Suddenly the main doors at the top of the steps opened. Everybody in the square turned to look and the tourists abandoned the soldiers and began aiming their cameras upwards as about half a dozen men in suits emerged from the doors. They were followed by a camera crew walking backwards and then two smaller figures, a man and a woman, strolling casually, evidently talking together. The men in suits made a half circle round them, their heads swivelling jerkily as they scanned the steps and square for potential assassins.
‘President Slovodjak,’ said Vladek, as, like everyone else, we moved closer and formed a small crowd below the steps, deterred from going any closer by the soldiers, who left their sentry-boxes and paced up and down beside the bottom step. But we were near enough now to see the faces of the group at the top.
‘I know the woman,’ I said.
‘You do?’
‘Not to speak to. I saw her on TV.’
The president, pink-cheeked and diminutive, with thick grey hair swept back off an impressive philosopher’s brow, was now kissing the hand of his companion. Smiling, attractively flushed, with short cinnamon-coloured hair fashionably spiked, Clare Studebaker was dressed simply but expensively in a white bosom-hugging vest and pale green jacket and skirt. She was a bit short for my taste and would probably turn dumpy in a few years, but I had a momentary desire to run up the steps and introduce myself as the real owner of this stately home. Then she started down the steps, still smiling, accompanied by the camera crew, while the President remained standing among his security men at the top, one hand slightly raised, like a good host not shutting the door until his guests have disappeared from sight. I decided to act. Pushing Vladek and one or two other people around us aside, I ran back some twenty yards towards the fountain, chose a spot fully visible to the President and the descending Clare and, shouting ‘Nil Quae Fed’, stood on my head. Taking a rapid upside-down reconnaissance I could see that I’d succeeded in catching everybody’s attention. The security men, one of them speaking urgently into a hand-radio, were closing round the President; the crowd’s faces were turned my way; Vladek was standing stupefied; Clare had stopped halfway down the steps and her cameraman was raising his equipment to his shoulder. The two soldiers were unslinging their guns.
I regained my feet and bellowed in German:
‘Mr President! Here Queen Flavia died for freedom. Where does she lie now - our country’s heroine? I call for her body to be found and buried with honour in the royal vault!’
I made a deep bow and, as the President and his entourage retired rapidly into the palace and the doors closed behind them, knelt down with my head bent and my hands on my chest, as if my next trick might be a display of hara-kiri. The crowd kept its distance, but began to chatter excitedly, a police car entered the square with its siren squawking and other police on foot were running towards me. Vladek reached me first, but just behind him was Clare.
‘Hold the police, if you can!’ I said to Vladek. ‘Tell them I’m just a mad Englishman with a passion for royalty!’
I got to my feet and looked urgently into Clare’s blue eyes.
‘I’m not mad,’ I said in English, ‘but somebody had to say it. Did you get the message?’
‘More or less. You speak very good English. Are you Ruritanian?’
The police, intercepted by Vladek and deterred by their respect for the interviewer, were standing round us.
‘English,’ I said, ‘but I feel very warmly towards Ruritanians and I was shocked to find that there was no memorial to this courageous woman who died resisting the Nazis. Must history always belong to men?’
I could see she was having difficulty digesting this, trying to match the acceptable sentiment to my unacceptable shaven head, as if she’d eaten a chocolate flavoured with fish.
‘What was the first thing you said, before you addressed the President?’
‘Latin,’ I replied and smiled enigmatically, my main aim being to spin out the conversation and make sure she wouldn’t forget me. But she sensed I was playing with her and started to turn away.
‘If I were you,’ she said patronisingly, ‘I’d be more careful about getting involved in what is a very complicated situation here.’
‘What were you talking to the President about?’
‘Just that.’
She walked away with her camera crew, leaving me to be arrested and taken to a police-station near the river. But as I continued to point out - reiterating the Rassendyll motto in German (‘ich habe nichts getan’) - I’d done nothing. What could they charge me with? Disturbing the peace by standing on my head in a public place and addressing a naive petition to the President? I wasn’t armed, I hadn’t threatened anybody, I’d just been carried away by my strong feelings after visiting the royal tombs in the cathedral. They murmured about a fine, but when I opened my wallet and showed them it was empty, they gave up and released me.
Vladek remained loyal and supportive throughout my interrogation but he was completely mystified by my behaviour.
‘Straws in the wind, Vladek,’ I said, as we drank whisky on Colonel Danzing’s account back in my hotel bar. ‘We need to make the monarchy an issue, not just a dim option. The chance of raising a little dust-cloud in front of both the President and the BBC was too good to miss.’
‘But the tourists and the BBC were taking pictures. Is it sensible to make a public spectacle before we’re ready?’
‘No one will recognise me,’ I said, ‘because no one has the slightest idea I exist. And even if anyone did, consider the symbolism: the President standing at the top of the steps, the King at the bottom, upside-down. To whom does the palace rightfully belong?’
Vladek liked that idea and brooded on it.
‘I will do a painting,’ he said. ‘But I hope Colonel Danzing hears nothing about it - or Mr Grabenau - they have no imagination.’
