After Zenda

by John Spurling

  ‘He was just bridge-building, he said, with his own people in the States.’

  Since we were leaving so early, we broke up early. Clare sent the others off, but kept me behind at the table drinking Russian brandy. She wanted to find out what I planned to do: would I claim the throne, lobby for support, try to use the rebels for a coup d’état I gave nothing away, just said lightly that I’d have to see how things turned out and whether I could be of any use to my country (public life breeds a hypocrite a minute). All the while I was thinking what to do about the Fisher/Michael story and it seemed to me there wasn’t much to hang it on if we could lose the interview. I knew where that was, because the cameraman, before leaving the table, handed the video-tape and the audio-cassette to Clare for safekeeping. She’d put them in her own shoulder-bag and it was under her chair now, against her feet. As we got up to go, she picked it up and patted it.

  ‘Valuable stuff!’ she said.

  I managed some sort of wincing smile and we went upstairs. In the corridor outside her door I offered to kiss her goodnight.

  if you like.’

  It went on a bit longer than she liked.

  ‘That’s enough!’ she said, withdrawing and pushing me firmly away.

  ‘You’d better lock your door,’ I said.

  ‘I always do.’

  ‘I only look like my great-grandfather,’ I said. ‘My character’s completely different.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘He was a gentleman.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I hardly know the meaning of the word.’

  ‘Goodnight, Karl!’

  She did lock her door. Even if she hadn’t and I’d got into her room by fair means or foul and stolen the interview - plan number one - I’d have been prime suspect. Plan number two was more trouble but safer. I went downstairs again and, after getting Michael’s number from Yakisch at Previce, spoke to him personally. He needed a lot of convincing that his first major appearance on the world’s screens should be postponed, but when I told him that it would be accompanied by the news of Fisher’s death and that that might easily mean the Americans lending at least covert support to the Rumanian government, if not pressing for Michael’s own trial for war-crimes, he gave way.

  Leaving Chostok at dawn on the road to Bilavice we were waylaid by a lorry-load of soldiers and escorted to the farm where I’d first been enrolled into the Ruritanian Army of the True Faith. There I paid my respects to the farmer and his wife while both cars and all our personal possessions were searched microscopically. Every video-tape or film, exposed or unexposed - including the footage of Bilavice and the private snapshots taken by one of the drivers -and every cassette was seized. Clare was devastated, of course, and demanded that I should exert my influence to stop it happening. I went back into the farm-house and pretended to phone Michael, returning to say that he was adamant and now thought he’d been a fool to give the interview; furthermore he was seriously worried about letting us leave Karapata at all and if we stayed to argue we’d probably be staying indefinitely. The only concession I’d obtained, I said, was that the material wouldn’t be destroyed and might eventually be returned.

  So we came back to Bilavice empty-handed. Clare would be able to tell the viewers about her experiences in front of some kind of still of mountain-scenery, but without any documentary material her story wouldn’t rate high in competition with Bosnia, Afghanistan, South Africa, Kurdistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Colombia, Sudan, Algeria, Liberia, Rwanda, Guatemala, Angola, Somaliland or any of the other stew-pots of the world where warlords were terrorising civilians and eliminating rivals. I’d also lost my propaganda about the government’s Sebrikov atrocity, but on the whole I’d thought it better to have everything seized and leave no room for error. I was sure TV people would stick at no deception in order to get their stuff safely out and, in fact, these ones had had a small extra camera called a Hi-8 attached to the main Beta camera, as well as an extra cassette recorder to back up the ‘DAT’. Clare’s distress at losing even this crafty stand-by material was sufficient to show they’d got away with nothing on this occasion. She was more or less hysterical when I came back with the bad news from my phoney phone-call and since Michael wasn’t available, I took the brunt. I thought this fair enough: she’d got the right target even if she didn’t know it.

  By the time the search was over and Clare had finally accepted that her career was blighted, it was too late to do the long journey to Strelsau in daylight and less urgent anyway. There were no hotels on our devious route to avoid the army check-points, so we spent that night in Bilavice. I didn’t look up Gerda but stayed in the same hotel as the others, an old German-style inn - with its own generator - called the ‘Kakadu’ (cockatoo). The name had the advantage for the owner of being exactly the same in Ruritanian. Clare’s fury had burned down gradually to resentment and self-pity and she wanted me there to share it. It’s extremely tiring pretending to be angry and upset when you’re really relieved and cheerful and I also found her quite unattractive in this mood. So I had every incentive to give her other things to think about and took her out to the restaurant I’d been to with Gerda; we had the same menu too. Here at last, freed of her team’s constant presence and in a town where I was already known, I could remove my hat in public.

  Through all the millennia since they lost their fur, humans have not kept hair on their head for nothing. There’s no doubt that, however basically handsome he is, a person who goes everywhere with a synthetic fur hat pulled down over his ears looks seedy and unappetising. A candlelit meal with the reincarnation of Rudolf Rassendyll soon perked Clare up. I think I compared her before to a cat: now, having been badly excruciated with the equivalent of a bucket of cold water, she began to be sleek and proud again. I told her everything I knew about my family - it was all going to come out anyway and I owed her the first interview. But although she enjoyed being in my company and playing around with the possibility of my being king, she was also instinctively suspicious of such a reactionary idea.

  ‘I suppose it might just work in a tinpot place like this,’ she said, ‘but it’s bucking the trend.’

  ‘Which trend?’

  ‘Towards democracy. Nobody believes in kings any more.’

  ‘If they can believe in the Virgin Mary, a king would be quite mundane.’

  ‘Those are peasants.’

  She’d have rapped me severely if I’d said anything so patronising myself.

  ‘Democracy is a belief like any other,’ I said, ‘with periodic elections instead of holy communion. Where in the world have you ever seen a democratic election bring a real change of power or personnel? Whenever there’s even a threat of it from outsiders to left or right, all the privileged people start to scream for the rules to be changed.’

  ‘You’re not a fascist, are you, Karl?’

  ‘Just an ordinary egoist.’

  ‘What would you hope to do for Ruritania if you did become king?’

  ‘Constitutional monarchs don’t usually have the power to do anything, do they?’

  ‘Not directly, but they can make a significant difference to people’s awareness of social problems, ecology, charities, etc’

  ‘You’d need to be trained for that,’ I said. ‘An ordinary egoist like me would just put his big feet all over other people’s expertise.’

  ‘We’re talking PR, not expertise.’

  It became a dispiriting conversation, because we were at cross purposes, talking about two different worlds: her highly-regulated western one, with sanitised ‘agendas’ and bus-lane ‘correctness’, and my still unformed, perhaps imaginary one, which was as much as anything, I suppose, a rejection of hers. Yelena was quite right. To become a king of the only sort Clare could envisage would be sheer misery. I began to wish it was Yelena sitting opposite me. But the odd thing was that the more Clare turned me off with her relentlessly prosaic version of my function, the more she turned herself on with my image, with who
I was. She wanted to be able to control the reality and reduce it to some kind of wizened welfare dwarf, but she loved the glittering dream, the intimacy with the future King Karel. It was the same thing I’d noticed about her approach to the scenery: she couldn’t see that paradise stopped being paradise with tourists in it or that a PR king wasn’t worth having dinner with.

  And so as the evening drew to a close we were at cross-purposes in another way. I’d fully intended not to be locked out of her room this time, whereas she’d made it clear when she accepted dinner à deux that no keys were on offer. Now as I looked into her blue eyes and screen-friendly face I had no desire to take her clothes off, but saw that she had that in mind. I put my hat on to go back to the hotel. The town was almost totally lightless and spring rain was falling. As we ambled side by side down the straight avenue from the bridge towards the church square, Clare took my arm.

  ‘Thanks, Karl, I enjoyed that enormously. You cheered me up after that appalling start this morning.’

  I murmured something deprecatory (Nil Quae Feci).

  ‘Whatever you may say, I think you are quite like your great-grandfather.’

  ‘In what sense?’

