After Zenda

by John Spurling

  The landscape round Vlod is a wasteland of industrial development. When the communists came to power in Strelsau after the Second War they looked at the ancient farming lands of Plotla, studied the methods of Stalin, the Great Leader, and drew up a series of plans for improving yields, providing modern machinery and housing the workers. Then they ordered factories built to manufacture tractors, cranes, harvesters, fertilisers and building materials and sat back to await spectacular results. Since everybody got paid simply for being employed and the only incentive to the managers was siphoning off funds for themselves and rising up the system by providing illusory productivity statistics, the results were indeed spectacular: comprehensive pollution, acres of shoddily-built, obsolete factories and housing blocks and the ruination of thousands of square miles of good agricultural land.

  In post-communist Plotla the few remaining farmers continue to cultivate their fields with spades and hoes and hand-held ploughs and they carry their stunted crops in horse- or ox-drawn carts. Amongst all this desolation the only fully functional and up-to-date institution is Vlod Hospital. Financed by international aid, newly equipped and expanded by the post-communist democracy, visited by distinguished foreign specialists, this hospital is at the sharp end of modern research into the poisonous effects and experimental treatment of ‘Soviet sickness’.

  The first tests on Yelena were inconclusive, but she seemed so much recovered after a blood-transfusion that I wondered if she was seriously ill at all. I found her in a ward crowded with the apathetic casualties of my namesake’s vision of the future. She was propped up against the pillows reading a book in Russian.

  ‘They asked me for your next-of-kin,’ I said.

  ‘I have an aunt in Kiev,’ she said.

  ‘I was tempted to say Jesus,’ I said, ‘but I thought you’d prefer to remain anonymous, so I just gave my own name.’

  She put down her book and looked at me inscrutably for a while.

  ‘It was kind of you to bring me all the way here, Karel.’

  ‘Not at all. I came as a favour to myself.’

  ‘You don’t have to sit here and talk to me if you don’t want to.’

  ‘What else should I want?’

  ‘It must be boring for you without somebody to play with on the bed.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Magda and I thought you were asleep.’

  ‘You have no obligations to me, as you said yourself.’

  ‘It was insensitive, I realise that. I can only say I’m sorry.’

  She pointed to my leg, pulled up sideways on the bed.

  ‘Did she sew your trousers for you?’

  I told her then about Fisher’s attempt to knife me in the watch-tower. When I’d finished she was silent for some time, with her eyes lowered so that I thought she might be falling asleep.

  ‘The statue anyway,’ I said, ‘is safe. I saw them bringing it into the castle next morning.’

  She still said nothing and I switched to the subject of Kapitsa. The barracks, I told her, had been overrun, with many casualties, and the Second Regiment had finally surrendered. The surviving officers were awaiting trial. I saw then that she was crying.

  ‘Yelena,’ I said, ‘I should never have told you this. It was completely-stupid. Insensitive again. It was only because I’m used to thinking of you as so tough, as responsible for everything . . .’

  ‘I am responsible, Karel. For everything, as you say. For believing in Fisher. For believing what he told me about myself and my mission. For telling people what was not true, for leading them into disaster. And for Kapitsa.’

  ‘People have some responsibility for themselves,’ I said. ‘Or do you think they’re just Gadarene pigs, ready to jump off any precipice if you tell them to? On the other hand, it’s true you made me really believe I could be king of Ruritania.’

  ‘That’s one thing I can’t take all the responsibility for.’

  ‘I think you must,’ I said, moving closer to her and taking her hand, which was wet with the tears she’d been wiping off her face.

  ‘If I’d never met you I’m sure I’d have got discouraged and left the country long ago.’

  ‘You’ll have to do that now. What’s the alternative? When the spring comes they’ll easily drive Michael out of the mountains.’

  ‘Unless we can surprise them.’

  ‘Karel, you must be realistic. The Ruritanian Army may have only three squadrons of aircraft and perhaps ten tanks and a few howitzers, but that is more than enough against people with none of these things.’

