After Zenda

by John Spurling

  ‘We do not need any Nazis.’

  ‘I’m sure you don’t,’ I said meaningfully. Ruritanian border control was obviously a nest of them.

  ‘Why did you cut off your hair?’

  ‘It was too much trouble to wash.’

  ‘This is not a joke.’

  ‘No, it’s a bloody disgrace. The first thing I shall do for my paper is warn off people looking for business opportunities in Ruritania. Especially people with hair disabilities.’

  ‘We do not like aggressive people in our country.’

  ‘Listen!’ I said, speaking in German for the first time, ‘I don’t like aggressive people either and I’ve got a perfectly good visa there from your Embassy in London. Why don’t you send for the British Ambassador and tell him what you’ve got against me?’

  ‘You speak good German, but I wonder why you want to look like a hooligan.’ He smiled, handed me my passport and waved me through the barrier. ‘Please! Welcome to Ruritania, Herr Fenton!’

  Colonel Danzing had arranged for two of his associates to meet me. They were waiting impatiently the other side of the baggage-hall. As we hurried outside and got into a down-at-heel Skoda in the car-park, I asked them why the passport people were so obstreperous.

  ‘They thought you might be a dangerous criminal,’ said the shorter and older of the two, without a smile, as he got behind the wheel of the Skoda. Anton Grabenau wore a blue, East European, Dracula-style raincoat and looked as if he’d been through every kind of hassle and compromise. There were trenches running down from his nostrils to the corners of his weary mouth, another straight down the middle of his forehead and his small eyes darted about inside dark grey rabbit-holes. He was a deputy in the newly-elected Parliament and wore a little green and blue badge in his buttonhole to prove it.

  ‘Do I look so terrible?’

  ‘Fairly terrible,’ said the younger and friendlier of the two, tall with thick, fairish hair cut short round the sides. Vladek Tarlenheim wore glasses, jeans and a check shirt and smoked incessantly.

  ‘Why did they get more polite as soon as I spoke German?’

  ‘They were probably afraid at first that you were an English mercenary coming to help the Slavs murder Germans.’

  ‘Is there a lot of that?’

  ‘Not yet . . .’ said Grabenau, leaving the sentence open as if he was really saying the opposite.

  The motorway from the airport to Strelsau probably hadn’t been repaired since the Nazis constructed it, but Grabenau and the other drivers seemed to know every crack and hole intimately: the traffic braked and bounced and swerved in a collective series of zig-zags, as if we were all dodging an invisible air-attack. Any newcomer -an unwary tourist, for example - travelling in a straight line would have broken an axle or collided with a deftly sidestepping ten-ton lorry. The vehicles were mostly of Fifties’ design and maybe actually dated from then, but there were a few newish Mercs. Market-forces had already started to creep into Ruritania like the first tentacles of ivy taking hold of an old tree.

  The tower-block, all set about with dogshit and dandelions, contained Vladek’s flat-cum-studio. I was booked into a hotel near the centre of Strelsau, as befitted a supposed Western journalist with hard currency, but meanwhile we needed somewhere private to talk.

  ‘Do they still have mikes in the hotel rooms?’ I asked.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Grabenau.

  ‘They’re probably not connected up,’ said Vladek, ‘or if they are, then nobody’s listening, but you can’t be sure.’

  ‘We can be sure of nothing,’ said Grabenau. ‘The old order is partly abrogated, the new one has not yet come into being. We are a disturbed ant-hill.’

  Vladek’s flat consisted of two small rooms and an even smaller kitchen, with cubby-holes for a loo and a bath. The whole place was tacky to a degree and more or less impassable with stacked-up canvases, thinly and messily painted with elongated figures. It didn’t surprise me that Vladek had taken to politics - he obviously had no talent as an artist. We sat crushed into the only clear space, drinking tea and some sort of local alcohol, with a smell like manure and a taste to match. They didn’t treat me as their potential monarch. Grabenau occupied the only arm-chair, while Vladek and I sat on kitchen-chairs. I was beginning to think that a bit of deference wouldn’t go amiss, if only to prepare me for my new role.

