After Zenda

by John Spurling

  ‘Shooting?’ The officer patted his pistol-holster nervously as if he expected an outbreak any minute. ‘We are not encouraging foreigners in the mountains for any purpose.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s dangerous.’

  ‘Landslides? Bandits?’

  ‘I cannot give you further information.’

  At this point my nausea overcame me and, pushing head-first past the officer, I staggered out of the car just in time to throw up my breakfast-sausage on the road. The officer handed my passport to Vladek and withdrew angrily, stopping briefly to wipe the side of one boot on a tuft of grass.

  ‘You proceed at your own risk,’ he said over his shoulder as he signalled to the soldiers near the bridge to let us through.

  I slept again for the rest of the journey and woke shivering to find we’d arrived at Previce Castle. We were in a large courtyard surrounded by a high wall and the building itself still looked more like a prison than a tourist attraction - a massive stone barrack with barred windows, although there were elegant pillars between them and architectural curlicues over the tops. However, the Count had domesticated a rocket-shaped tower at one end and I was helped inside, seated in front of a log fire and given a glass of brandy.

  ‘I hope this is not some serious illness you’ve caught in your kingdom,’ said the Count, occupying a leather armchair at the side of the fire.

  Vladek asked about the reason for the military checkpoint.

  ‘We will discuss that tomorrow when we can hope that Karl Marx will be feeling better.’

  I finished the brandy and was shown by a pretty girl of about eighteen, wearing some ethnic costume, to my bedroom on the second floor of the tower. There, after retching feebly into the toilet-bowl in the en-suite bathroom, I undressed and collapsed into a luxurious nest of blankets and hot-water bottles and slept through the night and well into the next day.

  It must have been afternoon by the time I got out of bed, weak in the limbs but no longer sick. The pretty maid had brought me a light breakfast and drawn the curtains. I dozed off and woke again when she came to remove the tray. I asked her name.

  ‘Magda, sir.’

  ‘Mine’s Karl. I mean Edwin.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s simplest. Can I have a hot bath, Magda?’

  ‘I’ll run it, sir.’

  It had been running for ten minutes or so when I got out of bed and went to the window. The weather had changed while I was sleeping and the view was blotted out by a mist of rain. I moved away from the window to go and turn off the bathtaps, just as Magda came in at the door for the same purpose.

  ‘Shall I turn off the bath for you, sir?’ she asked, not seeming much embarrassed by my total nudity.

  ‘I was just going to get into it,’ I said and, deciding not to be embarrassed either, walked boldly past her into the bathroom and felt the water with my hand.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I called out, turning off the hot and standing by the bath while the cold ran a bit longer. ‘Thanks very much.’

  She was standing now in the bathroom doorway.

  ‘Does everybody in the mountains wear national costume?’ I asked, waving my hand vaguely towards her embroidered blouse and ample flowered skirt over suede boots.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘but the Count prefers it.’

  The bath was cool enough now and I got into it.

  ‘Nice,’ I said, lying back in the water and smiling at her, wondering if she was going to offer to loofah my back.

  ‘Ring the bell, sir,’ she said, pointing to a button in the wall beside the bath, ‘if you need anything.’

  Coming on top of my previous nude scene with the old woman in the barge, I was puzzled by Magda’s behaviour and when I got downstairs again and was settled in front of the fire with the Count and Vladek, asked if all Ruritanian women were equally unabashed by naked male strangers.

  ‘You misunderstand,’ said the Count. ‘You are not a stranger. In the person of the King you are every woman’s father, brother, son or lover - an intimate part of their life and dreams. So your body is not a source of prurient shame but of interest, satisfaction and pride. I’m afraid you will have to get used to the complete absence of privacy, even for your private parts.’

  ‘I think it suits me,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I’m a natural narcissist.’

  ‘We must hope so,’ said the Count. ‘Royal persons who have not been sufficiently narcissistic have invariably come to grief. And by the same token extreme narcissists who were not royal, such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler, have proved very successful rulers until their weakness for world domination instead of straightforward sex overcame them.’

