If You're Reading This, I'm Already Dead

by Andrew Nicoll

  He signaled to the sailors standing round the walls, “Round them up. And the rest of you—GO AWAY!”

  The doors were flung open and men with rifles started herding the people out. They didn’t need much encouragement but, when they were all gone and their candles with them and the place had fallen back into shadow again, Mrs. MacLeod was left. The click of her heels, the tap of her parasol, that black and white dress, like a nun and nothing whatever like a nun. She raised her chin and waited.

  “You,” said Varga. “I remember you. The last time I saw you, you had forgotten where you put your knickers.”

  “Oh, I’m always doing that,” she said.

  “I like your hat.”

  “Isn’t it charming?”

  Varga cocked his pistol and took aim. “I could shoot you for it.”

  “But you might make a hole in it.”

  “I’m a very good shot.”

  “But it’s a very big hat. Hard to miss. Don’t you find it draws the eye?”

  “It does, yes.”

  “Hard to look away from it, don’t you think? It’s the sort of hat you just want to keep on looking at.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll tell you what—why don’t I give you this lovely hat as a present, from me to you?”

  “That would be kind. Thank you.” With his thumb, Varga uncocked his pistol and put it back in its holster, and Mrs. MacLeod drew out a long jeweled pin and removed her hat.

  She held it in front of herself as she walked, slowly, slowly, between the columns, through the shadows of the church toward Varga. “It is a lovely hat, isn’t it?”

  “Lovely.”

  “It really draws the eye.”

  “It does. It draws the eye.”

  “People find they can’t stop looking at it. Don’t you want to look at it?”

  “I do, yes. I want to look at it.”

  Mrs. MacLeod came on like a cobra. “You want to look at it so you should look at it. You should always do anything you want to do. You must do everything you want to do and you want to look at this lovely hat so you must look at it. Really, you must. You do want to look at it, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Then you must. You must look at the hat.”

  “Yes. I must look at the hat.”

  “Yes, look at the hat.” She was at the throne, standing beside me at the foot of the steps, holding the hat out to him, its jumbled, frozen aviary trembling a little in her grasp, and Varga came down the steps to take it from her.

  He held it in two hands, looking deep into it as if it was a window to another world, and we looked at him looking at it and we wondered.

  After a time Mrs. MacLeod said, “Imre. Imre? Imre, darling?”

  Varga looked up.

  “Weren’t you going to have these people arrested?”

  He looked round like a man waking up and seemed surprised to notice the sailors with their rifles and the rest of us, standing round waiting to be shot. “Yes,” he said.

  “And put in prison.”

  “Yes. Arrested and put in prison.”

  “And shot.”

  “Yes. We’ll shoot them tomorrow.”

  “But not me, Imre. I’m not with them. They didn’t ask me to join their silly Skanderbeg club.”

  Varga was fully awake now—or as close to awake as the little ginger lunatic ever got. “Not you obviously …”

  “Mrs. MacLeod.”

  “Obviously, not you, Mrs. MacLeod.”

  “You see, I’d very much like to meet this new king of yours. I feel sure he and I would get on very well indeed. And there’s something I’d like to give him.”

  Varga smiled a knowing smile that barely flickered out from under his enormous mustaches. “I’m no judge but, from what I recall, I feel certain he would like to meet you.”

  Mrs. MacLeod made a pretty nod to acknowledge the compliment. “But you haven’t told me his name,” she said.

  “The new king?” said Varga. “His name is Wilhelm.”

  She gave me a look. “Does he have a second name?”

  “Wilhelm von Wied.”

  “Really?” She put a tiny gloved hand in front of her mouth and laughed like silver bells. “It’s too rich. Wilhelm von Wied and Otto Witte. It’s almost as if somebody sent a telegram and ordered the wrong king—isn’t it, Captain Arbuthnot? Oh, do you think I might have my hat back?”

  “Of course.” And he gave it to her as if nothing could have mattered less.

