After Zenda

by John Spurling

  ‘But if he did, what then?’

  ‘A constitutional crisis, I should think. Something would have to give: the government, the Minister of Defence, the Chief of Staff or the President himself - or the whole bunch of them.’

  ‘So ask him and see! And if he denies it - you’re a very distinguished and experienced journalist, Ms Studebaker - just take note of how he denies it and see if you believe him!’

  With that I inclined my head, bobbed my umbrella and hurried away - paying her back for the way she’d walked off on me in the palace square, but more importantly, I hoped, leaving my message to fester in her mind, like a piece of shrapnel in a wound. I’d have liked to get to know her better over coffee or a drink, but I couldn’t risk removing my hat, being recognised as a Rassendyll and giving her another story which I wasn’t yet ready for the world to know.

  24 The Cavalry

  The original Cossacks came west with Genghis Khan. They were Tatars on horses. Until the Russian Revolution in 1917 they lived in self-governing communities called ‘hosts’ in Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania and Poland - the mutual borders of those countries came and went like ectoplasm - and contracted their military services to Polish kings or Russian Tsars or their enemies. The Cossack hosts operated a system of compulsory military service (starting at 18 and lasting twenty years) more Spartan than the Spartans’. In the 16th century the Polish kings invited them in as military colonists to protect their borders and in the 19th and early 20th centuries the Tsars used them to quell revolutions. Most Cossacks fought for the Whites in the civil war after the Russian Revolution and Lenin abolished all their privileges. Stalin first forcibly collectivised them and then allowed them to form cavalry divisions within the Soviet army. The deal I was proposing to offer this particular group of them was like every other deal they’d ever made in their long history of semi-independence within other people’s territories.

  Yelena gave me these facts when I got back from Strelsau. She’d driven in the pollution yellow 4x4 to their barracks outside Vlod, talked to Colonel Stavrilev and discovered that the whole regiment was infuriated by the events in Kapitsa. They sided, naturally, with the Slavs and couldn’t understand why the Slav elements in the Ruritanian Army didn’t beat the hell out of the German elements. They had not appreciated that the heavy weapons were all on the German side.

  ‘Perhaps they could borrow yours,’ Yelena said jokingly to the Colonel and told him of the guerrilla activities in Karapata. ‘But they too only have small arms and will be lucky to survive beyond the spring.’

  Stavrilev was sympathetic, but the mention of spring depressed him. That was the date fixed for his own regiment’s return to Ukraine and he thought that, bad as their conditions were in the run-down barracks near Vlod, they would be far worse off when they got home and had to crowd into barracks already occupied by other regiments. There would be resentment and hostility on both sides and for him personally life would be a perpetual misery of resolving quarrels, punishing his own men and alternately mollifying and trying to screw concessions out of the army bureaucracy above him.

  Yelena shifted the discussion to history and listened to Stavrilev’s account of Cossack heroism through the centuries before pitching in with a potted version of Ruritanian history, in particular the romantic story of how the kingdom was saved a century ago by a visiting Englishman who happened to be the King’s distant cousin and double. Stavrilev was intrigued and wanted to know what happened to the Queen and her gentleman Englishman afterwards. Yelena told him and then revealed that Rudolf Rassendyll’s great-grandson was even now in Rumania to claim his great-grandmother’s kingdom. Stavrilev liked that idea but assumed it would be equally unwelcome to democrats and Slavs. Yelena said he was partly right and partly wrong. The would-be King was indeed claiming a German inheritance, but he had actually fought in the ranks of the Slav guerrillas and been under sentence of death at Kapitsa before his identity was recognised and he was rescued. It was in fact this very rescue which had led to the latest atrocity. Furthermore, she said, she knew the man quite well and he was at present staying incognito in Vlod. Would the Colonel care to meet him?

  The upshot was that I was invited to dinner in the officers’ mess in a week’s time. Yelena insisted, however, that I would be coming only as plain Mr Karel Berg, since it was vital that no rumour of my existence should seep out either to the Ruritanian government or the authorities in Ukraine. She made this stipulation, she told me, partly for the reasons of security she gave the Colonel, but partly also because she thought I lacked the clothes to be anything but incognito.

