After Zenda

by John Spurling

  What happened was that I got to the station, had a schnapps and a couple of beers - there was nothing to eat but some very grey sausage which I didn’t fancy - and discovered a train leaving for Kapitsa. That seemed such a civilised form of transport compared to a clapped-out coach climbing snowbound mountains that I immediately bought a ticket, without thinking too distinctly about the change of destination. The main thing was to get out of Bilavice. True, Kapitsa was in the opposite direction from Chostok and was in the hands of the Ruritanian Army, but I’d signed no contract with the Army of the True Faith, I wasn’t a fanatical Slav nationalist and I owed them nothing - if anything, they owed me. As for my reception in Kapitsa, I saw no problem. My problem, as Gerda pointed out, was Bilavice. In Kapitsa I could simply phone the British Embassy in Strelsau and give them the glad news that, if they’d been missing him, Ed Fenton was alive and free.

  The train was waiting at buffers beside a platform - the line didn’t go beyond Bilavice. It was scheduled to leave at eleven and as I climbed up into an enormous old-fashioned carriage with a corridor, I had a momentary qualm about the coach. What if they waited for me when I didn’t turn up? Or went round the town looking for me and then left it too late to escape the incoming enemy? There were still five minutes in hand. I left my bag in an empty compartment and rushed to a public phone. Brobek’s number was engaged. I tried again several times and finally got his transport company’s answerphone:

  ‘Karl Berg,’ I told it. ‘Unforeseen circumstances. Don’t wait for me! Love to Gerda!’ I regretted that as soon as I said it, but you can’t erase messages on answerphones, so I quickly added: ‘Respects and thanks to Mikos and Susha. Goodbye, good journey, see you!’

  I came away from the phone to find my train on the point of leaving. The stationmaster had his whistle to his mouth and his flag raised. I raced for the nearest door and got it open as the whistle blew, the flag fell and the train jerked. But as I got my foot on the step and turned to close the door, I saw that there was another latecomer running on to the platform: a girl in denims with a rucksack on her back. I leant out, holding on to the door with my left hand and extending my right to the girl. She ran alongside and caught my hand as the train began to gather speed. For a few moments I thought I wasn’t strong enough and we’d both end up in a heap on the platform. But all my training and gym-classes and practice at hurling grenades had toughened my muscles and I hauled her off her feet and fought my way back up the steps with her and finally sat down with a bump on the passage floor to see what I’d caught.

  I hope this was the train you wanted,’ I said.

  ‘There’s only one line out of Bilavice,’ she said, dusting her knees, straightening her clothes and resettling her denim cap.

  She wore a complete denim outfit - jeans, jacket and cap all in blue to match her pale blue eyes - and looked as if she might have been directing, or possibly starring in, a film. But I knew, of course, that she hadn’t. She was Our Lady of Chostok. She didn’t thank me for my action and behaved quite distantly and coolly, as if she took it for granted that any man who happened to be standing in the doorway of a train she was about to miss would make sure to drag her on to it. Still, she came and sat in the same compartment as me and I took that as thanks enough.

  ‘How long have you been in Bilavice?’ I asked.

  ‘Off and on,’

  At that rate she could have been the figure in blue in the church who had such a powerful effect on Susha.

  ‘What happened at Kapitsa?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It sounds as if there was some sort of disaster.’

  ‘I wasn’t there.’

  I assumed you’d be on your way to Chostok with Michael and the others.’

  She didn’t answer - it was obvious she wasn’t.

  ‘We last met,’ I said, ‘in the square at Bilavice.’

  I sounded, even to myself, as if I was desperately trying to claim acquaintance with somebody I’d once met at a crowded party.

  ‘I remember the cap,’ she said.

  After that I gave up for a while and we sat silently staring out of the window into the darkness as the train descended a series of long loops down from the Bilavice plateau. The snow on the banks of the line reflected the lights of the train, but nothing was visible beyond. We had more or less finished with the steepest part and were entering the hill-country below when the guard came in and clipped our tickets.

  ‘Change at Kapitsa!’ he said, handing her back her ticket.

  ‘I thought this was a through train,’ she said.

  ‘All trains stop at Kapitsa until further notice.’

  ‘Are you going on to Strelsau?’ I asked, when the man had gone, thinking I might do the same.

  ‘No. Vlod.’

  She got up and pulled down the blinds over the door and windows on to the corridor.

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘In Plotla,’ she said.

  ‘Is that where you come from? Your home town?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What takes you to Vlod, then?’ was my next line, but I hadn’t the heart to say it. It was like talking to the recorded voice on a telephone information service. Her tone wasn’t rude or even dismissive, just efficient and automatic. After pulling down the blinds she sat down again and unzipped a side-pocket on her rucksack.

  ‘I have a favour to ask,’ she said.

  ‘Go ahead!’ I said, expecting to be told to stop asking silly questions.

  Instead she drew a pair of scissors out of the side-pocket and held them out to me.

  ‘Will you please cut my hair!’

  Completely thrown, I simply stared at her.

  ‘I know you are not a hairdresser - I presume you are not. You only have to cut it off.’

