Bilavice Hospital was a relatively comfortable place, certainly after so many weeks in a barn. The place seemed to be clean, the surgeon competent, nurses always warm the cockles of my heart and if I hadn’t had to lie in one position with my injured arm held up in a sling arrangement, I might have been able to sleep better. As it was I felt more depressed than grateful. Corporal Radichev came to visit me the next day, bringing my old civilian clothes from their temporary storage in the orchard sorting-shed, and told me about the victory celebrations. The people, he said, had been less wholehearted than those in Chostok about the destruction of their church interior and only a few of them had knelt to Our Lady of Chostok. His own attitude had changed a bit too: he seemed to have been infected by Bilavice’s lack of enthusiasm, not to the point of denying her special power for those of the true faith, but so that he could at least understand the reservations of others. This was probably why he’d taken the trouble to visit me - he didn’t refer directly to our falling-out and he warmly praised my ‘brave conduct’ - but he was basically a kindly and reasonable man and, just as in the matter of the boot, he must have felt he’d gone over the top.
When he’d finished telling me about the celebrations I’d missed he had nothing much more to say. Tired and gloomy, I hardly spoke. But he stayed sitting there in silence for some time and at last he said:
‘There was a woman asking after you.’
‘That’s nice!’
‘She knew who you really were.’
‘Oh yes?’ I wondered which real me she meant.
He looked carefully round the ward - there were several casualties from yesterday, including enemy soldiers.
‘She knew you’re really a British journalist,’ he said in a powerful whisper which could certainly have been heard by the patients in the beds on either side of mine if they’d been aware of anything but their own pain.
‘What did she look like?’
‘Quite small. Dark.’
I could only think of Our Lady of Chostok and the Count’s Magda - evidently this wasn’t either of them.
‘Did you give her my address?’
‘I told her you were in hospital.’
I began to feel sleepy and closed my eyes.
‘We shall bury Tishkon this afternoon,’ said the Corporal, ‘with the others.’
‘Say a prayer for him for me! Whatever he would approve of - nothing from the Old Testament. How many others?’
‘Only about ten - of ours. More of the enemy.’
Twenty-plus dead to make Michael master of Bilavice - it didn’t seem a worthwhile cause - but of course I was depressed and death had come even closer to me this time than it had with Thomas’s corpse. But since the dead don’t know what they’re missing it’s really very silly to get worked up about what they might have felt if they’d known they were going to be missing it. People who fight for their own or other people’s causes don’t expect to come out dead. They take that risk, of course, but the odds they’re really considering are what advantage it might give them on the presumption of staying alive.
The corporal left at last, shaking my good right arm vigorously and hoping I’d be back with the group before long.
‘Good-bye, Mis-ter Fen-ton!’ he said in spaced-out English.
‘Svidani, Kaprel!’ I said in svelter Ruritanian.
I had my next visitor a day later, when I was feeling better. It was Gerda, the girl from the Astoria hotel, but she looked quite different because, I realised, I’d never seen her smiling. When she’d thanked me effusively for my gallantry outside the hotel and I’d muttered Nil Quae Feci or words to that effect, I told her that if she’d smiled at me like that in the first place I’d never have let her go out with a man from the mafia.
‘Not mafia,’ she said, ‘Corpus - Secret Police.’
‘You still have secret police in the democratic republic of Ruritania?’
‘Not the same Secret Police, of course, as we had under communism - it was called Komsec then - but the same people. It was very brave of you to attack such terrible people.’
‘I had no idea. If they’d worn a badge saying Secret Police I’d have left you to your fate. I thought they were just common thugs.’
‘They are, but they work for the state.’
‘For the government, you mean? The present government?
‘Of course.’
‘For good President Slobodjak?’
‘Not for him personally. He probably hates them, but what can he do? When you move into a house which is rotten all through and full of rats, you have to live in it if you have no other.’
‘You could repair the house and poison the rats.’
‘Not if the house is ready to fall down and the workmen are more afraid of the rats than the owner.’
We talked for some time about the evils of Ruritania and Eastern Europe in general and then Gerda - sitting on the chair at my bedside occupied the day before by Corporal Radichev - suddenly said:
‘You are growing your hair, Mr Fenton.’
‘I’m tired of being a skinhead. People see me in the wrong light.’
‘That’s true.’
‘We skinheads only crave a little understanding.’
‘I have been sitting here looking at you in a different light for quite a long time.’
‘I’m sorry. Are you bored?’
‘Did you see the exhibition in the Palace of Youth in Strelsau?’
‘I did drop in. Very interesting in its way if you’re keen on history.’
‘You are the man in the coffin.’
‘What? Do I look so ill?’
‘The husband of Queen Flavia -I forget his name - the Englishman with the red hair and long nose.’
‘I thought he was a waxwork.’
‘You wouldn’t have looked like him if he’d been a skeleton, would you?’
‘Somebody told me there was a resemblance.’
