’

  And that, I thought, as we left the Palace of Youth and its dismal exhibition, was sheer fantasy. One schoolgirl with five tight red roses didn’t make a restoration. As far as I could see, it would be tanks or nothing.

  5 Sightseeing in Strelsau

  Colonel Danzing had asked me to keep in touch with him regularly by coded letter. That seemed a bit childish, but since he was providing the stamps along with all my other living expenses plus the air-fare, I went along with it. He showed me how a simple book-code worked and asked me to choose any book I liked. The Prince seemed an appropriate ti
tle, though I’d never read it; the Colonel approved and told me to buy a copy in English translation to take with me to Ruritania. Rather than spend good drinking-money on a book I borrowed it from the local library.

  After my visit to the exhibition in the Palace of Youth I thought I might as well open my secret correspondence with the Colonel by warning him that royalism in Ruritania wasn’t flavour of the month, with the implicit message that quick results couldn’t be expected and my expenses were likely to be open-ended. I shook off Vladek, therefore, returned to my hotel-room, composed a brief message and opened my copy of The Prince at random:

  Whether it be better to be beloved than feared, or feared than beloved? It is answered, both would be convenient, but because that is hard to attain, it is better and more secure, if one must be wanting, to be feared than beloved; for in the general men are ungrateful, inconstant, hypocritical, fearful of danger, and covetous of gain . . .

  This was amazing stuff! The depression that had come over me after the exhibition lifted and for the first time I felt really encouraged. O.K., nobody badly wanted a king of Ruritania, but suppose they got one all the same! I was it. Nothing had changed in my situation, which was still a case of grasping at red roses. The change was in my attitude: red roses might come later, when the outsider crossed the line in front, but they were no part of the race, which was just man and horse. The man was me, in the Elphberg colours, and the horse . . .? As the man said, ‘my kingdom for a horse’, meaning presumably that if he could get his hands on a horse he’d keep his kingdom.

  I scrubbed out my first message to Colonel Danzing - ‘Not much joy so far, but the food is edible’ - substituted ‘Machiavelli is my favourite author’ and coded it: ‘105 NWELOW: RAAOOCNKIW:, GUOMRWGML, U’. Then I signed it Karl Marx (DWUANWUP) to annoy him, addressed an envelope and went out to look for a post-office. Since I didn’t want Vladek seeing that I was making secret reports to the Colonel I’d arranged to meet him again - though he warned me I wouldn’t find it easy - at the cathedral, near the top of the old town. There was a post-office just over one of the bridges, but I very soon lost my way following a street that seemed to go up and then began twisting down again and fetched up, after trying to cut through side-streets, in a gloomy cul-de-sac of shuttered, crumbling houses with a stench of shit.

  As I cursed aloud and turned to go back I saw two men coming towards me. They were about twenty yards away and it was very obvious from the way they fanned out as soon as I saw them that their only business in the street was with me. One of them was Sumo-size, with a boulder-shaped head and shortish hair, the other tall and narrow, with shoulder-length dark hair and a ferocious Tatar face. They gave me the shivers, but I kept walking towards them hoping I was mistaken in their intentions. I wasn’t. The huge one stopped right in my path, while the thin one got hold of my arm and said in German:

  ‘Give your Deutschmarks!’

  ‘I don’t have any.’

  ‘Your dollars, then!’

  ‘Sorry, no dollars either.’

  The Sumo one trod on my right foot, the other produced a knife.

  ‘Your pounds and credit-cards! Give!’

  I played rugby at school, I took karate classes up to brown belt, second grade, but this was not a match I could win. Not being a credit-worthy person I had no plastic cards, but I gave him my pounds and when they’d checked my belt and pockets to make sure I hadn’t kept any back, they let me go.

  The money was no great loss - Colonel Danzing might have to top up the weekly allowance he’d arranged for me at a local bank -but the loss of self-esteem was serious. My great-grandfather would surely have sprung up a sheer wall or crippled one of his assailants with a fore-arm smash and dodged the other. I remembered one occasion in the book when he’d had to deal with no fewer than three assailants and made brilliant use of a small metal table. I definitely needed to be fitter and sharper.

  Vladek was waiting for me in front of the cathedral. I didn’t tell him I’d been mugged - he’d never have let me out of his sight again - but I asked him if the old town was as dangerous as it looked.

  ‘More so!’ he said. ‘Tourists are advised never to go there alone, not even in a public bus, but to travel through in their own coaches or by taxi. Of course the taxi-driver might easily charge you all your hard currency anyway. You were lucky not to be troubled - perhaps because you looked like a robber yourself.’

  ‘No police?’

  ‘Police! They’re so badly paid that many people say they go mugging as soon as they’re off-duty. Who can live on Ruritanian krunas?’

  ‘What about your’

  This was not a question he wanted to answer.

  ‘I manage somehow. Shall we go inside?’

