After Zenda

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After Zenda Page 31

by John Spurling


  ‘More or less.’

  ‘If it had been more or less by even a few minutes,’ she said, ‘you’d surely be dead.’

  I grunted vaguely. It was too soon yet to go into my later identity. Clare asked me about the True Faith. What did these people actually believe? I explained that it was a very basic form of Christianity.

  ‘Not fanatics, then?’

  ‘No. Except about church furniture.’

  ‘I’ve heard that they believe Christ or his mother returns to earth from time to time.’

  ‘They do, but it’s a strictly human form of reincarnation. No miracles, for instance.’

  ‘I’ve even heard that the Virgin Mary has made appearances in Karapata.’

  ‘You can ask them about that when you see them.’

  The foot-hills were now completely clear of snow and there were snowdrops and other small early spring flowers beginning to show in sheltered places. The people we passed on farms or in occasional villages stopped what they were doing and stared after us. We parked beside the road at the top of a rise and paced about in the cold wind, eating sandwiches and drinking cans of beer while we stretched our legs. We had brought enough rations for the six of us for two days in case we were really going to a starving town. Perhaps we should have brought an aid convoy, but the people in the villages looked healthy enough. It was sunny as well as cold and there was a spectacular view of the mountains ahead. The country here was mostly open - crops and pasture, with sheep and cows grazing.

  ‘This place could be a tourist paradise,’ said Clare, ‘if people knew about it. It’s so unspoiled.’

  Wearing an expensive black leather outfit, but with sensible flat shoes, she looked, as she sounded, the quintessential townee out for a weekend in the country and didn’t seem to be aware of the fatal contradiction in what she’d said. She asked me what had brought me to Ruritania in the first place. I told her I was here to tell the readers of Open Sesame about business opportunities.

  ‘They must be really dragging the pond,’ she said in her most arrogant voice. The only businessmen who’d look for opportunities in this place would be those who couldn’t make it in Hungary or Poland or Prague. Ruritania is the back of beyond.’

  ‘What brought you here, then?’

  ‘They asked me to go to Dresden,’ she said, ‘to cover neo-Nazis, but one can get sidelined in the obvious places just as much as in the sticks. Somebody, I mean, can be filling the screen from Albania when the girl in Paris or Berlin is eating her heart out. What decided me to opt for Ruritania was the story about Rudolf Rassendyll being re-buried in the cathedral. I thought there must be more to come - I loved the books when I was a child. But I’m afraid I guessed wrong - there’s only small-town politics.’

  ‘You did well with the President,’ I said, ‘and you may turn up something better yet.’

  ‘Can’t be too soon for me. They’ve virtually forgotten my existence at White City-’

  She went off below the road to pee and after she’d come back I did the same. As I was zipping up I heard them calling for me with a note of urgency and when I rejoined them on the road saw a lorry coming up the rise from the direction we were facing. It pulled up within a foot or two of our leading car and we were immediately-surrounded by about fifteen soldiers with Kalashnikovs.

  ‘Who are these?’ said Clare nervously, flourishing her government permission without getting anybody to read it.

  ‘Terrorists,’ I said. ‘You can tell by the scratch uniforms and informal headgear.’

  They told us to lie face down on the ground.

  ‘BBC,’ said Clare desperately. ‘From England.’

  ‘Lie down!’

  She did.

  ‘We’re making for Bilavice,’ I said, ‘to report on conditions there.’

  ‘Lie down!’

  ‘Are you from the Ruritanian Army of the True Faith?’

  ‘Lie down!’

  ‘Are you in touch with the Captain?’

  I was the only member of our party still standing. One of the soldiers fired his gun, cutting up the ground near me. I didn’t recognise any of them, but I thought some at least must have been present at Chostok or Previce at Christmas.

  ‘Surely you know who I am?’ I said in Ruritanian. ‘And I’ve brought my friends from the BBC to tell the world about your struggle.’

  They looked at one another uncertainly. They didn’t seem to have any particular leader.

  ‘Who are you?’ said the one who’d fired the shots.

