After Zenda

by John Spurling

  There were no sounds now from the neighbouring cells. My comrades had probably purchased their freedom and returned to Bilavice. I hoped so. I bore them no grudge for dropping me in it: on the contrary they’d relieved me of any lingering shame. I’d encouraged them to think of me and themselves as heroes and then we’d all four scarpered. Of course it would have been suicide, as Gerda said, to try to defend Bilavice without any help from our own side, but we’d not made a tactical retreat to rejoin our own side at Chostok, we’d simply run. And if the man with the armband runs, you’re entitled to shoot him in the back.

  I continued to exercise in my cell, but less frenetically. I spent long hours lying on the bed staring at the ceiling: it was difficult to sleep. My meals had improved, perhaps because my captors felt some pity for me, more likely because they now had three fewer mouths to feed. There was some grisly stew one night, an antique chicken-leg in a spiced sauce another, cabbage and potato most nights with the soup. And now that I could admit to knowing German I was able to speak to my guard. He was usually the same fellow, though he had the odd day or night off. I asked him if I could get my clothes washed. There was a tiny washbasin in the cell, in which I might have washed my shirt an arm at a time, but nowhere to hang anything up to dry. He brought me a pair of pink-striped pyjamas and an army greatcoat and took away all my clothes. But just as he was tramping away down the corridor I remembered what I’d left in the pocket of my shirt and urgently called out to him through the grille. When I told him the reason, he was delighted, re-opened the door and allowed me to remove my bunch of Yelena’s hair while the door stood ajar between us.

  This was my moment, if ever there was one, to fight for life - what had I to lose if he shot me down in the corridor? But I made no attempt to escape, took the hair, held it up to show him and stowed it in the breast pocket of my borrowed pyjamas, while he stood in the open doorway beaming like Father Christmas - his face was that sort of shape anyway.

  Perhaps my spirit was flickering low by then, my will to survive atrophied by lack of food and fresh air and poisoned by self-dislike. I don’t think so. I think I know instinctively when a moment is good or not, when the wind is behind me or in my face, when it’s fate that opens a door and when it’s only the guard. Next day he brought me back my clothes, washed and ironed, but he too had evidently thought about that lapse of security with the door and he pushed the little pile of clean clothes in along the floor like my food.

  ‘Did you do this?’ I asked when he had closed the door and while he remained outside watching through the grille for my reaction.

  ‘My wife.’

  ‘Please thank her!’

  ‘Look in the pocket!’ he said.

  I put my fingers inside the shirt-pocket and drew out a little rectangle of thin card. It was a mass-produced picture of the Virgin Mary in her standard blue robe - a typical Catholic product in soft focus, with ‘Ave Maria’ printed underneath.

  ‘Please thank your wife,’ I said, ‘I’m very touched.’

  I found it less touching than uncanny, in view of the claims made by the owner of the hair it had replaced.

  ‘She prays for you every day,’ said the guard, ‘and she lit a candle for you in the church on Sunday.’

  Did I believe I was actually going to be stood up against a wall and filled with bullets? Not wholly. Although we’re supposed to be the only animal that has a sense of past and future, it’s a very embryonic sense, decaying into nostalgia and frozen snapshots of the past, projecting the future mostly in the form of fears or hopes of a two-dimensional kind: yes or no, with a slot for ‘don’t know’ like a pollster’s question-form and just as unable to cope with variables and shades of yes-ness and no-ness which falsify the projection almost from the start. I did think about the actual moment, the bullets hitting me, and comforted myself with the fact that I’d already experienced that in a mild form and it wasn’t so terrible at the moment it happened. The pain came afterwards and I assumed I’d be missing that phase on this occasion. The worst would be the time just before - the waiting outside the headmaster’s study or in the dentist’s chair while the instruments were prepared and one had no active role.

