After Zenda

by John Spurling

  ‘Proceed, then, Lieutenant, but it is completely irregular and I shall see you and Lieutenant Grauner as soon as this affair is over!’

  The lieutenant saluted and marched forward to meet our group.

  I was now feeling weak in the legs and sick in the stomach. I would have liked to sit down just where I was or at least lean on one of my guards. My nose was running from the cold wind and rather than sniff I kept wiping it with my sleeve and tipping my head backwards. The sky was full of large racing clouds, high up, and it was barely light. The sun wasn’t visible at all. Three large birds with long necks flew over from right to left - swans, geese, storks, cranes? My ignorance was lamentable, but what did it matter when the few things I had managed to store in my head -including all that intimately acquired Ruritanian vocabulary - were going to be wiped clean anyway? I tried to whistle the tune from Tosca - ‘I never loved life so much’ - but it sounded more like the wind under the door in a horror-film. I certainly had no hope at all that those ten soldiers had blanks in their guns - the presence of Colonel Maggerling and his side-kick from the court precluded that.

  The young lieutenant and the captain in front of our group spoke briefly and the captain indicated the middle of the empty wall and ordered my four guards to take me there. I caught his eye for a moment and he bit his lip. He and Father Roddich remained together near the entrance, while the soldiers and I went forward to the wall. Then they withdrew towards the captain and I was standing alone. The lieutenant looked nervously at his watch.

  ‘Get on with it, Lieutenant!’ shouted the colonel.

  Several things happened at once: the lieutenant gave an order to the soldiers facing me and they raised their weapons; the captain started forward with one hand up towards the soldiers and the other pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket, as he called out that he’d forgotten the blindfold; and on the far side of the hangar there was suddenly a tremendous noise of engines starting. The colonel’s mouth opened and he made a step forward, the lieutenant seemed to be temporarily at a loss, but then he drew his revolver from the holster at his side and almost leaping in the air with the effort to be heard above the engines, screamed:

  ‘Fire!’

  I sat down abruptly. The muscles simply folded my legs independently, as if I’d been banged behind the knees. The captain -halfway over to me with his handkerchief - threw himself on the ground. The soldiers facing me fired, but not at me. The burst went to my right, over the captain and the heads of Father Roddich and the four guards, who all also dived to the ground. The lieutenant went straight up to the colonel and his adjutant and pointed his revolver at them, shouting to the soldiers in a voice almost falsetto with excitement:

  ‘Disarm the guards!’

  The fallen captain and I were left detached, while the soldiers surrounded Father Roddich and the guards and the lieutenant backed his two superior officers, with their hands in the air, towards the same group. I saw the captain put his hand to his revolver holster, but he didn’t even unbutton it. That gesture of impotence made my spirits surge up through me again as if I’d just stepped from a cold bathroom into a hot bath. I got up, still shaking with shock, and went over to him.

  ‘You were right, Captain,’ I said, ‘it was Puccini.’

  He looked bewildered.

  ‘Tosca,’: I said. ‘But this time it worked.’

  His handkerchief was still fluttering in his hand. I stuffed it back in his pocket, then opened his holster and removed the revolver.

  ‘Better join the party!’ I said.

  He stood up slowly, still dazed, and I swivelled him round and escorted him towards the group near the gate. At that moment an armoured vehicle rolled into the gateway and stopped. I looked wildly round to see where I could run, but its machine-gun remained pointed in the air and a soldier’s head and shoulders rose out of the top. He had a smile on his face and raised two fingers. The lieutenant gave him two fingers back and then, as I urged my prisoner on towards the group, turned and saluted me.

  ‘Sir!’ he said.