  ‘Supposing we found friends who did have these things?’

  ‘British? Americans? French? Which of them would support Slavs against Germans in order to turn a democracy into a kingdom?’

  ‘I was thinking of your own countrymen and our neighbours, the Ukrainians.’

  She blew her nose with a handkerchief from under the pillow and slowly shook her head.

  ‘They’d be mad to get involved and never would. They have troubles enough of their own.’

  ‘including their own soldiers. About ten miles from here there’s a whole regiment of Cossacks waiting to go back to a country that doesn’t want them, has nowhere to house them and nothing for them to do.’

  She smiled, looked interested for a moment, then shook her head again.

  ‘It’s a clever thought, Karel, but . . .’

  ‘Five or six hundred of them, according to the corporal, with up to sixty tanks and some artillery. They wouldn’t have to fight, only move in the wrong direction - from the Ruritanian Army’s point of view.’

  ‘They couldn’t do that without orders from Ukraine.’

  ‘That depends, doesn’t it? On what they think of their bosses and how bored they are with doing nothing and having nothing in prospect. Why not ask them, at least? Why don’t you ask them - in their language? They only have to move west instead of east and if they wanted to stay - Ruritania may have more to offer them than Ukraine.’

  ‘You remember what Machiavelli says about mercenaries and auxiliaries: unprofitable and dangerous ?’

  ‘Yes, but how does he define them? Those forces which are not the prince’s own, neither his subjects, his citizens nor his servants. I think we should ask the Cossacks to become citizens of Ruritania.’

  ‘This would be a terrible risk, Karel.’

  She was looking tired again and didn’t want to argue any more. I left the hospital and went to meet the corporal and driver for a drink and cheap meal. It threatened to be our last, since we were all out of cash and it looked as if we might have to flog the 4X4, which the others had spent the day repainting a violent yellow.

  The news from Strelsau was mixed. After noisy scenes in parliament during which the Slav deputies demanded the sacking and trial of the generals responsible both for this latest atrocity and the previous one, the junior minister who had promised an inquiry resigned.

  The prime minister, however, refused to be held responsible. The minister’s promise, he claimed, had not been endorsed by the government, which regarded the Kapitsa mutiny as an army matter. No government, he said, could make such promises under duress and he had always maintained that the mutineers would have to release their hostages before there could be any talk of an inquiry. True, they had released them, but the government was still considering its response when the army decided to seize the barracks. This was a purely military decision and the generals had been quite within their rights: no army could make terms with mutineers. Regardless of the rights or wrongs of the mutineers’ demands, mutiny had to be suppressed and punished or all army discipline would be at an end.

  He conceded, however, that there was some confusion between the political and military aspects of this ‘complicated case’ and he proposed to start a fresh inquiry into the whole affair which would ‘subsume under its remit’ the original inquiry into the Kapitsa Atrocity. Meanwhile, the trial of the captured officers would be postponed and the prime minister hoped this would provide a breathing-s
pace and a chance to draw back from ‘unleashing ethnic hatred’. He meant, presumably, that there was a real danger of civil war or at least of Plotla and Karapata splitting off from Strelsau, as Slovakia had split off from the Czechs.

  So the prime minister wriggled free and the hard-line generals remained in control of the army. The President stayed above it all. No one suggested that he had endorsed the handing-over of the hostages in return for an inquiry. When I visited Yelena next day I pressed her about the promise on the phone to the officers of the Second Regiment.

  ‘Was this the man himself speaking or just somebody in his office?’

  ‘It was Slobodjak himself. They demanded to speak to him personally and at last he did come to the phone and the officer recognised his voice. Otherwise I would never have advised them to release the hostages.’

  ‘Then if this could be proved . . .’

  ‘How could it?’