  ‘I helped capture Bilavice,’ I said, again in Ruritanian. ‘I was a prisoner at Kapitsa. I was at Sebrikov, in Chostok on Christmas Day and later at Previce Castle. Did none of you see me in any of those places?’

  They looked very confused now and more like the bunch of farm-boys they really were than the soldiers they were pretending to be.

  ‘The Captain, Sergeant Vakisch, Corporal Radichev - any of them would know me immediately.’

  A boy with a broad, fair-skinned face that seemed vaguely familiar came forward and looked at me more closely. He was growing a moustache and was probably about twenty. None of them was much older.

  ‘Take off your hat!’ he said.

  I’d hoped to avoid that. I wanted Clare to file her Bilavice story before she got wind of my real identity. But the soldier’s finger was flicking constantly at his trigger and his barrel was pointed straight at my chest from a few feet away. I lifted my hat, held it in the air for some moments and said:

  ‘Karel Berg, you see.’

  As I replaced the hat they were lowering their guns and staring at me with curiosity. The boy with the incipient moustache put out his hand.

  ‘Venslar Yavelets,’ he said. ‘Tishkon was my brother.’

  We embraced emotionally. He told me he had left his family farm to fill his younger brother’s place and if possible avenge him.

  I went round and shook hands with all the others in turn, while Clare and her crew, getting up off the ground and dusting themselves down, watched us with relief and amazement. The soldiers, it turned out, were a local patrol and got warning of us by phone from the villagers. They had no radio, so couldn’t make contact with their superiors, but their general instructions were to stop and arrest all strangers. Several of them had seen me from a distance outside the church on Christmas Day and everyone in Karapata, they said, knew of me by repute since my symbolic anointing by Yelena.

  With the lorry leading the way, we drove on to the next village, where phone calls could be made and our way cleared to Bilavice. Tishkon’s brother joined Clare and me in the front car and brought us up to date with events since the bombing of the dam. Conditions were rugged, but not impossible. Some of the villages and farms had their own generators and in any case they were used to working by daylight and keeping themselves warm with wood fires. There was more hardship, he thought, in Chostok and Bilavice, but emergency committees were making sure everyone survived and the net result of the bombing had been to bring over a lot of waverers to the nationalist cause. Everyone was nervous about what would happen in spring, but the main hope was that the government would be too weak by then to risk invading Karapata.

  After stopping to make the phone calls in the next village, we said goodbye to Venslar and his comrades and left them standing behind us in the road, waving their guns enthusiastically in the air. Clare, sitting in the back seat next to him, had questioned Venslar carefully, but I had only intervened occasionally from my place in the front seat to help out Venslar’s halting German with my own halting Ruritanian. Now she wanted to question me.

  ‘What was so magical about taking off your hat?’

  ‘They recognised me without it,’ I said.

  ‘It makes such a difference?’

  ‘That’s why I wear it.’

  ‘Unfortunately I missed the revelation,’ she said. ‘I was lying face down in the mud.’ She brushed irritably at a dried patch on her leather jacket. ‘You gave your name as Karel Berg.
Is that a pseudonym? Or is Ed Fenton a pseudonym?’

  I have to admit this was a good moment. Like most people, I suppose, I have ambiguous feelings about television people. Is it a privilege to hobnob with them or is it a pain in the neck to have to put up with their self-esteem and general assumption of power and influence? It’s a mixture, in fact, of envy and of enjoying being envied by people outside the charmed circle: humiliating either way. Clare Studebaker, being attractive as well as successful and highly conscious of both, touched this nerve in me from the moment I first saw her on Freddy’s screen talking about Rudolf Rassendyll. We were now climbing the escarpment below Bilavice and although the road itself was clear of snow, there was still plenty of it on the rocks and patches of forest that hemmed the road in.

  ‘This story has an embargo on it,’ I said.

  ‘Yes? How long?’

  ‘Until further notice. But if you give me your word to respect it, I’ll give you mine that you can be the first to use it.’

  ‘Is it such an important story?’

