The President could only resign or side with the hard-liners. His equivocal part in the suppression of the Kapitsa mutiny had lost him the support of Slav nationalists and he’d never been liked by ex-communist Slavs because of his history of dissidence. With no chance of persuading the guerrillas to back off, he would either have to try clobbering them or give in to Michael’s demands for semi-independence and lose the support of the German population. As for the Cossacks, they already held nearly a third of the country simply by sitting in Kapitsa with the whole unprotected province of Plotla behind them; and they seriously threatened both Zenda and Strelsau itself. The president’s first move was to summon the Ukrainian ambassador and make a personal phone call to the President of Ukraine, but neither had any effect at all. The Ukrainians insisted they had no prior knowledge of the Cossacks’ action, didn’t condone it, were baffled by it and had no means whatever of rounding up a herd of elephants which had clearly gone rogue. They could only recommend that the President of Ruritania tell his government to be nicer in future to their Slav minority.
The caretaker government was also in difficulty. They couldn’t ignore the President and negotiate with the rebel Slavs on their own account; nor did they want to use the army and were convinced that, if they did, they would lose the country to the Slavs. If they chose to fight they would certainly have to release General Rischenheim and his senior officers so that what remained of the airforce could take part. But if they ordered the release of General Rischenheim they would have to replace General Practsin as head of Corpus and if he refused to go and his security forces stood by him, then the Army would have to deal with Corpus before going on to deal with the guerrillas, let alone the Cossacks. And although the personnel of Corpus - at least in Strelsau - were predominantly German, General Practsin kept a very tight grip of his organisation and would be difficult to oust or replace at short notice.
From the government side their position must have looked hopeless. The Count, who was in constant touch with them, told us that several ministers might have been glad to use my spare ticket to Frankfurt. But our position was also weak. I had never contemplated the military conquest of Ruritania, which was probably impossible anyway with the forces at my disposal and would certainly have started me off with the wrong image as king. Neither Michael nor the Cossacks had any plans to advance further or indeed any further plans period; and if the government havered long enough they might discover that the threat was less terrible than it appeared. In a way, it was all a much more fraught version of my head-stand in front of the President’s palace: if the performance was taken seriously right away, well and good. But if not, I might just have to go right way up again and slink off. This time, though, I’d be leaving the guerrillas and the Cossacks still standing on their heads.
My room at the ‘Royal Elphberg’ looked down over the Volzer to the parliament building on the far bank. The Count, returning from his latest session with the prime minister, said that the cabinet had discussed whether they could ask me, as ‘a new friend of Ruritanians on both sides of the ethnic divide’, to negotiate with the guerrillas and their Cossack allies, but thought it impossible without the consent of the President. He was so angry about my antics at the airport, as already gleefully reported in the Strelsau Abendstern, that he’d ordered my arrest and forcible deportation if I was not in Mrs Amstervan’s seat to Frankfurt without fail the next day. General Practsin joined us shortly afterwards and said he’d received the President’s order and would either have to obey it or become an open rebel himself.
‘Any chance of that?’ I asked.
‘You want me to seize the President and lock him up in the dungeon at Zenda?’
‘Why not?’
‘It would damage my reputation, Mr Rassendyll. Not to mention yours. In both cases fatally, I would think.’
‘I wonder if the President would like Mrs Amstervan’s ticket,’ said Vladek.
It was a conundrum which, like a sudden stalemate in chess, I hadn’t foreseen. Only the President could invite me to resolve the conflict between Slavs and Germans and so in effect hand me the key to my kingdom; but the President was the person who least wanted anybody to be king, let alone me. I asked the Count, if it would be possible to persuade the President to grant me a farewell interview.
‘For what purpose, dear boy? Not to kick his teeth in, I hope? I have no particular affection for the man myself, but I think personal violence would be counter-productive from your point of view.’
‘He’s a philosopher,’ I said. ‘He ought to be willing to listen to an argument.’
‘I doubt if you can assume that and I doubt if you are as good at arguing as you are at kicking teeth, but we can only try.’
The Count spoke to his friends the prime minister and the Archbishop of Strelsau and they spoke to their friend the President and I was given an appointment for half past nine that night, provided I came completely alone and without any press attention whatever.
Wearing my grey fur hat and a long coat, so that I looked and felt like a Russian assassin, I arrived at a side door of the palace, was admitted by a flunkey and taken straight to the President’s library. He was seated at his desk, covered with papers; through an open door between the bookcases in one wall, I could see an office with a studious-looking girl in glasses busy at the phone. There was no sign of any security. However low Slobodjak’s opinion of me, he obviously had no fear that I might do him an injury.
‘Would you be so kind as to shut that door, Mr Rassendyll?’
I closed out the secretary and sat on the chaise longue. He laid his spectacles on the papers in front of him, put down his pen, rubbed his impressive brow and turned his chair round to face me. He looked another ten years older than when I’d last seen him less than a week ago and hardly had the energy to speak.
‘What do you wish to say to me?’
‘I believe I could help you avoid a civil war.’
‘There already is one.’
‘I could make peace between the Germans and the Slavs. With your help.’
‘What makes you think that? I know you’re good at imposing on the press, but this goes somewhat beyond publicity.’
‘Everybody seems to see this conflict in crude material terms, as a struggle for political power or territory or even personal gain, but there are ideals at stake.’
He rubbed his back slowly with one hand but didn’t interrupt and I went on to tell him about the True Faith and Yelena. I didn’t reveal that I knew her well, but explained how powerfully she’d impressed me when I first saw her on the steps of the church in Chostok. It was listening to her, I said, that made me want to fight for the guerrillas (was that entirely a lie?). I described how I’d taken part in the capture of Bilavice and seen this extraordinary woman again, dressed as a soldier, just at the moment when Tishkon was dying. Then I told him about the train-journey to Kapitsa, the hair-cutting episode and my last-minute escape from the firing-squad in the turmoil of the mutiny. I didn’t mention that the mutiny had been brought forward specially for me nor that I had gone to Sebrikov. After the escape, I said, I had lived quietly on a farm until Vladek and the Count were released and I could rejoin them in Strelsau. The President listened carefully and patiently, though we could hear the telephone constantly ringing next door and he must have expected to hear at any moment that the guerrillas or the Cossacks or both had begun to close in on the capital.
‘So you see,’ I said, ‘that it’s not this bandit chief of the guerrillas or even perhaps straight nationalism that you’re dealing with, it’s a belief. It’s a crusade for the True Faith, led by this strange woman, a kind of Joan of Arc, who comes originally from Ukraine and must have inspired the Cossacks to follow her.’
He rose painfully from his chair, paced the length of the room and then came and sat beside me on the chaise longue. I made space for him so that he could put his back against the raised part.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I like your story an
d I like you better for telling it to me so simply and modestly. I’m sure it’s an edited version and I’m sure your own part in these events was more important than you pretend. It’s a story that makes me feel sad and old and out of touch. I see that I’ve been deceived about these guerrillas -or terrorists, as we usually call them in Strelsau. I haven’t taken their aspirations seriously and although I’m mainly Slav myself, I’ve become a hostage to German interests. It is this, no doubt, which has exacerbated the divisions in our country and this which has brought us all - and myself in particular - to our present crisis. Greek Tragedy, you know, says it all: the truth will always emerge in the end, however you try to suppress it. I, who gave the best part of my life to proving that fact to communists, have now become an instrument for suppressing the truth. What is it you want to do, Mr Rassendyll?’
‘If you and I were to ask to meet them . . .’
‘Yes, by all means, arrange that if you can! But, for God’s sake, without publicity!’
‘I’m flying to Frankfurt tomorrow.’
He smiled faintly and wearily.
