After Zenda

by John Spurling

  ‘The day is dawning. This is the last night of your darkness. The light shines again. It shines through me. I will be with you and lead you - as I was with you and led you in many dark times past - until all Ruritania is one in the one true faith of Jesus my son. There will be no more ignorance of the truth, no more obscurity, no more corrupt practices and false priests, whether from East or West. All will be plain and simple, as it was when my son first walked the earth and I taught him the love of God and he taught the world.’

  She waited for a moment, straight and still, her face looking calmly out over the crowd, her arms at her sides - she made no gestures at all, but she didn’t stand stiffly like a statue. Her body inside the plain white robe touched different parts of the material as the breeze blew or as she breathed or swayed infinitesimally. She was as relaxed as an actress or a model.

  ‘But when this work is done and Ruritania is one in the true faith, I shall leave you again. Do not be sad and think of me as dead then. I shall not be dead, I shall be alive, as I always was, in Heaven, watching over you. But you must believe and believe nothing else except the true faith and do nothing else except what will establish the true faith in Ruritania. In the name of my son, for ever and ever, Amen.’

  When they had all fervently repeated ‘Amen’, she stood there in silence just as before, for up to a minute. Then she walked along the line of her supporters, held out her hand to one of the soldiers on the right flank and led him back to the centre. The soldier, in his camouflage, with an automatic rifle slung over one shoulder and a plain black beret on his head, was hardly taller than her. He had a round, plebeian face, clean-shaven, but with blackish jowls, and a beaky nose. His eyes also seemed to be black and were close together. He never smiled, though he had a sort of fleeting sneer which perhaps did duty for a smile, and he looked discontented and mean.

  ‘This is my servant Michael,’ she said. ‘Listen to him!’

  She went and stood behind him, like a guardian angel, while he gestured irritably to the crowd to get off its knees. He made no attempt to speak Ruritanian, although German certainly wasn’t his native language. He looked southern - perhaps he came from Georgia or Romania.

  ‘I am a soldier, not a speech-maker,’ he began unpromisingly, his voice sounding like a crow’s after hers, ‘and I am only here to say that what we have begun we will finish, that Ruritania will be one country again for the good of all its people, that we will drive out all gangsters and corrupt politicians and Western infiltrators and that in all churches, like this one, we will restore the purity of the true faith. No one who joins our cause will be harmed by us, but all those who oppose it will be thrown aside. Ruritania in the true faith!’

  He unslung his gun and raised it above his head, at which some of his armed followers round the steps actually fired theirs into the air, causing the front rows of the crowd to step back hastily against the rows behind and the whole mass of people to heave and jostle dangerously. Michael spoke angrily to his troops and they stopped firing, but it was obvious that, even if this uprising had divine assistance, it badly lacked discipline and training and its leader -frightening as he appeared - had no public charisma.

  The crowd had lost its concentration and was beginning to shift around and talk among itself. Michael waved his gun again and shouted over the rising noise:

  ‘Go to your homes now, everyone! But tomorrow morning all men who are fit and less than thirty-five years old must come to this square and be ready to join us on the march to Bilavice, our next objective. Ruritania in the true faith!’

  The people obeyed him immediately and began to disperse, but it seemed to me that the powerful stimulus of the bonfire and the genuine holy awe created by the woman in white had been dissipated by this clumsy bandit chieftain and that if I had been one of their fit men under thirty-five I’d have found a hole in the ground and stayed there until after they’d left for their next objective. Thinking this and watching to see what the party on stage would do next -would the woman float over the crowd or suddenly vanish? - I entirely forgot that to all intents and purposes I was one of their fit men under thirty-five. The crowd round me had drained away and I was standing there exposed as the soldiers began to move into the now vacant space in front of the fire. The ones I had been leading inside the church immediately recognised me and took hold of my arms with excited camaraderie:

  ‘You’re the one! You must come with us. We’ll need you at Bilavice, the church is much bigger there . . . etc. etc’

  As I stood there bemused, wondering whether to make a dash for one of the streets, try to outdistance them and hide somewhere until I could safely search for the hospital, a soldier I hadn’t met before, a big fellow with a thick Stalin moustache and some sort of special arm-band, came over to see what the fuss was about. My friends told him all about my brilliant exploits in the church - now that things had calmed down I was beginning anyway to regret departing so far from the family motto - and urged him to recruit me immediately for greater glory at Bilavice. I hoped he’d say that he’d look for me in the square in the morning, but he probably noticed my reluctance. The upshot was that I was enrolled there and then.