  The mutiny of the 2nd Regiment of Infantry had been planned for a week or two later, when there was to be a visit of inspection by a senior general from Strelsau. He and his staff would have been held as hostages to reinforce the mutineers’ demands for a full inquiry into the so-called ‘Kapitsa Atrocity’ - the attack on the rebels during which parts of the town had been damaged and many civilian lives lost. Based on the border of the province of Karapata, the 2nd Regiment consisted mostly of Slav soldiers, officered by a mixture of Slavs and Germans, with the senior posts held by Germans. It had played no significant part in the ‘Kapitsa Atrocity’, which was carried out by the predominantly German airforce and artillery, and its uncertain loyalty to the Strelsau government had been the reason why so little had been done earlier to contain the rebels in the mountains.

  I almost got the impression that by downing a civilian aircraft over the Kapitsa airfield Michael had deliberately provoked the Kapitsa Atrocity so as to split the enemy forces, but no one would admit as much.

  I received this information in a confused form in the officers’ mess, where the victorious mutineers - mostly lieutenants with a captain or two - gathered briefly to toast their success in schnapps and vodka. While our own drama was taking place in the scrapyard, the other armoured vehicles had been deployed at strategic points and the rest of the barracks seized piecemeal by Slav soldiers under Slav subalterns. Standing beside a blazing fire, surrounded by leather armchairs and exhilarated, flushed young officers, with old photographs of Warsaw Pact parades and exercises on the walls, I discovered a pleasure I had not even fantasised about in my cell. In the space of three minutes, from collapsing in front of the firing-squad to being saluted by Lieutenant Voleski, I had been transformed from a piece of human scrap to a prince. They knew my real identity because Gerda had revealed it to Michael and the mutineers had had secret contact with rebel headquarters. The date of the mutiny was brought forward solely on my account.

  Now everything that had told against me in front of the court was in my favour. I was no longer a foolish and disloyal mercenary, but a hero of Slav self-determination. The new description fitted me no better than the old, but I much preferred it. No one seemed to hold my rash flight from Bilavice against me - Bilavice itself, incidentally, had not yet even been approached by the Ruritanian army, so our panic was premature. All that mattered now was that I had abandoned my German connections to side with Slavs and had risked my life - very nearly paid it - for their cause. So here I stood clinking glasses with my admirers while the colonel and his fellow Germans nursed their humiliation in the cell-block I had just vacated. My own particular saviour, Lieutenant Voleski, told me that the worst moment was when the colonel nearly countermanded the whole execution because of finding the wrong subaltern on parade. The lieutenant detailed for the job was, of course, a reliable German, but the conspirators had gone into his room the night before, held him down and poured alcohol into him until he was incapable. Voleski’s perhaps too flippant explanation that his colleague had drunk too much the night before even to be able to stand up, let alone conduct an execution, had put the colonel into a passion. It looked as if his rage might throw out the timing arranged for the mutiny with the other participants round the barracks, but Voleski had finally persuaded him that it would be inhuman and perhaps even an international war crime to make the condemned man go through it all again another day.

  ‘And the soldiers in the firing-squad?’ I asked.

  ‘There were some substitutions the day before, but most of the soldiers in this regiment are of our way of thinking.’

  ‘Forgive me asking,’ I said, ‘it may seem ungrateful after such a brilliant coup, but why did it have to be left to the last moment? Couldn’t you have seized the colonel in his bed or his office and released me earlier?’

  We considered that,’ said Voleski, ‘but it would have been more difficult to be sure of success with the colonel close to a tele
phone and alarm system and protected by his German sympathisers. There would certainly have been bloodshed in those circumstances. As it is, there was none at all.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘not even mine.’

  ‘We knew you had the courage to bear it,’ said Voleski, tapping my heart enthusiastically, ‘And everything had to be decided in a great hurry, because of you.’

  ‘Who threw the stone through my window?’

  ‘That was me.’

  ‘So are you the leader of the mutiny?’

  ‘Me? No, certainly not.’

  But he failed to tell me who was and when one of the captains, in a voice already slurred from drinking too much so early in the morning, announced that it was time to ‘dishcush’ their next moves, I began to wonder if they had any distinct leader at all or if they hoped to sustain their mutiny with democratic conferences. If so, it was surely doomed. They would still be arguing when German-commanded tanks surrounded their barracks.

