After Zenda

by John Spurling

  A few days after the exhibition opened I took tea with the President, arriving by taxi in the palace square to find an enthusiastic crowd and a mob of press reporters and photographers. Vladek came with me, but I made a point of paying the taxi-driver myself, with a thick wodge of Ruritanian krunas (the Count had already paid in advance in dollars). As I reached the bottom step a little girl of about ten ran forward and held out a red rose. I took the rose and kissed her, then taking the rose in my teeth, lifted her off her feet and held her up for the cameras. As I put her carefully down again, reporters from the front of the crowd, which was being held back by police, shouted questions:

  ‘What are your feelings, Karl?’

  ‘It’s a nice house.’

  ‘Do you want to live in it?’

  ‘Haven’t seen the inside yet?’

  ‘Do you think Ruritania needs a king?’

  ‘It’s already got a president.’

  ‘What will you talk about?’

  ‘Englishmen always talk about the weather.’

  I ran up the steps two at a time, with Vladek close behind, and waved the rose nonchalantly from the top step before going in.

  The drawing-room where the President and his wife received us was large and ornate, with chandeliers, mirrors, paintings, silk-covered chairs and big windows looking across the Volzer to the gracious part of the city. Vladek told me afterwards that most of the furniture and fittings were reproduction Second Empire, itself a mix-up of imitations of earlier styles.

  The little President looked older than when I’d last seen him at the top of the steps. It might have been that he’d been improved by distance then or that he’d aged since with the anxiety of the Kapitsa Atrocity. His hair seemed whiter, his eye-sockets more cavernous and his flesh grey and flabby where before it had looked pink and chubby. He spoke hoarsely and he moved and sat stiffly, as if he had a perpetual pain in the lower back. His wife was taller than him - a thin, nervous, bird-like person with a high, fussy voice. They were more like a couple of retired schoolteachers than the head of state and first lady. The President, however, in spite of his used-up appearance, had the manner of somebody who liked being looked at, whereas she never quite caught my eye and I thought would have preferred not to be visible at all. A flunkey in a dark blue uniform with silver buttons served us from a side-board with porcelain cups of tea and German cakes. I asked if tea was a usual thing in the presidential palace.

  ‘No, it’s in your honour, Mr Rassendyll,’ said Slobodjak, ‘as an Englishman.’

  I took the point. I was a visitor from a foreign country and had no business in his except as a tourist. Mrs Slobodjak rammed the point home by asking how long I was staying. I replied that I had no immediate plans to leave - I was enjoying myself too much. They both seemed edgy, probably because they’d witnessed my arrival and found it altogether too showy. The President asked me about my experiences in Karapata and when I replied that the people there seemed mostly friendly and peace-loving, said, with a touch of sarcasm:

  ‘You never encountered any terrorists, then?’

  ‘Probably,’ I said, ‘but what would they have against me?’

  He left the subject abruptly and asked me what I did in England.

  ‘Worked in the City,’ I said, ‘but latterly I was more of a philosopher.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Not professional, like yourself. But I thought about things.’

  ‘What kind of things?’

  ‘Life. Purpose - or lack of it. Forgive me, I haven’t read your books. What’s your own area?’

  ‘Absurdity,’ he said in his Louis Armstrong gravelly voice. ‘The absurdity of all human endeavour in the light of history and our chance existence on a lump of matter in a mysterious universe.’

  ‘It sounds very close to my own line of thought,’ I said. ‘Could I be a disciple of yours without knowing it?’

  ‘The arguments are too bleak to live by,’ he said, ‘but philosophy is not a practical subject. Philosophers, you know, are often hedonists in ordinary life.’

  He tucked into a piece of sticky chocolate cake.

  ‘I know this is bad for me, but I like it. Mitzi tells me . . .’ he glanced wearily at his wife, as if he knew she’d heard this one a thousand times before, but would have to hear it again and not for the last time either . . . ‘that I deny the validity of cake but keep on eating it.’