  ‘If that’s what you want.’

  She gave me the scissors and with the other hand took off her denim cap. Her long blonde hair was piled up under it and secured with pins. She pulled out the pins with a few quick movements and the hair fell down to her shoulders. We passed through a village station without stopping. She hadn’t drawn the blinds down over the outside windows and I wondered if any gaping peasant on the platform had had this sudden vision of Our Lady’s head and shoulders framed in a shower of pale gold hair whisking past inside the night-train to Kapitsa. If so they might also have seen the half-crazed face of the man in the flat cap opposite her, gripping the closed scissors in his palm as if he was about to stab her.

  ‘As short as you can,’ she said, and drew her finger round the back of her head at roughly the level of the earlobes.

  ‘It’s a terrible thing to do,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sorry to ask you, but it’s not easy to do it myself.’

  ‘I meant, it’s such beautiful hair,’ I said.

  ‘Are you sentimental? It will grow again.’

  ‘True. But it ought to be cut properly. I shall make a butcher’s job of it.’

  ‘You think I should make an appointment with the hairdresser in Kapitsa?’

  ‘Or Vlod,’ I said, so distressed at the thought of what I had to do that I missed her irony.

  ‘Vlod would be too late,’ she said. ‘Cut please!’

  I stood up, put my fingers into the scissor-handles and snipped the air a few times to test the blades’ resistance. Then I sat down on the seat beside her and gathered her hair in my left hand.

  ‘No! Wait a moment!’

  I let go of her hair, relieved to think she was having second thoughts about this vandal act.

  ‘Have you got a newspaper?’

  ‘Sorry, no.’

  ‘Or a towel? Something to cover the seat so that we leave no traces.’

  I took a damp, grubby towel out of my bag and she stood up while I laid it over the seat. Then we both sat down again and I started to cut. I soon found it necessary to kneel on the seat, with my side braced against the back and my knees touching her bottom, but I was too concentrated on the job in hand to be s
exually aroused and besides she was as relaxed and unconcerned as if I really was a hairdresser. I’m not turned on by being made to feel subordinate -whips and bonds and women in boots do nothing for me - and she was certainly not turned on by me. Hairdressers, however, have one perk - they’re allowed to talk to their customers.

  ‘You know my name, but I don’t know yours.’

  She made no reply immediately, but turned her face more towards the window to make my task easier as I worked round to the back of her head. My right knee slipped on the pile of fallen hair and I butted her by mistake at the base of the spine.

  ‘Sorry!’ I said.

  ‘Yelena,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve always had to think of you up to now as just Our Lady of Chostok.’

  Our eyes met in the reflection in the train window and since she didn’t look away and I didn’t either, there was a hiatus in the haircutting. It was a battle of wills and she clearly wasn’t used to losing such battles. It was beginning to become ridiculous when she spoke:

  ‘Why don’t you go on?’

  ‘Turn your head a bit more, please!’

  She did so and broke the eye contact in the window.

  ‘What do you expect to happen when we reach Kapitsa?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Will it be like crossing a frontier - passports and customs?’

  I remembered then that I had no passport. It was still at Previce Castle with the rest of the things I’d brought from Strelsau, including my copy - Hackney Library’s copy - of Machiavelli.

  ‘Why ask me?’

  ‘I suppose I thought you’d know.’

  I was getting increasingly irritated by this persistent stonewalling.

  She exacted services from me but gave nothing in return except the privilege of serving.

  ‘Are you Ruritanian?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes - no - sort of.’

  ‘Then you will know better than me. I am not even a sort of Ruritanian.’

  ‘Where from?’

  ‘From Ukraine.’

  I had finished all but the far side of her hair.

  ‘Would you mind changing places now?’ I said. ‘So that I can do the last bit.’

  She moved up and I knelt on the seat next to the window. And now I was aroused. Perhaps this profile looked more vulnerable than the other, perhaps I was that much closer. Her high-boned cheek, the deep arc of her jaw and the longish neck were extremely near and intimate as I held the hair away from her ear. There was a mole just under where the hair dwindled into down in front of her ear. The eyebrow was thick and straight over the inner corner of her eye, but curved up from the centre before fading away over the outer edge. That shallow saucer of tight skin between the cheekbone and the temple was within nine inches of my long Rassendyll/Elphberg nose. I put my knee deliberately against her bottom. She moved a few inches away. I edged it forward again.

  ‘Finish cutting please!’ she commanded.

  ‘Tiring work,’ I said.

  ‘You are strong.’

  ‘My left arm is still weak from a wound in Bilavice.’

  ‘But you are using the right arm.’

  ‘That’s weak from lifting you on to the train.’

  She suddenly stood up and almost in the same movement pulled the scissors off my fingers.

  ‘I can finish it now myself.’

  She went to the door and opened it a little, peered out cautiously for a moment to check that the corridor was clear, stepped delicately through the gap and closed the door behind her. I was left kneeling on the seat with huge quantities of pale gold hair and a hot flush of frustration, betrayal and injustice. What a bitch! What a cock-teaser! What an egotistical Ukrainian narcissist!