  ‘How much nostalgia is there for the old days?’ I asked. ‘The days of Queen Flavia.’

  ‘None,’ said Grabenau. ‘She was mad for the last years of her reign and most people looked forward to a republic. A few people considered her death heroic - you know that when German tanks entered Strelsau she came out alone from the palace wearing her crown and stood in the middle of the square to stop them, only to be run down by the leading tank? But most people thought she was too mad to know what she was doing and in any case there was widespread support for Hitler.’

  ‘What happened to the crown?’

  ‘Also crushed, I should imagine,’ said Grabenau.

  ‘Or stolen by the Nazis,’ said Vladek.

  ‘Could be expensive to replace,’ I said. ‘But I’ll have to have one.’ Grabenau looked at my shaven head and scratched his wrist expressively.

  ‘So what makes you think,’ I said, ‘that there’s any mileage in restoring the monarchy?’

  ‘Lack of alternatives,’ said Grabenau.

  ‘I take a more positive view,’ said Vladek, offering me a bowl of Russian sweets that looked as if their sell-by date had expired some time during the siege of Stalingrad. ‘We have experienced so many dismal forms of so-called popular government - Fascism, the First Republic briefly after the war, Soviet Communism, now the Second Republic - that we are craving for something more colourful, more inspiring. In this context monarchy would not seem so much like a return to tradition as a fresh idea.’

  ‘Failure of alternatives, as I said,’ said Grabenau.

  ‘How much clout do you have?’ I asked. ‘I mean, are you just freelances or is there some kind of royalist organisation?’

  They looked at each other and then at me warily. Grabenau answered.

  ‘We are not official,’ he said.

  I always used to think that skinheads shaved themselves mainly to annoy the other people that had to look at them. Now I began to suspect it was to annoy themselves. At any rate, the combination of feeling like a criminal plus the alcohol, the horrible canvasses hemming us in and the general squalor of this dead-end place suddenly got to me. I stood up and started to complain.

  ‘Bloody hell! I didn’t come here to be pushed around. I may not be King of Ruritania but I’m bloody heir apparent. What have you got to offer in return for me taking an interest in your grotty problems?’

  They looked alarmed, but also curiously gratified.

  ‘The walls are quite thin,’ said Vladek.

  ‘I’m not worried about that,’ I said, I can get on a plane and go home tomorrow. As far as I’m concerned this is a business transaction. I happen to have something you want - even if it’s only a pint of royal blood - so what have you got that I want?’

  ‘You misunderstand our position,’ said Grabenau, ‘or at least mine. I am not convinced that we want you or your half litre of royal blood, but Colonel Danzing’s family was good to my family after the war and therefore I agreed to introduce you to our country and investigate the prospects of a royal restoration. As for you, I don’t imagine that you’d be here if you didn’t wish to be King of Ruritania, so I think, yes, you’d better go straight back to England if you can’t take an interest in our grotty problems.’

  ‘We are seeking something more spiritual than material,’ said Vladek. ‘A King in the modern world has no material power, but he supplies what we have all lost, the power of our own collective identity, the power of ceremony. You are necessary to us, Karl, because you are not a business transaction and for no other reason. Therefore I hope you will not go home and therefore I shall be happy to make you a crown.
’

  It wasn’t clear whether he was speaking metaphorically or whether he actually intended to fashion the thing with his own hands, but I noticed that several of the figures in his paintings were wearing hideous crown-type head-dresses of various kitschy kinds and I was very much afraid it was the latter. It was at this point that I understood forcibly that one of the worst things about being a King would be having to stand in for other people’s dreams and live down to their stunted imaginations.

  4 The Palace of Youth

  Strelsau reminded me of Edinburgh: a large chunk of rock with the old city crowded up it on twisting cobbled streets; and, down below, the spacious, gracious part - squares and avenues of the 18th/19th centuries. The concrete fangs of the Soviet era make a desolate outer ring. Strelsau’s rock is less dramatic than Edinburgh’s sinking ship -more the shape of a heaped-up sand-castle, with the dome of the royal palace and the spire of the Gothic cathedral sticking out of the top. Still, any tourist would feel he was getting his money’s worth of the picturesque, especially with an exchange-rate of 500 kR (Ruritanian krunas) to the pound and still inflating at about 100% per annum. Below the rock - roughly where the railway runs in Edinburgh -between the gracious part and the cobbled part, flows the river Volzer (or Wloczr, depending on your ethnic preference), with several bridges. The river looks fine from the bridges or the banks, but don’t try swimming in it, as I did later - the fish all died of chemicals years ago.