  ‘I also tell Stepi,’ she said, her glance flitting about his head like a fly that couldn’t settle, ‘that if only he could prove its validity, perhaps he could give up eating it.’

  My only real acquaintance with philosophy was my mother reading Alice in Wonderland to me as a child and we seemed to be quite close to that now. Vladek, however, began asking about the pictures and furniture and Mrs Slobodjak was a keen custodian of them. They moved about the room examining things.

  ‘Come and see my library, Mr Rassendyll!’ said Slobodjak.

  It was more of a study than a library, quite small, with nothing much in it except the desk and chair and built-in shelves of books.

  ‘Not so very many books, you see,’ he said. ‘A philosopher doesn’t need to read all that much. You can never accuse a philosopher of ignorance, only of stupidity. I began to be a serious philosopher only in prison, in Previce Castle, as a matter of fact, when I had no books at all. I believe you have stayed there with Count von Wunklisch, our rich re-immigrant?’

  I nodded, looking at the shelves to see if he kept Machiavelli handy. It seemed not: Mao, Marcus Aurelius, Marcuse, Marx . . .

  ‘Your activities in Karapata are not unknown to me,’ he said. ‘My attention has been drawn to the photograph of a terrorist making an unequivocal sign of victory from the middle of a mountain stream. This terrorist, I understand, was an Englishman called Edwin Fenton who was later captured and condemned to death - a sentence never carried out because of a sudden mutiny in the barracks where he was being held. Naturally you did not refer to this episode in your TV interview. But I was surprised Ms Studebaker failed to. She can be a very sharp and even aggressive performer. If she had done any serious research, consulted the military authorities, for instance, she might have formed and imparted a very different view of you and given you a rougher ride, don’t you think?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘If I’d been making any political claims I’d have opened myself to tighter questioning, but I was only coming on as a kind of circus performer. You don’t make the clown take off his flat cap and makeup and reveal himself as just ordinary Ed Fenton. That would spoil everyone’s pleasure, wouldn’t it?’

  Slobodjak now lay down on a small chaise longue to ease his back and waved me to the only other seat - the chair at the desk.

  ‘You said your father was a socialist. What sort of socialist?’

  ‘A real one. A believer.’

  ‘What did he think about his ancestry?’

  ‘We never talked about it. I imagine he disapproved.’

  ‘I should have liked to meet him. Well, if you’re going home in a day or two, there’s no need to spoil everybody’s pleasure.’

  ‘You really don’t want me to stay around?’

  ‘No, really not. We have enough troubles in the present without digging up the past.’

  ‘Would a week be too long?’

  ‘Say five days!’

  ‘And you aren’t as keen for me to come back some time as you said you were?’

  ‘Some time in the future, Mr Rassendyll, I said. After about 2001.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you then.’

  ‘No, I expect to be dead. No longer a fragment of the consciousness of absurdity.’

  I got up from the chair - the very same chair I’m sitting in now to write this - and, running my finger along the books with authors beginning M, went to the door. Even a philosopher shouldn’t be ignorant of Machiavelli if he takes a job as head of state.

  29 The Key to the Kingdom

  Five days was per
fect. I’d suggested a week to be on the safe side, but fate - you can call it providence or the zodiac or God or the laws of chance if you prefer - made the philosopher of absurdity draw the line finer. At dawn on the day Vladek had tipped off his friends in the media that I was booked on the midday flight to London, the Cossacks enveloped Kapitsa and the Ruritanian Army of the True Faith erupted out of the province of Karapata and across the Volzer.

  The Cossacks had sweated with such fervour in their workshops that nearly forty tanks actually rumbled into Kapitsa on their own tracks and seized the town and barracks. The Second Regiment immediately arrested their new senior officers and released their mutinous junior ones from custody, declaring themselves allies of their fellow Slavs from Ukraine. The units of the First Armoured Regiment which had remained in Kapitsa to police the Second Regiment lost two tanks and an armoured vehicle in a foolish attempt to defend the barracks against overwhelming odds, but their other three tanks - chocked up in the workshops for repair - were captured, as were a dozen or so lighter armoured vehicles.