  Yelena was back in bed, completely exhausted by her expedition to the Cossacks, but buoyed up by her success. She seemed to have forgotten any reservations she’d originally had about the risks. She was delighted by the sheer effrontery of the idea, its historical aptness - given the Cossacks’ long history of riding in to the rescue of kings - and the revival, after near despair, of her own hopes for the Slav people of Ruritania. But she didn’t mention either her mission for the True Faith or her illness. The two probably went together.

  ‘I’m just tired,’ she said, when I asked if she knew any more about what was wrong with her.

  ‘But you’re having more tests?’

  ‘Of course. You can’t stay in this hospital without having tests. It’s their raison d’être.’

  I kissed her forehead as I left. It was clammy. Her eyes looked deeper in their sockets, with dark patches underneath. The doctor told me he knew nothing for certain yet, but he hoped for the best and would be giving her another transfusion.

  Clare Studebaker did me proud. She obtained a televised interview with the President to ask him about the minister’s resignation and the crisis over Kapitsa; and when he’d served up some bland pudding to the same recipe as the prime minister’s, she suddenly asked him point-blank if it was true that the mutineers had released their hostages only against his personal promise of an inquiry and no assault on the barracks.

  This interview was not, of course, broadcast in Ruritania and I didn’t discover its exact contents until later, when Clare showed me a transcript which left no doubt whatever that my bomb had exploded and blown off the great man’s trousers. He admitted he’d spoken to an officer in the barracks, but denied making the promises attributed to him. Why, then, Clare pressed him, did the mutineers release the hostages? Perhaps they had misunderstood him, was the feeble reply.

  ‘A fatal misunderstanding for them, Mr President, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It was unfortunate. But you should reserve some of your sympathy, Mrs Studebaker, for the officers they were holding hostage. Mutiny, you know, is a terrible crime which no state can be lenient to. I wonder how you think the British would have dealt with this affair? Would they have sent in the SAS?’

  ‘Are you suggesting, Mr President, that even if you had made such a promise and not kept it, that would have been justified in the circumstances?’

  ‘I am certainly saying no such thing.’

  ‘To break a promise of that sort would be wrong in any circumstances?’

  ‘Obviously. One doesn’t have to be a philosopher to know that.’

  ‘But should a philosopher of all people speak in such a confused way on such a crucial matter that he can be fatally misunderstood?’

  What a terrier!

  ‘I reject that adjective - confused . I may be an old man, Mrs Studebaker, but I assure you I still have a very clear head. It’s possible, of course, that over a long distance line, speaking to an officer understandably wrought up, my speech might be less clear.’

  He was pressing every public sympathy button he could see - probably at this point rattling his false teeth.

  ‘So it was a question of their not hearing what you said?’

  ‘Not hearing it correctly, I suppose. Since I was not on the receiving end, I can hardly say what they did or did not hear. I’m afraid they must have leapt to unjustified conclusions.’

  ‘But yo
u gave them no firm promise?’

  ‘I’ve already said so.’

  ‘No promise of any sort?’

  ‘I have answered your question, Mrs Studebaker.’

  Although Ruritania in general was not permitted to see this interview, its contents filtered back immediately into parliament and the President’s hitherto cast-iron feet began to turn to clay, at least so far as the Slav deputies were concerned. One of them actually suggested that the President seemed to be a hostage himself to German interests and the military high command.

  For my appointment with the Cossacks I wore the new clothes I’d bought in Strelsau, a black polo-neck sweater and trousers with a vaguely English tweed jacket to offset the fascist impression. Incognito I may have been, but Colonel Stavrilev didn’t let that cramp his style. Our pollution- (or royal-) yellow 4X4, with the corporal up front next to the driver and Yelena - restored by her latest transfusion - and me behind, no sooner appeared at the entrance to the camp than the gates were opened, the guards stamped and saluted, and we swept through into the barrack square to find the Colonel with his senior officers and a guard of honour awaiting us outside the mess. The Colonel himself was a handsome clean-shaven man, heavily-built and heavily-medalled, wearing one of those enormous Russian peaked caps designed to keep snow off the shoulders as well as the face, and spoke a little English. He had a loud, encouraging laugh and it was immediately obvious that if he might prove useful to me, I was his answer to prayer - a completely new and unexpected factor which suddenly introduced colour and space into the dreary grey perspective that boxed him in.

