After Zenda

by John Spurling

  I asked her about the relationship between Fisher and Michael.

  ‘Michael never liked Fisher, but he was dependent on him.’

  ‘For funds to buy weapons?’

  ‘I don’t know about that. I suppose you must be right.’

  ‘For the use of his house as a cover and base for the cave.’

  ‘Yes, but most of all for the alliance with the True Faith, which gave him his justification.’

  ‘And with you. Our Lady of Chostok.’

  ‘It sounds as if we were all cynical and conspiratorial, but I don’t think any of us was. The True Faith is a true faith and comforts and supports many people, as I know myself. Fisher truly wanted to bring the true faith to others and he thought Providence had given me to help him. Michael thought the Slavs had to fight for their rights and territory and wanted to believe it was also God’s will.’

  ‘What about you?’ I asked.

  ‘I believed Fisher.

  She closed her eves and seemed to go to sleep. I sat looking at her - it had taken me till now to be able to look at her without glancing away in embarrassment - and thought about the deceptiveness of appearances: Michael the ugly bandit hating treachery; Tishkon the shy nervous boy who could shoot better than anyone; Corporal Radichev who pretended to be a bully to conceal his soft heart: Clare who seemed so sophisticated and was so naive and even silly; Yelena. When Yelena was beautiful I’d been quite certain that, however inspiring she seemed, she was basically a power-woman, using the religious thing for quite obvious and not very attractive purposes of her own. Now she was ugly I could easily believe her body was really just an envelope for something more than herself. She opened her eyes, found me looking at her and stared back.

  ‘What do you see?’ she asked.

  I opened my wallet and took out the creased, half-obliterated picture of the Virgin and gave it to her.

  The gaoler’s wife sent that to me when I was waiting to be shot,’ I said.

  ‘Did it help?’

  ‘Not in itself, but perhaps the thought counted. And it did seem significant that it came with the bunch of your hair which I’d stupidly sent to the wash in my shirt.’

  ‘What bunch of my hair?’

  ‘Don’t you remember how I collected it in the train?’ I said. ‘After you’d thrown the rest out of the window. And I kept it in the rubber-band holding your message on to the stone that came through my window. Though, of course, I didn’t know then it was a message from you.’

  She thought about that and so did I.

  ‘Have you still got my hair?’ she asked, touching her bald head as if she hardly believed she’d ever had any.

  I told her how I’d given it to Michael and how it had certainly made sure of his co-operation, though at a higher price than I’d realised at the time.

  ‘I’d never have given it to him if I’d known it would be so difficult to replace,’ I said.

  ‘And if he’d known, he might not have wanted it,’ said Yelena.

  ‘Or all the more,’ I said.

  She shook her head. It was a painful subject and we were both glad to drop it. She gave me back the picture of the Virgin.

  ‘When I went into retreat,’ she said, ‘and made Fisher move out to educate you, I was trying very hard to hold on to his idea of me. As some contemporary, living version of that vulgar image. But I didn’t succeed.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I saw how I’d taken myself in under his influence. The reason I could see that was that I was no longer under his influence. And the reason for that . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I looked in the mirror,’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I saw a silly woman who had taken it into her head to make you King of Ruritania.’

  I wasn’t quite sure what she meant.

  ‘Your letter?’

  ‘And your letter, Karel. I took your letter to heart.’

  ‘I certainly took yours to heart.’

  ‘The last thing you would do now is tell me to look in a mirror.’

  I still wasn’t sure what she meant. I couldn’t remember much about my own letter, though I knew hers, with the phrase about ‘the silly woman’, almost word for word.

  She didn’t want to talk any more that day and the next I had an urgent summons from the Count to go to Zenda. The body of Queen Flavia had been found in the grave of her first husband, King Rudolf V, buried under the stone marked ‘Rudolf Rassendyll’. I called at the hospital, but Yelena was under treatment. I left a note for her:

  Great Granny resurrected. Gone to Zenda. Love, K.R. Then I took the train to Zenda.