‘Your hair is the same colour, your nose also long and straight, your whole face similar. Lying down like that with your hair beginning to grow you look exactly like him.’
‘Gerda . . .’ I said, ‘. . . may I call you that?’
‘Of course. But what am I to call you? You see, I am trained to look and I have a good memory. I don’t go round exhibitions with my eyes closed and my mind switched off, I read the information and study the exhibits. My memory fails me now for the real name of the man in the coffin - the Queen’s husband - but I remember his false name very well - the name he took when he was pretending to be a photographer in a beard. That name was Edwin Fenton, Mr Fenton.’
‘Are you secret police yourself, Gerda?’
‘I am not secret police, no, but I was student resistance in the last years of communism and we were not less observant or dedicated to our task than the secret police, though much less vicious.’
‘And who are you working for now?’
‘For Slav Nationalism, of course. Didn’t you know that? You have been fighting for Slav Nationalism, you were instrumental in saving one of their key agents in Strelsau, you helped to capture Bilavice . . . Are you just Clint Eastwood or a knight in shining armour from a mediaeval romance who happened to be riding through Ruritania looking for good deeds to do? Or did you come here with some purpose in mind?’
‘What would you think if I did?’
‘What would I think? I don’t know. It never occurred to me till now. Did Queen Flavia and her English husband have any children?’
‘Actually they did. A son.’
‘And who was he?’
‘Very briefly a school bursar. My grandfather.’
She sat there looking at me for a long time with an extremely serious expression. I had the feeling of being interviewed for a job - in fact I was once interviewed in my palmy days in the City by just such a small, sharp woman in charge of somebody’s investment department. That one turned me down, this one looked as if she might too. At last she crossed her legs - she had very nice legs indeed
- and rested her small chin on her small hand.
‘It’s something I had never thought of at all. Nobody has, I’m sure, among those I know. It’s almost ridiculous. But why not? Nobody has thought of a better way to solve so many problems.’
‘The President seems to be a good man,’ I said, as devil’s advocate.
‘The President is old and losing control. The Slavs no longer believe he can help them, although they respect him and he might wish to. His day is past. He has carried us out of the communist nightmare, but he cannot carry us further. He is Moses, who led the slaves out of Egypt, but could not himself reach the promised land.’
I was feeling tired again.
‘It’s all quite complex and alien to a simple Englishman,’ I said, and I yawned and scratched my head, jerking my damaged arm in its sling painfully as I did so. The yawn turned to a yelp. She stood up at once.
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have stayed so long. I never meant to, but how was I to know that I’d discover something so extraordinary? Will you tell me your real name? You can save me going back to the exhibition and finding out for myself.’
‘I wonder if I won’t just go quietly back to London,’ I said.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘And it would be a pity.’
‘Karl Rassendyll,’ I said and held out my hand.
‘Now I remember,’ she said, taking my hand. ‘Thank you, Karl.’
She didn’t let my hand go at once, looking at me with the same intense expression as before. Then she suddenly smiled and let my hand go.
‘We couldn’t have a better-looking one,’ she said, and quickly turned and went out.
She came again next day, when I was out of bed and had my arm in a more convenient sling round my neck.
‘I cannot return to Strelsau for the moment,’ she said, ‘for the reasons you know, so I am helping the new administration in Bilavice to enjoy its new status as capital of Ruritania Slavonitsa.’
‘Is this a new country already?’
‘No, but a more distinct and self-confident region which is almost ready to discuss its future role in the country as a whole.’
‘And who is running the new administration?’
‘The same people as before, of course, but with a fresh sense of their priorities.’
‘Like the secret police.’
‘Four-and-a-half million population, Karl! Ruritania doesn’t have enough educated and trained people to keep in a cupboard as spares like your left wing in England. It must always be a question of recycling.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I suppose I’m part of the same trend towards conservation.’
‘You are really a wonderful survival, Karl,’ she said, ‘and I’m beginning to think that fortune may be smiling on us at last.’
She was smiling herself and her enthusiasm lit up her whole face and took away all the unattractive severity it had had in the lift when I first saw her.
The idea is so good and so unexpected that I think it must work,’ she said. ‘That’s to say, I think we must make it work. Nothing can be done until Michael has finished this campaign - he will have to be told who you are, of course, and he may not like the idea at all. In that case, I’m afraid we could do nothing.’
I began to be irritated. I’d had enough of Michael ruling my destiny.
‘Is Michael confident of capturing the airfield at Kapitsa now?’
She looked round significantly at the rest of the ward and spoke in such a hushed voice that I could only just make out what she said.
‘Please, Karl . . . this is not a topic we can discuss.’
‘But my secret is?’ I said, putting my mouth almost into her ear and hissing like a snake.
‘They are not secrets of the same order,’ she said, not noticing any sarcasm in my approach. ‘Many lives might be put at risk, whereas in your case . . .’
