After Zenda

by John Spurling

  ‘I will,’ she said.

  I put my good arm round her and we were friends again.

  She had a room in a house along the street the corrugated lorry had appeared from. The whole town went down a slope on this side, so one had a view from her window of orchards and fields and farms beyond. It was a nice place for our lessons and we mixed them with a lot of sex of a fairly athletic kind - it would have been more athletic without the hindrance of my arm, but Gerda made up for my comparative stasis with extra activity of her own. I’ve already mentioned her legs. Her body - when she took off her black trousers, black jacket and white basics - was quite French in style, with a tight, jutting bottom, just visible spine and ribs and small round breasts. Her stomach was almost flat and the hair between her legs sparse. I was like a beached Spanish galleon with my mast in the air and she like a fleet of Drake’s small ships, attacking from all angles.

  ‘Your hair down here is much brighter red,’ she said, switching my belly with her black hair.

  ‘Less exposed to the weather,’ I said.

  I didn’t leave all the action to her. My left arm was still painful, but if I got my right round her middle I could turn her over quite easily or pull her up off the floor on to the bed and vice versa. We didn’t let these encounters interrupt our work on Ruritanian vocabulary:

  ‘This is entitled what?’

  ‘No, Karl. What is this called? ‘

  ‘What is this called, Gerda?’

  ‘This is called . . . you want the rude name or the medical name?’

  ‘As many names as possible, please!’

  ‘Vlug...’

  ‘Vlug? You can’t be serious!’

  ‘I am laughing so much I can’t say it.’

  Even to this day there are serious gaps in my command of idiomatic Ruritanian, but I am totally fluent when it comes to the parts of the body.

  We didn’t spend all day and every day in Gerda’s room. She was extremely busy in the local museum and the town-hall next door to it, where she was organising an exhibition and a series of concerts. And when I left the hospital a day or two after we started our honeymoon/language classes, she found me a room of my own:

  ‘It would not be respectable here, Karl, whatever it might be in London or Strelsau, to share a room.’

  She also arranged for me to take language classes of my own, in the town-hall most evenings, so that the citizens of Bulavice could acquire a smattering of English.

  ‘My classes will be terribly dull compared to yours, Gerda.’

  ‘I hope so. But you need friends and the people need to learn your important world language.’

  I also gave her a hand with the exhibition, which was a display of local crafts with a strident nationalist message. One of my jobs was to help make the labels and since this propaganda element didn’t appeal to me at all I was always trying to tone it down.

  ‘Do we have to tell them yet again that this cock’s head is a traditional Ruritanian Slav motif? I mean, the person that carved it probably couldn’t care less.’

  ‘You must please leave it as it is! The purpose of this exhibition is to show the essential solidarity of our people. Even in small ways, which they were perhaps not conscious of, they were all the time reinforcing their common identity.’

  ‘He probably took the idea off an English beer-mat.’

  ‘You are so crude and arrogant!’

  I tried a more oblique form of disruption:

  ‘What about this lovely plate? It looks very plain and we haven’t found any political content in it so far. But consider the wavy pattern round the edge! Some connection with a cock’s comb? A traditional Ruritanian Slav motif?’

  ‘Good. Very good, Karl. Put that in!’

  ‘It was a joke.’

  ‘I know, but I believe you are quite correct.’

  ‘You’ve been brainwashed,’ I said. ‘Your communist education has made you see the whole of life as a Party message.’

  ‘The exact opposite. I want everything to do with this terrible totalitarian philosophy to be stripped away and the real identity of the people, which it tried to obliterate, rediscovered and revealed.’

  I gave up trying to argue: why spoil a very good physical relationship for an ideological impasse? Gerda without her clothes on was never a bore.

  The concert-programme at the town-hall was equally spiked with propaganda. Gerda had been trained as a musician until she switched to political activism, which had not allowed her time to practise her viola. Ruritanian Slavs, she told me, were exceptionally musical: Bilavice possessed a band, a small orchestra, a string quartet and several pianists.