  My great-grandfather doesn’t waste much space on descriptions in his book, but he does go into some detail about the Castle of Zenda, so I can leave that out, since it’s hardly changed. The old fortress part, where King Rudolf V was kept prisoner, was used as a prison and torture-centre by the Nazis and then the communist secret police, but is now open to tourists. The 18th-century chateau facing it across the moat and drawbridge, however, still belongs to the security service, Corpus. It was here that, after taking a taxi from the station, I found the Count, Vladek and General Practsin.

  Queen Flavia and Rudolf V were also on the premises, in the basement, but I saw no need to view the remains. As the Count said, it wasn’t a sight for loved ones - even Rudolf Rassendyll would have had to rely on a dentist to identify them. But the Nazis, as I’d guessed, had been very punctilious: not only had they put Flavia in a decent coffin with a discreet brass label reading ‘Flavia Elphberg’, they had popped her crown in too. It wasn’t, of course, the crown of state - she wouldn’t have had that hanging on the hat-stand in the hall when the German tanks rolled into the square - but a simple, thin gold circlet. Vladek said it was very ancient, probably dating from the middle ages.

  ‘When my ancestors were kings,’ said the Count.

  There it lay on the massive desk in front of General Practsin. It was badly kinked, but Vladek said he knew a goldsmith who could easily iron it out. He produced a tape-measure.

  ‘Take your hat off, please, Karl!’

  I looked at the Count, standing near the window, with a view of the old Castle behind him. We were on the first floor, in a spacious office which had once been the bedroom of the villainous Duke Michael. The Count smiled at General Practsin, standing behind the desk.

  ‘You will not need a forensic scientist to identify this member of the family,’ he said, then to me: ‘General Practsin has a good eye and an excellent filing-system, but he confused himself after our meeting at the ‘Royal Elphberg’ by turning up the photograph of a wanted criminal in a proletarian cap: a mercenary known as Karl Berg or Edwin Fenton. You should give him a better idea now.’

  I took off my fur hat and, when the General had walked all round me and satisfied himself that I was real, Vladek measured the circumference of my head and wrote the figure on his wrist.

  Then we sat down to work out a final timetable. Afterwards we walked across the drawbridge and had a private view of the Castle -it was after tourist hours - finishing, as all official tours did, with the dungeon at moat-level beside the main gate from which Rudolf V was rescued by Rudolf Rassendyll. Vladek took photos to be included in his exhibition. The Count soon became fidgety.

  ‘I know what it’s like to be a prisoner,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t we all?’ I said. ‘But perhaps not you, General Practsin?’

  ‘I was a prisoner here,’ he said. ‘In Zenda, though not in this particular room.’

  ‘You must find it depressing to revisit - or even to look at from your office?’

  ‘No, on the contrary,’ he said, without any alteration in his permanently lugubrious expression, ‘my spirits are always raised by being on the right side of the walls. Or, if I’m on the wrong side, by having the key in my hand.’

  He swung the huge old key with which he had locked the inner door of the dungeon in case we should be disturbed. I was encouraged - he i
f anyone would surely know how best to stay on the right side and keep control of the key.

  Vladek, the Count and I dined and spent the night at an expensive hotel on the far side of the small town of Zenda. ‘The Tarlenheim’ was a nineteenth-century French-style chateau perched on a hill with a view across to the Castle - my great-grandfather describes staying there when it was a private house belonging to Vladek’s family. Now, like the ‘Royal Elphberg’, it belonged partly to the Count, but as he said to Vladek:

  ‘You’re happier without it, dear boy. The last thing artists need is a lot of property. Look at the way that promising young Spanish draughtsman ruined his art once he began to acquire real estate all over France!’

  ‘Do you mean Picasso?’ asked Vladek.

  ‘Women and chateaux!’ said the Count. ‘What a wasted life!’

  I learnt, incidentally, on this occasion, how Vladek made his living. It wasn’t from selling his own pictures, but by brokering the sale abroad of old furniture, paintings and objets d’art. There was nothing crooked about this - Ruritanian museums were allowed to dispose of their unwanted possessions - but Vladek did nicely out of selling in hard currency and paying the museums in Ruritanian krunas. It wasn’t, obviously, a trade that could last indefinitely and he was pinning a lot of hopes on his exhibition in the Palace of Youth.