  ‘It may be balm to my narcissism,’ I said, ‘to be treated as if I were a royal person, but nothing I’ve seen so far in Ruritania suggests that the thing will go much beyond taking baths in front of maids in ethnic costume.’

  ‘Your encounters with criminal elements in the streets and chemical elements in the river have made you severe and cynical,’ said the Count.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I meant my encounters with democratic elements in the royal palace and parliament. These people have created enough splinter-groups of their own without you and me and Colonel Danzing introducing another one from outside.’

  ‘Ours is not another splinter,’ said the Count, ‘but the glue to stick all the splinters together.’

  ‘You were going to tell us about the reason for the checkpoint,’ said Vladek.

  ‘There is some kind of disturbance, not in itself perhaps all that serious, but an American has disappeared - feared kidnapped or even murdered - and the government is no doubt afraid that other foreigners might be targeted.’

  ‘An American missionary called Fisher John?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know, but I understand there is a religious basis to the insurrection as well as a nationalist one.’

  ‘An insurrection?’ said Vladek. ‘Do you mean these people are fighting the government?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Then it’s very serious.’

  ‘Not necessarily. It depends how well armed they are and how well organised.’

  ‘Slavs?’ I asked.

  ‘You can take it that all the mountain people - excepting one or two returned landowners like myself - are Slav. Likewise the people of Plotla, the province in the plain to the east. But numerically speaking they are perhaps less than half the population and mostly peasants. The real weight of the country - industrial, financial and intellectual - is concentrated in Strelsau and the mainly Germanic province of Zenda.’

  ‘There seem to be a lot of Slav deputies in parliament,’ I said.

  ‘Those are mostly the ex-communists who now call themselves Liberal-Socialists or Socialist Democrats or Democratic-Unionists. But there are Germans among them too, such as our friend Anton Grabenau - people one might call all-weather amphibians, who adapt with impressive facility to any political climate.’

  ‘What part does the President play?’

  ‘Mainly ceremonial. He signs what Parliament decrees, but because Stepan Slobodjak is the man he is, he has more power than appears in the constitution. He was a leading protestor against Soviet imperialism in the Seventies and Eighties - a figure parallel to Walesa in Poland or Havel in Czechoslovakia. Slobodjak is the keeper of the Ruritanian conscience. He stands for principles and morality, he is the white knight of freedom, unsullied by compromise and cowardice.’

  ‘A difficult act to follow.’

  ‘Quite so.’

  ‘Is he ambitious? I mean does he want more constitutional power?’

  ‘Not at all. He has everything he wants already - an assiduous staff, an admiring wife, an adoring nation, a library.’

  ‘Any weaknesses?’

  ‘He is vain and intellectually conceited, also elderly and often tired, but there are no rumours of women, drink or corruption.’

  ‘How could he be replaced wi
th a King?’

  ‘His health is not wonderful - he spent several years in prison under the communists - so he might conveniently die. Otherwise he would have to be willing to replace himself - to retire in favour of a King, thus bestowing all his moral authority on his successor.’

  ‘Is that likely?’

  ‘No. He is an enthusiastic republican.’

  The Count watched me while I thought about this.

  ‘Why do you want to replace him?’ I asked.

  The Count’s eyes flickered towards Vladek, making it clear that the question couldn’t be properly answered here and now.

  ‘I’m not such a republican,’ he said lightly.

  ‘The problem with Slobodjak,’ said Vladek, ‘is that he’s a genuine socialist - that’s why the so-called socialists put him in prison - so when he interferes in politics it’s always for the best moral reasons - public welfare, freedom, equality of opportunity - and just undermines what little authority the government has by showing up the compromises they’ve had to make with opposition factions.’

  ‘Too good for this world,’ said the Count, getting up from his chair and going to the window, as if he wanted to close the discussion.