  ‘You’re more of a gentleman than you pretend.’

  ‘Is that a compliment?’

  ‘All I mean, I suppose, is that you’re not a bloody-minded bastard like Michael.’

  ‘Yes, he has behaved badly.’

  ‘If I could cut off his head and kick it down this street, I would.’

  Alcohol makes some people sleepy and others maudlin; it seemed to make her wrongs return to her mind with increased violence.

  ‘I feel some sympathy for him,’ I said.

  She stopped, let go of my arm and virtually spar.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He doesn’t want to antagonise the Americans.’

  ‘Well, he’s antagonised me and not being a gentleman I shall never forgive or forget the way he’s buggered me up.’

  Not being a gentleman either, I hoped she’d never find out that he hadn’t.

  We arrived at the Hotel Kakadu arm-in-arm again, but with nothing fixed. Outside her door, in a very dim light, with the old boards, which must have been first nailed down at about the time of Rudolf V’s coronation, creaking at every movement, I bent down to kiss her.

  ‘Goodnight, Clare!’

  She took off my hat, studied me with a serious expression and then allowed me to kiss her, which I did quite formally, on one cheek. She unlocked her door, opened it and stood in the doorway. Still unsmiling, she held out my hat, then suddenly put it on her own head.

  ‘How do I look?’

  ‘Fetching!’

  She did, especially now she smiled. The hat - hiding her short, barbed, gingery hair - made her look, of course, Russian, but also frivolous, raffish, off-duty. We went inside together, locked the door and stripped completely in seconds, though I made her keep the hat on. The Count was right, it had magical powers. Visually her face was her strong point and her body rather square and homely, but the visual aspects never bother me at this stage of a relationship. Her breasts were larger than they looked when she wore clothes, she had broad hips, a flat stomach and shortish legs. She was a very ardent lover and we were busy much of the night, with intervals for rest. She bit and scratched quite a lot and by breakfast-time I was sore in several tender places and very reluctant to get up. She pulled me out of bed, picked up my clothes for me and when I’d got them on, transferred the hat from her head to mine.

  ‘Ed Fenton,’ she said, ‘I never thought I’d sleep with you.’

  We left Bilavice immediately after breakfast. It’s a pleasant peaceful town, historically interesting, but for me will always be associated with war, death and very good sex.

  28 The Elphbergs Come to Town

  I intended this account of my adventures to be as lean and mean as my great-grandfather’s, but I’ve found myself including more detail than he did. That may be because people expect more detail these days or because ours is a more complicated world than his. However, it’s time now to fast spool, especially since, with the arrival of spring, events began to move very quickly indeed.

  But first things first. Soon after parting with Clare in Strelsau -she had a comfortable flat in one corner of a square in the gracious part of town - I went back to Vlod to check up on Yelena and the Cossacks. The Cossacks were doing fine, hammering in their workshops as busily as Wagner’s Nibelungen and much more cheerfully, and I was able to settle a precise date for the circus with Colonel Stavrilev. Yelena was not fine at all. The hospital had diagnosed the disease her husband died of.

  Among the recognised causes of leukaemia - which is basically white blood cells crowding out red ones, a sort of ethnic cleansing - are chemical pollution and radiation. Since she and her husband both came from near Kiev, the doctors thought they might be delayed victims of the Chernobyl disaster. But the cause hardly mattered, the question was whether the disease could be stopped and the doctors were practising their own form of ethnic cleansing with state-of-the-art drugs. At least, that was my understanding of the treatment: if we call the white cells Germans and the red cells Slavs and the problem is that the Germans are eliminating all the Slavs, then the straightforward remedy is for the Slavs to start eliminating Germans in sufficient numbers to restore the original balance.

  I hardly recognised Yelena. Her face looked wasted - actually, she reminded me of the last photographs of Flavia - and she was nearly bald. I came bouncing into the hospital ready to juggle all my promising schemes in front of her like coloured balls, only to be diverted to an interview with a doctor which told me what I could hardly bear to hear. Now when I saw her I began to cry. Yelena wasn’t upset or even surprised. Crying is no guarantee of feeling for others - one is usually crying for oneself - and she knew me well enough to guess this would be my reaction. She said nothing, but gently took my hands and stroked them until I stopped. After that we talked for a while, but not about anything I’d come to tell her -none of that mattered to me any more.

  Bv the time I came to see her next day I’d decided to call a halt to all my arrangements and when she asked me what news I had, I told her my decision.

  ‘Why?’ ‘

  ‘Because I couldn’t care less. I only care what happens to you.’

  ‘You’re very bitter because you think I’m spoiling your plans.’

  ‘It’s not that at all.’

  ‘It’s quite unnecessary. I shall not spoil your plans.’

  ‘Do you mean you’ll get better?’

  ‘I’ll be with the Cossacks - as promised.’

  ‘How can your’

  ‘The doctor virtually guaranteed that if I underwent this treatment I would get better. Not necessarily for ever, but sufficiently. I didn’t lose my hair and my looks, Karel, because I was afraid of dying, but because I was afraid of not being with the Cossacks at the crucial time.’

  ‘I don’t want you to do that,’ I said. ‘I don’t want any of it.’

  ‘If you’d mentioned that before, I would have refused the treatment.’

  ‘But what is the point of it?’

  It’s very hard for sick people to become really angry. They lack the energy and usually they don’t have sufficient interest in anything outside their own bodies to be made angry. But I never had a greater sense of Yelena’s difference from other people than now. White, skull-like, hairless - only her head, shoulders and arms visible against the heaped-up pillows - she incandesced.

  ‘You ask what is the point of my sacrifice? No, it’s not for Slav nationalism, it’s not for the True Faith, it’s not even for myself. It’s for you, Karel Rassendyll, and your bloody kingdom!’

  The flame burnt out almost at once. Her energy was a very short match. I sat with her until she went to sleep and came back the next day to find her rested and ready to talk. I apologised for my first reaction to her illness, promised everything would go ahead as planned and gave her the date I’d f
ixed with Colonel Stavrilev. I also told her that Michael had agreed to co-operate and that Orlin and the corporal would drive into Karapata to give him the final details, including the date.

  Then I told her about Michael killing Fisher. She took it calmly and said she’d begun to distrust Fisher well before the incident of the statue and his attempt to murder me.

  ‘So why did you make me go through that hellish time with him at the chalet?’

  ‘I didn’t want him with me and I thought you deserved him. Even more, he deserved you.’

  ‘But before that - were you lovers?’

  For a moment I thought she was going to be furious again and no doubt she would have been if she’d been well. But obviously she didn’t want to waste energy on something that no longer mattered, so she relaxed and spoke so quietly that I had to move nearer to catch what she was saying.

  ‘I didn’t find him physically attractive. He did a lot for me, though, he pulled me out of despair; and it took me a long time to lose my faith in him. He wasn’t a bad man pretending to be good, he was a good man who thought he’d discovered a formula for being good. Of course there isn’t one - formulas never fit properly - but having found one, as he thought, in the land of his ancestors . . .’

  ‘He came from Ruritania?’

  ‘His parents were refugees from the Nazis. They joined the Disciples of the First Instance in America because it shared some of the ideas of the True Faith, but Usher wanted to get back to the real thing. And he really believed, when he and I met at the time my husband was dying and I joined the True Faith, that I might be the Virgin Alary returned to earth. But this was where his formula started to betray him. Instead of waiting to see if there was any truth in what he believed, he began to act as if the truth - the True Faith - was what he believed. Anything then could be done in its name - he didn’t need to test it any further. If I was the Virgin Mary and he was my earthly sponsor, whatever we did must be good. Slav nationalism was good if we decided to support it, Michael and his guerrillas were good if we chose to enrol them under our banner. I suppose the business with the statue was only the squalid ending of an increasing addiction to his own certainty. I’m sure he didn’t want to kill you so much because you threatened to expose him as because he’d begun to know that he’d lost his way. It was more like an attempt at suicide.’