  Two weeks before it was due to open the government fell, after losing a vote of no confidence. An election was scheduled for the early summer and meanwhile the President installed a caretaker government of moderates, led by the suave and popular foreign minister, Heinz Albert, who, although German, was sympathetic to Slavs and always at odds with the hard-liners in the government and the military. He was also a particular friend of both the President and the Count.

  Albert and his moderate cabinet had only just moved into their new offices, when it was announced that the body of Queen Flavia had been discovered in the cemetery at Zenda and that she and her first husband would now join Rudolf Rassendyll in the royal vault in Strelsau Cathedral. Their grave at Zenda was to be left empty, with the stone reading ‘Rudolf Rassendyll’ still standing and the leader-writers of the Ruritanian press agreed this would be a fitting local monument to an elusive character and certainly not less of a draw for tourists.

  At about the same time, but without publicity, Corpus began to investigate irregularities in the administration of the airforce. The main military airfield near Zenda was effectively occupied by units of the security force and the senior officers placed under house arrest.

  The state funeral of the last king and queen of Ruritania received world-wide coverage, albeit as a curiosity item at the foot of front pages or the end of main news-bulletins on TV and radio. The train bringing the two coffins from Zenda was met at Strelsau station by the President with a ceremonial guard. Led by a military band and six mounted hussars, followed on foot by the President, members of the caretaker government and military chiefs - minus General Rischenheim of the airforce - the coffins were carried up the hill to the Cathedral on gun-carriages.

  The Cathedral itself was packed with the Ruritanian great and good and foreign ambassadors and the cameras recording the ceremony were able to pan - as the coffins of Flavia and Rudolf V were laid side-by-side in front of the chancel steps - to the waxwork of Rudolf Rassendyll, freshly installed in a glass case in the side aisle. The Archbishop of Strelsau - another good friend of the Count -described in his address the different kinds of heroism displayed by all three: the steady endurance of the royal prisoner; the flamboyant courage of his English cousin; the defiant patriotism of the queen, last of her line, in the face of Nazi aggression. Then he held up the very crown she had worn as she died, crushed by the tanks, but now restored to its original shape; and, as many patriots wept openly, he went down from his pulpit and placed the crown on the high altar.

  But, as the service drew to an end, those watching it on BBC and Ruritanian Television were carried away from the Archbishop standing in front of the altar as he gave his blessing; briefly shown the two coffins with their ceremonial guards and the VIPs kneeling in the front row of the congregation - among them the President and his wife - and brought in close to the waxwork of Rudolf Rassendyll at the side. Then, rapidly passing over the main body of the congregation, these favoured viewers in Britain and Ruritania found themselves suddenly focussing on the outside end of the back row. Could this be true? It must be a trick of the camera. Rudolf Rassendyll - or it might be Rudolf V, come to that - appeared to be kneeling there in the flesh.

  The congregation itself, of course, missed this coup de theatre altogether and the two wayward cameras flicked almost immediately back to the main action, as the service ended and the VIPs, led by the President, began to leave their seats. The television viewers must have been still rubbing their eyes in disbelief as they were carried for a second time to the back of the Cathedral to catch another fleeting glimpse of the same red-headed, long-nosed figure as he hurried towards the door, pausing for a moment to stoop and kiss the toe of the famous statue of Our Lady of Wloczovar.

  The mystery was cleared up next day by headlines in the Ruritanian papers and front-page news in the rest of the world’s press. The heroic Queen Flavia was not the last of her line. The person who looked so like Rudolf Rassendyll was indeed his direct descendant by the secret marriage to Queen Flavia. What could be more natural or romantically appropriate than that Karl Rassendyll should attend his great-grandmother’s belated funeral? In fact he had been in Ruritania for at least six months and had even found his way into the rebellious province of Karapata, where, according to the BBC’s reporter, Clare Studebaker, who was to interview him that evening but had not known his identity at the time, he had behaved very much as his dashing great-grandfather might have done. Asked for his response to this astonishing news, the philosopher-president, Stepan Slobodjak, replied that he was delighted fate should have delivered this charming coda to a solemn and moving ceremony and hoped that Karl Rassendyll might pay him a call before he returned to London and feel free to visit Ruritania again at some time in the future.

