After Zenda

by John Spurling

  Corporal Radichev was not one of my regular pupils, but he liked to try a few English phrases himself when he occasionally took me into the farmhouse for a drink of schnapps with the farmer. The farmer was a weather-beaten veteran of the outdoor life and a passionate Slav nationalist; his wife was younger and less rugged-looking. She smiled sweetly and served us, but she never sat down with us or spoke more than a few words. Their daughter worked in a shop in Chostok and their son had been with one of the first guerrilla groups and was now driving the Captain’s car.

  ‘What sort of car does the Captain have?’ I asked on one of these occasions.

  ‘A very good car,’ said the farmer. ‘Made in England.’ ‘You’ll see it tomorrow,’ said Radichev, ‘when the Captain comes to inspect our readiness.’

  Early the next morning we formed up in three lines in the farmyard to receive the Captain. He kept us waiting, but the Corporal wouldn’t allow us to fall out - he was evidently afraid of the Captain’s temper - so we remained there in a light drizzle for about half an hour. I was glad of my cap. The car that eventually rounded the corner of the farmhouse and drew up near its door was Count von Wunklisch’s Range Rover. The farmer’s son leapt out of the driving-seat and opened the other front door for Michael, while the Corporal brought us to attention. Michael, who wore no badge of rank at all, was followed by a man wearing an armband like the Corporal’s, but blue instead of black. All three walked rapidly along the lines, more as a matter of form than to make any proper inspection. My cap brought them up short for a moment - everyone else had got woollen caps or, in a few cases, forage-caps - but Michael said nothing and moved on.

  When he had finished, the Corporal stood us at ease and the Captain addressed us, with the same irritable and menacing awkwardness he had shown in the square at Chostok. First he introduced his companion as Sergeant Vakisch, who was second only to himself in the rebel army and responsible for all matters of supply and logistics. Then he told us the Corporal was satisfied with our progress, that the time for training was now over and that we must consider ourselves real soldiers and behave accordingly, obeying orders without question, doing no unnecessary damage to anywhere we might pass through - since it was all friendly country, our own country and our own people - but eliminating, if we had to, anyone that resisted. No prisoners were to be taken, since there was nowhere to put them except underground. He sneered wanly. Our immediate objective, he continued, was Bilavice, but we would pause there only to regroup. Before winter set in properly we needed to be in control of most of the province - certainly all the mountains - so that the enemy could not hem us in, cut off our supplies and starve us into surrender. His own hope was that we might even reach the airfield at Kapitsa in the foothills and either seize it for ourselves or at least prevent its use by the enemy.

  With that, we were dismissed for a break, after which we were to demonstrate how well we could shoot and mount an attack. The Captain and his logistical expert went into the farmhouse with the Corporal. After a few minutes the Corporal appeared again and summoned me inside. There was no sign of the farmer or his wife. The Captain and the Sergeant - a tall, intelligent-looking fellow with thick wavy hair who looked as if he might have been a headmaster or a hospital consultant before becoming a guerrilla - were seated at the kitchen table, the Corporal sat down a little apart and I was told to stand in front of the table and remove my cap.

  ‘You call yourself Karl Marx Berg?’ asked Michael.

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘But your real name is Edwin Fenton - a British journalist.’

  ‘That is correct.’

  ‘Are you spying or just trying to get a good story for your paper?’

  ‘Neither. It’s been a series of accidents. I was visiting Count von Wunklisch - his driver was killed . . .

  ‘I know all that.’

  ‘Where is the Count now, sir?

  ‘I ask the questions.’

  ‘Another friend of mine also disappeared,’ I said, ‘an artist called Vladek Tarlenheim.’

  ‘You are in danger of disappearing yourself,’ said Michael, with his half sneer, ‘if you don’t shut your mouth except when you’re told to open it.’

  ‘Either I’m a soldier in your army,’ I said, ‘in which case I’ll do as you say, or I’m a British journalist, in which case I’m as much entitled to ask questions as you are and I’d like a chair.’

  ‘You have a nerve, Herr Fenton. There’s nothing to stop me having you shot. The Ruritanian government would shoot me in any case if they could catch me, so it is quite irrelevant to them what I choose to do with you.’

  He stared at me maliciously, then scratched his head.

  ‘You remind me of somebody.’ He looked at the Sergeant, who nodded slightly and looked puzzled. ‘Have you ever had your photo in the paper? Have you been on television? Are you a. famous journalist?’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘I’m not even a journalist in any real sense. I’m just here to write articles for a business magazine about Western business opportunities in Ruritania.’

  This amused Michael. He laughed very briefly - it could have been a cough.

  ‘We have interesting opportunities for arms-dealers at present. Do you wish to return home, Herr Fenton?’

  ‘To London?’

  ‘Isn’t that your homer’

  This was a strange thought and, as I soon realised, an unwelcome one. Fond as I was of Freddy and Jennifer, the idea of finding myself back in Hackney with the usual round of nothing to do filled me with despair. Nil Quae Feci was the story of my life in London.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Absolutely not.’