  ‘It’s a pity we can’t use the church for our concerts,’ said Gerda. ‘It would have given us a better acoustic, but without any windows it would be too cold at this time of year.’

  ‘Why not repair the windows?’

  ‘It’s expensive and there is an argument about who should pay. The town council think the army should pay, but we think they should, since they have received their freedom for nothing. It would have been best not to damage the windows in the first place, in my view - they were fine windows - but the soldiers insisted on shooting them all out. They said it was their custom.’

  I’ve never been particularly musical myself. Still, I obviously had to attend at least the opening concert in Gerda’s programme and it turned out to be more interesting than I’d expected. There was a large audience of Bilavice’s leading citizens, of whom I knew a good many from my English classes.

  ‘Still wearing your cap, Mr Berg?’ one of them called out from a row or two back as I reached my seat in the front row next to Gerda.

  ‘I go nowhere without it,’ I called back in English.

  ‘I am going to London,’ called out another, also in English, repeating a phrase we’d been practising in one of the lessons.

  ‘Ve are going to London,’ called out another.

  ‘Ven ve haf ze munnee,’ said several in chorus.

  ‘Is this what you teach them?’ muttered Gerda disapprovingly, ‘these conventional tourist aspirations?’

  ‘We get on to Slav Nationalism in the next lesson,’ I said, sitting down with a cheery wave to my pupils.

  The first item was an overture by Ruritania’s most admired composer, Rustivan Carol. He was hardly known outside the country, but the programme-note - written by Gerda - said he was a pupil of Smetana and might easily have rivalled his master if only the German cultural establishment which dominated 19th-century Ruritania and listened exclusively to Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner, had ever given any encouragement to their native composers. The overture would have made a pleasant background to a TV travel slot, with shots of mountains and rivers and smiling peasants round wooden tables, but was thin on its own. Gerda’s programme-note assured me that Carol’s use of bird-song was extremely innovative for its time and went to the root of the people’s instinctive love for their landscape, but I missed the bird-song altogether. Looking round the hall to keep myself attentive, I noticed three latecomers standing at the back: Fisher John, Count von Wunklisch and Vladck Tarlenheim. They found seats before the next item, a symphony by Dvorak. After that there was a break and we all met up in the improvised bar in the town-hall’s lobby.

  ‘You have been through the wars, Karl Marx,’ said the Count, ‘but did you know who you were fighting for?’

  Vladek had been wounded in the leg and suffered a cracked skull during the ambush in which Thomas had been killed, but had quite recovered except for a slight limp. He was sharing the Count’s home imprisonment at Previce Castle while the Ruritanian Army of the True Faith consolidated its grip on Karapata. Fisher John’s position was less easy to determine. It was he who had arranged this excursion in a taxi from Chostok, though at the Count’s expense. He was certainly allied in some way to the True Faith and considered reliable enough to be responsible for the prisoners, but Gerda didn’t strike me as too friendly to him and I thought he seemed ill at ease. Perhap
s he didn’t like music. Gerda and the Count were open enemies.

  ‘I hope Michael Jagdanovitch will remember to service my car,’ said the Count. ‘These Bulgarians are very careless about such things.’

  ‘He is not Bulgarian,’ said Gerda.

  ‘Forgive me! Perhaps I meant Serbian or Ruthenian.’

  ‘His mother is from Ruritania.’

  ‘Ah. I thought she was Hungarian,’ said the Count in his suavest manner.

  ‘She was born in our country.’

  ‘That certainly makes him native - by a thread.’

  ‘We are not so obsessed with pure blood as Germans are. It’s a question for us of where your heart lies.’

  ‘When I hear any Slav - or would-be Slav - talk about the heart, I check my wallet and my passport.’

  Vladek and I drew away from this acid-slinging.

  ‘Who is this fierce lady, Karl?’

  ‘She organised the concert.’

  ‘Is she organising you?’