  My hotel, previously ‘The Lenin’, now ‘The Astoria’, was in one of the gracious squares. My room was small and high up, but clean. There was no proper table to work on, but Colonel Danzing had arranged for me to write my business articles in the offices of a German-language magazine called Augen which had computer and fax facilities.

  Not many of the other rooms in my hotel were occupied - the place had been used under the communists, Vladek said, mainly for minor party functionaries attending rubber-stamp conferences and hadn’t yet been face-lifted for Western tourists. But we shared the slow, creaking lift as far as the floor below mine with a petite white-faced, black-haired girl, dressed in black and white, who stared resolutely at the lift-buttons and wouldn’t even give me a glance. Vladek, accompanying me to my room, said she looked like trouble, but I thought she might be trouble worth taking and asked him why she was so frosty.

  ‘We were speaking German, you see. She is Slav.’

  ‘The ethnic split is that bad?’

  ‘Not ethnic so much as historical-political. We are all the same race, but sometimes we have been part of the German world, sometimes Slav, divided by religion, divided by power. Throughout our history, not just the history of this century, it has been a see-saw.’

  Obviously I had been brought in as ballast for the German end of the see-saw. Danzing, Grabenau and Tarlenheim were all German names, though Vladek’s first name suggested some Slav connection. Of course I spoke German not Ruritanian (a Slav language) and, since most of the leading Slavs had been communists, it was clearly their turn to lose weight. All the same, I didn’t like the idea of being an exclusively German candidate. I would have to rely on my immediate sponsors until I knew more about the place, but the sooner I added a few Slav acquaintances to my quiver the better; and why not start on the floor below? The girl, I have to say, wasn’t especially good-looking, though she had a good body. I’ve trained myself over the years not to be too fussy about women’s faces or indeed their looks in general. The ones who are born beautiful are too much effort to get close to and often not worth it when you do; whereas the others don’t expect much and occasionally have a lot to offer. It’s the law of life, really: backing the favourite is a waste of everybody’s time and trouble, you only stand to make a serious profit on outsiders.

  Vladek left me to unpack and relax. He and Grabenau were to call round later and take me out to a restaurant for supper, but meanwhile it was early evening. The hotel bar was empty except for the barman and a mean-looking stubble-bearded man in a grey tweed jacket, dark trousers and white polo-neck sweater. He was drinking mineral water and had his back against the bar so as to face the entrance-hall. Correctly assuming he was American, I introduced myself by my false name and asked him in English what brought him to Strelsau.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I’m here to explore business possibilities for my newspaper and wondered if you’d found any.’

  ‘I’m a churchman not a businessman.’

  ‘Which church?’

  ‘I don’t know that we have a community in your country.’

  I was afraid he’d ask me to start one, but he wasn’t the usual proselytising type. In fact he was distinctly cagey and this provoked me to press him further.

  ‘Considering they’ve got Catholics and Russian Orthodox here already, is there much scope for alternative religion?’

  The whites of his eyes showed above his green pupils.

  ‘The true religion of this country,’ he said, ‘is primitive Christianity. Bohemia produced the Hussites, but they were little more than a protest against the worst aspects of Papism. In this country some folk went right back to basics and that tradition - for all the other churches tried to stamp it out with every kind of atrocity -has never completely died out.’

  ‘So you’re here to revive it?’

  ‘I’m here to study it, Mr Fenton. In case there should be an opportunity for reciprocal arrangements with our own folk.’

  The idea depressed me - it was clearly open season for mountebanks in Ruritania and maybe they needed a king even less than they needed a few spare religions. Also the word ‘folk’ always irritates me.

  ‘Are you primitives too?’

