After Zenda

by John Spurling

  It was unpleasant and extremely boring being in the cell, but I wasn’t really worried because I was sure that once I got interviewed by somebody higher up than the soldiers who’d arrested me, I’d be able to pull my status as a foreign national and get help from the British Embassy or Grabenau or the Count, who might by now or surely would soon be free of his own imprisonment.

  After a day or two of solitary confinement, during which I saw only the guard who brought me food twice a day and seemed to be a deaf mute - of course I was still pretending to speak only English - I was marched to a small bare room containing a table and two chairs and interviewed by a lieutenant of about nineteen. Thin-lipped, shaven-headed, wearing glasses with thin silver rims, he looked as if he hoped to be running a death-camp when he grew up. He spoke good English.

  ‘Mr Edwin Fenton?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He consulted papers in front of him.

  ‘If we are to prove your identity we need passport or other documents.’

  ‘All my things, including my passport, are at Previce Castle.’

  ‘Previce Castle is not yet liberated.’

  ‘Could you phone the British Embassy in Strelsau?’

  ‘That is not necessary.’

  ‘Of course it’s necessary. I’m a British citizen and I’m being kept in prison on charges I don’t understand. I wish to phone the British Embassy.’

  ‘The British Embassy will be informed when investigations are completed.’

  ‘But how can you complete your investigations until you’ve established my identity?’

  ‘I understand you are British. That is clear.’

  ‘Good! So I have a right to speak to my Embassy.’

  ‘No, no right. Mercenaries have no rights.’

  ‘I am not a mercenary.’

  ‘You were a combatant with terrorists.’

  ‘What’s your evidence for that?’

  ‘You were carrying military clothing and you travelled from Bilavice which was in the hands of terrorists.’

  ‘I was a journalist observing events in the front line and I wore the clothes as some protection from being seen and shot by mistake.’

  I wasn’t sure whether war correspondents wore camouflage on the job, but it seemed a credible idea. The teenage Himmler sighed.

  ‘Journalists must have papers, must have identification, must be accredited to war zones. No journalists have been accredited to these terrorists.’

  ‘I happened to be visiting my friend Count von Wunklisch at Previce Castle and became involved with the terrorists by accident. It was too late then to ask for my accreditation.’

  ‘You only speak English, Mr Fenton?’

  ‘A little German.’

  ‘I think you did not understand very well the position you were in.’

  ‘I understood very well that a war had broken out and I thought that as a journalist it was my duty to see and report what I could.’

  Himmler shook his head and wagged his finger with infuriating complacency.

  ‘No journalist,’ he said. ‘We have no identification for a journalist, so we have to agree a mercenary, but a mercenary not fully understanding what he is doing.’

  I controlled my urgent need to pick him up by a leg and an arm and hurl him at the guard standing to attention by the door.

  ‘Can I please speak to the British Embassy or to Count von Wunklisch or to a parliamentary deputy called Anton Grabenau?’

  ‘This is not necessary.’

  ‘Not necessary! That’s a completely stupid thing to say! You’re holding me in prison and accusing me of being a mercenary. This must be illegal.’

  This time he nodded his head in little quick jerks like a car mascot, patiently humouring my outburst.

  ‘Normal laws do not apply. This is a military emergency. Not understanding is best, Mr Fenton.’

  I stood up and banged my chair on the floor.

  ‘I demand to be put in touch with the British Embassy!’

  He compressed his lips so tightly that he seemed to have a sewn-up scar where his mouth should be and signed to the guard. I was marched back to my cell.

  Two or three more days went by and I began to get seriously depressed. I was used by now to the foul smell of the toilet-bowl in the corner; and the food - porridge in the morning and a thin soup with a piece of bread at night - kept me alive, though violently hungry. I was not let out even for exercise, so I spent much of my time walking round and round the cell, running on the spot, standing on my head, jumping, swinging my arms, practising lethal blows against an invisible enemy whose face I envisaged with thin lips and thin-rimmed glasses. I tried to remember all the Ruritanian words and phrases I had ever learnt, but since almost every one conjured up an image of the circumstances I’d learnt them in with either Gerda or Susha, I soon found this too painful.