  ‘In a sense.’

  is that good?’

  ‘Very good on some scores.’

  ‘What are you going to do now, Karl? Do you hope to lead the Slavs against Strelsau?’

  ‘They already have a leader.’

  ‘He is just a bandit. Don’t trust him!’

  ‘I’m more interested in his woman - Our Lady of Chostok.’

  ‘Is she his woman?’

  ‘I thought you’d be able to tell me.’

  ‘No one has ever heard of her before,’ said Vladek. ‘The people in the high mountains believe she is supernatural, but you have seen her, what do you think?’

  ‘She rides in the back of the Count’s car and she wears military kit and carries a Kalashnikov, which I would guess she also uses.’

  ‘Just another bandit, then!’

  The second half of the concert consisted of a complete performance of Smetana’s My Country. Some parts were better than others, but my attention wandered. The Count had whispered to me just before we went back in:

  ‘What do you know about this American missionary?’

  ‘He seems to be a friend of the nationalists, at least the True Faith part of them.’

  ‘He is interested in money.’

  ‘You mean he wanted a bribe to let you escape?’

  ‘Not exactly. He thinks I will be free again anyway in a month or so when the present campaign is over. But he wants to go shares with me in a business opportunity. He has something very marketable, he says. If I will arrange for it to leave the country, he will give me a small percentage of its price. This expedition today is part of the process of softening me up. What can it be? Has he discovered the Ruritanian Crown Jewels?’

  I didn’t tell the Count what I thought - knew - it must be. Fisher John was waiting for us at the entrance and looking suspicious of our whispered conversation; besides, something made me keep the knowledge to myself. Sailing merrily down the Moldau, Vltava, or whichever river it was, with old Smetana, I was thinking hard about ‘my country’. Was it really mine or was it Gerda’s, or Michael’s, or the Count’s, or Corporal Radichev’s, or the Secret Police’s, or President Slobodjak’s or all these confused Bilaviceans’? I came to no definite or immediate conclusion - except that it certainly wasn’t Fisher John’s and it would be a pity if he got home to Oklahoma with any part of it.

  12 Fallen Leaves

  The first snow fell and we had no news of Michael’s success or otherwise. The national radio and television services still didn’t suggest that the government was facing anything but a little local banditry; however, they admitted that civilian flights to Kapitsa might be suspended without notice and advised people travelling to Karapata by road or rail to consult the authorities first There was apparently still a train-service between Kapitsa and Bilavice, though the checks and searches made by both sides were said to be extremely stringent and ruinously expensive in bribes. I didn’t meet anyone who had risked the journey personally and goods got through only fitfully. Bilavice was well supplied with local produce, but the amenities of modern life started to peter out. Chocolate, paper, batteries, soap-powder, light-bulbs, tinned food became first over-priced and then unobtainable. Petrol was short and few people used their cars. There was still electricity, because Karapata’s power-stations were mainly supplied from a huge hydro-electric scheme built by the communists in the mountains. All the same, the atmosphere in Bilavice was generally pessimistic and jittery. Judging by the people who turned up in increasing numbers at my English classes, the population was more or less evenly divided between those who hoped for a resounding nationalist victory and those who just wanted an end to hostilities either way.

  The concerts continued; so did my Ruritanian lessons, but more sporadically since a person of Gerda’s energy and political passion was obviously wasted on mere culture. She was sitting on more and more committees connected with the general administration of the town and when it was announced that she’d been co-opted to the council itself as ‘special representative for Slav national interests’, I asked her if this was a one-woman coup.

  ‘The Council is a democratic body, Karl,’ she said wearily. ‘One day somebody will have to explain to you what real democracy means.’

  ‘In our country,’ I said, ‘it means the rule of the most assertive.’ The mayor, a bag-eyed, bald father of six, who ran a saw-mill and sometimes attended my classes, approached the subject with careful ambiguity:

  ‘We have a saying, Mr Berg, If the woman wants to cut down the tree, sharpen the axe .’