  Yelena was so much recovered that she was out of bed and we were talking in a small visitors’ lounge next to the ward. On the walls were coloured photographs of sunny Rumania: Zenda Castle, a rural landscape from Plotla and the Sebrikov dam in the mountains of Karapata. We sat in plastic armchairs drawn up close together so as not to have to raise our voices. Yelena wore a long hospital nightdress - some cheap cotton material printed with small pink roses, but her dressing-gown was her own white one, which I’d last caught a glimpse of in the gallery of the Sebrikov chalet. Her shoes were the soft white ones she’d used for her appearances before the faithful in Chostok. The improvement in her health and these mixed reminders of the history of our relationship had a powerful effect on me. She was both the Yelena I’d known and a new one I wasn’t yet sure of -somebody less authoritative, more approachable. Perhaps it was I that had changed. I wasn’t the pupil now or part of an entourage. Our relationship was more equal.

  ‘There’s a money problem,’ I said. ‘We’re going to have to sell the car to pay for our rooms and food.’

  ‘I have a little money still,’ she said, ‘which I’ll give you. But don’t sell the car. I want to visit the Cossacks in a day or two.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘The consultant here is a good friend of their Colonel and has promised me an introduction.’

  ‘Am I to go too?’

  ‘Not immediately. But I must have my own vehicle and driver and bodyguard before putting my head into this lions’ den. It’s a question of status. People who have escaped from the Soviet system are very conscious of status. Above all, if you should pay them a visit later, as King Karel, you don’t want to turn up in a taxi.’

  ‘I couldn’t afford one. But I must warn you that Orlin and the corporal have painted the colonel’s car yellow.’

  ‘Yellow?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. They said it was the cheapest colour they could get.’

  ‘A good yellow?’

  ‘Buttercup? Dandelion? I’m not good at colours. No, it’s more the colour of the chemical cloud over Vlod.’

  ‘Shall we call it royal yellow ?’ she said.

  Yelena’s money wasn’t enough to last us more than a few days. However my original rucksack - which I’d rejoined at Previce Castle and brought to V!od - contained not only Hackney Library’s copy of The Prince but also Colonel Danzing’s authorization for my weekly allowance from the bank in Strelsau. I tried it on the bank’s branch in Vlod, but they said it had to be drawn in Strelsau. It was very likely, of course, that Colonel Danzing would have stopped the allowance altogether. On the other hand, he might not have bothered - I’d drawn nothing after the first week and the next he’d heard of me I’d been waiting to be shot. Failing the bank, I would have to find Vladek or the Count and borrow from them. There was some risk, of course, in going to Strelsau. I might run into Grabenau or one of the ex-hostages from Kapitsa and be recognised as the escaped terrorist Ed Fenton/Karl Berg. Still, the risk of running out of money completely was greater. I bought a cheap and nasty grey fur hat (synthetic, not an ex-cat) to disguise my hair and a train ticket to Strelsau and went.

  Strelsau was under a cloud of black rain - ‘Communist Five-Year-Plan rain’ or ‘Stalin’s rain’, as a student I met in the station bar called it. I asked him what he thought about events in Kapitsa and he told me it was no more than the next segment of the wheel of history.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The generals will take over now. After communism, democracy; after democracy, the junta.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘Dictatorship. The biggest general will seize power.’

  ‘You really believe that?’

  He shrugged. He didn’t much care. He was cynical. He’d emerged from school, he said, in a cloud of euphoria at believing himself part of the free world, only to discover that his part of the free world was an impoverished slum and that if he really wanted to be free he’d have to cheat his way into the rich part.

  Colonel Danzing hadn’t cancelled my drawing-power at the bank, but I wasn’t so foolish as to demand the whole sum available. In the first place I might be robbed and in the second place I didn’t want the cashier consulting the manager and starting an investigation into my credentials. For the same reason I rejected my first idea of asking them to extend the drawing power to their branch in Vlod. I took the money mostly in dollars, since the kruna had devalued catastrophically since I’d last been in Strelsau.