‘Only one,’ I said aloud and stood up and walked to the window. Outside there were a few trees and some scrubby grass between our ward and another hospital building opposite. The trees were losing their leaves - winter was close.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, coming to stand beside me, ‘I didn’t mean it to sound like that. I didn’t mean to make you angry.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said, I’m not angry about that. I don’t know what I am angry about. Maybe I’m not angry at all.’
But I was and it was something to do with Michael. He used people - used some of them up altogether and didn’t mind if they blundered into tanks in the process - and he might be so condescending as to use me further, but I really didn’t like him. Could it be just because the only time I’d met him I’d called him ‘sir’ and not been offered a chair? Was I so petty about my dignity?
Gerda kept coming and after a few days we went for a walk into the town. It’s strange being a sightseer in a place you first knew as just a playing-field for a game of life and death. From the hospital we crossed the old stone bridge and looked down at the river we’d surely have drowned in if I’d decided to run that way and we’d got so far. It was a bright warm day and the mountains we’d come down from to capture Bilavice were hazy and distant. Nostalgia was something new to me - perhaps I’d occasionally felt it for my Lotus days in the Eighties, but not as a sense of real loss, since I always assumed I’d do better than a Lotus one day. This feeling now was a genuine pain. It wasn’t just for Tishkon, though I remembered him most days, but for the whole training episode, the whole group. Yet I’ve never much cared to be part of a group - neither at school nor in the City.
‘Tush, pish!’ I said aloud and startled Gerda, leaning over the parapet with her trimmed and disciplined black hair a little tousled for once.
‘What’s the matter, Karl?’
‘I’m getting old,’ I said. ‘I shall be thirty before I’m much older.’
She took my good arm and we walked on towards the square.
‘You look younger when you don’t wear that awful cap,’ she said.
‘I shall continue to wear it,’ I said, ‘until I’m not afraid to be recognised for looking like my great-grandfather the waxwork.’
‘That might be a very long time.’
‘Well, I shall be able to discard it when my hair turns white.’
Another difference from the Bilavice I’d seen before was that it contained people - ordinary people strolling about, talking in groups, going in and out of shops - where before there were only killers in helmets. Quite a lot of people were in the square, enjoying the Indian summer. The church had its doors closed, as it had when I last saw it, and showed no sign from the front of having been vandalised. The town-hall had notices on a large new board outside it. Some were printed, some written by hand, but all were in two languages.
‘Do you speak Ruritanian?’ I asked Gerda.
‘Of course.’
‘You learnt it at your mother’s knee?’
‘I learnt it.’
‘Isn’t it a bit unnecessary - a bit pious - to keep up this double language fiction? I mean who really speaks it? Out of a population, you say, of four-and-a-half million? A few thousand?’
She didn’t answer for some time, but let go of my arm. She was furious, standing very close, virtually spitting at the point of my chin:
‘You have so much to learn! You feel so superior to us from your safe, well-organised country with your important language and your hard currency and your proud history of progress and freedom and being protected from what happens in the rest of this cold, hard, brutal world. I know what you feel like. I can understand you, even if you can’t understand me. I have never been to England or America, no, but I know your complacency. We hear and see it every day on our news broadcasts and yours. This little language of ours which you so much despise is not some nice souvenir for tourists, some charming old-world survival from the pretty mountain scenery, it is our identity. I learnt Ruritanian because I wanted to belong to my country. Well, your German is perfect - that is a start - but do you i
magine anyone could rule over Ruritania without speaking our language?’
‘I never got the impression the Elphbergs bothered with Ruritanian,’ I said, backing away from her outburst.
‘No, probably not. But that was another world. That was a world of many peoples and many kings - many different peoples, but all the kings were German.’
‘Not our British kings.’
‘Yes, yours too. How badly educated you are!’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘point taken. But as a matter of fact I did learn some Ruritanian from my friend Tishkon Yavelets.’
I walked away across the corner of the square and sat on the church steps leading up to the portico we’d broadsided in our moment of glory. Staring vaguely at the cars parked just where they’d been when we were using them for cover, I was astounded to see that the one at the end of the line was a beige Lada.
‘That’s odd!’ I said to Gerda, who had come and sat beside me. I pointed to the Lada.
‘You are odd,’ she said. ‘What were you trained for? Is there anything you take seriously?’
‘I’m seriously intrigued by that car,’ I said and walked over to have a closer look. There were plastic bags stuck with tape over the missing windows and bullet-holes here and there in the bodywork. I looked at the ignition - no key.
‘Perhaps you were trained to repair worn-out cars,’ said Gerda at my elbow.
‘That’s not a worn-out car,’ I said. ‘That’s a heroic car. But the driver’s learned his lesson.’
The sight of the battered but still useable Lada drove away my depression and nostalgia.
‘Gerda,’ I said, ‘I am still under thirty, my faculties are mainly unimpaired, my mind still razor-sharp - will you teach me Ruritanian?’
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