  The mind being the main problem, then, the simplest solution would be to slosh it so full of alcohol that it wouldn’t know whether it was going to be shot to pieces or awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Having no alcohol I decided the next best thing would be to get so heavily into fantasy that my mind would be confused anyway. I lay on my bed and tried to let my imagination rip. It started, of course, poor ill-nourished thing, with an Indian restaurant in Islington where Freddy and Jennifer and I had celebrated their third wedding anniversary; and then, gathering strength, found a better restaurant near Covent Garden where I used to take girls in the Eighties. But meals, however good, only demonstrate the human predicament at its most extreme: they are nothing at all in retrospect, meaningless in the future, good only in immediate expectation and fulfilment. Next I tried sex - not much different. Money, then? That was better grist for fantasy because of being a vaguer entity with a larger range of pleasures attached, some of them purely intellectual, such as obtaining a personal interview with my stroppy bank-manager so as to hand him a cheque for five million to cover my £50 overdraft and telling him to transfer the balance to another bank. But what to do with my limitless fantasy money? Meals and sex had already proved unsuitable. What about houses, cars, travel? As soon as they became freely available, of course, they lost their appeal. But suppose I gave most of my billions, in my father’s memory, to the Labour Party on the sole condition that they changed their red rose to a black spanner? What pleasures would I buy myself with the small change - two million or so?

  I yawned and fell asleep - pleasure enough in my circumstances - and dreamed vividly of a huge sheet of calm water, a lake among mountains where I was waterskiing behind a speed-boat. Was this my chosen slice of the rich man’s life? I have never water-skied in reality. From time to time I would fall over, deliberately it seemed, because I wanted the boat to come nearer so that I could identify its occupants. Michael was surely the one sitting in the stern, but his arm obscured his face. Was the driver Yelena, with her hair either cut short or pinned up under a yachting-cap? I never found out -I was now in a church, perhaps the cathedral in Strelsau, since I seemed to be kissing the toe of Our Lady of Wloczovar - or was it the wooden statue stolen by Fisher John? - and suddenly they were shooting at the windows from outside, so that glass slivers or bullets were falling all round me. I was lying down, feeling no pain, but one wouldn’t feel pain, would one, after the execution was over?

  I woke up in a bad temper. Had they bungled it? Surely I shouldn’t still be conscious? I was lying on my bed in the cell, but very cold, in a draught. Part of the window was broken, there were pieces of glass all over the floor and among them the stone that must have done the damage. Round it, secured by a rubber-band, was a piece of roughly-torn paper. I quickly got off the bed and picked it up, glancing first out of the window and then at the grille in the door to see if I was being watched. The space outside the window was completely empty and since it was the middle of the afternoon, two or three hours short of my supper, the guard had probably got his feet up somewhere and hadn’t heard the window being smashed. There was a brief message in capitals on the paper, in Ruritanian:

  HAVE FAITH, CORPORAL, UNTIL THE END

  I read this in disbelief. I tried to make the Ruritanian mean something else, but what else could it mean? Whoever threw the stone must have gone to some trouble, taken some risk to deliver this piece of tawdry uplift. Couldn’t they have wrapped it round a file while they were about it? Perhaps it was in code, but how was I supposed to puzzle it out? I tried to make anagrams out of the Ruritanian words, but would they be words in Ruritanian or German or English? I juggled about with all three and got nothing but nonsense. I turned the paper over and found a single word, also in capitals:

  TOSCA

  A name? A Ruritani
an word whose meaning I didn’t know? Or the famous opera, which I’d never heard or seen and whose story I didn’t know? As darkness began to fall outside I abandoned all this mental effort, flushed the paper down the loo, used the rubber-band to make a more handy bundle of Yelena’s hair and put it back in my shirt pocket with the picture of the Virgin Mary. I didn’t really want to keep that, but I hesitated to throw it down the loo out of respect for the guard’s wife rather than the superstition it represented. Then I sat on the hot pipes to one side of the window to try to neutralise the icy draught coming through the hole.

