After Zenda

by John Spurling

  The government was admitting to army ‘unrest’ in Kapitsa and blaming it on ‘foreign troublemakers’ who were trying to destabilise the country and stir up ‘ethnic tension’. A government minister was interviewed and assured his viewers that there was no question at present of ‘a violent response’. Rather, a mediator would be sent with a brief to listen to the soldiers’ grievances and to try to remedy them, since the root of the trouble seemed to be a feeling that there was some ‘imbalance’ in ‘promotion prospects’ and the minister certainly wished to correct this - or at least the impression of it, since he didn’t admit it was actually true.

  The general who was interviewed next thought quite differently: he saw little scope for mediation in ‘a military context’, in which ‘the first duty of soldiers was to obey orders’. However ‘this is a democratic country now’, he said sarcastically and ‘straightforward military solutions are not always practicable in peacetime situations’. He had a large cube-shaped head set on squared-off shoulders which filled half the screen and questions about what he really meant bounced off him like air-gun pellets off a lump of granite, but his meaning was perfectly clear: the sooner we were into a wartime situation and he could blitz the hell out of the Second Regiment of Infantry and possibly parliament too, the sooner normality would be restored to a world gone mad.

  The news passed on to other matters - fears about deteriorating nuclear stockpiles in Russia, the latest complications in the Balkans, some minor border dispute with Slovakia, doubts expressed in parliament about whether Ukraine would stick to its agreed schedule for repatriating the Cossacks in Plotla, a change of government in Poland, a mafia shoot-out in Strelsau. I switched off. Ruritania may lag behind Britain in all sorts of important ways, but its news service is the same acupuncture by a thousand needles of anxiety-I sat staring at the blank screen, satiated, relaxed, thinking about the person whose reflection I could dimly see, as he was 24 hours earlier. What if he had been able then to look forward as I was now looking back? Then life would be much the same as opera and we’d have to enjoy it more for the tunes than the story. I hummed the tune from Tosca and wished I still had the cassettes. But perhaps there was music in this place - I had got out of the habit of expecting independent diversions. I walked round my new luxury cell, but there was no sign even of a loudspeaker. Disappointed I flopped down in another chair and turned over the magazines on a small table next to it. They were mostly old copies of Ogonyok and Der Spiegel. If Yelena was really Ukrainian she presumably spoke Russian as well as German and Ruritanian. Did she also speak Italian to her cook?

  Underneath the other magazines was one of a quite different sort, thinner, on matt paper without a glossy cover, its contents starting straight off on the front page under a title in big green letters: ‘FIRST INSTANCE NEWS’. Under that, in smaller green print: ‘Disciples of the First Instance, Tulsa, Oklahoma’ and the date - a month or two earlier - in black. The front-page article was a tract about fund-raising, arguing that it should be seen not as a pact with mammon but as the conquest of mammon, turning mammon’s own weapon - money - into the ploughshare of God. I flipped the page and found a headline reading ‘OUR FISHER IN RURITANIA’ and a large photograph of Fisher John.

  The article below the photo clarified immediately what had puzzled me before: the nature of Fisher John’s relationship with the rebels. He was turning mammon’s weapon collected from the faithful of the First Instance in Tulsa, Oklahoma, into God’s ploughshare for the True Faith in the lovely mountains of Karapata. In other words, if Count von Wunklisch represented the funds behind restoring a German monarchy in Ruritania, Fisher John represented the funds behind Ruritanian Slav nationalism. The reason we’d never been short of small arms and ammunition was that mammon’s-weapon turned God’s-ploughshare fetched up as Michael’s AK47s and rocket-launchers.

  17 Biology and Theology

  I was woken at eight next morning by a brisk knock on my door. I was sleeping in the bed with the green cover, since no one had suggested anywhere different. The door opened and Yelena put her head round it.

  ‘Time to get up,’ she said and immediately disappeared, shutting the door.