  Meanwhile - some measure of the invaders’ confidence, as the newspapers put it next day - at least a third of their armament never even left its transporters, but was carried straight through the town and parked in a sinister convoy pointing along the main road to Zenda. The transporters drove so urgently through the streets that the people peering fearfully out of their windows as they were woken by the racket, had no time to observe - even if they’d been technically knowledgeable enough - that the tracks of the tanks they were carrying did not always even join up; and they had no way of telling that not one of them had a working engine, while many contained no engine at all.

  At Kapitsa airfield the sudden arrival of three tanks at - and shortly afterwards through - the main gates convinced the sentries that resistance was useless, though they had time to ring the alarm. The tanks were followed by a yellow 4X4, which raced straight for the airfield’s single helicopter and arrived beside it at the same moment as a green 4X4 carrying the airforce major in command of the airfield. This major was a large, clumsy man with a swinging beer-belly and flabby jowls either side of an untidy Zapata moustache. By the time he’d extricated himself from his seat, his driver and the helicopter pilot had their hands up and his bodyguard, who had immediately exchanged fire with two armed passengers from the yellow car, was lying wounded on the tarmac. The major’s surrender was taken by a thin, white-faced officer, half his own size, whose recently-fired machine-gun trembled slightly, but whose hypnotic pale blue eyes never wavered from his face. The airfield was defended by only a small force of soldiers and the major had little choice but to give instructions over the radio in his car for all resistance to cease. Then he got into the yellow car with his diminutive captor, whose sidekick - a corporal in regular army uniform with the flashes of the Second Regiment - made the captured helicopter pilot and driver load the wounded man into the green car.

  Shocked and dismayed as he was, however, the major still had hopes of saving the four aircraft in his care and he saw that three of them were already emerging from their hangars. The pilots scrambled as soon as they heard the alarm, but in their haste the ground staff reversed one of the tractors too abruptly and damaged both the coupling gear and the fourth aircraft. From the major’s point of view, though, three out of four planes airborne would make good reading on the official report and, as the yellow car stopped in front of the main building and he lowered his legs to the ground and began to raise the great weight of his belly, he was overjoyed to see the three aircraft taxi forward. The nearest of the Russian tanks (was the Soviet Union reclaiming its empire already?) began to swivel its turret and depress its gun, but the major reckoned it would be too late to stop his pilots taking off. There was a light morning mist hanging over the airfield and the jets would be into it and invisible before the tank’s gunner could get their range.

  But as he stared gratefully at the mist he thought he’d begun to hallucinate. It was full of horsemen. From under the mist, like the foam under an incoming wave, came a long line of galloping Cossacks in traditional white astrakhan hats, tunics and breeches, some with drawn sabres, some with ordinary farm bill-hooks, and, stabbing and ripping as they broke like surf around the three aircraft, left them slewed and crippled before wheeling in a long arc and breaking round them a second time from behind. As the Cossacks re-formed and trotted demurely towards the main building, the traumatised pilots could be seen jumping out of their damaged machines and haring back to the safety of the hangars. The airforce major - whose description of the episode was published in the Ruritanian press some weeks afterwards - only fully believed what he’d seen when, half an hour later, the convoy of horseboxes which had deposited the Cossack chargers at the far end of the airfield drove in to collect them.

  Kapitsa was seized almost without casualties, but the army checkpoints at the two main bridges over the River Volzer were each equipped with an armoured vehicle and put up serious resistance. However, when they called for air support from airforce headquarters at Zenda and were told that none was available, they gave up. Both sides had dead and wounded. Michael disarmed the surrendered troops and released those that were uninjured to walk the sixty miles or so to Strelsau, while he and his victorious guerrillas settled down with the captured armoured vehicles to hold the two bridges into Karapata and the main road linking Strelsau and Kapitsa.