  ‘You’re being offensive, Mr Fenton.’

  ‘You used the word yourself.’

  ‘Primitive Christianity was the term I used. That is a very different concept. It aims at truth and authenticity, whereas you seem to be implying something from the stone-age.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  O.K.’

  ‘Have another drink, Mr . . .!’

  ‘Thanks, but I have to go. Fisher John.’

  He pronounced it ‘Jarn’. We shook hands. Suddenly the little white-faced girl from the lift appeared in the entrance-hall and Fisher John bounced off the bar to intercept her. They spoke briefly, then turned together towards the street door. I saw I had to seize my chance and caught them up on the pavement. A cab was waiting with its engine running.

  ‘Excuse me, Fisher,’ I said, not sure whether it was his first name or the primitive Christian substitute for ‘pastor’ or ‘reverend’, ‘I wouldn’t like you to go away with the impression that I’m just a yob . . .’

  Saying this I managed to catch the eye of the girl and smiled encouragingly. She didn’t smile back, but she didn’t look away.

  ‘Religion matters a lot to me,’ I said without a trace of irony, ‘but I don’t find it something easy to talk about in the first instance.’

  He gave me a very sharp and puzzled look.

  ‘I can’t talk now,’ he said. ‘Maybe later.’

  We shook hands again and he gave me a card from his breast pocket before following the girl into the cab. The card was printed in raised green letters: ‘DISCIPLES OF THE FIRST INSTANCE’, with his name and an address in Tulsa, Oklahoma. No wonder he looked puzzled by my random phrase.

  The restaurant was in a basement in the gracious part of the city. It had an expensive Hollywood-Roman decor, but the food was mostly local - thick, spicy flavours, peasant cooking - nice, but completely at odds with the ambience. We were four at the table: myself, Vladek and Grabenau plus an elderly German who had only recently returned from a long exile in Switzerland to reclaim his ancestral estate. He was called Count Wenslaus von Wunklisch and claimed to be descended from an older dynasty of Ruritanian rulers than the Elphbergs.

  ‘So we’re nouveaux, are we?’ I said. ‘I thought the name sounded iffy.’

  ‘I am not competing for your throne, don’t worry!’ he s
aid in English, putting his prehensile brown-spotted fingers on my arm. ‘On the contrary, I shall do all in my power to give you joy of it.’

  My impression was that he represented any funds there might be behind the royalist party and also that, although he took to me immediately, he was on sticky terms with Grabenau and contemptuous of Vladek, who was deferential to him. The Count warmly invited me to stay in his castle.

  ‘In the mountains, Charles, very very romantic, but remote.’

  ‘His name is Karl,’ said Grabenau in a prickly whisper across the table, ‘but for the present, especially in public places, it would be better to call him Ed or at least Edwin.’

  ‘I prefer Charles,’ said the Count, again touching my arm. ‘Edwin is ridiculous, Ed vulgar, and Karl only reminds me of that bearded monster from the British Museum who brought so much misery on mankind.’

  ‘I was called after him,’ I said.

  ‘Oh dear!’ said Wunklisch, with a long sharkish smile under his bristly grey moustache. ‘But no one need be aware of that.’

  ‘My second name too, I’m afraid.’

  What? Karl Marx Rassendyll?’

  I nodded, hanging my head in mock shame, while he laughed happily and patted me on the shoulder.

  ‘I take my hat off to your parents, They didn’t do things by halves.’ He raised his glass. ‘To Karl Marx Rassendyll!’

  I raised mine in return, but Grabenau and Vladek looked furious and alarmed and I saw that the pretty fair-haired waitress in a very tight short skirt and ephemeral blouse, who had just arrived at the table with some plates of meat balls, was staring at me.

  ‘I’m hoping to see Rassendyll’s waxwork in the Palace of Youth tomorrow,’ I said, ‘but I doubt if he’d be pleased to be shown off in a building intended for Marxist propaganda.’

  The waitress put the plates down in front of us and went away, but I had the feeling she’d given me mine with particular deference. If so, it was the first I’d yet received and I distinctly fancied it. The others still looked tight-lipped, but the Count couldn’t care less.