  We drank quantities of vodka in the mess bar and were on back-slapping terms even before we filed in to dine at the head of a long table where all the regiment’s officers were assembled. Yelena drank nothing and made hardly any personal contribution to the conversation. She seemed to see her role purely as that of interpreter. The officers treated her with deference and admiration, but only as a beautiful woman, not as a person possessing any power of her own. This was odd to me, not least because she herself seemed to accept completely their estimate of her as my side-kick. She was conserving her energy, no doubt, and she knew her countrymen better than I did. To them she was the engineer’s daughter from Kiev, not the semi-divine leader of a holy war, and she wanted the Cossacks to be impressed by me without reference to her.

  As we sat at the head of the table, on either side of Colonel Stavrilev, I looked across at her and couldn’t help smiling with pleasure. Many of the officers down the table did the same from time to time - it was a kind of aesthetic and possessive pleasure -they were all happy to be in the company of this attractive person. For me, of course, it was much more. I had come with her, would go away with her, she was my friend and ally. Also, she smiled back at me in the same spirit, not like a teacher approving of the way I had learned my lessons nor even in polite acknowledgment of my smile, but openly, collusively, as if she too was genuinely happy to be sitting opposite me. Colonel Stavrilev intercepted this smile and put his own interpretation on it.

  ‘Queen!’ he said to me in English, putting his hand on my shoulder, ‘I sink you have Ukrainian Queen.’

  I could feel the blood flooding up into my face.

  ‘King first,’ I said. ‘One step at a time.’

  Colonel Stavrilev turned to Yelena and asked a question in their own language, putting his other hand on her shoulder as if he meant to draw us together into his substantial embrace. Yelena, amused by the way I’d blushed and not at all put out herself, made some throwaway answer. The Colonel laughed loudly and translated into English for my benefit.

  ‘She sinks exactly same,’ he said, ‘One sing first.’ Then he turned to Yelena and made some further remark in Ukrainian, ordering her, with mock severity, to translate it into German. She hesitated.

  ‘Prosho, Yelena Andrivivna!’ he said, pretending to be angry.

  ‘When a man and a woman have exactly the same opinion,’ she said, ‘it means they are in love.’

  She looked at me steadily with a straight face.

  Tm not sure whether this is folk wisdom,’ she added, ‘or the Colonel’s own.’

  ‘Yelena Andriyivna,’ I said, and then in Ruritanian, ‘I am certainly in love with you.’

  ‘You’ve been in love with so many,’ she said, ‘especially in Ruritanian.’

  ‘What is reply?’ asked the Colonel in English, ‘She takes you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘she thinks I’m not serious.’

  ‘Not serious?’ he said, shocked and, not quite sure if he’d understood the word, turned again to Yelena: ‘Ne seryozno?’

  Yelena, still smiling, shook her head.

  ‘Tak, doozhe seryozno,’ he said, and removing his hands from our shoulders banged himself violently on the chest with them like a cartoon gorilla. ‘Ya znayoo!’

  ‘He says he knows,’ she translated into German, ‘that you are very serious. But of course he doesn’t know you as well as I do and I consider it’s better he should think of you as very serious, so I will not correct him.’

  We went on to talk about the Kapitsa affair and I told the Colonel that it seemed likely the President intended a peaceful resolution but was pre-empted by the military and now implicated in their action. Did this mean, the Colonel asked, that the country would split apart? I said I hoped not, since the majority of Germans were moderate and such a small country could hardly hope to survive by dividing itself. The main problem now, I suggested, was that the once cohesive influence of the President, with his impeccable background as opponent and former victim of the communists, was being eroded by his new attachment to the hard-liners. Ruritania needed a genuine national leader who would stand up to the extremists on both sides and attract loyalty from all the rest. Colonel Stavrilev nodded at Yelena to show this squared with what she’d already told him and then suddenly stood up with his glass in his hand. Everyone else stood up too, but the Colonel gently pushed me down again.