  Her peremptory, schoolmistress tone was annoying and inclined me to turn over and go back to sleep; but contradictorily I wanted to see more of her, so I got up and had a shower. When I came downstairs I saw that the small table had been moved to the window looking out on the lake and was laid for breakfast, with one place. It was petty, no doubt, after being given a holiday chalet in exchange for a death-cell, but I was irritated still more by this further evidence of being deliberately isolated and when the Italian cook came in with muesli, coffee and a boiled egg, I took it out on her:

  ‘Why am I eating alone again? Where is Yelena?’

  ‘Please!’

  I was standing away from the table to show my displeasure and she put the things down and indicated the chair.

  ‘Maria is coming,’ she said.

  ‘Maria?’

  She nodded and went out before I could ask any more questions which she either couldn’t understand or didn’t want to answer. I kept my stand-off protest going a little longer, but my appetite was too much for me and I sat down and polished off the muesli. The sun was shining directly through the window and I moved my chair sideways to avoid it before tackling the egg. As I did so, I saw that Yelena was standing in the middle of the room. My irritation increased by another notch. Was she always trying to pretend she’d materialised?

  ‘Who is Maria?’

  ‘I am Maria.’

  ‘You told me you were Yelena.’

  ‘I have more than one name, like you.’

  ‘So which am I to call you?’

  ‘As you like.’

  ‘Why do I always have to eat by myself?’

  ‘I never take any breakfast.’

  ‘Or supper?’

  ‘I was out last night.’

  She brought an upright chair, put it near my table and sat down. I kept an eye on her while I finished my egg, in case she tried to dematerialise. Then I put the egg aside and reached for another piece of toast, all the while glancing at her frequently and slightly raising my eyebrows, as if to say ‘Still here? Surely you have better things to do?’ The duel of silence, if it was a duel, finished with her speaking first:

  ‘You like attention paid to you. Aren’t you getting enough?’

  ‘Not really. I’ve been living alone for too long and I’m not a natural hermit.’

  ‘Conditions are better, though?’

  ‘No comparison. All I lack is human company.’

  She watched me silently again, while I spread the toast with butter and jam and sipped my coffee. Her bony, scrubbed face, in the bright light from the sun and snow, looked severe, even hostile. She sat bolt upright, legs close together, hands loosely clasped in her lap. She was much better-looking, but she reminded me depressingly of my sister-in-law on one of her regular disciplinary outings.

  ‘You’re very selfish in the use you make of human company,’ she said.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘At least female company.’

  ‘I give as good as I get. I would have thought that in your case I gave more than I got.’

  ‘You helped me on to the train, you cut my hair and you wanted to rape me.’

  ‘Rape you? For Heaven’s sake! You attracted me and I showed it. Is that rape? I thought it was just sex. Or do you think men shouldn’t be allowed to have sex with women?’

  I wondered suddenly if she was actually a nun. But nuns should stick to their cloisters and not wear pale blue denim outfits or ask men to cut their hair if they want to retain their apartheid. She smiled.

  ‘It depends. For the man’s purpose only? Or for the purpose of both man and woman? In the case of Susha I think you behaved badly, don’t your’

  ‘Yes, I probably did. But I don’t see what that’s got to do with you.’

  ‘I believe she was very u
nhappy when you failed to go to Chostok.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, but if I had gone to Chostok, you would have missed your train.’

  ‘I could have caught another. I was not running away from Bilavice like you.’

  I felt this was unfair. Was I running away or was I just leaving Bilavice?

  ‘Weren’t you also running away?’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘So why the sudden need to get rid of your hair?’

  ‘I am known to the government authorities by photographs with long hair. I didn’t wish to be recognised.’

  ‘Did they let you go on to Vlod?’

  ‘I bought a ticket to Vlod, but I wasn’t going there. I was going to see some officers of the Second Regiment in Kapitsa.’

  She watched me steadily while I thought about this.

  ‘You were involved with the mutiny?’

  ‘It was my initiative, though I left most of the details to them.’

  ‘And you also left me to be arrested and taken out to be shot.’

  ‘You weren’t apparently a very important person, were you?’

  I stirred my coffee as calmly as I could and looked at her with all the contempt I’ve always felt for snobs.