  They both looked surprised.

  ‘So what do you wish to do?’ asked the Sergeant.

  This was more difficult to answer. The purpose I had originally come for could not be mentioned and, in any case, seemed quite remote at present. Perhaps I had assumed too many different identities recently and could no longer be quite sure who I was or what I wanted. And if I asked to go back to Strelsau I’d either be thrown back on the tortuous soundings and shufflings of Grabenau and the deputies or, most likely, repatriated to England anyway.

  ‘I was hoping to visit Bilavice,’ I said.

  ‘You want to get a scoop for your magazine?’ said Michael.

  ‘As a soldier,’ I said.

  ‘You want to exchange fire with the Ruritanian Army? It may come to fighting in Bilavice.’

  ‘It seems a pity to waste all this training you’ve given me.’

  ‘We are going to kill people,’ said Michael. ‘And some of us will be killed. That cannot be avoided. If the enemy captures you, you may be shot as a mercenary. So you would never get back home to London.’

  ‘Need they know who I am?’

  ‘You are very recognisable,’ said the Sergeant, ‘at least without your cap.’

  ‘I’ll take the risk.’

  They consulted together in low voices. It was odd how the argument had switched. Instead of being the prisoner who might be beneficently released, I had become the soldier anxious not to be discharged.

  ‘Corporal Radichev is pleased with your conduct and abilities,’ said Michael. ‘He had intended you to command one platoon during the advance on Bilavice and would regret losing your services. I am willing to believe that I never saw you without your cap and that you are a Ruritanian national called Karl Marx Berg. Is that what you want, Herr Berg?’

  ‘Sir! Thank you.’ I clicked my heels and put on my cap.

  ‘Dismiss!’

  I turned to go. This army didn’t hold with saluting.

  ‘Your friend the Count is alive and well. He is under house arrest in his Castle, but, as you know, it is quite a comfortable place and I am looking after his car for him. Your friend Herr Tarlenheim is also alive, but less comfortable. He was injured at the time of his capture, but is now recovering in Chostok hospital.’

  I went to the door.

  ‘Don’t prove a disappointment to us, Herr
Fenton, above all not a traitor, or I will personally pull out your eyes as in the play by your national poet.’

  10 The Battle of Bilavice

  We saw Michael again a few days later. The lorry we were travelling in towards Bilavice crested a range of hills and started a long descent down a road designed like a bolt of lightning. Parked on a passing-space just before the first bend was the Count’s Range Rover with an open map flapping under stones on its bonnet. There were three people in military clothes standing near the car. Michael, with another soldier beside him, was staring down into the valley through binoculars, while his driver - the farmer’s son - watched the road and waved to us as if we were all out on a picnic. I had just time before our lorry took the bend to notice that there was a fourth person, inside the car. She wasn’t wearing white, but as her face turned towards us I was nearly certain it was Our Lady of Chostok.

  Of course it was obvious when I thought about it that she must be Michael’s woman as well as his guardian angel. Yet on the church steps they’d appeared to belong to such different worlds that their common purpose seemed coincidental. And she’d fetched him across the stage with such theatrical aplomb that I’d somehow accepted their relationship as theatrical too. This new idea that it was quite real and just what you’d expect - their common purpose came from their relationship - depressed me. It wasn’t that I’d actually believed she was a higher being, but I had thought of her as separate. I hadn’t given her a private life apart from her role as Joan of Arc.

  Our lorry decanted us into an orchard on the outskirts of Bilavice and went back to fetch Corporal Radichev and the rest of our group. As we lay or reclined in weak sunshine under the trees gorging ourselves on apples, Tishkon told me about the True Faith we were theoretically righting for. Our training hadn’t included any kind of indoctrination, religious or political; it was simply assumed that we were all Slav nationalists with a natural dislike for any existing or recent authority - the government in Strelsau, the Catholic and Orthodox churches, Soviet communism. Most of our men’s religion probably went no further than a vague notion of being Christian with a lot of ancestral superstition. Tishkon was exceptional. His family, he said, had belonged for generations - even discreetly during the communist period - to the Community of the True Faith, an ancient and fiercely independent sect of radical Protestants which rejected the Old Testament as Jewish Nationalism with a particularly repulsive god and every Christian doctrine since the Gospels as inauthentic. Knowing as little as I did about the Bible, let alone church history, I wasn’t sure what this meant.

  ‘We just believe in Jesus,’ he said, ‘and his Father and Mother and that they are three people, not one.’

  ‘His father being God, not Joseph the carpenter?’

  ‘Joseph was not the real father of Jesus.’

  Tishkon, who was usually timid and deferential, suddenly became confident and authoritative on this subject.

  ‘But is the lady in white we saw in Chostok really Jesus’s mother?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘How come? She looked quite human to me.’