  I thought hard about escape, of course. The cell was not a custom-built dungeon, but simply a small room in a kind of barrack-building: the barred window looked out on a bare tarmac space surrounded with other one-storey buildings. People, mostly soldiers, crossed the space from time to time, hurrying through what was evidently a cold wind, though there was no snow here yet. The walls were not particularly thick. I could hear the guard coming down the corridor and faint sounds from the cells on either side - coughing, the flush of a toilet, doors slammed. The walls went right up to the ceiling, which was about twelve feet high - I could just touch it if I stood on the bed or leapt in the air. But the only way out of this place for a prisoner without any kind of weapon or instrument was to pull the bars off the window with his bare hands or rush the guard when he opened the door to slide porridge or soup in along the floor. Since he always peered through the grille in the door and ordered me to stand at the far side of the cell before he would open up, it would have to be some rush. I made a few practice runs and decided he’d get the door closed and have time to spit in my food for good measure without even trying.

  My depression was less to do with any real worry about my ultimate release - I was sure that at some stage I’d get access to someone with more authority and broader ideas than the Himmler youth. What depressed me was the emptiness of my own barrel. I didn’t know any books or long poems - or even short ones - by heart; my thoughts hardly went beyond food; sex in this utterly sexless place seemed a bad joke and even the bunch of pale gold hair in my top pocket failed to stir me: basically I found my own company completely lacking in style or content. I began to take much the same view of myself as Yelena obviously had - a strong right arm to get on to a train with and a haircutter in an emergency - but of no conceivable interest personally or intellectually. Would my great-grandfather, I asked myself, have lost interest in himself in the same circumstances? Of course, he never made the mistake, so far as I could remember, of getting himself jailed. But his double, King Rudolf V, my distant cousin and great-grand-stepfather, did, in the dungeon of Zenda Castle, and it broke him up completely. Perhaps I was going the same way and would emerge like him as a chronic alcoholic. I only wished somebody would offer me a drink and start me off.

  It occurred to me, of course, that prisoners traditionally keep themselves sane or plot escapes by tapping out messages to each other along the pipes. There were pipes in my cell, running close to the floor under the window and straight through to the cells on either side, but I didn’t know Morse code. Probably one could have shouted through the walls, but if my neighbours were still the ex-Home Guard of Bilavice I didn’t feel I had much to shout to them except ‘sorry it didn’t work out’. Altogether, by the time I was marched out of my cell again, I had decided that of all the experiences on this earth, my own sole company was the pits and I was really looking forward to another interview, even with the lipless boy.

  I found myself, after waiting half an hour or so in an antechamber with a silent guard, in a large room containing about ten people. There were three officers in military uniform sitting behind a long table; an elderly woman and a y
oung man in civilian clothes taking notes at side tables; a saturnine, hook-nosed officer in his mid-thirties seated facing the long table, with a sort of lectern in front of him; and on my side of the room, also seated behind a similar lectern, young Himmler. He, it turned out, was not only my defence counsel before this military court but also my interpreter, so that unless I cared to give away my knowledge of German my case had to be filtered exclusively through him. The whole thing was Kafkaesque. I’ve never read Kafka, but you don’t have to have been to hell to know what hellish means.

  The prosecutor put some papers on his lectern and kicked off with a brief statement of the charges against me: I was a British mercenary - identity not firmly established, but certainly English-speaking and claiming to be a British citizen called Edwin Fenton - who had been a combatant with the so-called Ruritanian Army of the True Faith against the Republic of Ruritania and therefore a terrorist. He offered no proof, called no witnesses, sat down and left the floor to his esteemed colleague, Second-Lieutenant Schutz. My baby-faced defender now stood up nervously, put his papers on his lectern and began by agreeing fervently with the prosecutor’s summary of the probable facts. However, he said, given that his client spoke virtually no German, he would ask the court to take a lenient view of his crime. There was no doubt, of course, that he knew he was among terrorists, but he misunderstood his own position and thought he was not so much fighting as observing. There was no evidence that he was a professional journalist but he might well have hoped to be able to make some money when he went back to his own country by selling his story to a newspaper. He was also probably very confused about the issues and was essentially unaware that he was actually fighting against the legitimate forces of the Republic of Ruritania and therefore open to a charge of State Treason. He sat down.