  Together with several other likely young men, some enthusiastic, some distinctly press-ganged, who had been part of the crowd, I was led to a lorry and invited to climb into the back. As I did so I looked round at the church and saw that Our Lady of Chostok and her party had disappeared. Some of the soldiers seemed to be preparing to spend the night in the square, but they were taking no chances with new recruits. In a convoy of lorries which had been parked in side-streets, we drove out of town and down a lot of hairpin bends to a farm. There we spent the night, sleeping as best we could, on bales of hay inside a barn. It wasn’t specially cold, but I thought miserably of my room with the en-suite bathroom and Magda in her flowered blouse and, most of all, of what might have come out of the Count’s kitchen for my now ravenous appetite. My only comfort was that at least, unlike Thomas in his ice-tray, I still had an appetite.

  9 Mountain Air

  We got some kind of porridge to eat, with tea to drink, at dawn. Afterwards we were given time to wash and shave in a cold-water sink and then the new boys were lined up in the farm-yard so that the Ruritanian Army of the True Faith - that was what we had joined

  - could assess what it had picked up. The big man with the Stalin moustache and the arm-band, who seemed to be the sergeant-major, came along the line followed by a runt of a man carrying a clipboard - they looked like Laurel and Hardy. Each recruit in turn was asked a few personal questions and then told to do some physical task -running round the yard, lifting a ploughshare, scrambling over a stable door, climbing a rope - to test their stamina and speed of reaction. Most of them were very young and healthy, but clumsy and slow in the uptake. The big man amused himself making mock of their efforts and promising them they wouldn’t know themselves in a week - they’d either be fit or dead.

  While Laurel and Hardy made their way up the line - I was near the far end of it - I was considering what answers I’d give. Obviously I was going to stand out as totally un-local, even if I managed to conceal the fact that I wasn’t even Ruritanian. I also had to have yet another name. The questions so far had been perfunctory, but they might be less so in my case.

  The boy on my right was about sixteen and extremely nervous -he’d probably never spent a night away from his home and mother before. His name sounded like Tishkon Yavelets and he was a real Ruritanian-speaker. He knew some school German, but it was a completely foreign language to him. He had three sisters and two elder brothers and came from a farm, smaller than this one, in another valley nearby. He had once been to Bilavice, but never beyond the borders of Karapata and the only town he really knew was Chostok. He could shoot and run up hills, he said - even catch a rabbit with his bare hands if it was far enough away from its burrow. His head only came up to my shoulder, but he was well-built and presumably nimble when he wasn’t nervous. As it was, the
sergeant-major told him to jump over the horse-trough and he caught his foot and fell painfully across it. I was too busy inventing my curriculum vitae to join in the general laughter and the sergeant-major waited for the bedraggled and confused boy to limp back into the line before he moved on to me.

  ‘You don’t find that funny, Shorty?’ I was the tallest person in the line.

  ‘No,’ I said, trying to sound neither truculent nor obsequious.

  ‘Go and do the same - only better!’

  The horse-trough wasn’t very high off the ground and I made a reasonably graceful job of it.

  ‘Now run three times round the yard as fast as you’re able.’

  The others - those who had been made to run at all - had only been set one circuit. My patience was being tested. I took it at a good loping pace, but not as fast as if my life depended on it. When I finished, panting a bit, I could see my tormentor debating with himself whether to make me do it again faster. He decided that would be too boring and - probably irritated by the flat cap I was still sporting - snapped instead:

  ‘Stand on your head!’

  This wasn’t a smooth, even surface like the cobbles in the palace square at Strelsau and I missed it the first time. The sergeant-major looked delighted. At the second attempt I got it and held it. It was he who tired first:

  ‘Stand in line!’