  ‘Of course she’s human. Wasn’t she human in the Gospel?’

  ‘Yes, but humans generally disappear when they die. She must have died a long time ago.’

  Tishkon went silent. I thought I had mortally offended him, but he was probably just struggling to find the right German words.

  ‘She became a god,’ he said finally. ‘Gods don’t die.’

  ‘She’s human and a god?’

  ‘That’s right. If Jesus and his mother could be humans once, why not again? Whenever they choose. That’s what we believe.’

  ‘So from time to time they drop down from Heaven to give you a helping hand?’

  ‘If we ask them properly and if they think we deserve their help.’

  ‘But why you particularly? Why don’t they drop down to help all mankind?’

  This made him think hard again. He pulled his nose and crinkled his forehead as he wrestled with this thorny theological problem in a foreign language.

  ‘Maybe they do. How would we know? Maybe they only come to us because we are the only people who ask them.’

  ‘What do they do when they come down? Do they make things go the way you want them?’

  ‘No. They might do a few healing miracles, but mostly they inspire us with courage and resolve and remind us of what is right and what isn’t. I told you, when they are on earth they are only human, just as they were in the Gospels.’

  ‘So they could be killed?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘But that wouldn’t stop them coming back another time?’

  ‘Why should it? You can see from the Gospels they are not afraid of pain or even being killed.’

  ‘So the fact that Our Lady of Chostok is inspiring our army doesn’t mean we’ll necessarily win?’

  ‘No.’ He smiled at my simplicity. ‘Otherwise we would have conquered the world by now, wouldn’t we?’

  ‘But if God made the world, doesn’t he want you - his special people - to conquer it?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Anyone that reads the Gospels can tell that he’s more interested in how people behave than in what they have.’

  That was a bit too naive. I might have asked him why he was prepared to kill to have something he didn’t have - control of Bilavice, for instance - if behaviour was all that mattered. In my experience people behave better when they have what they want. Instead I asked him another cynical question:

  ‘Wouldn’t it be a temptation to men - or women - who wanted people to admire them or give them things, to pretend they were Jesus or Mary when they weren’t?’

  ‘Yes, but we have to decide if they’re pretending or not.’

  He threw his apple-core at a bird in the tree above us and just missed it. The bird flew away in a fright, dropping a white blob on my cap.

  ‘We have to decide that about most people anyway,’ said Tishkon severely.

  It seemed a reasonable and foolproof faith, if you thought it necessary to believe in gods at all. Of course, if this faith became widespread, there would be mountebanks claiming to be Jesus and Mary all over the world’s television channels, but since there were already any number of them claiming to be scientists, professors, statesmen, singers, artists, millionaires, prophets, economic experts and at least one proposing to be king of a country he’d never visited until now, that was just the human scene as we knew it. As I went round the edges of the orchard to check that our sentries were alert, I imagined myself being crowned in Strelsau Cathedral by Our Lady of Chostok herself, while the confession-boxes and the rest of the contents of the building blazed merrily in the square outside. But perhaps if she really was what Tishkon thought she was, she wouldn’t.

  The night was chilly and we had no proper camping equipment -the Sergeant’s logistics didn’t run to that. We did have an assortment of coats and ground-sheets, carried, like our personal belongings, in an assortment of kitbags and backpacks, but we weren’t allowed to light a fire. There was a shed with open sides for sorting the fruit from the orchard, but between cold and nervousness about what might happen tomorrow, it wasn’t easy to sleep anywhere for more than an hour or two. Corporal Radichev and his lorry-load arrived towards evening and we ate bread and sausage and chocolate with more apples, but the main incentive for taking Bilavice began to seem the prospect of hot dinners afterwards.

  We were to enter the suburbs on foot at first light and simply make for the centre, while the other groups of nationalists did the same from all round the side nearest the mountains. There was known to be some force of enemy troops in the town and it was hoped we would simply drive them in front of us out of town. The road towards the foot-hills had been left open deliberately to encourage them to leave. We no more wanted to kill a lot of them, who were after all our countrymen even if on the wrong side, than to lose a lot of us. I asked the Corporal if Michael - or whoever had drawn up this simple plan - had co
nsidered that the enemy might use their free exit as a free entrance for reinforcements - on the principle that if you want to get into a cinema free, it’s always worth trying the exit doors first. The Corporal said that the exit road would be mined and blown up if necessary and anyway that reinforcements were unlikely, given the inadequacy of the Ruritanian Army.

  ‘But supposing they come at us from the air?’

  ‘They have a small air-force, of course, but they wouldn’t want to use it against Bilavice - that would be bad propaganda - and they are altogether very confused. They have not yet admitted the existence of the Ruritanian Army of the True Faith, but are talking of a few troublemakers in the mountains. They don’t want even to speak of fighting a war. This is how we hope to get to Kapitsa before winter - by flowing quickly through the mountains while they are still biting their fingernails.’