  “So we’re agreed then? You’re not going to arrest me? And those five silly Albanian girls and their smelly old fathers—you won’t be needing them, will you? And Countess Gourdas—you know, I’m sure the new king will want to meet her too, so let’s keep her, and you can shoot the others—but not until the morning.”

  “No, not until the morning,” Varga said. “And not Maxxie. Not poor dear Maxxie. He’s too nice to shoot.”

  But my mate Max said he would really much prefer to be shot quite a lot than to live an extra day as Varga’s special friend. Well, that wasn’t what he said but it was pretty much what he meant.

  “Shame,” said Varga. “Have it your own way.”

  And then Zogolli broke ranks. He’d been standing there, chewing on his gloves and trying not to cry, but when he saw that Tifty had been saved, and Max had wasted his chance to get away, the little coward cracked.

  He flung himself at Varga’s feet and soaked his shiny boots with tears. “Not me. Don’t shoot me. I know about government. The new king will need a government. I can help. Not me!”

  It was horrible to watch. And it did no good. Varga took out his pistol and slapped the boy away with a crack across the head.

  Poor Kemali. I could see his heart was breaking. The old man rushed forward with groans and cries and went to help. My Sarah would have gone too but I held her by the hand and shook my head. Bad enough for Zogolli to suffer that humiliation without a woman showing him how a man should behave.

  So there was Kemali, getting blood all over his fancy gloves and muttering soothing noises, and there was Zogolli, spitting bits of broken tooth out on the floor, and Varga, the little madman, couldn’t even be bothered to look at them.

  He put his pistol away and said, “His Majesty King Wilhelm has no need of cowards in his government. You will be shot along with the rest of these traitors.”

  Zogolli couldn’t take it. The courage that Kemali had tried to teach him failed utterly, like a bit of elastic stretched too far. He just snapped. He jabbered and he yelled, he raged and he wept and he howled. The poor bastard went to bits. Like those people in the bomb shelter. He wanted to live, that’s all. It’s not such a bad thing. I can’t find it in my heart to blame him for it. My mate Max could lift beer barrels straight up over his head, and you wouldn’t make fun of a bloke who couldn’t do that. Zogolli didn’t have the strength, that’s all.

  There was nothing to be done. We just had to stand there and let him get on with his sniveling while we tried hard not to do the same, but, credit where credit’s due, he didn’t piss his pants and that’s more than I can say. It went on for a long time. It’s hard not to notice somebody for that long, but we all pretended and then, at last, he stopped his howling with all the ease of a child and he stood up and he wiped his face and pushed his fingers through his hair and spat a little more blood and he said, “You can’t shoot me.”

  Varga cocked an eyebrow at him.

  “I know where the vault is. The national vault of Albania. I know where it is and I know the combination. You’ll never find it without me, and you’ll certainly never get it open.”

  Kemali looked at him in horror and he said something in Albanok which needed absolutely no translation, and then he did an astonishing thing. I expected a punch—a slap at the very least—but that never came. Instead he took hold of the curtain tie fixed across Zogolli’s shoulder and he tugged it until the button popped and he threw it on the ground.

  The old
man said, “There used to be twelve of us and our king, but you betrayed him and left us. The Christians will recognize that story. They know your name. I choose to die with my king.”

  “Excellent choice,” said Varga. “We’ll see about that tomorrow.” He grabbed Zogolli by the lapels. “I like you. You can stay. You ladies, come with me. Send the peasant girls away with their horrible, stinky daddies.”

  Armed men moved in and tried to drive the fathers-in-law off, but they refused to leave me. “Tell them to go,” I said. “Get out while they can,” and, after a bit, after Kemali translated, they shook my hand and left. It took three of them to carry Aferdita and she screamed fit to bust a gut.

  The sailors formed up, ready to march us out, and I was scared and I was sad and I was ashamed. I’d let so many people down. I’d made promises to the Professor. I wouldn’t listen when he warned me and he was right and I was wrong and now he was about to die and so was Sarah—just as he always said. I was scared and I was sad and I was ashamed but, by God, I was proud too. I was proud that she had chosen to dare this thing with me. I was proud of her standing there beside me.