  ‘Not in world terms, perhaps. It’s royal, but not British royal. Still, for a journalist based in the back of beyond, it’s probably as good as you’ll get.’

  O.K.’

  ‘You’ve heard of Rudolf Rassendyll. You’ve enjoyed the books. You may remember that when he was supposed to be dead of an assassin’s bullet they buried a waxwork, while he went off to live in Cornwall as a bearded photographer called . . .’

  ‘Edwin Fenton. And secretly married the Queen.’

  ‘And they had a child, you see. Charles Gordon Rassendyll. And he had children. And one of those children had two sons, whom he named after his socialist heroes, Karl and Friedrich. Who are therefore the great-grandsons of Rudolf Rassendyll and Flavia Elphberg.’

  She was leaning back in her corner of the back seat, watching me closely, one hand in her lap, the other holding the strap over the window as we took a steep bend. The sun shone directly on to her intent face and she half closed her eyes. I savoured my moment and, while the driver was concentrating on sticking to the road, I lifted my hat and showed her my profile. She sat up, shading her eyes.

  ‘Unbelievable!’ she said.

  ‘A good story?’

  ! put the hat on again. She moved to the middle of the back seal and leaned forward.

  ‘And you think you can make it?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I’m glad I turned down Dresden.’

  ‘You obviously have a nose for the right place,’ I said. ‘And incidentally you’ve still got mud on it.’

  ‘Where? ‘

  I touched the place and she immediately opened her handbag and, like a cat, began grooming herself.

  Bilavice received us warmly and Clare was soon busy collecting interviews and shots of empty shops, though it must be said she didn’t find anybody as emaciated or war-torn as her audience might have liked - even the hospital was doing business as usual with its emergency generator.

  I saw Gerda again as soon as we arrived - she was running several of the emergency committees from the Town Hall - and we arranged to meet at a restaurant for supper, as soon as her committee-work was over for the day. She warned me to expect austerity rations, but in fact the meal was delicious: an excellent vegetable soup and chicken grilled on a wood fire, eaten by candle-light with an encouraging bottle of Hungarian red.

  ‘Perhaps Karapata should go off electricity for good,’ I said. ‘ A way of life unchanged since the middle ages . . . the happy people of Karapata have turned their backs on the 20th century . . . yak rides to the tranquil waters of Lake Sebrikov ... Is the dam badly damaged?’

  ‘Hardly at all,’ said Gerda. ‘But the machinery is. And they demolished the house.’

  ‘The house?’

  ‘The one you stayed in with Maria. Perhaps it was her they were aiming at or perhaps they mistook it for another part of the hydro-electric plant.’

  ‘The house was empty?’

  ‘No. It was very early in the morning. Maria’s cook and her husband were sleeping there. They were both killed. But there was no damage to the barracks, where they might have killed and wounded a lot of soldiers.’

  The news upset me.

  ‘You look very sad,’ Gerda said. ‘Were you fond of her?’

  ‘I hardly knew her. She was an excellent cook and . . .’

  ‘And . ‘. .?’

  ‘She cheered me up a lot on one occasion.’

  ‘I wonder what you mean by that?’

  I didn’t try to explain, though I could see that Gerda misunderstood me. I didn’t want to talk about my relationship with Yelena and it involved going into that. I drank my wine in silence, thought about Anna - her noisy shoes and brief remarks - and then about Yelena. What results from her tests? Gerda left me to my thoughts for a while and then said:

  ‘I have news of another lady who cheered you up on more than one occasion. Susha is expecting a baby. Everybody says it’s a miracle: she and her husband without children for so long and suddenly she has a vision of the Virgin Mary in church and conceives.’

  ‘Is there a problem, then?’ I said warily.

  ‘On the contrary. She’s very very happy. So is Mikos her husband. He’s a changed man - not angry and mean any more, but optimistic, helpful. All this time, it seems, his only trouble was that he couldn’t have children of his own.’

  ‘Sounds very satisfactory.’

  ‘One doubt remains, of course. What will this miracle child look like when it’s born? Will it - perish the thought! - resemble the father?’