  ‘Completely expendable,’ I said.

  ‘I also thought that since you were really an English journalist you’d be released in a few days. Also that you deserved to suffer a little.’

  I drank my coffee and pushed my chair back.

  ‘Yelena,’ I said, ‘or should I call you Maria? It was very kind of you to entertain me here and remind me of my failings, but I think you’ve fully repaid any obligation you owe me for my help in the train, and I’ll be on my way. Is there transport or shall I walk?’

  I stood up and put my hands in my pockets in case I was tempted to strangle her. She was close to laughing and her face was so attractive when her small mouth spread across it, that I wasn’t really as keen to leave as I pretended.

  ‘Where do you want to go?’

  ‘I don’t mind. Kapitsa’s out of bounds, I suppose, but Chostok or Previce Castle or even Strelsau would suit me fine.’

  ‘Susha is back in Bilavice,’ she said.

  ‘Make it Bilavice, then! I can offer her my apologies or my company, whichever she prefers.’

  ‘You’ll find Gerda there too.’

  She was laughing openly and I felt my face going red with a mixture of anger and confusion.

  ‘Where’s my coat?’

  I remembered throwing it over a chair as I came in the night before and I started to go round the room looking for it.

  ‘Anna hung it up for you. But enough of this! You don’t have to go.’

  ‘But I certainly do,’ I said, making for the door into the kitchen. ‘You’ve fed me and rested me and told me I’m a rapist and a shit and I think we’ve had as much of each other as we can stand.’

  ‘Possibly that’s true,’ she said, suddenly serious again. ‘But it’s not really a personal matter. You are not just Edwin Fenton and I’m not just Yelena Lopotska. I am also, for one thing, Tosca.’

  ‘You sent the message?’

  ‘I wrote it and advised them what to do. Perhaps you still don’t understand the risk we took by changing our plan at the last moment. Now they have only a colonel to bargain with instead of an important general. This was a decision I had to take and I’m still not certain it was the right one. Do you think I would even have considered risking the lives of perhaps 500 men for an English journalist who had been playing soldiers and playing with women? Your value as Karl Rassendyll is still not established - maybe you have no value and we have bought a bad horse - but we have paid a lot for you, believe me! It was not at all for your wonderful character and abilities - perhaps a little for your handsome face so like your great-grandfather’s and King Rudolf V’s - but mostly for your name and your pedigree.’

  It was hard to know how to respond to this. Gratitude seemed inappropriate, since I’d been rescued not for myself but my ancestry. Much more than Colonel Danzing, this beautiful but impossibly self-satisfied manageress and moral tutor made me feel uncomfortable, totally miscast. Maybe after all I wasn’t so different from my great-grandfather: his famous code of honour, his gentlemanly refusal to go on pretending he was king was probably just a cover for the same sense of unsuitability. He, after all, had a private income to go back to. On the other hand, who - come to think of it - wouldn’t feel unsuitable for a job like that? Hereditary top-dog? Almost every monarch I’d ever heard of could take Nil Quae Feci as his family motto.

  I was standing near the bottom of the stairs while this went through my mind and now I sat down on the second or third step and looked across at Yelena without replying at all. She stood up as I sat down, then walked across and sat on the arm of a chair facing me.

  ‘For myself,’ she said, ‘I think the horse is not as bad as all that, but I’m still wondering how best to use it. Maybe you have some ideas yourself?’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’m expecting Michael in about an hour, which is why I got you up so early and in such a bad temper. I thought we should understand one another first.’

  The atmosphere was suddenly lighter. She too had probably been in a bad temper or nervous about something.

  ‘I’m still very unclear about a lot of things,’ I said. ‘When I first saw you in front of the church at Chostok, you were making an extraordinary speech. It was not only the way you made it -though that had a very extraordinary effect on me. What I thought you actually said seems so incredible now that I probably imagined the whole thing . . .’

  I tailed off. I was trying to avoid making the question I wanted to ask sound like a criticism. Women are easy to provoke and this one especially so and the fireworks can be amusing, but I wasn’t aiming for another scoring match - not even to equalise the one I’d just lost - so much as a straight answer. Her face was quite relaxed and expressionless, as if she wasn’t bothered, but she kept her eyes on me all the time in an intimidating way. That made me determine not to be intimidated.