‘I doubt it. All flights have been stopped. The airport is close to the military airfield. We couldn’t risk a jet fighter colliding with an airliner, though I admit I had moments of wishing such an airliner might have contained you.’
‘You were going to fight, then?’
‘It was on the cards.’
‘You didn’t kick him in the teeth, then?’ said the Count, when I got back to the hotel and told him of my success.
‘It wasn’t necessary. He saw that he’d been stupid. Also, oddly enough for a philosopher who pretends to believe in absurdity, he’s really an idealist.’
I sat down and drank the whisky the Count had poured for me. As I did so, the sheath-knife pushed into my back pocket pressed uncomfortably against my buttock. I pulled it out and put it on the table next to the bottle of whisky. The Count looked at it and then at me.
‘Did you have that with you, dear boy?’
‘I borrowed it from Vladek. But it’s not something to take to a peace conference.’
‘What a risk if you’d been searched! How very rash and irresponsible you still are, dear boy! Did you imagine the old fellow would have a go at you, like that American missionary?’
‘I didn’t give it a lot of thought. I just felt that we haven’t come so far to be stopped by one old man not being able to admit he was wrong.’
The Count picked up the knife, slid it out of its sheath and tested the point with his finger.
‘I wonder how Ruritania will enjoy being a kingdom again when you wear the crown. But why are you showing me this?’
‘Why not?’
‘It would be inconvenient if I happened to mention it to anyone.’
‘Why should you? We’re on the same side.’
‘But later? If we should fall out?’
‘Perish the thought!’ I said.
‘You mean I should be an accessory after the fact?’
‘You can put it like that. You can put it that Vladek is an accessory before. But among friends those terms sound a bit legalistic’
He returned the knife to its sheath.
‘You’d never have used it, Karl Marx. Not even to threaten him! I know you better.’
I shrugged. I didn’t know the answer to that myself and was glad I hadn’t needed to find out.
30 Never To Be Yours
It always rains on my birthday and my thirtieth was no exception. As the Count and I, in a hired car driven by his new Polish chauffeur, left the ‘Royal Elphberg’ for our rendezvous, it was raining so hard we could scarcely see the parliament building across the driver. The surface of the Volzer looked as if it was coming to the boil. We stayed close to the river most of the way; the rendezvous was an island near the small town of Dresch, about forty miles from Strelsau and twenty from the nearest bridge held by the guerrillas. On the island was a country-club (formerly Party membership only), with tennis-courts, facilities for boating and fishing (discontinued), a dance hall, casino, restaurant and self-contained chalets among birch trees. The place had evidently been created by some Russia-freak, perhaps in the early days after the communist takeover when Germans were still definitely bad and Russians thought to be good: the chalets were called ‘dachas’ and each was named after a Russian writer acceptable to the Party. The Count had rented ‘Mayakovsky Dacha’ and sent some trusted staff from the ‘Royal Elphberg’ ahead to stock it with refreshments and other temporary amenities, such as soap and towels, tissues and vases of flowers.
The owners of the country-club knew nothing of our meeting and, to maintain complete secrecy, there was no attempt to provide serious security. I was the guarantor to Michael and Yelena of their safe conduct and the Count and General Practsin guaranteed the President’s and Prime Minister’s. Yelena, driven by Orlin, came in a hired car from Kapitsa and collected Michael on the way; General Practsin brought the President with one bodyguard in a Corpus car; two more Corpus men brought the Prime Minister in another. By ten o’clock on the morning of my birthday, the morning after I should have flown to Frankfurt, the four cars had crossed the bridge from the main road to the island, circled the main country-club building without attracting any particular attention and parked beside ‘Mayakovsky Dacha’. The drivers and bodyguards took up posts round the house to keep out intruders and the rest of us assembled in the dacha’s bare, wood-panelled living-room, while the rain continued to pour down outside.
Yelena and Michael were the last to arrive, she in a white round-necked shirt and light grey cotton jacket and skirt, he all in black imitation leather. He looked ill at ease and just what he was, a small-time bandit outside his natural habitat, a black beetle creeping out from under a stone. She was ethereally thin, her face, though, less cadaverous, her hair or lack of it concealed by a white woollen hat. As they entered the room, the others, drinking coffee and talking jovially, went silent. It was partly the sense that here at last was the enemy face to face, but still more, outright astonishment at the appearance and presence of Yelena. I saw at once that each one of these self-important people who thought they’d seen it all - the cynical, bantering von Wunklisch; the gloomy, watchful Practsin; the smooth, worldly Heinz Albert; and the old, disillusioned, exhausted President - was knocked sideways by her, just as I had been when I first saw her in Chostok - and was again now. I’d instructed her beforehand to treat me distantly, as if she barely knew me, but I hadn’t imagined I’d need to instruct myself. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to embrace her and kiss her restored face, though that would have been bliss, as to fall at her feet and kiss her toe. She gave nothing away herself, not a spark of special feeling for me in her face, but as I took her hand, she drew her little finger very lightly along mine and said in a strangled voice I hardly recognised as hers:
‘Karel.’
I shook Michael’s hand and introduced them both to the others, one by one, he just as Michael, she as Yelena Lopotska. He accepted coffee, she didn’t; then we all sat down facing a wood-burning stove in the grate: an inner horseshoe of myself, in an upright chair with arms, flanked by the President and Prime Minister in armchairs to my right facing Yelena and Michael on a sofa to my left, with the Count and Practsin sitting a little apart near the window. There was no small-talk. The President, fascinated by Yelena, lost his look of exhaustion and began immediately to question her about the True Faith and her part in it. She replied simply that she’d been converted to it after the death of her husband, that she knew she had to lead the Ruritanian Slavs towards a better life, politically as well as spiritually; and that the Ruritanian Army of the True Faith was not a band of ruthless, professional terrorists but just what their name proclaimed them: ordinary people fighting for a belief which would otherwise be suppressed, as it always had been in the past, by Catholics and Orthodox alike. She never mentioned the Virgin Mary and regretted involving her countrymen and their tanks, but, after the atrocities and treacheries of t
he Ruritanian Army in Kapitsa and the ruthless efforts on the part of the authorities - especially the bombing of the Sebrikov dam, in which two innocent friends of hers had died - to bring the people of Karapata to their knees, she had seen it as a last resort.
‘If I had not led out the Cossacks,’ she finished, ‘can you honestly say, Mr President, that the Ruritanian Army would not have crushed Karapata as soon as the snow melted and gone on to suppress the True Faith for another generation at least? One is only alive once and must do what one can in one’s own time.’
The fact was, of course, that this peace conference was nothing of the sort. Everyone in the room, except the President, was already committed to a particular outcome. Even Heinz Albert, the caretaker prime minister, though he and I had never met before, had agreed with his friend the Count to edge the moderates towards a monarchy, if that could be achieved, as he put it, ‘naturally, unemphatically, moderately’. He himself was a handsome, fit-looking 55-year-old, with curly white hair and a bronze complexion, who wore expensive Italian suits and hand-made shoes and loved the international circuit. The last thing he wanted was to continue as what he called ‘Mayor of Ruritania’ or ‘second biggest frog in our local puddle’; he wanted to hop off again as Foreign Minister to the lily-pads of more stately ponds abroad. The Count, on the other hand, who had run powerful corporations and constantly increased his wealth and power by obscure board-room intrigues and manipulations, but never held any public office, longed to run a country, however poor and small. General Practsin’s motives were less obvious - he was already one of the most powerful figures in Ruritania - but he thought as little of the other military chiefs as he did of Rischenheim and if they were toppled and he had a voice in their replacement, his own position would be virtually unassailable.
After Zenda Page 36