He returned to his studio to disfigure another canvas, while I went up to my room, lay on my bed and read Machiavelli:
... it is better to be hot and precipitate than cautious and apprehensive; for fortune is a woman, and must be hectored to keep her under; and it is visible every day she suffers herself to be managed by those who are brisk and audacious rather than by those who are cold and phlegmatic in their motions, and therefore, like a woman, she is always a friend to those who are young, because being less circumspect they attack her with more security and boldness.
He had imagination for sure.
6 The River Volzer
Vladek finished his painting and was delighted with it, but I put off going to see it with the excuse that I needed to spend all my spare time in the gym he’d found for me. The instructor was an ex-soldier, not much older than me, called Andrzej. He wasn’t particularly tall or muscle-bound, but you could see just by the way he stood and moved that if my two muggers had tangled with him they’d have got the equivalent of a metal table up their noses. I told him I wanted to be fighting fit and that was no figure of speech, and without asking any questions he put me on what he called ‘a radical self-defence regime’, which combined body-building exercises with a repertoire of kicks, locks and swipes guaranteed to cause radical, if not lethal damage to anything on two legs.
Nothing came out in public about my head-stand: no photos, no news-item in the local press, no report by Clare Studebaker for the BBC. It only went to prove the shortcomings of any kind of PR effort unless you cause actual bodily harm or the media are already focussed on the subject. Grabenau, however, had heard about it. Presumably he had contacts in the police. I was meeting him for lunch in the canteen of the parliament building, so that he could introduce me to some other deputies who might prove useful allies in the future. For the present my role was strictly that of a foreign journalist, with no hint of my real identity. Arriving at the entrance to the building to see me through the security checks, Grabenau looked even more dyspeptic than usual.
‘What were you playing at?’ he asked sourly as we walked down a corridor side-by-s
ide.
I shrugged. People have been asking me that question all my life and it never expects or deserves an answer.
‘Nothing I’ve seen of you convinces me you’re a serious person,’ he went on, still sounding like every schoolmaster I’ve ever had to do with, I’m beginning to regret being drawn into this pantomime of Danzing’s.’
‘Pantomime’ annoyed me. I slowed down, let my arms hang loosely and wiggled my hands about as Andrzej had taught me: ‘Relax into any encounter,’ he advised.
‘Mr Grabenau,’ I said, very slowly and almost tonelessly, still following Andrzej’s advice (‘breathe deeply, speak slowly without emotion, ask a question so as to pass the tension to your adversary’). ‘What can I do to gain your good opinion?’
‘It’s not my opinion that matters,’ he said, ‘but a whole people’s.’
Sanctimonious bugger! I shook my arms gently downwards as if dropping water off my hands.
‘Do you think people would have such a bad opinion if they knew who I really was?’ I said. ‘Given that it was my great-grandmother who died resisting the invaders and that it’s her house - actually mine now - the President’s treating as if he owned it.’
This was too much for Grabenau. He stopped dead and confronted me.
‘What arrogance is this? The palace doesn’t belong to you or your family, but to the people of Ruritania. At present and probably for a long time in the future they have an elected President and it’s his right to occupy the palace.’
‘Excuse me!’ I said, rotating my shoulders first in turn and then both together, ‘what right is that? Surely you’re not still a communist, Mr Grabenau?’
People were pushing past us all the time, so we spoke in low voices with our faces close together, his at the level of my chin. I gave the word ‘communist’ extra volume, startling one or two passers-by and causing Grabenau to glance around apprehensively.
‘Certainly not!’ he said.
Gotcha! I put my hands on my hips and rose gently on my toes.
‘But perhaps you were once and haven’t quite shaken off your Marxist-Leninist reactions?’
He was looking winded now. I put my face very close to his and spoke in an urgent whisper:
‘If Count von Wunklisch can float gently back from Switzerland and recover his family castle, why should I be locked out of my ancestral palace? I regard it as stolen property - stolen by Nazis from my family, stolen later on by communists and now occupied by Republican squatters who pretend to respect the laws of property.’
‘This is not the place to talk about these things,’ he said, trying to break the clinch and walk on down the corridor.
‘Fair enough. But I think you have to make up your mind, Mr Grabenau. Are you a serious person? Whose side are you on?’
I surprised myself with my own vehemence and this easy victory. Perhaps I was at last shaping up to the ghost of my father; perhaps it was the influence of Machiavelli, undoubtedly it owed much to the admirable Andrzej. We walked in silence through several swing-doors which I insisted on holding open for Grabenau (‘never let your adversary out of eyeshot - think of the eye not just as a visual receiver but as a laser’); then, as we joined a self-service queue in the crowded and noisy canteen, Grabenau muttered in my ear:
‘No tricks here, please, unless you want to cause me severe embarrassment. I may be on your side when the time comes, but for the present our politics is not so much the art of the possible as of making the impossible possible.’
He nodded and smiled wearily at passing acquaintances as we edged towards the counter for a choice of goulash or salami salad and then, under cover of the clashing plates as a cook ladled out goulash, confided:
‘Everyone here is uncertain. It’s a question always of who can be trusted - who is strong, who is weak. It’s not the time to take sides, but to explore opinions and tendencies.’