  By the time I reached Zenda Airport for my return flight to London, the news that Ruritania was in the grip of civil war had reached everybody. Disembarking from the Count’s new crimson Mercedes at the airport entrance, I found only a small group of young reporters and photographers waiting for me. Their seniors were urgently filing what news they had or besieging the government, parliament and the presidential palace for more. Flanked by Vladek and the Count, with my rucksack slung over one shoulder, I gave a short statement:

  ‘I’m not leaving Ruritania because I want to. Even less do I want to now that the country in which I’ve found so much happiness seems to be tearing itself apart. The President personally asked me to leave no later than today. He is a wise and fatherly man and I couldn’t think of refusing such a request, even though it seemed a bit unreasonable, not to say authoritarian. I got used to that sort of treatment from my own father when I was a boy, but I thought now that I’m grown up ... Well, even if I’d considered refusing, it wouldn’t have made much difference, would it? Fatherly requests tend to turn into orders if they meet any opposition. So I’m going. But please make it clear that far from being a rat leaving a sinking ship I’m a cat being shoved out into the cold. And I’d swap this any day . . .’ (holding up my EC passport)’. . . especially today, for one of yours.’

  Then the three of us moved towards the departure desks in the concourse. Here there was a problem. We’d hoped that all scheduled flights would be cancelled because of the emergency, but the government had evidently been occupied with more important matters and whereas the various airlines had themselves cancelled incoming flights for fear of losing their aircraft, for the same reason they were only too eager to maintain their outgoing flights. All the desks had queues of anxious travellers and the departures board told us that the flight to London via Warsaw was still due to leave at midday. The Count thought we might have to invoke General Practsin to get it stopped on some specious excuse, but Vladek had a better idea. He pointed out that the desk issuing last-minute tickets was besieged with anxious foreigners and, while the Count and I joined the back of the queue to be checked in, Vladek made a quick survey across the way and found an elderly American woman standing to one side and clutching her heart with apprehension and despair as she watched the struggle to reach the ticket-desk.

  ‘I have a ticket for tomorrow to Frankfurt,’ she told Vladek, when he asked politely if he could help, ‘but I know there will be no planes by tomorrow.’

  ‘How would Warsaw or London do instead?’ asked Vladek.

  ‘London would be the greatest thing that eve
r happened to me - it’s almost New York.’

  So, followed by my two or three most persistent young press-hounds, I approached the woman and offered to exchange tickets. Seeing my entourage she became momentarily suspicious.

  ‘Is this some kind of stunt?’

  ‘The stunt that saved a kingdom,’ murmured the Count, sotto voce in German.

  That was an exaggeration, but the story and photo in the Strelsau Abendstern of Karl Rassendyll giving up his chance of safety and risking the wrath of the authoritarian president (‘just like my father’) for the sake of an unknown elderly woman (‘perhaps she reminded him of his mother’) was one more candle lit in front of my myth. Mrs Amstervan recognised her gallant saviour as soon as she heard his name and the exact spot where he kissed her cheek as he wished her a safe journey was still being shown to reporters when she reached New York the following day. What interested me most about the whole affair was Vladek’s part in it. He, the idealist, not only had no scruples about such blatant media chicanery, he actually dreamed it up.

  So we returned to Strelsau with a ticket to Frankfurt for the following day. I went to ground in the ‘Royal Elphberg’, while we waited to see what the President, the government and the military would do next. This was the most dangerous moment - the rocky narrows in our strategy. The military chiefs, who would surely have to resign and possibly face court martial if they sat on their hands, had nothing to lose by ordering what remained of the Ruritanian Army - based in Strelsau - to attack and if possible destroy Michael and his guerrillas. Even with its handful of tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery, the Army could probably win quite easily and if the airforce at Zenda became operational again, it would be a savage walkover. They couldn’t, of course, take on the Cossacks in Kapitsa - especially believing as they did that the unused tanks were useable - but without air support it would be very risky for the Cossacks to advance further and impossible for them to hold Kapitsa indefinitely.