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked. ‘That you should cut it down for her? Or that she needs a sharper axe than a man?’

  ‘I’ve always taken it to mean that you should let her cut down the tree, but not let her sharpen the axe. The axe being, of course, much more valuable to the woodcutter than any single tree, it could be ruined by inexpert sharpening.’

  ‘So you let her have her way in the short term, but keep a grip on the instruments of power?’

  ‘That would be reading too much into a simple piece of folk wisdom.’

  Deprived of Gerda’s private lessons more often than I liked and with little else to do in the daytime, I attended the local gym, swam and even jogged - becoming a fitness freak of the kind I used to despise in London. Also, twice a week, I paraded with the local militia -mostly older men who were supposed to be holding Bilavice for the Ruritanian Army of the True Faith while it was in the field. As a distinguished veteran of the glorious battle of Bilavice I was made a temporary corporal - with a black armband - and expected to pass on my expertise in infantry training. In the light of my own experience I suggested to the commander of the militia - a temporary sergeant called Brobek, that we ought to concentrate on street-fighting and lay our hands on heavier weapons. If the regular army tried to recapture Bilavice, I said, they’d probably use tanks and even artillery - wasn’t there something we could do about that?

  Sergeant Brobek, who had himself done military service in the artillery and now ran a transport company, many of whose lorries had been commandeered by Michael’s army, thought there was nothing. He had a long face and a permanently gloomy outlook and was one of those conscientious types who always say ‘no’ to every suggestion and then ruin their health proving it can be done after all.

  The upshot was that we brought the surviving armoured-car back into service - though we couldn’t afford the petrol to take it out much - and with the help of the local foundry, a garage and a quarry company constructed a quantity of home-made grenades and mortars. We practised using these things round an abandoned factory outside the town and also attended the local rifle-club to bring our sharp-shooting up to a higher standard. The twenty or so best shots in the militia were then formed into an elite squad of snipers and spent a lot of their spare time enthusiastically investigating people’s top floors and roofs and arguing about the best spots for ambushes. The rest of us concentrated on the rougher business of handling explosives and pr
ojecting them by one means or another.

  Meanwhile, as Gerda had become less and less available, I had discovered an alternative source of Ruritanian lessons. The room Gerda had found for me was on the opposite side of the town from the way I had first entered it and near the edge. In fact the back garden, which was mostly a vegetable plot, gave directly on to a large wood. The house was newer than most in Bilavice -part of an estate added to the town in the Sixties or so when some communist five-year-plan had been trying to turn mountain peasants into factory-workers. Hoping no doubt to make the peasants feel less alienated, the authorities had built them a street of houses in the traditional style - though they were smaller, cheaper imitations - instead of blocks of flats. The house was lived in by a childless couple in their late thirties. The husband, Mikos, was an electrician and a member of the town council. He was one of the ultra-nationalists, an eager supporter of Gerda’s new regime and I thought a fairly nasty piece of work, resentful and spiteful, with a sharp bad-tempered face. I never saw him smile, let alone laugh, and he was a puny size too: he looked like a stoat. He was civil to me, however, since I was Gerda’s protégé, and I took care to cross his path as seldom as possible.

  His wife, Susha, worked at the power-station, mostly night-shifts. Electricity had probably brought them together, but now kept them mostly apart. It was not surprising they had no children since he was not often at home in the daytime and she only occasionally at night. Their personalities had nothing in common. She was a cheerful, well-built extrovert who had no interest whatever in politics and occupied her spare time and energy gossiping with a large circle of women-friends and acting as courtesy aunt to their children. She seemed perfectly happy with this arrangement and never spoke as if she missed having children of her own. Nor did she give any sign of distress at being saddled with such a miserable husband: she seemed to accept his moans and complaints about the food, the other people on the council, the stupidity of his customers, the indiscipline of other people’s children, as if an unattractive husband was simply a natural misfortune like bad weather or old age.