  I returned to my own seat and glared belligerently at the pile of hair on the opposite seat. Then I suddenly felt very hungry. Her rucksack was still lying on the seat and I wondered if it contained any food. Even if it did, of course, she’d never give any of it to me.

  Generosity was not in her nature. I returned to my angry contemplation of the fallen hair, then after some time got up, undid the flap and the string at the top of her rucksack and pulled it open. It seemed to be mostly clothes, neatly packed, with a book in Russian on top and directly below that an immaculate pale blue towel. She had a towel of her own all the time! Bloody hell! I slid one hand down the back of the rucksack to see if there was anything edible. The door clicked and I looked up to see her half through it.

  ‘What are you doing? Are you a thief?’

  She’d finished off her hair and tidied up the part I’d done. It didn’t look soigné, but it certainly didn’t spoil her looks.

  ‘I’m incredibly hungry,’ I said.

  ‘You’re incredibly bad-mannered,’ she said.

  Coming from her that annoyed me.

  ‘Bad manners are catching,’ I said.

  ‘You think I owe you something?’

  ‘Give as well as take,’ I said.

  She went to the rucksack and did it up again, put the scissors away in their side pocket, zipped it up and unzipped another below it. She extracted a small bar of chocolate and held it out to me.

  ‘That’s all I have. I have nothing else to give you, unless you want money.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘I don’t eat money.’ I took the bar, broke it in half and held out one half to her.

  She paid no attention, but started gathering up the loose hair in my towel and carefully adding stray bits from the floor and the back of the seat. I ate my half of the chocolate bar and again held out the other.

  ‘Won’t you go halves?’

  ‘Your payment,’ she said. ‘I don’t want it.’

  I ate it, while she picked up the towel and its contents in a bundle in both arms.

  ‘Do you want to keep this dirty towel?’

  ‘I half choked on my chocolate.

  ‘Not if it’s any use to you.’

  ‘Open the window please!’

  Being an old-fashioned carriage it had the kind of window you could actually open. I pulled down the top and she stood on the seat and lifted her bundle to breast height. She wore her breasts flat. The wind rushing in from outside caught a few small bunches of hair and blew them on to the floor. I picked them up as she dropped the whole bundle out of the window. I was about to reach up and send the stray hair after it, when I had a better idea. I closed the window - the air was bitter - and put the pinch of hair in the top pocket of my shirt.

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘The rest of my payment,’ I said. ‘You gave me a bar of chocolate, Our Lady of Chostok gave me a relic’

  She almost smiled, then picked up her rucksack and went to the door.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said.

  I must have looked completely crestfallen.

  ‘It would be best if we were not together when we reach Kapitsa,’ she said.

  ‘You think I might give you away?’

  ‘Or I might give you away. Not deliberately. But it’s easier to make one story for yourself alone. With two people they can set up traps.’

  ‘The ticket-collector saw us together in the same compartment.’

  ‘I can say that I came into the compartment after you helped me catch the train, but had to go to another because you started to annoy me.’

  ‘Annoy you? I’m cast as the lusting brute?’

  ‘But not miscast, surely? Anyway, men don’t consider that disgraceful. On the contrary.’

  ‘And suppose I mention the hair?’

  ‘You can easily destroy me, if you wish. And I you, after your exploits in Bilavice. We must each act as we think right and best.’

  She went out and closed the door.

  I spent the rest of the journey obsessively spotting and disposing of odd hairs, but it never occurred to me that, although I was wearing my original jeans and sweater, with an anorak bought in Bilavice against the cold weather and, of course, my faithful cap, the bag beside me contained almost
nothing but spare underwear, a khaki shirt or two, and the camouflage jacket and trousers I had worn as a soldier of the Ruritanian Army of the True Faith.

  The train’s brakes wailed as we slowed towards Kapitsa.

  14 The Prisoner of Kapitsa

  All my protests in loud English and pretence that I knew only a few words of German did no good at all. Offering money - I had no hard currency, just a small amount of Ruritanian krunas earned from my English lessons - was worse than useless. It simply confirmed, what my wretched bag already told them, that I was a nationalist on the run. I was taken straight from the train, which had been searched end to end by about twenty-five armed soldiers, in the back of a van, to an army barracks and dumped in a cell to await further questioning. With me and into adjoining cells went three of my former comrades from the Bilavice defence group, who had been on the same train. We didn’t speak and could hardly meet each other’s eyes in the van: where was all our braggardly sniping and grenade-throwing now?

  Our Lady of Chostok - Yelena - was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps her Ukrainian passport had passed her through to Vlod, perhaps she was being reserved for special treatment, gentler or nastier than ours. My main occupation, as I sat alone on the bed in my cell waiting for further developments, was thinking of all the questions I should have asked her in the train: Why aren’t you with Michael any more? When you made that speech in front of the church in Chostok, did you believe what you said? If I told you who I really am, would you still treat me as just a serviceable slob? Are you a Lesbian? I also speculated on what her replies might have been, but of course I knew perfectly well there wouldn’t have been any, which was why I hadn’t asked the questions in the first place.