  My interview with Clare was rated a success. I turned off her questions about my activities in Karapata with careless replies about the kindness and hospitality of all Ruritanians and raved about the scenery. I realised, of course, I said, that there were political problems, but no one had expected me, as a visiting Englishman, to take sides and how could I?

  ‘You had no difficulties making yourself understood?’

  ‘None whatever. My mother was German, so it’s, as you might say, my mother-tongue and as for Ruritanian I found it almost as easy to pick up as lying in bed.’

  Karapata, of course, said Clare, was very beautiful and relatively unspoiled, but what of Plotla, which I had also visited? I replied that it saddened me to see the dire results of a command economy, but was sure the West, if properly approached, would be particularly sympathetic to Ruritania’s needs.

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘I’m recalling, I suppose, how they rallied round my great-grandmother, Queen Flavia, after the First War. And it wouldn’t be hard to put a small, united country like this one back on its feet.’

  ‘But Ruritania is sadly disunited at present.’

  ‘It only needs a determined and fair-minded leader. I’m sure the election in the summer will produce the man for the hour.’

  ‘Have you any thought of claiming your great-grandmother’s throne?’

  ‘Good Heavens, no! It’s a lovely, romantic idea, of course, for Ruritania to become a kingdom again. Obviously it would do wonders for tourism. But a country isn’t a piece of property. A country is its people and they must choose their own leader.’

  ‘Suppose the Ruritanian people did want you as their king? Would you accept?’

  ‘I wasn’t brought up to be a king, you know, but just to make my way in the world like everybody else. I’d be deeply honoured, of course, and feel I owed it to my great-grandmother, who sur
ely never wanted her crown buried with her, not to refuse out of hand, but - Heavens! - I’m not sure I’d have the nerve.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘How can I tell?’

  ‘I’m thinking of that occasion in Karapata recently when my team and I were stopped by a lorry-load of armed men and made to lie on the ground . . .’

  ‘Yes, well, that’s the sensible thing to do if people with guns are suggesting it . . .’

  ‘But you were with us, Karl, and you didn’t do the sensible thing - not even when one of the guerrillas fired at the ground just beside you - you kept on standing and talked us out of trouble. Wouldn’t you call that nerve?’

  ‘More like stupidity. I never believe anybody can really mean me harm. I always see people as basically friendly and reasonable. And, of course, it was useful to be able to speak a bit of Ruritanian.’

  ‘You look remarkably like your great-grandfather - do you think you are like him?’

  ‘I wish I was. But no - he was a real old-fashioned English gentleman and I’m just the son of a socialist schoolmaster.’

  I genuinely hadn’t known in advance that Clare would put in the heroic bit. She was, I suppose, genuinely impressed by it; but of course the explanation left out the fact that the guerrillas wouldn’t have been so friendly if they hadn’t known who I was and that depended on a lot of events in my Karapatan experience which were also being left out. So it was a disgracefully rigged interview, but what can anyone expect? People don’t appear real under bright lights in front of cameras by being real. And who can blame Clare? She needed her own exclusive king to be real too, not a one-day wonder.

  Vladek came in on the act next. He filled three rooms in the Palace of Youth with his accumulated paintings, but the last room was devoted to photographs, portraits and reconstructed scenes of ‘Karl Rassendyll in Ruritania’. The photos from the dungeon in Zenda Castle were evocative, of course, but the portraits and reconstructed scenes looked as if they were drawn in barbed wire and blood and were quite dull in content, since the Count had censored any that suggested I’d fought with the guerrillas. The head-stand ‘masterpiece’ had also been left out in case it should seem too insulting to the President. The success of the show, to Vladek’s chagrin, was his photo of me and Magda, posed in a window of Previce Castle and titled ‘Karl and Karapatan Girl’. My red hair with the virulent green of her ethnic costume against the snow outside the window thrilled the public. Poster-size versions were sold by the hundred, postcards by the thousand.