‘O.K.,’ I said, ‘but it’s different for me. I am one of the sides. Maybe that gives me a certain strength.’
We joined three deputies already seated with their lunches and beers at a table. They looked anxiously at my shaved head and I avoided smiling so as to keep them worried. The conversation was exclusively about business opportunities for foreign investors and I took notes. They talked as if this tinpot state - with its peasant-based agriculture and obsolete factories - must be a great prize to western moneybags simply because of its previous obscurity and present innocence. They were like a lumpish, unattractive girl imagining that every handsome capitalist wanted her just because she was a virgin. No doubt they were overdoing the optimism in front of someone they saw as a useful blurb-writer, but what really depressed me was their collective myopia and parochialism. If these were Grabenau’s most promising allies, likely levers of my restoration, I’d be better off kissing Our Lady of Wloczovar’s toe than their arses.
When I’d had more than I could stomach of the business opportunities, I put away my notebook, finished my beer, stretched my legs out and asked casually:
‘Any worries about the military?’
They all looked as if I’d been sick on the table. Hans Grünberger, a vast pudding in his mid-thirties, with another only slightly smaller pudding for his head, was the first to recover:
‘Why should you think so?’
‘Military people tend to be resistant to change. Yours might want to put the clock back to a command economy.’
‘I think not,’ said Grabenau. ‘Our army is small and has never shown any desire to intervene in politics.’
‘Well, you might say that - ‘ I conceded, smiling round at them all, ‘or you might equally say that as an outstation of the Soviet military machine it was nothing but an intervention in politics.’
‘That’s all in the past,’ said Hugo Maitek, smoothing down the skeins of hair that bridged his bald forehead. ‘The Cossacks in Plotla will be returning to Ukraine next year and meanwhile there is even talk of integration with NATO.’
‘One other thing . . .’ I said. ‘Investors are nervous people, particularly worried about instability in countries they don’t know much about. I’ve heard people in London say that Ruritania looks stable, with a popular president and an elected coalition government, but that underneath there’s a serious rift between Slavs and Germans. Could that become a problem?’
This was the big one. However, unlike the question about the army, they’d clearly expected it and exchanged knowing looks before the least talkative and least unimpressive of the group, a neat, dark, dandyish fellow called Misha Kurtinov, made his prepared reply:
‘It is a problem and no one could deny it. I see that you’ve put your notebook away, so - off the record - I’ll speak frankly. In the first place, of course, there’s one point of complete agreement between Slavs and Germans: nothing must happen to deter potential investors. In the second place, on the other hand - I speak as a Slav myself- the country must not be allowed to become again, as it was for more than a century, a German bourgeoisie exploiting a Slav peasantry.’
‘Or a Slav nomenklatura penalising a German underclass,’ said Grünberger.
‘It is for this reason,’ said Kurtinov, carefully shifting his coffee-cup as if it might be concealing an underclass German, ‘that many of us are anxious to encourage people from the English-speaking countries in particular to take shares in the Ruritanian economy.’
‘You discourage Germans?’
‘We discourage nobody - we are too poor and in any case no free country could discriminate in that way - but we would very much prefer investors from further afield. This is off the record, as I said, but please emphasize our desire for British and American investment.’
The others kept their eyes down during this statement and their disagreement was palpable. Kurtinov, as token Slav, had been picked to sell the party line of ethnic togetherness, but he couldn’t help drawing attention to its danger-point: the more German money flowed into Ruritania the stronger the German faction would become and vice versa. Thin
king it over afterwards as I sat in the visitors’ gallery and watched the afternoon session of parliament, I concluded that Grabenau and his fellow -Germans only needed me if they couldn’t get the upper hand by more conventional means; my best hope, therefore, was an improvement in Slav prospects and who would bet on that? There was something else from the conversation at lunch which I’d marked down as significant, but the beer I’d drunk had blotted it out.
The session I watched was all about education - sparsely attended and drearily detailed - and I had difficulty staying awake. I tried counting Slavs and Germans but it wasn’t easy: there were about a dozen small parties in shifting alliances with one another and they didn’t sit facing each other like the government and opposition in the British parliament but all together in an amphitheatre arrangement facing the Speaker and one or two government ministers on a platform. There was simultaneous translation over headphones between the two languages, but most of the deputies spoke in German whether they were Slavs or not. It looked as if Ruritanian, like Welsh or Irish, was a language on a life-support system.
Grabenau’s manner towards me had changed noticeably. After lunch, as he led me to the visitors’ gallery, he said:
‘That was excellent, Edwin. You were quite serious and your questions made a good impression.’
‘Even the one about the military?’
‘I don’t think we need fear them, even though they’re predominantly Slav. The most senior officers associated with the old regime have been retired and their places taken by more reliable men. The younger ones, like everyone else, are more interested in sharing the good life of the West than playing politics. We have never been a militaristic country. Our army is more accustomed to ceremonial than fighting.’
But when he came back, still in a friendly mood, to fetch me from the gallery my woozy brain suddenly achieved link-up.
After Zenda Page 6