  ‘What is going on?’ I said loudly in English. ‘I don’t understand a thing. Is this a court? Where are my rights? I wish to speak to the British Embassy in Strelsau. Bitte, Britisher Embassee!’

  The judges consulted together and my defender was told to give me a brief version of what had been said. Meanwhile the prosecutor was sitting twisting one of his very large ears with impatience and as soon as the translation was finished he was on his feet again.

  ‘Second-Lieutenant Schutz’s account of the prisoner’s misapprehensions might be more credible,’ he declared in a voice creamy with satisfaction, ‘if we did not have incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. Please put on your cap, Mr Fenton!’

  I looked blank.

  ‘Put on his cap!’ he said sharply to my guards and one of them did so.

  ‘Observe his appearance, Colonel!’ he said to the judge at the centre of the table and paused, while the colonel - a pink, pudgy-faced buffer of about fifty with bristly white hair and a yellowing moustache carefully separated from his nose by a shaved trench - stared at me. So did his two flanking judges. I set my jaw and stared back from under my cap with what I hoped was rugged British insolence.

  ‘Now compare this!’ said the prosecutor and with a melodramatic gesture produced from among the papers on his lectern an enlarged photograph and held it up. He walked the few steps to the judges’ table and laid the photograph in front of the colonel. All three judges looked at it carefully, looked up at me, looked back at the photograph.

  ‘Second-Lieutenant Schutz!’ said the colonel.

  My defence counsel hastily crossed to the table and was shown the photograph. When he too had compared it with me he seemed completely unnerved.

  ‘Show it to the prisoner and ask him if he has anything to say!’

  His face white, hand shaking, the poor boy showed me an excellent aerial shot of myself in my flat cap and shoulder-slung Kalashnikov standing ahead of my section in a mountain-stream and making a two-finger sign at the camera. The face was mostly hidden, but the nose poked out sufficiently to be unmistakable. I felt more sorry for the boy than for myself. It looked as if he had been set up for this forensic disaster, encouraged to make his lame excuse about misunderstandings so that the prosecutor could achieve maximum effect when he produced the ace in his hand. Surely prosecutors were supposed to present their evidence first? The judges must have colluded in bending the rules.

  Standing there in my cap, unquestionably the same person as the rude guerrilla in the photograph, what could I do? I adopted more or less the same pose and gave the judges two fingers.

  ‘There is no victory for you,’ said the colonel, stretching the sides of his mouth to show his teeth as if he meant to brush them.

  ‘It doesn’t mean victory,’ I said in English, ‘it means up yours.’

  Second-Lieutenant Schutz was unable or unwilling to translate this and I didn’t see either of the note-takers write it down, so that misunderstanding persisted.

  But although the argument might have been said to be over, the prosecutor had three more aces in his hand and wanted to show them. He retrieved the photograph from the cowed Schutz and asked the judges if he might now call his witnesses. They were called and they were my three old comrades from Bilavice. Each in turn, never catching my eye, described me as the leading light in the planned defence of Bilavice against the Ruritanian Army, the energetic corporal who, wounded in the original assault on the town, had enthusiastically organised the manufacture of grenades and mortars, supervised the selection of an elite band of snipers, suggested and approved points of ambush and counter-attack. My name, they all agreed, was Karl Berg and I not only spoke German like a native, but also made a very decent shot at Ruritanian. I was pleased to hear that. Schutz was asked to sit down - he was no longer in any state to stand up and made no attempt to question the witnesses or cast doubt on their evidence - and the colonel dealt directly with me.

  ‘Mr Berg,’ he said, ‘Can you deny any part of this evidence?’

  ‘My name is not Berg,’ I replied in German, ‘and I am a British citizen. Otherwise it’s broadly correct.’

  ‘May we know why you chose to fight with such enthusiasm for our enemies?’