  ‘Close resemblances,’ I said, ‘very often skip a generation or two. Look at my own red hair and long nose, for instance!’

  ‘I should have thought your genes were more pushy than most,’ Gerda said.

  After the meal we went home to her place. Our relationship was almost entirely physical now. We didn’t talk about Slav nationalism or my plans or hers. I didn’t tell her I’d met the boss of Corpus, the people who’d tried to abduct her and eliminate me. She didn’t ask me about Yelena - she probably wasn’t even aware that Yelena was ill or that I was in touch with her. Gerda was making her life now in Bilavice and Bilavice was simply waiting for spring. The government would fall or it wouldn’t, things would get marginally better or distinctly worse. Without the active presence of Yelena, Karapata’s sense of a larger destiny had evidently faded. Gerda certainly had no suspicion that my prospects for the immediate future were any brighter than before.

  Why should she, after all? People mostly see life as a slow natural shift of circumstances and I suppose I’d seen it like that myself until recently. The idea that circumstances can be completely altered by deliberate human interference is worrying, because humans have a low opinion of each other and don’t trust others to interfere for the best, but assume purely selfish motives. That’s probably broadly correct and accounts for the way any big interference is usually followed by a big reaction. If you start throwing stones in the pond and making rings, others just want to do the same from the opposite side. My task as I saw it now was to throw all my stones in the pond so neatly and rapidly that the rings would spread right across before anyone even had time to pick up a stone of their own.

  26 Cavemen

  Clare was very keen to interview Michael. He never came to Bilavice, which was a basically bourgeois place where he was not popular and regarded as little more than a bandit, even if he did make mayhem under the colour of Slav nationalism. I wasn’t entirely happy about meeting him myself, in case he hadn’t forgiven me for my disappearance with Yelena. On the other hand, he was one of the stones I needed to throw into the pond and I thought he might be manageable if I came in the company of Clare. So a meeting was set up. I didn’t stipulate that Vakisch should be present - I thought that would only ensure Michael would leave him out - but I sincerely hoped he would be.

  Michael chose the venue. It was to be neither Chostok nor Previce Castle, but Fisher John’s pl
ace outside Chostok, where Yelena had gone into retreat. The roads from Bilavice up to Chostok were still partly snowbound and although we made an early start we arrived late for our appointment.

  The house was large and modern, in Roman villa style. It was another communist big-wig’s country mansion, set among beetling crags in a sheltered bowl open to the south, with a large central courtyard surrounded by a covered cloister. Perhaps it was that monastic touch which had appealed to Fisher and Yelena. There were a lot of soldiers about, including a few I recognised, and Fisher was there as well as Michael, but not Vakisch. Michael was very irritated by our lateness: he was worried about the light. He didn’t want the interview filmed in the house, but about three quarters of an hour away by foot, in a mountain-cave which had been his original hideout and therefore the cradle of the Ruritanian Army of the True Faith. It looked as if Fisher had not only set up the religious side of the rebellion but at least connived in the early stages of the military side by occupying the house which acted as both supply-base and camouflage for the cave above it.

  Michael’s reception of me was cold and only just short of hostile. Fisher avoided me altogether, shaking hands with Clare when I introduced her at the front door, but immediately disappearing into the house as if he’d heard the telephone. We were given hurried refreshments and then set out in a long file - Michael, Clare, me, the cameraman and sound recordist and at least ten soldiers - up the steep path to the cave. Fisher stayed behind. I’d asked Michael, while we were snatching our meal, where Vakisch was and been told he was busy elsewhere. I’d given him news of Yelena - that she was still undergoing tests and was intermittently better - and received no reply beyond a grunt. On the way up to the cave he talked to Clare, walking just behind him.

  When we reached the cave I asked him why he chose to publicise his hideout like this. Surely he might need it again?

  ‘Do you think so? You have no faith.’

  ‘But just in case.’

  ‘As far as I’m concerned, it’s win or lose now. This was not the best time of my life, living in this hole in the mountain for two winters. I’d rather be dead or leave the country than have to do it again.’

 

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