After Zenda

by John Spurling

  ‘That’s not your job, Karel, and will only waste your time.’

  I pleaded to be allowed to improve my marksmanship on the improvised firing-range behind the barracks and she agreed to that, mainly because she was in favour of my remaining on familiar terms with the soldiers;

  ‘These will be your praetorian guard, Karel.’

  And she quoted Machiavelli on the necessity for a prince to have forces of his own and not depend on mercenaries and auxiliaries. I saw this as further evidence of Michael’s decline in the scheme of things.

  The next stage in my education was acting lessons. Yelena brought an old, retired actor called David Devinsky from Bilavice and had him stay in the chalet for a fortnight teaching me how to stand, walk, speak and gesture both for stage and screen. I practised interviews and speeches, which he recorded on tape or video so that we could study the results and correct my errors. It all seemed a bit ludicrous at first, especially since Devinsky, who had been mainly a classical actor in supporting roles, seemed such an old ham himself. He was a smallish, pasty-faced, fussy person, quite nervous when he first arrived and full of baroque gestures and banal small-talk uttered in ringing tones, as if he were trying to disguise a bad script; but as he admitted when we got to know each other better:

  ‘I was never a good actor myself, Sir (he always called me ‘Sir’, not by any of my names), but I know very well how it should be done and I am absolutely brilliant at picking holes in everyone else’s performances.’

  I was worried about losing my natural charm under this professional showbiz veneer.

  ‘I shall not have you long enough to make a bad actor of you, Sir. You will forget most of what I tell you, but retain a few useful little tricks of the trade. For instance, you must never never clasp your hands together, either behind or before, unless you deliberately wish to convey that you are ill at ease.’

  ‘Would I ever wish to convey that?’

  ‘In your profession I should think not. The appearance of ease is an important part of our mystery, but I should say it is the heart and soul of yours, Sir.’

  ‘Did you give lessons to Yelena before she began to appear as the holy mother?’

  He looked round apprehensively, though she was not even in the house.

  ‘This is not a question I can answer, Sir, forgive me! Nor shall I answer it in future if anyone were to ask the same question about you.’

  ‘Then you should find another way of not answering it,’ I said.

  ‘How would you suggest, Sir?’

  ‘What about No ?’

  ‘Would you think that the right answer to make in your case, Sir?’

  ‘Anything else would give the impression that I was just playing a part.’

  He looked unhappy.

  ‘The business of acting is concerned with illusion, but not dishonesty.’

  ‘I should think any idea of illusion would be fatal to my business,’ I said. ‘Even dishonesty would be preferable; so I might have to settle for the illusion of honesty. But I’ll put the question to Yelena herself. I’m sure her reply will be No .’

  In fact I didn’t ask her. I had virtually no secrets from her, while she had many from me, including the story of how she got from being the water-engineer’s grieving widow to the True Faith’s reincarnation of the mother of Jesus. The simplified version she’d offered me had little to do with the living icon who’d first presented herself to the people of Chostok and I suspected she must have put herself through the same sort of programme as I was following now. But if I kept my suspicion to myself that would be one secret on my side. In other words, I was beginning to learn lessons from my teacher which she didn’t necessarily mean to teach.

  By the time Devinsky left it was getting near Christmas and my training entered a new phase. Yelena began to take me about with her on excursions to the more accessible villages. We travelled in the Colonel’s 4X4, which she’d retained, together with its driver and the useful corporal with local connections, as her private transport.

  In each village we would meet and talk with the people and usually take part in a religious meeting similar to the one I’d attended in Bilavice. Yelena’s status was somewhere between a church elder and a film-star. She behaved and was treated in a superficially ordinary way, drinking tea, discussing local problems, giving advice, smiling and setting people at their ease; but she was always addressed as Maria and I noticed that most people wanted to touch her and that when she spoke they never disputed her statements, only put deferential questions for clarification.

  My own status was more nebulous: I was part of her retinue, introduced always just as ‘Karel’, with no further explanation, but never required to do more than observe, sit on the sidelines, make small-talk and be friendly. People looked at me curiously, were pleased to shake my hand and talk to me and answer questions about themselves and their families, but never questioned me. They seemed to have been prepared in advance on how I was to be treated, just as Yelena had given me strict instructions never to be off my guard, never to allow myself to be drawn into controversy or even into expressing a provocative opinion. In some ways I felt like a Denis Thatcher or Prince Philip character, the shadowy consort of the queen bee, and wondered if the people perhaps thought of me as Yelena’s husband or lover; on the other hand, she didn’t treat me that way herself, but more like a distinguished colleague, a foreign dignitary, as it were, a king bee in my own right. The word ‘king’, however, was never uttered by anybody.

  All this was possible because we moved in very limited circles, church circles. There were certainly people living in and around these villages who weren’t even fair-weather believers in the True Faith, but we didn’t usually meet them. On one occasion we had just come out of a village church and were pausing in front of the door with a small crowd round us while our car waited nearby -Yelena never stayed very long anywhere nor allowed any individual to monopolise her for more than a few minutes - her technique was hit-and-run. I was separated from her by several people pressing to get near her and by a few fans of my own, when a short man wearing glasses, with a small pointed grey beard and moustache and a pot-belly edged up to me and said:

  ‘I’m surprised at you.’

  ‘Mr . . .?’ I said politely holding out my hand.

  ‘Dr Moritz,’ he said, taking my hand briefly. ‘I’m surprised at you lending yourself to this caper. It’s got no future, no future at all. You’ll only compromise yourself by trailing round behind this charlatan.’

  ‘Are you a local man, Dr Moritz?’ I asked blandly, ‘Or just passing through?’

  ‘I’m visiting my mother,’ he said, ‘but I live and work in Chostok. I helped to patch up Tarlenheim and I’m well acquainted with Count von Wunklisch.’

  ‘Will you give them both my best wishes,’ I said. ‘If they’re still at Previce Castle and we happen to be anywhere near it, I’ll try to call on them.’

  ‘They are still at the Castle,’ he said, ‘and not at all pleased at the way the greater part of it has been taken over as winter quarters by the nationalist rebels. They would hardly welcome a visit from you in your present company, I should think.’

  ‘Well, we’re all looking forward to the spring, of course.’

  ‘You must realise,’ he said angrily, ‘that as soon as the snow melts, so will this snow queen and her absurd pretensions. We are not all gullible peasants in Karapata, you know.’

  ‘I’d very much like to make contact with the Count again,’ I said, ‘but at present I’m no more a free agent than he is.’

  I looked him in the eyes, so far as I could see them through his dizzyingly thick lenses, and he nodded his head and changed his tone completely.

  ‘Understood. Well understood. I’m glad I managed to get a word with you.’

  We’d been speaking in low voices and I’d been nodding and smiling at other people round us all the while, but Yelena had noticed who I was talking to. Easily and fluently she moved to my side, put her
arm through mine and, with a melting smile for the doctor, led me all in the same movement, to the car. She gave no one other than Moritz the sense that she was dispensing too abruptly with their company. On the contrary, they all stood there deeply contented, full of happiness and gratitude for her visit, as I held the car door open for her and then got in beside her, turning to wave to them with a gesture polished by Devinsky. They all waved as we drove off, except Dr Moritz who was walking briskly away in the opposite direction.

  Yelena didn’t refer to the incident in front of the driver and the corporal, but waited until we were sharing our evening meal back at the chalet.

  ‘Dr Moritz is a Catholic. What was he doing there?’

  ‘He told me he was visiting his mother.’

  ‘What did he say to you?’

  ‘He told me my old friends were still at Previce Castle. I said I hoped to see them again soon.’

  ‘Did he give you any message from them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or take any from you?’

  ‘I sent them my best wishes.’

  I glanced at her innocently and twirled my spaghetti with theatrical panache. She watched me carefully, considering whether to interrogate me further, then started to cut up her own. She was a very neat feeder.

  ‘You should avoid talking to such people. Dr Moritz works at the hospital in Chostok - he’s in government employment - his interest lies with the status quo.’

  This raised a question we’d skirted round until now.

  ‘Shouldn’t we make any overtures to the other side?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They’re very worried, but they’re still in a strong position. Making overtures from weakness to strength would only improve their morale.’

  ‘But how far shall we get by fighting? Not, surely, as far as Strelsau?’

  ‘It depends on the attitude of the Army.’

  ‘You think they won’t want to fight or that enough of them might actually join us?’

  ‘If the government is forced to start an inquiry into the Kapitsa Atrocity, that will probably cause the resignation of the Minister of Defence as well as the Chief of Staff and other hard-line generals. Then we shall be in a very strong position.’

  She told me that the Second Regiment was still holding out in its barracks in Kapitsa, while the government havered, as well it might, between the dangers of submitting to the demands of the mutineers and of allowing their own high command to commit a further atrocity and perhaps start a full-scale civil war. The main approaches to the Second Regiment’s barracks were guarded by tanks and temporary barriers, but it was a half-hearted cordon and easy to get in and out of.

  ‘So Colonel Maggerling and his senior officers are still locked up?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘I hope they’re being treated more humanely than I was -allowed some exercise, conversation, reading-matter, better food.’

  ‘Of course, but if the food supplies to the barracks were stopped they would be the first to suffer.’

  ‘And heating?’

  ‘Yes, they’d get very cold if heating oil weren’t allowed in.’

  ‘Our friends have got the government by the short hairs, haven’t they?’

  After the meal we moved with our coffee to chairs by the fire. Yelena sat with her legs folded under her.

  ‘A useful exercise for you, Karel: suppose it was your government in this dilemma, what would you do?’

  I sat and looked at her in silence.

  ‘Come on, Karel, concentrate! Think!’

  I was tired and she distracted me sitting like that and looking so available. She probably wasn’t much older than me, yet our relationship from her point of view seemed to be mother and adolescent son - with the big difference, of course, that most adolescent sons aren’t overtly keen to go to bed with their mothers.

  ‘How old are you, Yelena?’

  ‘What would you do about the Second Regiment?’

  She was using my frustrated desire for her as a source of energy. It was a form of hydro-electrics: dammed-up water into electricity, dammed-up sex into the will for power. I knew nothing whatever about Joan of Arc, except that she’d somehow keyed up the effete French Dauphin to thrash the rude crude English, but surely Yelena must have studied her methods and had no doubt first tried them out on Michael.

  ‘Do you think Joan of Arc ever had sex with the Dauphin? I’m sure he must have asked her.’

  ‘Answer, please, Karel! Don’t be lazy!’

  ‘Answer my question and I’ll answer yours!’

  ‘No, she didn’t.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’

  ‘He didn’t appeal to her. Now your answer!’

  I gave a Machiavellian solution: a treaty with the Second Regiment under which they would surrender their prisoners in return for an inquiry; then, when the prisoners were free, cancellation of the inquiry, assault on the barracks and execution of the mutineers.

  ‘This would split the army and the whole country.’

  ‘Not if I got rid of the general or politician who’d made and broken the treaty - had his car blown up perhaps - and attributed it to Slav retaliation. Then I could hold the inquiry after all, blame the dead man for everything and unite the army and the country under my own benevolent, even-handed rule.’

  I lay back in my chair, stared into the fire with a stern, patriarchal expression and enjoyed the sense of being stared at by her.

  ‘You’re giving me Borgia’s or Stalin’s solution. What’s yours?’ she said at last, with, I thought, a trace of anxiety.

  ‘Tell me how old you are,’ I said, ‘and I’ll think of another solution.’

  But she wouldn’t and I wouldn’t and finally she retired to bed in a bad temper, leaving me, I felt, master of the field. I played myself one of the operas she’d brought me, together with a cheap compact-disc-player, from Bilavice. I think it was Turandot. She appeared then in the gallery, wearing a short white towelling dressing-gown like a boxer’s, and asked me to turn it down. Her long bare legs, which she’d never shown me before, were visible through the gallery railing. I turned the music off immediately and ran up the stairs. She fled into her room and bolted the door. I went to the door but didn’t touch it.

  ‘Yelena!’ I said, ‘Yelena!’

  I waited some time and then walked round the gallery several times, but there was no response at all and in the end I went to bed alone under my green cover.

  In the morning there was no sign of Yelena, but I found an envelope beside my plate at breakfast. Inside was a letter in very careful handwriting, almost like print, the letters mostly not joined up. German, of course, was not her native language, though she spoke it fluently:

  Dear Karel, I know that you think a woman’s role is only to be made love to by men and that she should be eternally grateful if you personally find her sufficiently attractive to make the effort to pursue her. But please understand that I do not want you as a lover and will not have you under any circumstances. This is partly for personal reasons - I am a person, you know, not an object - but mainly because of the purpose to which my life is dedicated.

  I know you think nothing of my mission and imagine it’s just a game I’m playing or that I’m deceiving myself. This is not so. Try to look at it from your own point of view, since you’re not very good at putting yourself inside other people. You did not at first take your own position very seriously, but now I think you’re beginning to understand that the strange chance of your birth gives you responsibilities as well as privileges beyond yourself. I am the same, nobody actually told me face to face, as they did you, that I was more than I thought I was, but it was just as if somebody had. And because my summons came to me inwardly, instead of through any human agency, and because I was always a serious person and very seriously affected - as I think you never have been - by the loss of someone I loved, I responded quite differently from you. I threw myself into the task of bei
ng what I was asked to be, I accepted that this was the purpose of my life and nothing else.

  You have not accepted any such thing. You are still drifting along in any current that catches you - for the moment it is some silly woman who has taken it into her head to make you king of Ruritania. Well, you think, why not? And since you also find the silly woman sexually attractive, why not sleep with her too - it’s part of the offer, isn’t it, with the free food and lodging, the opera recordings, the excursions and the general adulation for your wonderful person?

  I’m afraid you are still just a consumer, Karel, with the mentality of your privileged class and country -the mentality, no doubt, of your distinguished great-grandfather, but not of your still more distinguished great-grandmother. The difference between them was not courage in the face of physical danger - they both had that - but courage of conviction. She knew she had to serve her country, but he couldn’t be sure it was his country or that he could commit himself to it and preferred photography. Of course, he would have been happy to die for Ruritania, because in the short term he was brave and generous, but because he was also conventional and cowardly in the long term, he refused to live for it

  Consider this carefully, Karel, and if you believe you can only emulate Rudolf Rassendyll and not Flavia Elphberg, I will try to arrange for you to leave Karapata and return to Strelsau, from where I’m sure your country’s embassy will easily be able to repatriate you. Otherwise, I make this condition of your staying: you must dedicate yourself to your preparations and treat me as what I am: not yours, never to be yours, Yelena.

  This was not the best news to get over breakfast. When Anna brought my fresh toast, I asked if Yelena was still in.

  ‘Is out.’

  ‘When does she get back?’

  Anna shrugged. I sat and stared at the lake, with a light wind ruffling its surface, and wondered what had been so special about the water engineer from Kiev that had turned his beautiful widow into a nun.