  I resumed my cap and did so, while he turned to the rest of the recruits:

  ‘This man with the ugly bald head is pleased with himself. He can do simple tasks quickly and correctly. But although I like soldiers who take pride in their abilities, I do not like cocky recruits. I will ask this man to lick my boots to teach him his place.’

  He placed one foot just in front of me. I stared straight into the distance.

  ‘Lick my boot, piece of shit!’

  ‘Captain!’ I said. ‘I am a free man, ready to fight for my country and learn what you have to teach me. You have no reason to insult me.’

  ‘Lick my boot!’

  ‘You’re asking too much.’

  ‘Lick my boot!’

  He didn’t like this impasse any more than I did - in other circumstances he was probably a kind family man not a bully - but he couldn’t see any way out that wouldn’t look like weakness. I let him wait for a little, until I could see sweat round his hairline, then I licked my index finger, bent down and rubbed the toe of his boot with the spittle and straightened up again. He considered this for a moment or two, decided it was an acceptable compromise not a further provocation and withdrew his boot as if he was completely satisfied.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Berg.’

  ‘German?’

  ‘Ruritanian.’

  ‘First name?’

  ‘Karl.’

  ‘Patronymic?’

  ‘Marx.’’

  ‘Marx! Karl Marx! Are you making a fool of me?’

  He was all ready to start the boot-licking episode over again.

  ‘That’s my name, Captain. My father was a very dedicated Marxist and he thought I couldn’t have a better name than his hero’s.’

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Strelsau.’

  ‘Occupation?’

  ‘Teacher of English.’

  ‘An intellectual? What are you doing here?’

  ‘I met some soldiers in Chostok. They told me I should join the Ruritanian Army of the True Faith.’

  ‘Yes, I remember some of them admired you for your hooligan behaviour in the church.’

  ‘I am new to the true faith. When I saw they wanted to clear the church of its contents, I thought I could help.’

  ‘What were you doing in Chostok?’

  This was the tricky bit. I had decided to be as truthful as possible, since any other story could very easily be blown apart by my total ignorance of the area.

  ‘I was staying with a relative near Chostok and we came on a sightseeing visit.’

  ‘Name of your relative?’

  ‘Count von Wunklisch.’

  ‘That millionaire! He must be a supporter of the Strelsau government.’

  ‘I don’t think so. He only returned to live in Ruritania recently and it’s quite possible he feels as I do, that the government in Strelsau is ruining the country.’

  The runtish assistant with the clipboard was already well down his second sheet of paper with my replies and the sergeant-major obviously felt my interrogation was becoming too complicated. He abruptly moved on to the next man, but then looked back at me again:

  ‘Have you any particular skills, Herr Berg, other than teaching English and standing on your head?’

  ‘I can sometimes shoot straight,’ I said, ‘I can swim . . . that’s about it.’

  ‘And you can talk like a lawyer and you are related to a millionaire.’

  His heavy, expressionless face was momentarily improved by a smile.

  ‘But for all your advantages you have learnt something today.’

  ‘Not to be too pleased with myself, Captain.’

  ‘I am a corporal, not a captain.’

  He began questioning the man on my left.

  We didn’t move on for some time. The commander’s boast about going straight on to Bilavice was only a manner of speaking. The Chostok affair had been the rebel army’s first major public appearance - up till then it had been little more than a few guerrilla groups operating round different villages in the most inaccessible parts of the mountains. There was a nucleus of trained soldiers like our Corporal Radichev - drop-outs or deserters from the regular Ruritanian Army - but most of us were young peasants from the mountains who were still under the age for compulsory military service or had been allowed to postpone it because they were eldest sons and needed on the farms. Our military gear - issued to us after that first parade - was so motley that I was allowed to keep my flat cap, but there were plenty of reasonably new automatic rifles and quantities of ammunition from the arsenals of the ex-Warsaw Pact. I saw no sign of anything heavier, such as rockets or grenades, let alone artillery or armoured vehicles, but those might have been reserved for more established units.