  “Can I take your arm, Otto?” she said, and I didn’t say anything because I was afraid that I might cry, so we all fell in together, Sarah and me and Max and the Professor, with Arbuthnot strolling along beside them as if he had been on his way to a glass of champagne and a plate of oysters.

  “Good luck, Tifty,” said Max.

  “Good luck, darlings.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. MacLeod, “good luck.” And she brushed the front of my tunic with the tips of her gloved fingers, “just to smarten you up a bit. You should look nice for your firing squad.” I could have punched her.

  They marched us out.

  “You’ll never get away with this,” said Kemali. “You can’t just snatch a country like an apple off a market stall, not with this handful of thugs. You’ve terrified Zogolli into joining you and I am ready to die, but that square is filled with loyal Albanian troops. They will cut you down.”

  “Really?” said Varga. “How do you think I got here so quickly? Where do you think these sailors came from? Where do you think the bombs came from? Look!”

  He flung back the doors and the light flooded in and there, above the square, looming over the rooftops like the angel of death, was a balloon, a giant silver balloon, a Zeppelin with an enormous double-headed eagle painted across the nose like a screaming butterfly pinned in a case and, beneath it, a gondola bristling with guns.

  “Faster than the wind,” said Varga, “and as high as the clouds—so high up that none of your pissy little popguns can reach her—but not so high that she can’t look down on every shack in this godforsaken dung heap of a country and bomb it flat. Behold your proud army.”

  He threw his arms wide and we saw the square, empty except for a mother weeping into her handkerchief. The boy beside me dropped his saddlebags and ran to her.

  I don’t think I ever told you about my mother’s Uncle Fritz. He lived on a farm a few miles east of Tübingen, and as I recall he was in charge of the dairy or something like that. Anyway, Great-Uncle Fritzie went off to market and he had a good day and he stopped off for a little bit of wurst and a little bit of beer and then the snow came down and it snowed and it snowed and it snowed. Poor old Fritzie couldn’t get the cart through the blizzard and eventually, after two days and nights, he had to leave it behind, put the horse in a stable and tramp home alone, walking along on the tops of the hedges, so deep was the snow.

  Well, after hours of walking he reached the farm and he found his way to his cottage, where the door was completely covered by drifts, but he shoveled them away with his big farmer’s hands until he could see the keyhole and he opened the door and fell inside with half a ton of snow, which he flung out again so he could shut the door. Then, because Uncle Fritzie was no fool, he broke up some sticks, put them in the grate of the range and got them going and, after that, he went out to feed the cows.

  As you might imagine, that took a bit of time, and all the while those sticks were burning away in the grate, and they burned so long that they set light to a little pile of logs there in the grate with them and soon Uncle Fritzie’s kitchen was good and warm again.

  Out in the shed, Fritzie was thinking how nice it would be to get back indoors where everything would be so pleasant and cozy and bright, and he was looking forward to turning the tap on his range and drawing off some nice hot water and making himself a pot of coffee and drinking it while he warmed his feet against the bars of the fire.

  But what Fritzie didn’t know was that all the pipes had frozen while he was away and the copper water tank on his little kitchen range was stoppered up with a big blob of ice and the fire was blazing away merrily and the water tank was getting hotter and hotter and the air inside was expanding and expanding and the seams were getting tighter and tighter and every rivet was straining like the laces on your granny’s corsets.

  So Fritzie got finished with the cows and he made sure they were all set for another night on their own and he shut the door and he climbed back on top of the snowdrift and he started to tramp back to his little cottage. And, when he was about halfway there, he noticed that his bootlace had come undone and he thought, Well, to hell with that, I’m not going to bother doing that up because I’m going to be taking these boots off in a minute anyway. But when the snow came in and chilled his toes he thought, Damnation, I’m going to have to tie this lace after all.