  When the guard arrived with my supper and peered through the grille, I pointed at the broken window and the stone on the floor and said:

  ‘Can you do something about this? It’s very cold.’ His face disappeared immediately and a moment later I heard an alarm bell, followed by running feet. A face I didn’t know looked apprehensively through the grille and then the door was unlocked and two guards came in pointing guns at me. Behind was my familiar guard and a sergeant. When they’d searched the cell, tested the bars and found nothing suspicious except the stone, my guard was sent to fetch an officer, while I was locked in again and the others waited outside in the corridor. All this while I’d sat quietly on the pipes -except when I was being body-searched - and said nothing beyond explaining that I’d been asleep when the stone arrived and hadn’t seen who threw it. But as I sat I was still turning over the message in my mind, trying to find some secret key. It occurred to me after some time that it could just be read not as a last religious up-yours to a person without religion, but as an exhortation to keep hoping right up to the end. That still didn’t explain the name or word on the back, but perhaps ‘Tosca’ had nothing to do with my message, just happened to have been written on the piece of paper already.

  A fattish captain with thick eyebrows, small eyes and hairs protruding from his nose was now let into my cell, while the soldiers with guns came in too to cover me with their weapons. The captain searched the place for himself, examined the damaged window and the stone, tried the bars, questioned me closely and finally gave orders for me to be moved into the next cell.

  ‘Captain!’ I said, as he was about to leave, ‘Can you tell me whether they’ve informed the British Embassy?’

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ he said, ‘But you won’t have to wait much longer.’

  ‘Wait for what?’

  He didn’t care to answer that, but rubbed the channel below his hairy nose several times.

  ‘You will be informed,’ he said and turned to go again.

  ‘Captain!’ I said, i think I know what you mean. Is it possible to make a last request?’

  He said nothing, but waited.

  ‘The hardest thing,’ I said, ‘is never to hear music again. I’m very fond of music. Would it be possible for me to listen to my favourite opera once more before . . .?’

  ‘How would that be possible?’

  ‘If somebody would lend me cassettes and a player . . .’

  ‘What is your favourite opera?’

  ‘Tosca,’’ I said.

  ‘Composer?’

  I stood and gaped at him.

  ‘I don’t know what’s happening to my memory, Captain. My favourite music in the whole world . . . I’ll forget my own name . . .’

  I hung my head.

  ‘Tosca!’ he said. ‘Is that Puccini?’ ‘I fancy it is.’

  ‘Don’t count on it!’ he said as he went out. The next cell was warmer, of course, but the loo stank worse than mine.

  The following morning my plate of porridge came accompanied by a small portable cassette-player with earphones and a boxed set of the tapes of Tosca, complete with libretto in Italian and German translation. When I’d played the whole thing through, I played it again and many times more until I could hum the tunes and had acquired my life-long addiction to opera. And a longer life it promised to be, since now I knew what the message meant and roughly what I was to be prepared for.

  All the same it was not much to cling to when the guard handed me a letter the morning after that. The attention of the British Embassy would be drawn, it said, to my case at the appropriate time and the Embassy would no doubt inform my relatives as well as Colonel Danzing, the former Ruritanian Ambassador in London, of the measures found necessary to protect the Republic in such a dangerous emergency. It had not been found possible to contact either Count von Wunklisch or Herr Tarlenheim, but they too would be informed as soon as convenient. Herr Grabenau had already been informed and had expressed his deep sorrow at the outcome, while finding it hard to believe that such a promising and well-connected young man had descended to a crime against the State for which unfortunately there was the clearest possible first-hand evidence. The sentence of the court, the letter went on, would be carried out at dawn tomorrow, but not before I had been visited by Father Roddich, the chaplain, and offered spiritual consolation and preparation. The letter was signed ‘with regrets’ by Colonel Maggerling, officer commanding the 2nd Regiment of Infantry, Kapitsa.