  After a few days in which they acted as demonstrators and sheep-dogs to the new flock, the ‘trained’ soldiers moved to some other base and more recruits took their places. We were taught only the rudiments of our new trade: firing, moving under cover, making simple assaults and keeping more or less in step on the march. All this took me back to my teens in the school cadet force and when Corporal Radichev, who had become quite friendly after our first encounter, saw that I knew roughly what I was supposed to be doing, he put me in charge of one section of the recruits. There seemed to be no one senior to him at the farm and I asked him why, with at least fifty men and boys now under his command, he remained a corporal. He explained that this army was proud of having almost no ranks at all. There were a few other corporals and the odd sergeant, but even the commander-in-chief, the dreaded Michael of the beaky nose and close-together eyes, only called himself ‘Captain’.

  ‘It is the opposite to our currency,’ he said. ‘We don’t want inflation in our army. Officers are for offices.’

  But somebody was organising this army, however minimally. The runtish man from our first parade was in charge of communications and had dealings with headquarters somewhere by radio and phone. Lorries turned up at the farm with more weapons and supplies as well as more recruits. We were clothed and we were adequately fed.

  The main question for me, once I was trusted enough to take my section out for exercises in the valley, was whether I should simply dive into the undergrowth and find my way to Previce Castle. I decided not to for several reasons: the weather was turning cold and wet, the terrain was mountainous and completely unknown to me, the Count had probably fled back to Strelsau by now, and I was unexpectedly enjoying myself. And there was another reason, which I hardly admitted to myself: the hope that when we did move on to our next objective I might see Our Lady of Chostok again.

 
; We’d been at the farm for two or three weeks - the farmer, incidentally, continued to milk his few cows, graze his sheep and plough his steep fields with some help from the recruits - when we got our first reminder that this wasn’t just an outward-bound course. We were a mile or two above the farm, crossing the river where it came down through a thickly-wooded ravine over a series of small waterfalls; my section was supposed to secure the crossing while the Corporal and the rest of the force waited in cover further back. I had sent two men over and was just going across myself with five or six more when we heard the frenetic chugging of a helicopter. I knew the sound well. My siestas in my brother’s pretence of a garden in Hackney had often been disturbed by a police helicopter making wide circles overhead as it observed the traffic or a football crowd or escaping bank-robbers or whatever police helicopters do.

  This one was also circling and in a moment we saw it over the crest of the hill on our right. It was much larger and fatter than the police helicopter over Hackney and was khaki-green instead of white.

  There was little we could do to avoid being seen - it was hardly likely to be one of ours - since we were nearly up to our thighs in fast water, with loose boulders underfoot. I shouted to my companions to keep moving and concentrate on not falling in. The helicopter circled round again and came lower - now it had certainly spotted us - and on the next circle I could even see the helmeted faces of the crew peering down at us. Reaching shallower water, I placed each foot carefully on a steady rock, straightened up and gave them a two-finger sign. That seemed to discourage them - at any rate they rose over the trees and chugged away out of earshot. I learnt afterwards that they had been taking pictures and much later - when a lot of water had flowed down that river - the image of me with my flat cap and two-finger sign, which was interpreted to mean ‘victory’ not, as I had intended it, ‘up-yours’, became famous.

  Because there was no shortage of fire-arms and ammunition, we got a lot of practice at shooting and it wasn’t the rarefied kind they have in regular cadet-forces and armies, with special ranges and targets and a lot of safety-precautions. We just stood or lay at one side of a field and banged off at a gate or tree or boulder or even a bird. We also shot rabbits and pigeons to improve our meals. Of course you don’t have to be specially accurate with a Kalashnikov - you can just spray bullets in the general direction of the target as if you were using a hose - but if you’re fighting someone with the same weapon it gives you the edge to be spot on straight off. Several of the lads became quite good at hitting the mark first time and so did I. The best of us all was the boy called Tishkon who had fallen foul of the horse-trough. He was brighter than he’d first appeared and in the evenings when we mostly played cards or just talked I helped him improve his German. But his real ambition was to learn English so that he could go West and make his fortune and when I began to teach him a few phrases, others wanted to learn them too. So most evenings when we weren’t out on night exercises, I found myself giving regular English lessons to a class of about a dozen and continuing the lessons even more informally as we crept about the landscape on manoeuvres. At the same time I was picking up a useful smattering of Ruritanian, especially from Tishkon.