  Of course all that took no more than a moment, since Fritzie had the benefit of more or less a lifetime’s experience in tying bootlaces in a range of colors and sizes, but it meant that, when the rivets on the water tank finally gave way and his kitchen was filled with little bits of exploding copper and clouds of scalding steam, Fritzie was still outside the door and, when he finally came in to survey the scene of horror—a mere bagatelle compared to what is about to happen to my little caravan any second now, mind you—what did Fritzie find but the copper spigot of the water tank, blown across the room and sticking in the back of his favorite chair, right where his heart would have been?

  The details of this story have been engraved on my memory from boyhood, as Great-Uncle Fritz was sufficiently impressed by his narrow escape from death to sit down and write a full account of it to every member of his family, including us. We got a lot of enjoyment out of that letter and we made my mother—who had a beautiful speaking voice—read it out over and over.

  Us kids were all sitting round the table, listening again to the story of how Great-Uncle Fritzie cheated death, when the letter came telling us that two weeks after his boiler blew up he got kicked in the head by a cow and died.

  I only tell you this to illustrate a point, the point being that what’s for you will not go past you. Call it fate, call it destiny, call it luck, call it what you like, the point is that you just can’t beat it.

  You’ve heard so many stories like Uncle Fritzie’s that you’ve already forgotten it. Would you sit round the kitchen table with all your brothers and sisters telling that story over and over again? Of course you wouldn’t. It’s ordinary. It’s a bore. I’m sitting here now, in the middle of this air raid where the perfect, unchangeable geometry of a hundred falling bombs has spared me, and in a little while another bomb will come and it will blow me to bits. There’s no accounting for it but you’ve seen it a thousand times all across this city. It’s the luck of the draw and nobody gives it a thought. This one lives, that one dies. That’s life. You either laugh or you cry. It’s just luck. Good luck, bad luck—one is not more remarkable than the other, so I don’t want to hear any disbelieving complaints about the rest of my story. I told you when I was a coward, so I expect you to believe me when I tell you how brave I was. Uncle Fritzie dodged a flying spigot and died of a kick in the head, and I lived through a firing squad so I could keep a date with an English bomb.

  And this is how it happened.

  I don’t suppose you have ever been
marched to your execution arm in arm with the woman you love. It is a depressing situation.

  We all knew we were going to die, but that is the terrible burden we all carry from childhood. Everybody dies, and we are all part of everybody so we all die. Just not yet. And “not yet” is a great comfort. “Not yet” is a large and comfortable place to hide. “Not yet” is a country that stretches a long, long way off, even when the little passport booth which marks the border with the Republic of Right Now is just around the next bend.

  So we all knew we were going to die, just not yet. Not until the next morning and that was a long, long way off. Still, we must have made an unhappy little procession, strolling along through the streets with armed men on every side—and how those streets had changed. It was as if a plague had struck the town. The crowds had vanished back into their houses. The doors were barred, the windows were shuttered, the streets were silent and once, as we were going down through a narrow lane, Sarah caught the heel of her shoe in a loop of thin rope, a broken string of bunting that somebody had torn down in too much of a hurry to hide properly. I stooped to untangle her, holding her little foot, that slim ankle I had gazed at in church, the same slim ankle I kissed in the railway carriage, and I was certain I had kissed it because there was no tiny part of her I had not kissed and I wanted to kiss every little bit of her again and fight for her and save her but I knew that would have taken us across the river from the Kingdom of Not Yet to the Republic of Right Now. I didn’t want to go there so, instead, I wiped my eyes and I stood up and I offered Sarah my arm again.

  “Thank you, Otto,” she said. My God, she was so brave, my girl.

  We walked on in silence because there was nothing to say and whatever there was that we wanted to say we didn’t want to say in front of other people. That’s what Not Yet means. It gives you hope. We hoped. We hoped that there would be another time when we would be alone to say those things. One more time. My friend, I am here to tell you that there are never enough such times. Don’t wait for the next one. If there is a chance to say, “I love you,” say it because, believe me, the border post of Right Now is much, much closer than you think.