  After buying myself an umbrella against Stalin’s rain and some new clothes and stationery, I found a cafe and settled down to compose a coded message from Machiavelli informing Colonel Danzing I was still alive. I congratulated him on resigning his embassy under a corrupt government but hoped he would soon resume it under a grateful king and I asked him to apologise on my behalf to Open Sesame, the business magazine to which I had so far sent no copy at all. Understanding business opportunities in Ruritania, I explained, required a lot of background knowledge, which I had been busy acquiring. The passage I chose for my code began on page 110:

  A prince, therefore, who is wise and prudent, cannot or ought not to keep his parole, when the keeping of it is to his prejudice, and the causes for which he promised removed. Were men all good this doctrine was not to be taught, but because they are wicked and not likely to be punctual with you, you are not obliged to any such strictness with them; nor was there ever any prince that wanted lawful pretence to justify his breach of promise . . . Let a prince, therefore, do what he can to preserve his life, and continue his supremacy, the means which he uses shall be thought honourable, and be commended by everybody; because the people are always taken with the appearance and event of things, and the greatest part of the world consists of the people . . .

  When I’d finished I used the cafe’s phone to ring the BBC’s office in Strelsau and asked for Clare Studebaker. ‘Who’s speaking?’

  ‘A friend of Ed Fenton, the English journalist.’

  ‘She’s not available at the moment. Have you any message?’

  ‘She may or may not be aware that Fenton went missing in Karapata some months ago and I have some very hot news for her. I’ll be waiting outside the Cathedral at half past three. She must not inform the police, but I’ve no objection if she brings a minder or two from your office to stay at a distance and keep an eye on the encounter.’

  There was a risk, of course, that they might inform the police, but I thought it more likely Clare Studebaker would prefer a story to an arrest.

  It was still raining as I waited on the cathedral steps. A few people went in and out and hurried through the square, but the weather was too dismal for there to be any other loiterers. I was beginning to stamp my feet and think about giving up, when a white Citroen stopped at the far side of the square. After a few minutes Clare Studebaker got out, put up her umbrella and walked fastidiously across the wet cobbles. She was dressed in a double-breasted black raincoat with black leggings and her umbrella was scarlet. I raised and lowered my own umbrella a few times to show I was the person she was looking
for.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ I said in English when she stopped at a cautious distance.

  ‘I know your voice,’ she said. ‘Where have I seen you before?’

  ‘At the President’s Palace,’ I said, ‘upside-down. But I wasn’t wearing a hat.’

  ‘The message I got was from a journalist called Ed Fenton. I checked with the Embassy and they said there were rumours he was in Karapata with the rebels.’

  ‘He was,’ I said, ‘but now he’s standing in front of you.’

  I pulled out my passport, flipped it open and showed her the photo with the shaven head. She still looked dubious and showed signs of bolting, less from fear that I might assault her than that I might be wasting her time. Her mouth was tight with self-importance and her eye hard with suspicion that I wasn’t important enough.

  ‘What do you want to tell me?’

  ‘I can tell you a lot of things,’ I said, ‘but not now. The story I have for you - and it’s quite free - is simply this: when the officers of the Second Regiment in Kapitsa handed over their hostages at Christmas, they did so only because they were promised by the President himself- on the phone - that there would be an immediate inquiry into the Kapitsa Atrocity and that the barracks would not be attacked. As you know, that promise was broken and no word has got out that the President personally made it.’

  ‘What’s your evidence?’

  ‘My evidence comes directly from the officers themselves, but they’re obviously in no position to substantiate it. The only other person who could do that would be the President. I’m suggesting you ask him.’

  ‘What’s your motive for telling me this?’

  ‘Somebody’s lying - or at least omitting to tell the truth,’ I said. ‘I’d hate to think it was the good and honourable President Slobodjak. On the other hand, I’ve met these officers myself- in fact I owe my life to them - and if they say they spoke to the President, I’m inclined to believe them.’

  ‘If he did make that promise,’ she said, ‘he’s in dire trouble. I doubt if he could admit it.’