  ‘One larsht toasht,’ called out the captain, refilling his glass and raising it: ‘Our distinguished and courageoush comrad, Karl Berg! May he one day remember, if hizh deshtiny should be to rule our country, that hizh life wazh shaved by the Shecond Regiment of Infantry, Kapitsha!’

  ‘Berg! Berg!’ they all called out, filling and raising glasses so hastily that the carpet and chairs were drenched in spirits.

  ‘No! Elphberg! shouted Voleski, his voice going falsetto with excitement again as it had in the scrapyard.

  ‘Elphberg, Elphberg!’ they echoed, downing their drinks and flinging the glasses in a salvo at the back of the fire. I thought of my dream and my cell window.

  ‘Was Tosca your idea?’ I asked Voleski.

  ‘Tosca? No.’ He laughed. ‘That meant nothing to me.’

  ‘Then it wasn’t your message or your plan?’

  ‘I just carried it out,’ he said, embraced me and went through with the others to an adjoining room.

  I’d been briefly afraid during the toast that they might be proposing to elect me their leader and, seeing no glorious future for myself as the democratic colonel of a mutinous regiment, was wondering how to refuse without offence. But they had other plans for me. I was considered too precious an asset to the Slav cause to be put to further risk and was conducted outside to the colonel’s 4X4.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked the soldier in the driver’s seat. ‘To Chostok?’

  ‘No, sir. Sebrikov.’

  Sebrikov was not a town or even a village, but the name of the huge lake and hydro-electric plant that supplied most of Karapata with electricity. My driver, who came from Kapitsa, had no idea why we were going there and wasn’t sure we’d make it through the snow, but he had a radio and there was a corporal in the back of the car who came from the area and told us that if we got stuck we’d soon be rescued from the nearest farm or village.

  ‘These are not bare mountains,’ he said reassuringly, ‘but full of my relations.’

  The journey took many hours and - except for a couple of times when I had to get out to help dislodge the car from a drift - I slept. The back of the seat made a hard pillow and the vehicle was constantly twisting and turning and sometimes sliding, but the heating was reasonably powerful and nothing short of actual pursuit by the enemy could have kept me awake. I was knackered, I was half drunk and I was alive when I’d expected to be dead. It was sleep that went nearer to being ecstatic than merely therapeutic. By the time we got out of the second drift - with the help of a tractor supplied by one of the corporal’s relations - we were nearing Sebrikov. I closed my eyes and was dozing off again when the corporal behind me, proud of his local scenery and disappointed that I’d missed most of it so far, touched my shoulder.

  ‘Sebrikov dam, sir!’

  It was high above us still, but filled the windscreen: a vast, smooth black collar across the gap between snow-covered mountain-shoulders. We climbed to the right and it disappeared for a while, but every so often as we circled up we caught glimpses and finally rose above it and could see part of the huge sheet of water it contained. The further shore, the far end of the dam, must have been nearly a mile away.

  Now I began to wonder what we were heading for in this black and white landscape: a bandit hideout? another barn in a farmyard? a cave? I thought hopefully of Previce Castle, with Magda waiting to loofah my back in a hot bath, but although I’ve never been good at geography I knew that Chostok was a long way off somewhere to our right and the Count’s castle beyond that.

  We hadn’t been running along above the lake for more than about half a mile when the corporal, who had been having a crackling conversation with someone over the radio, warned the driver to slow down and soon afterwards we turned left down a track - it was probably a drive, but the snow made it look rough - and stopped at closed wrought-iron gates set into a high concrete wall. The corporal spoke into the radio again and in a few minutes the gates were opened by a man in rubber boots, fur hat and a heavy belted coat with big pockets and a fur collar. He looked more like a hunter than a guerrilla. After we’d passed through the gates and he’d closed them again, he followed us in a small truck.