  I played Tosca several times more and wondered why Colonel Danzing had retired or been replaced. Was it connected with me or just old age? Grabenau’s response was quite consistent with everything I knew about him - I liked that ‘well-connected’, a masterly marker put down for the future in case anybody should ever accuse him of allowing the heir to the throne to be shot in ignorance. I was glad that at least I hadn’t stayed in Strelsau waiting for him to discern through his fog of factions no clear political consensus for the restoration of the monarchy.

  Father Roddich, the military chaplain, was a young, tall, black-haired peasant from the countryside round Zenda, who had shown more aptitude for school lessons than the rest of his large family and been sent to a seminary to ease the pressure on the limited resources of his father’s farm. We talked more about his own circumstances than the prospects for my soul, since I told him I didn’t possess one. He looked mildly shocked and assured me I would be proved wrong.

  ‘What form will the proof take?’ I asked.

  He was unwilling to say. His brief was probably to comfort and calm the condemned man, not threaten him with hell-fire and he tried to nudge the discussion back on to standard lines: that dying was a stage everyone had to go through and that the important thing was to set my mind on the better world I would soon be entering.

  ‘What can you tell me about that better world, Father?’

  Very little, of course. Priests have even vaguer ideas of what they’re promising than politicians.

  ‘I used to work in the City of London,’ I said. ‘We would never have advised our clients to invest even a worthless Ruritanian kruna on the basis of such an inadequate prospectus.’

  ‘You must have faith,’ he said.

  We left it there. I asked him how he came to have faith himself and discovered that he too was more of an investment in this world than the next. I declined to confess my sins, but allowed him to say a brief prayer for me and then, as he raised his hand to bless me, the guard at the grille must have raised his to someone further down the corridor. Marching feet halted at my door, it was opened wide and I was led out by two armed soldiers to find two more and the fat captain with the hairy nose in the corridor with my usual guard. I shook his hand and asked him to give my respects to his wife - there were tears in his eyes - and thanked the captain warmly for the loan of Tosca. Then we marched away down the corridor, the captain in front, the chaplain behind, the four guards and me in a close phalanx in the middle.

  ‘E lucevan le stelle . . .’ I hummed half aloud and ‘E non ho amato mai tanto la vital’. Tosca was now certainly my last hope, but I had no great faith in it at this appalling moment, especially when I considered that the heroine’s belief that her lover would only have to face a firing-squad using blanks was false and that the bullets fired at him were real.

  16 A Change of Life

  We emerged from the corridor into a concrete car-park with a vicious wind swir
ling round it. It wasn’t an ordinary car-park, since the only vehicles parked there were half a dozen armoured ones. It seemed appropriate that I should be seen into oblivion by this fleet of my old enemies from Bilavice. The building on the right was a large hangar with its sliding doors closed. The captain led our little procession towards it and then round and behind to a yard about the size of six tennis-courts, surrounded with a high wall topped with barbed wire. Piled up on three sides was scrap of various kinds, mostly bits and pieces of vehicles. That seemed appropriate too, a kind of last reproof from my father about the vanity of everything on wheels. The fourth side of this dump, the back wall of the hangar, was partly clear and obviously reserved for my own demolition.

  Ten armed soldiers, lined up at attention as if waiting to be inspected, stood with their backs to the piles of scrap and faced the blank wall of the hangar, while in the middle of the yard was a group of three officers, whose faces turned towards us as we marched round the side of the building and halted in the broad gateway. One of the officers was the colonel from the military court, the second was the younger of the two who had sat with him at the table - the adjutant of the regiment - but the third I hadn’t seen before. He was a good-looking, fair-haired youth with a turned-up nose and a sprinkling of acne along his jaw - he reminded me of my brother Freddy - and he seemed to be having an argument with the colonel. Our arrival put a stop to it and the colonel, with the adjutant following him as if they were wired together, turned and walked aside, proclaiming in a choleric voice for all to hear: