After Zenda

by John Spurling

  So I thought it a good day’s work: I had another secret from Yelena and for the last day of my studies with Fisher I was altogether excused any more of his ‘agenda’. He had a bad cold and mostly stayed in bed. When we met at lunch we talked about the news on television. The government had promised an inquiry into the Kapitsa Atrocity, the colonel and my other persecutors at Kapitsa were being released this very day and fresh senior officers were to be appointed to command the Second Regiment and bring it back into the fold of the Ruritanian Army.

  ‘Doesn’t this mean,’ I asked, ‘that we’ve lost some valuable allies?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Fisher, blowing his nose and looking very bleary-eyed. ‘What it means is that the hard-liners will be out and the government will be more ready to come to some accommodation with us.’

  ‘And where do I come in?’

  ‘You’ll surely be part of that accommodation.’

  With his blocked nose it sounded like ‘combination’ and I began to have doubts about whether the news was all that good from my point of view. But I had no doubts whatever that if Fisher had any say in the matter I would be no part of anybody’s combination. I had purchased the secret of the statue at the price of his total antagonism.

  Most of the Christmas (Twelfth Night) service in Chostok church was just as dreary as all the others I’d attended and much the same. I suppose it’s true that the more spiritual people are, the less they want all the glossy trappings, their eyes being turned inwards and upwards. But it’s hard for non-spiritual people mixed up in these sessions because they miss all the inwardness and get left with nothing to look at - the windows were plain glass now, the chandeliers were naked light-bulbs and even the altar and pulpit had been removed -and nothing to listen to except the same old passages from the New Testament and devout statements which on the surface just sound trite.

  Fisher and I had arrived early to join five or six black-robed people - the inner-circle of the True Faith - in the church vestry. A lot of the guerrillas were in town too, their lorries parked in the streets round the square, themselves gathering - in a more disciplined way than on the night of the bonfire - in the square itself. About three-quarters of the men from our own barracks by the lake had accompanied us to Chostok. Everyone was in high spirits because of the news of the government climb-down and the hope that they might not after all have to fight again in the spring, but could return to their farms and families.

  We waited in the vestry in silence. Fisher and I had nothing more to say to one another and the black-robed people no more wanted to exchange small talk with me than I did with them. Immediately before the service was due to start Yelena joined us, escorted by Michael. She was wearing her white robe and headband and soft shoes, but her hair, of course, was still quite short. Her eyes looked tired and the skin over her cheek-bones tauter than usual - perhaps she had been fasting and praying all night. The black robes bowed to her and Fisher took her hand and kissed it. I was at the back of the group and wondered if I should do the same, but I didn’t want to copy Fisher and my feelings for Yelena were mixed: she had put me through my punishment course on the ‘moral dimension’ and I wasn’t sure I forgave her. So as she turned towards me I nodded in a neutral way and said:

  ‘Hello!’

  Yelena came straight towards me, holding out both hands. She took me by the upper arms, embraced me and kissed me on each cheek and then once more. I stood back in a daze when this was over, but not so much of a daze that I missed the expressions on Michael’s and Fisher’s faces. They hadn’t expected this any more than I had and hated it. Yelena didn’t smile - her face was very solemn - but her pale blue eyes were still looking steadily at mine as she stepped back. I wondered if she was trying to hypnotise me or if, not having communicated with Fisher, she assumed he’d accomplished his task and brought me to a holier frame of mind than she’d left me in. She made a sign to Fisher, who opened the vestry door - the little door he’d emerged from to save the statue all those months ago - and went through, followed by the black robes. We heard a collective sigh of anticipation from the people inside the church. Michael went next, with another unfriendly glance at me, then Yelena took my hand and led me through into the church.

  ‘I may speak of you, Karel,’ she said, very quietly, ‘if the moment is right. Be ready!’

  Holding her hand - child or lover, I hardly minded which - I was ready for anything, even Heaven.

  As we appeared hand-in-hand behind the little procession of Fisher, the black robes and Michael, the whole church-full, with a scraping of chairs, went on its knees. Yelena gestured for them to sit again and we took the empty seats reserved for us at the centre of the congregation. Then the service proceeded in its desultory, improvised way and I kept myself alert by observing faces - there was nothing else to look at. Yelena had instructed me once on the importance of reading faces and trying to determine not so much their immediate thoughts as their general character - reliable, obstinate, timid, rash, conceited, frivolous (I’d bowed in acknowledgment of those last three), etc. In this company I tried to decide what the proportion was of true believers to time-servers and reckoned it was about ten percent. But some of the time my attention lapsed and I just thought lazily of the woman beside me.

  After an hour or more, when a great many believers had had their say and the gaps between people standing up were growing longer, with some shuffling and coughing in the outer circles, two or three of the black robes said their pieces and then there was complete silence for a minute or so. Yelena stood up and the congregation knelt again. This time they stayed kneeling and she began to speak in short sentences, Ruritanian repeated in German, just as on the first occasion I’d seen her. She talked first, as most of them had, about the birth of Jesus in a stable and pointed out its significant simplicity and poverty in a world organised by and for the great people; but she didn’t talk for long and soon reached her conclusion:

  ‘. . . As well as cows and donkeys and sheep and shepherds and the carpenter Joseph, there were also kings at the birth of Jesus. These were the wise kings, the kings with knowledge and foresight, the kings who were good shepherds to their flocks. How many such kings do we have today, even if we call them presidents or prime ministers? How many kings who kneel at the cradle of Jesus in true humility and true faith? Dear people, we have such a king today in Karapata. I name him here before you all tonight in Chostok . . .’

  She turned and put both her hands on my head.

  ‘I name him Karel Rassendyll Elphberg, descendant in the direct line of Rudolf and Flavia, King-to-be of Ruritania.’

  Her hands on my head induced such a tingling glow of pleasure that I closed my eyes and wanted to fall asleep. When she took her hands away and I opened my eyes again I saw that many of the congregation were weeping, others staring at me with open mouths and expressions of awful devotion, and a few - forgetting they had abandoned Catholicism or Orthodoxy - were even crossing themselves. But now Yelena sat down and as she did so brushed my ear with her hand and whispered:

  ‘Speak, Karel! You must!’

  I glanced at Michael and Fisher, both of them staring grimly at the floor. With Michael it was obviously a simple case of envy, but I felt almost sorry for Fisher, surreptitiously mopping his nose with his handkerchief. Clearly his brief had been to prepare me for this -not to coach me in exactly what I should say, but to bring me to the point where I would rise spontaneously and declare myself for Jesus. He had failed miserably. Still, it was worse for me. What on earth was I to say? I rose slowly from my knees, as slowly as I dared, while my mind raced. I stood and looked round the whole congregation, waiting for inspiration in the total silence that had fallen. The open doors were packed too, with the soldiers from the square pressing to see first Yelena and now me. I gained more time by gesturing to everybody to get off their knees and sit down. When the noise had finally subsided and I could think of no more delaying tactics, I began to speak, using German and as much Rurit
anian as I could muster:

  ‘People tell me I look exactly like a waxwork. I feel like one too. Wax in the hands of . . .’

  I made an expressive, Devinsky-style gesture towards Yelena, stroking my hand upwards in the air to imply both her and her heavenly sponsors.

  ‘But I’ve no wish to speak of myself. There were three kings at the cradle of Jesus and there are three kings in Chostok tonight. The gift I bring is nothing but the blood of Queen Flavia. The gift Michael brings is more dependable and more necessary: the victorious Army of the True Faith . . .’

  I made a sweeping gesture from Michael - caught off-guard by the mention of his name and rapidly adjusting his expression to a friendly sneer - to the soldiers at the door.

  ‘And the gift Fisher brings is perhaps the most precious of all: the encouragement and still more the support of his own folk in the West . . .’

  Fisher, with his eyes watering, his nose running and his sodden handkerchief in his hand, looked like a rabbit crouched under a headlight, but he was more accustomed to public presentation than Michael and managed a more convincing smile.

  ‘And I want to tell you something else about Fisher. On the night this church was cleared of its Catholic ornaments there were those who made no distinction between one object and another. That wonderful statue of Our Lady of Chostok, which should not be seen as a religious icon worthy of destruction but as a work of art made by a great Ruritanian artist, was in danger of going on the fire. Fisher knew better. He saved Chostok’s greatest treasure at the risk of his own life. And he has kept it safely all this while against the day when it can be restored to Chostok. Not to the church, of course, where it would be out of place, but to the local museum, perhaps, where it will surely attract thousands of visitors from all over the world and help to ensure the future prosperity of this beautiful town. This is a kingly gift indeed.’

  Fisher’s attempt to keep his smile going for the benefit of the congregation, while trying to strike me dead with his eyes, told me clearly that he’d still hoped to outwit me and smuggle the statue out of the country. I turned and held out my hands to Michael and Fisher, made them rise to their feet, and stood between them with my arms round their shoulders.

  ‘Three kings in the service of the mother of Jesus . . .’ I said, knelt at Yelena’s feet, kissed her hand and passed the buck to her.

  21 Cobwebs and Dry Rot

  My speech didn’t make my number with the truly faithful. It wasn’t devotional enough. On the other hand, it went down very well with the majority of the citizens of Chostok and also pleased Michael and the soldiers, who received us with enthusiasm when we came out on the steps of the church after the service. Fisher was hostile, of course, but he had been before. As we returned from our reception in the square through the now empty church, he muttered in my ear:

  ‘Unforgivable!’

  Unforgivable that he’d exchanged mere earthly riches for the gratitude of a whole community? Moralising is not my style, so I simply said:

  ‘You should have prayed to the angel to give me a push.’

  Yelena’s attitude I couldn’t quite gauge. She said nothing but she didn’t seem annoyed with me. She was probably famished and exhausted and needed to recuperate after whatever harsh regime she’d imposed on herself in her retreat.

  We were going now, it turned out, not back to the chalet but to Previce Castle, where the main body of guerrillas was based. Fisher insisted on travelling in the 4X4 with Yelena, no doubt so as to give her a bad report on my studies. Michael, whose favour I had temporarily gained even if I’d permanently forfeited Fisher’s, offered me a place in the Range Rover. But I was reluctant to arrive back at the castle in the same car as I’d left, not from superstition, but to spare the Count’s feelings. I couldn’t avoid appearing to be on the wrong side as far as he was concerned, but I thought that sitting in the back of his stolen and damaged car with Michael would be a long-term error of image. So I accepted a lift in a lorry with Corporal Radichev and in this way I arrived, somewhat after the Range Rover, at the head of a convoy of guerrillas. As we all drew up in the courtyard of the castle and the soldiers spilled out round me, shaking my hand and patting me on the back, I glanced up at the tower and saw the Count and Vladek at a window on the first floor. I waved cheerily and the Count raised one finger in acknowledgment.

  The guerrillas were quartered in the main block of the castle, which was still essentially a prison, though the cell doors were open and the cells themselves partly domesticated into soldiers’ sleeping-quarters. They still had bars on the windows, but there were no bars on the windows of the suite of three large reception-rooms on the first-floor overlooking the cliff. They had been used as offices and rest-rooms for the prison-staff and were now the communal dining- and living-quarters of the guerrillas. Long trestle-tables were laid through all three rooms for a Christmas feast for several hundred. It wasn’t a sophisticated affair. The rooms were bare and dilapidated, their eighteenth-century proportions ruined by false ceilings cutting off the tops of the once-elegant pilasters, their cheap brown paint peeling, their grand marble fireplaces chipped and grimy, their folding double-doors sagging at the hinges. The food, with bottles of wine and beer and schnapps, was all plonked on the table anyhow and everybody helped themselves greedily in the Slav-style. There was no particular seating-plan. Yelena (the only woman present) and I sat together in the third room, with our backs to the windows, and I had the regular army corporal from Kapitsa on my other side. Corporal Radichev and several of the guerrillas from the Sebrikov contingent were opposite me, but Michael and Fisher and Vakisch were in other rooms.

  Yelena ate a little and drank tea, but she was evidently almost at the end of her energy.

  ‘Fisher thinks we should have nothing more to do with you,’ she said.

  ‘He gave me a hard time,’ I said.

  ‘He was meant to.’

  ‘I think he suffered a bit himself.’

  ‘A teacher expects to with a difficult pupil. We were both aware of your problems, but we didn’t imagine you were also a bully.’

  That seemed unjust. He had been put in to bully me, surely, but I had got the better of him.

  ‘You probably regret laying your hands on my head in the church,’ I said. ‘You should have had a word with Fisher first.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘He’d have told you I didn’t make the grade in social psychology, you wouldn’t have made me stand up and speak and Fischer would have been spared my revelation about the statue.’

  ‘He never mentioned the statue. He just thought you weren’t up to the job.’

  I told her then the whole story of the statue. She wasn’t - Fisher had been right about that - at all interested in where it might be now or even whether it was of any value, but she still tried to resist seeing Fisher in any but the best light and clung to his explanation of the deal he’d suggested to the Count. It came out in the course of her defence of him - probably only because she was tired and off-guard - that her ‘retreat’ had been in a house rented by Fisher near Chostok and she ‘knew him too well to believe him capable of any selfish motive’.

  ‘How long have you known him?’

  ‘Some years.’

  ‘So this isn’t his first visit to Ruritania?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  I saw now - or thought I saw - a great light on the origins of Our Lady of Chostok - the one sitting beside me, not the statue. But I didn’t press her any further, I thought it better to let her marinade for a while in doubts about Fisher. Instead I changed the subject and asked what her plans were. Would she, I asked hopefully, resume my education in the chalet beside the lake?

  ‘We’ll talk about that tomorrow,’ she said.

  It sounded like a rebuke and I wondered if Fisher had already done me more damage in her eyes than I could do him. At this point the corporal on my right, who had been busy so far piling into food and drink, leant across me and said to Yelena:


  ‘We’ve got to go back to Kapitsa now, you know.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Not now now,’ he said, ‘not tonight, but tomorrow or the day after at the latest.’

  She looked very put out.

  ‘But I rely on you, corporal. You and driver Orlin and the car.’

  ‘I understand that,’ he said. ‘But now that the mutiny’s over we’ll be posted deserters if we don’t get back to barracks with the jeep.’

  ‘I see. I never thought of that.’

  She became silent and withdrawn. I pressed her to eat more or at least try a glass of wine.

  ‘No thank you, Karel.’

  ‘I’ve never seen you depressed,’ I said. ‘Is it my fault?’

  ‘Always thinking of yourself,’ she said. ‘No, it’s many things, of which you are only one small part.’

  ‘Smaller than the loss of the colonel’s jeep?’

  ‘About the same.’

  ‘You rate an unsuitable king about the same as a temporary transport problem?’

  ‘You’re not an unsuitable king, Karel. On the contrary.’

  She put her hand on my arm.

  ‘This will only increase your self-love, I’m afraid, but if one criticises one should also praise. When you stood up in the church between Michael and Fisher, it was obvious to everyone who was the real king. I regret your weaknesses - but at least you know what they are. Fisher is quite wrong in saying you’re not up to the job. If you never come to do it, that will be one of the many wrong turnings of history.’

  She removed her hand. Forgetting my contract entirely, I put my arm round her shoulder and clumsily kissed her cheek. She didn’t fight me off, as I half expected, but received the kiss stoically and then gently removed my arm.

  ‘I must go now,’ she said and got to her feet.

  Corporal Radichev and his companions across the table, who had watched me put my arm round her and kiss her and raised their glasses encouragingly, also got to theirs, begging her not to go. I rose too and the effect rippled down all the tables in all three rooms, so that the whole company stood up, not knowing why, with their glasses in their hands.