  ‘But if it was clear that the majority of the people wanted a King,’ said Vladek, ‘Slobodjak would surely agree to retire.’

  ‘Surely,’ said the Count, with open derision, which seemed to apply equally to the people, the president and the earnestly optimistic Vladek. ‘But look, the mist is clearing! Are you fit to go out, Karl Marx?’

  The mist had not cleared much, but it was less dense outside than it seemed through the windows. The castle stood on a cliff with open ground all round it and we followed the edge of the cliff for some way before the path went in amongst trees. There was a decaying wooden construction here - a kind of cabin on a high platform.

  ‘A watch-tower,’ said the Count.

  He and I were walking behind Vladek and Thomas the bodyguard/chauffeur, who was carrying a couple of shotguns, in case any game broke cover. The Count stopped, while the others entered the trees.

  ‘They had a high wire fence all round this open part and watch-towers at each corner. This is the only one still surviving. Perhaps I’ll restore it as a summer-house and twine it about with flowers, so that my guests can take tea here and experience a pleasant frisson at the thought of evil times now happily gone by.’

  ‘A serious prison,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yes, and our dear good president was once an inmate. You see, he naturally feels he has earned his beautiful palace and will not be happy to leave it, whatever the people say. And, of course, the people will not tell him to leave it - he knows that - because he is the one stable and believable element in all this unbelievably unwholesome place. Oh, yes, Karl Marx, if the river made you sick, I can tell you that’s only the beginning. Ruritania is so sick that it really ought to die.’

  ‘So why have you come back to it?’

  ‘My homeland, dear boy!’ He waved an arm theatrically back towards the castle: ‘My ancestral hearth!’

  I picked a bit of rotten timber off the steps leading up to the watch-tower and crumbled it slowly.

  ‘I am reasonably rich,’ he said, after watching me for a moment or two. ‘I have lived in Switzerland in some comfort most of my life and I have bored myself for a good many years. So I hoped it might be amusing to try a new life in Ruritania. Until I came here and saw it would not be amusing at all, merely sickening, and I began to make plans to leave again. And then I visited London and Colonel Danzing told me about his mad idea for restoring the monarchy. All the same, I was intrigued when he told me a little about you . . .’

  ‘He doesn’t think much of me.’

  ‘No, he was quite shocked by your unsuitability and so, you see, I began to wonder whether fate had not shuffled the cards again and given me a hand I could play. Because Colonel Danzing’s Ruritania and Ruritania as it now is are not the same place. Therefore a King who would be unsuitable for the one might be highly suitable for the other. And when I actually met you I became quite sure that fate had dealt me a most interesting hand and now the problem is, how are we to play it? But I have an important question to put to you first, Karl Marx, and that is why I could not discuss this matter in front of our poor friend Vladek.’

  He suddenly left me and walked round the watch-tower, evidently to make sure we were not being spied on. I was reminded of Colonel Danzing’s antics in Regent’s Park.

  ‘It is quite plain to me as to you,’ he said, returning and putting one arm round my shoulders, ‘that nothing is to be looked for from parliament or the government. There is no faction or even combination of factions which could, even if it wished to, deliver you your throne. Hard currency, of course, will go some way and I have enough of it to make a start, but quite frankly those people are not even worth buying. You might as well buy the fishing rights in the River Volzer.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So we come to my question and I must say that if you give me the wrong answer, I may have to go back to playing bridge in Switzerland after all.’

  ‘Could I ask you a question first?’

  ‘Dear boy, I know what your question is: what do I get out of it?’

  ‘More or less.’

  There were shouts in the distance.

  ‘Tell them we’re coming!’ said the Count. ‘I’m sure you can shout louder than I can.’

  ‘Coming!’ I bellowed into the trees and when they shouted again, so did I. The mist had lifted almost entirely and the sound came back to us like a boomerang from behind, where the cliff curved out into more forest the far side of the castle. We started to walk on into the trees.