  ‘Can you arrange for me to attend a gym, Vladek?’

  ‘Very easily.’

  I didn’t fancy the cathedral. It was big, with plenty of space for large-scale TV opportunities such as coronations, but dark and very Catholic - cluttered with religious statues and those gruesome wooden booths, like mobile torture-chambers, they use for confessing. The Elphberg vault was round the back of the main altar, with the various tombs lined up behind a high iron railing. The whole area had been spruced up recently - there was new gold paint on the railing and a smart new royal flag, with red roses, a stag’s head and a mailed fist, hanging from a horizontal pole in the wall behind. The tombs were inscribed to several Rudolfs, a Frederick or two and one Heinrich. The nearest and latest had been thoroughly cleaned up and read ‘RUDOLFO Qui in hac civitate nuper regnavit in corde ipsius in aeternum regnat FLAVIA REGINA’. The translation is given in Rupert of Hentzau, but I couldn’t remember the details, only that it was cleverly aimed at both Rudolfs: the king she was married to as well as the substitute she was in love with and who in fact wasn’t actually dead at all at the time the inscription was made. This was where the waxwork had been and where they had recently re-buried the genuine corpse of Rudolf Rassendyll, my great-grandfather, after digging him up from the Harz Mountains and giving him a state funeral.

  ‘So why is there no inscription to Flavia?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s not here. After her killing in front of the palace the Nazis disposed of the body we don’t know where.’

  ‘No records?’

  ‘None that we can trace.’

  ‘If you could find her, you could have another state funeral.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘The Nazis were Germans,’ I said. ‘Flavia was German, a relation of Kaiser Wilhelm even. Germans are very punctilious, correct people - surely they wouldn’t just have chucked her on a rubbish-tip?’

  ‘True, but they didn’t want her remembered as a patriotic heroine and the communists after the war didn’t want her remembered either, so it’s probably too late to pick up the trail.’

  I thought about this as we walked back through the cathedral. Vladek stopped to light a candle in front of a statue with a foot worn away where people had kissed it over several centuries. He did so himself after lighting his candle and sticking it beside a lot of others in a tray of vicious metal spikes. When he urged me to do the same, I shook my head. I’m squeamish about other people’s saliva, even if I know them quite well. I never kiss my sister-in-law, for instance, although I like and even respect her.

  ‘This is Our Lady of Wloczovar,’ said Vladek, ‘the old Slav-name for Strelsau. In ancient times she was supposed to have saved our country many times: from the Poles, the Austrians, Bohemians, Moravians, Hungarians . . .’

  ‘But not from the Germans or the Russians in modern times.’

  ‘Not?’ said Vladek. ‘Where are the Russians and the Germans now? It’s a Slav superstition, of course, and the Elphbergs discontinued the old custom of the monarch kissing Our Lady’s foot after the Coronation, but that was in my opinion a political mistake - a slight to the Slavs among their subjects. A King of Ruritania must be seen to be Slav as well as German, especially now. What harm in making a prayer to Our Lady of Wl
oczovar with a candle and a kiss? You certainly need her help.’

  I overcame my nausea and did as he suggested. I even breathed a prayer on to her eroded toe: ‘Find me the horse, lady!’ And whether it was her doing or not, I had a sudden inspiration as we left the cathedral:

  ‘Vladek,’ I said, ‘has anybody tried the other grave?’

  He looked confused.

  ‘The real King Rudolfs grave in the cemetery at Zenda. Couldn’t that be where the Nazis put Flavia after they’d scraped her off the palace square?’

  The square was actually more or less a circle, with a big fountain in the middle. Three marble ladies, their drapes slipping provocatively, were swarming up a green-slimed rock towards an enormous naked man in bronze, who was blowing spray over them out of an ear-trumpet.

  ‘The River Volzer,’ said Vladek.

  ‘And the ladies?’

  ‘Zenda, the forest nymph; Plotla, nymph of the eastern plain; and Karapata, nymph of the mountains: the three provinces of Ruritania.’

  ‘He must be fertilising them.’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘It’s a very explicit scene to have right under the royal windows.’

  ‘The Elphbergs have seldom been undersexed. You yourself bear witness.’

  The square sloped upwards and, beyond the fountain, on the very top of the hill, was the palace, a long, elegant building with a flattish dome and a pillared portico, above high, wide marble steps. I stared at it with mounting enthusiasm. This was an address worth killing for. The flag of the new Republic, dark green, light green and blue like Grabenau’s deputy’s badge, stirred lethargically on a tall pole over the portico. I recalled from my City days Collins’s first law of the Euromarkets: ‘Never lend money to a country with green in its flag!’ There were a few people in the square, some cars parked in an official space near a police post to the side of the palace and a small party of tourists snapping the ceremonial soldiers in blue-and-gold uniforms standing in front of sentry-boxes at either side of the steps.