  ‘Did you believe what you said?’

  ‘I never say what I don’t believe.’

  ‘No, I’m sure that’s right. So you did - you still do - actually claim to be the Virgin Mary?’

  ‘Will you listen seriously and carefully and try to understand?’

  ‘I will.’ I smiled encouragingly.

  ‘You’re not a serious person.’

  ‘I can be when I try.’

  ‘Then try harder!’

  We both smiled at the same moment and I would have been quite happy for that moment to go on indefinitely, but she resolutely suppressed her smile and I followed suit.

  ‘People are not paintings or antiques,’ she said. ‘They cannot be verified as genuine articles or fakes. What a person is, is what she feels herself to be and what she achieves. I know that I was born Yelena Lopotska, an ordinary Soviet child, only daughter of engineers working in the nuclear industry. But when I came to live here in Karapata with my husband - who was a water engineer attached to this Sebrikov hydro-electric project - I discovered the True Faith and began to understand my true purpose: to be a vehicle, a container for the person I felt myself to be.’

  ‘How did your husband react?’

  ‘My husband had leukaemia. We were both very young. It was because of what was happening to him that I first looked for help from the True Faith. Our Marxist/Leninist education offered nothing to a young man who was dying or to his wife. This simple faith consoled us both, it gave us what we so much wanted, another world, another life to meet in, but I wonder if we really believed it then. It seemed a little too simple. Then, after ray husband died, I thought more deeply. Why not simple? Why do religions so often try to complicate things, to make mysteries? Of course, it’s to give power to their priests. There is nothing complicated or mysterious about Jesus. He tells people how best to live their lives in his own time. Does he ever say his mother is a virgin impregnated by God or a
nything but a human mother, the wife of a carpenter? Yes, he does say he is the son of God. But is this some biological pedigree like yours? What a primitive idea! Isn’t that the first absurdity which leads to all the others: the impossible virgin mother who bears the biological son of God, the son who is magically present in bread and wine, the popes and priests with special powers conferred on them by hierarchies and ceremonies instead of by their own merits? How do these churches with their fantastic doctrines and rigid power-structures differ essentially from Marxism/Leninism? But the True Faith is only faith in the authenticity of Jesus as he appears in the New Testament. No, I do not claim to be the Virgin Mary -there never was such a person. Or that I am not a human being, born Yelena Lopotska near Kiev. Jesus and his mother were also humans as long as they were on earth. If God created the world, then He is the father and mother of all living creatures at all times and all places. The existence of the world and its creatures is sufficient mystery and miracle and already contains God. Why should He change the laws of physics, which are His own laws? Gods only come to earth as gods in human myths and stories. All I claim is to be an empty computer which fills up with the disk put into it. You can call the disk Mary, mother of Jesus - call it what you like - its programme is the same as you find in the New Testament, directed to a new time and place.’

  ‘I know hardly anything about the New Testament,’ I said, ‘but the one thing I remember from school is the non-violent bit, turning the other cheek instead of punching back. That always seemed to me a clever idea, but quite unrealistic. Violence doesn’t seem to bother you.’

  ‘It’s not very important. Jesus was often quite aggressive towards authoritarian, conventional or corrupt people - nevertheless, the revolution he led was specifically non-violent. This was a tactical decision on his part, not an inflexible rule for all times and all places. All living creatures die. Death is not an issue, then, since it’s universal, inevitable. Of course, the fear of death may be an issue for creatures without understanding and for humans who reject understanding -but what’s that to us? We have enemies, as Jesus did, and we cannot ignore or walk round them. It’s no great step - no fundamental alteration of principle - to go from throwing moneychangers out of the temple or abusing Pharisees to taking the lives or threatening the lives of violent enemies. Of course it should never be done for any purpose but the advancement of the True Faith, nor with cruelty or for pleasure, but if the time and situation demand it, then violence may be necessary.’