  At the end of the track, which wound through a wood of fir-trees, was a two-storied wooden chalet close to the edge of the lake. The corporal said it was a holiday house built for the former Secretary of the Ruritanian Communist Party. He was now in exile in one of the ex-Soviet states ending in -stan and the parliament in Strelsau was still bickering about whether they could afford to keep the place on as a retreat for the current prime-minister. Meanwhile it seemed to have fallen into other hands. The man in rubber-boots, politely shocked that I had no luggage of any kind, opened the front door for me, but then disappeared with the corporal and the driver somewhere round the back.

  The large room I found myself in took up most of the ground-floor and suggested a hunting-lodge, with antlered heads on the walls, a big log-fire and a gallery all round at first-floor level, reached by a narrow right-angled staircase in one corner. Sliding windows on the side looking over the lake led to a covered verandah; beyond that a slope of snow went down to a jetty with a boathouse nearby. The place appeared to be completely empty. I warmed myself in front of the fire under the largest stag’s head, walked to the window and stared out at the lake, then climbed the staircase and creaked round the gallery. There were doors leading off it on three sides; the fourth had more sliding windows opening on to a balcony overlooking the lake and forming the roof of the verandah below. I tried a door in search of a loo. It was a bedroom with a view of the far end of the dam; the near end was obscured by the wooded mountain-side. We had seen the sun for a while as we got higher up the mountains, but now it was growing dark and a little snow was falling. The bed, with a soft green cover, looked inviting. I lay down, closed my eyes and went back to sleep.

  I don’t think I slept for long - my bladder was beginning to make urgent demands. I lay there for a while disputing with it, but finally opened my eyes, sat up and swung my legs off the bed. Yelena was sitting in an armchair near the window watching me. She was between me and what little light was left outside, but I recognised her at once, though her cropped hair had been tidied up since I’d last seen her in the train to Kapitsa. She was wearing a thick white jersey with a floppy polo-neck and a narrow blue skirt of some heavy material.

  ‘You managed to find a proper hairdresser, then?’ I said.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were Karl Elphberg?’ she said.

  ‘What difference would that have made?’

  ‘A great deal. Now, without your cap, it’s obvious.’

  I only remembered then that I’d left my faithful cap in my cell. The colonel or one of his colleagues would have it now -a reproachful reminder of the whirligig of fate. I stood up.

  ‘I need a pee.’

  ‘First door to the right.’

  The next pleasure in store for me was a meal, but although it came with Hungarian wine and in three courses plus cheese I ate it
alone, at a small table in the main room, served by a short dark peasant-woman, who was also the cook. She was middle-aged to elderly, had a slight squint and only spoke, with a thick accent, to acknowledge my remarks:

  ‘Did you make this soup?’

  ‘Yes.’’

  ‘Delicious! Who shot the stags?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘When is Yelena coming back?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you from these parts?’

  ‘No.’’

  ‘Where from?’

  ‘Rovereto.’

  ‘Sounds like Italy?’

  ‘Is Italia.’

  Her German was vestigial and I didn’t try very hard because I was chiefly interested in the food, still exhausted, and also irritated by Yelena’s behaviour. She was downstairs when I came out of the loo and called up that we’d talk tomorrow when I’d eaten and slept, before disappearing into the back of the house. I didn’t see her again that night. I felt I’d exchanged one kind of solitary confinement for another, even if my status and the comforts attached to it had improved significantly.

  After the meal I settled down with my coffee to watch TV -there was a set in the corner of the room, under the stairs. Watching TV is not my idea of an occupation for adults younger than sixty or eighty but I used to be driven to it in London by the need to divide up the day a bit. The programmes here were if anything directed at a deeper level of disadvantage even than the British ones, but I sat courageously through a comedy slot in which a Ruritanian version of Rowan Atkinson tried to nurture a boa-constrictor in his mother-in-law’s bathroom without her noticing, followed by a chat-show mainly devoted to a sentimental folk-group from Kapitsa. That seemed ill-timed in view of the news bulletin that followed it.