  ‘Our distinguished guest!’ he said. ‘Karel Berg!’

  They all drank to me and sat down.

  ‘Now you,’ said Yelena.

  I rose and raised my glass.

  ‘Cossacks!’ I said, ‘Colonel Stavrilev!’

  But as I began to sit down again, Yelena said quietly:

  ‘You must tell them now what you want. These are not ordinary soldiers. They are a community as well as a regiment. They make their decisions together, even though the Colonel is their leader.’

  ‘Another improvised speech?’ I said. ‘You’ve done this to me before. And this time I’ve had too much to drink.’

  ‘So have they. Just tell them what you want! There will be no better opportunity.’

  I looked down the lines of bemedalled uniforms and the staring faces, mostly flushed, mostly young; many, but not all, with the characteristic Tatar cheekbones, some with thick moustaches, all with short-clipped hair. I had a sense of absurdity, even fear. What if they refused? That would be disappointing, perhaps humiliating, probably the end of my Ruritanian adventure. But what if they accepted? I would be declaring war on a state, I would be hijacking the troops and equipment of a major power, I would be leading the descendants of Genghis Khan’s and Stalin’s hordes westward again.

  Up to now I had dived and shimmied, popped up and popped down again, skirted other people’s quarrels and causes, put my crown on and taken it off again like an actor between the stage and the wings. But if they accepted, I was cast for ever as King Karel -most likely failed-King Karel or ex-King Karel or even dead King Karel - but undoubtedly serious King Karel. I glanced at Yelena and remembered her letter - what she’d said about the difference between Rudolf Rassendyll and Queen Flavia. Of course he’d slid away - what else could he do? - and of course I should do the same. I looked just like him, I was just like him, I felt at that moment as if I actually was him. Privileged, idle, detached Englishmen don’t thrust themselves permanently into other people’s squalid realities, they do their b
it (Nil Quae Feci), retire gracefully, casually to their island and leave the natives to strangle themselves in their insoluble and incomprehensible feuds.

  I started to sit down and glanced once more, with a deprecating look of apology, at Yelena. She had turned absolutely white and was leaning forward, staring at me with an expression I recognised from the train journey to Kapitsa - that moment when she’d come back to the compartment and found me searching her bag for something to eat. ‘Are you a thief?’ she’d said - or something like it - with angry contempt. That was more or less what she was saying now, a thousand times more contemptuously, without moving her lips but with the whole force of her personality directed - the laser effect recommended by my gym-instructor Andrzej - through her pale eyes: ‘Are you a coward?’

  Halfway between sitting down and standing up again I almost lost my balance and had to steady myself by grabbing the outsize shoulder-tab of the officer sitting on my right.

  ‘I’m not completely drunk,’ I said, ‘even on your royal hospitality. I’ll explain why I staggered when I’ve first told you a story.’

  The story was that of Rudolf Rassendyll and Queen Flavia and his decision not to remain King. Then I told them how I’d discovered my own lineage and come to Ruritania for the first time. All this Yelena translated sentence by sentence, so I kept it short and simple.

  ‘The reason I staggered,’ I said, ‘was this: I was torn between the ghosts of my ancestors rising up inside me. The ghost of Rudolf Rassendyll told me to make the same decision as he did: not to wear a false crown. But the ghost of Queen Flavia told me that my crown would be hers: the true one crushed by German tanks in 1940. And then, as I leant for support on this gentleman next to me, I realised that the decision was not mine at all. I shall never wear any crown - true or false - without your help. What German tanks destroyed only Cossack tanks can replace. And if that’s what you decide to do, then your reward will be your own land and village in Ruritania and your own self-governing status subject only to the authority of the crown you restore.