  Put like that it did sound bad. Why had I? It all started with vandalising the church-windows. Yet at no point did I feel any particular animosity towards the Ruritanian Army - except perhaps when they were trying to annihilate me in Bilavice - nor any great sympathy with the nationalist cause. I’d actually grown to dislike the nationalists’ leader.

  ‘No reply, Mr Berg?’

  ‘I think,’ I said, ‘that I wasn’t so much fighting against enemies as with friends.’

  ‘It’s a pity for you that you chose such friends!’ said the colonel, flashing his teeth again. ‘Have you any further points to make, Second-Lieutenant Schutz?’

  Schutz stood up like a puppet, moved his head as if it was attached to tight wires and spoke with difficulty:

  ‘No, sir.’

  Schutz sat down, the three judges put their heads together and everyone else was preternaturally silent.

  ‘What is your real name, Mr Berg?’ the colonel said suddenly.

  ‘The name on my passport is Edwin Fenton,’ I said, ‘and several Ruritanian citizens, including Count von Wunklisch, the parliamentary deputy Anton Grabenau, the artist Vladek Tarlenheim and the Ruritanian Ambassador in London, Colonel Danzing, can vouch for my identity.’

  ‘I simply do not understand your motives, Mr Fenton,’ said the colonel. ‘These are all well known and loyal Ruritanians. What possessed you to betray their friendship for these other friends ?’

  I shrugged. There seemed no easy answer. But thinking about the question afterwards, I realised how loaded it was, as those sort of questions fired at one by angry and baffled schoolmasters always were. ‘Loyal’ to what?

  The court’s verdict was that I was a mercenary guilty of fighting for terrorists and that that constituted State Treason for which the prescribed sentence was death by firing-squad. Under the emergency regulations there was no necessity to inform the British Embassy until after the sentence had been carried out, but the court would consider
whether or not it might be advisable in the circumstances.

  15 A New Taste For Opera

  Am I writing these memoirs in my cell - like Alec Guinness in the film where he murders all his relations for a title - the night before they take me out at dawn? It did occur to me to pull title, to send a note to the colonel asking him if he was really prepared to eliminate the great-grandson of their last monarch, the nearest thing to a king they had. But he’d have bared his teeth and torn the note up, of course, thinking it was yet another of Mr Fenton’s inexplicable idiocies. In any case, I suddenly remembered that I wasn’t the only possible king on offer: there was still Freddy waiting in the wings and I couldn’t help thinking that, offered the prospect of being Queen Jennifer, my sister-in-law - fond as we were of each other - would not have stood in the way of my execution. She would have seen it as a moral imperative, the inevitable outcome of a misspent life, better for everyone, especially myself. Freddy didn’t know Ruritanian, of course, but his German was nearly as good as mine and he’d undoubtedly be ‘loyal’ to anything they asked him to be loyal to. His loyalty to Hackney Council proved that.

  No, I am not writing in that cell, but in a room larger and more comfortable, though nearly as empty, in less nerve-wracking circumstances. My nerves were wracked in the days that followed the court’s verdict, chiefly, I believe, because of that teasing hope of survival, supposing that the court in its wisdom chose to inform the British Embassy of my plight before sentence was carried out. If there’d been no let-out clause I would surely have been calmer and happier. Perhaps I would have asked for pen and paper and sat down to write these memoirs up to this point, ending with the pious reflection that I had now bored myself so silly that it would be a relief to be shot of myself.

  While I’m in this introspective vein I should emphasize that although I can almost recall what it was like to be ready to lose my own company for ever, its only lasting effect has been to make me detest solitude. I have not seen the point of Buddhism or turned to Jesus or embraced the soppy humanism which was buried somewhere under my father’s dour socialism or even learnt to love prisoners. I have had no moral conversion at all nor improved my character, but merely reverted to my old arrogant, selfish self, with the extra determination never to be forced to contemplate it at such close quarters again, but to let it hum away unexamined like the engine of a really good car that never goes wrong as long as you don’t tinker with it. Having looked into the heart of darkness and seen my own face, I’m grateful that most of the time it’s other people that have to look at it.