  ‘In the first place,’ said the Count, ‘I have always liked the idea of myself as an eminence grise - you know what that means?’

  ‘The power behind the throne.’

  ‘Exactly. Colonel Danzing told me you were pig ignorant, but I knew you’d had a paid education. In the second place, of course, thrones these days do not have power behind them, but in front, and it is there I would wish to be and there I think you would need me, since you may be street-wise but you are hardly power-wise. You will need a government and a minister to control it. That would be my role.’

  ‘Then someone would have to elect you, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Oh, I suppose so. But elections, you must know, are only a branch of PR and PR is mainly a question of money. I would not see those technical details as much of a problem, provided the package were attractive enough.’ Shots sounded ahead of us.

  ‘I’m sure you’d be a first-rate prime minister,’ I said, ‘but the whole thing seems to me extremely remote. I mean, it’s one thing weaving fantasies of power from London, like Colonel Danzing, but when you’re here it’s all gritty real. I reckon even Mr Kinnock’s cellophane rose had a better chance than my crimson climber.’

  ‘Yes, but you are a realist and you come from a country that has real elections. This makes you a little narrow-minded perhaps. I am working round to my crucial question. Colonel Danzing said you knew no history at all.’

  ‘He was right.’

  ‘You’ll forgive me, then, if I tell you how the Soviet Union came about?’

  ‘Lenin, wasn’t it?’

  ‘So you do know some history.’

  ‘That was the only kind Dad wanted us to know.’

  ‘But he wouldn’t have told you that Lenin cheated?’

  ‘In what sense?’

  ‘By seizing power from a minority position, without any mandate from the people. The mandate was discovered later, when the system had been reorganised.’

  ‘Dad’s view was that it was a weak position, but made strong by Lenin’s courage and genius.’

  ‘Ah, good! So there was no moral issue involved?’

  ‘In Dad’s eyes, all the morality was on Lenin’s side.’

  ‘Do you have any moral principles yourself, Karl?’

  He had dropped his usua
l bantering tone. We were walking downhill now and fir-trees hemmed us in on steep slopes above and below. The banks beside the path were deep green moss, with various kinds of mushrooms in clumps under the trees. It was like an illustration from a fairytale - there should have been gnomes sitting on the mushrooms and an ogre striding round the bend of the path.

  ‘What exactly do you mean?’

  ‘Is there anything you wouldn’t do or wouldn’t wish to be done for you in pursuit of your aims?’

  ‘The question hasn’t really come up in the ordinary course of a layabout’s life. I suppose I’d have had no qualms about cheating on Social Security if I’d wanted to moonlight, but I was too lazy.’

  ‘I’m asking you to consider the question now.’

  ‘I wouldn’t actually kick anyone in the teeth for the hell of it. I mean, I don’t have the skinhead mentality.’

  ‘But if somebody was in your way and wouldn’t get out of it voluntarily?’

  ‘It would depend on his attitude and, of course, his size. If he really annoyed me and I thought he looked weedy enough, yes, I’d probably take a swipe at his teeth.’

  ‘But if he was a kindly and polite old man, much loved by all, who had never done you any harm and intended you none, but still wouldn’t allow you into your own house?’

  ‘I’d prefer to argue it out with him and convince him he was being unhelpful.’

  ‘And if he still wouldn’t give way?’

  I knew what he was really saying or trying to get me to say, but I was reluctant to give him a straight answer. Not so much because I cared a toss about the President, whom I didn’t know, as because I didn’t like the way the Count was trying to edge me into some scenario of his own.

  ‘The family motto is Nil Quae Feci.’

  I don’t follow.’

  ‘I’ve done nothing, officer. No admission of guilt - past, present or future.’

  ‘You surprise me, Karl Marx, and disappoint me. Is guilt a concept that registers with you?’

  ‘I went to a public school of sorts, with a Christian ethic. The one thing they knew enough about to teach was guilt.’