Oliver VII (19 page)

“I know, Your Highness,” St Germain replied, with a deep bow. “I know, and I am profoundly grateful. But that is
precisely
why I am asking you to allow me to take my leave.”

“I don’t understand,” the King said, exasperated. “Do you think you could find, anywhere else, a better situation than the one you have here?”

“I don’t think that, Your Highness. In fact I am quite
certain
that some very difficult times lie ahead of me—living on the top floor of some little hotel and dining on the
boring
menus of restaurants in the student quarter. A hundred thousand dollars is a large sum of money, but it will drift away as mysteriously as it came. And then I’ll start all over again, until I am grown too old and end my worldly career in total poverty.”

“So, then … ? Why would you rather not stay on as my chief financial adviser?”

“A settled bourgeois existence would never suit me, Your Highness. I’m a man for serious work. I just cannot see
myself administering, writing memoranda, counting money and transacting legitimate business for the rest of my life. My financial talent is for making money from nothing and then looking for another nothing to make more money from. That’s my
métier
.”

“And aren’t you afraid of getting tired of doing this? That the permanent insecurity might grind you down?”

“Get tired? Oh, who knows, Your Highness, perhaps I already am? But I always bear my illustrious ancestor in mind. No country’s borders could contain him. New courts kept coming, and new gullible princes, new secrets and new adventures; the whole world glittered at his feet like so much treasure trove that had to be pocketed up quickly before the rightful owners came back … until he found his rest in the crypt in that little North German town … ”

“But that was then, in the gorgeous pink and sky-blue eighteenth century, with its frilly lace and beauty spots. It’s a bit harder to pocket things up in this modern world of
reinforced
concrete, St Germain!”

“Your Highness, my illustrious ancestor claimed to have lived for over a thousand years, and to have known Pontius Pilate personally. And sometimes I think of myself that I too have always been here, and will live forever … Long after reinforced concrete has disappeared, the need for adventure will still be with us … But this theme has taken us rather a long way. Your Highness, give me leave to go.”

“I don’t know what to say. If you must go whatever the cost, I cannot restrain you by force. I can only say I shall miss you very, very much.”

St Germain smiled, and bowed.

“If ever your situation changes, Your Highness, and Oscar has to be resurrected and he needs my help, St Germain will give it, even from his grave.”

He bowed again, and vanished, as if he had been dropped into a magician’s hat.

A few days later Princess Ortrud and her dazzling entourage arrived from Norlandia. The capital gave her an enthusiastic welcome. The whole day was given over to the celebrations. She held a reception for the female members of Alturian aristocracy, attended a banquet in the City Hall, inspected the arrangements and fittings in the so-called Queen’s Wing of the palace, and only towards evening, before dressing for the celebratory night at the opera, did she find a few moments to be alone with her fiancé King Oliver.

“At last,” he cried, as Baron Birker went out. He went quickly over to Ortrud, embraced her, and gave her a gentle, intimate kiss.

“It’s so good to be here,” she said. “How I love this country. When I go down the street now, people shout their heads off the moment I appear. And they no longer bash Baron Birker on the nose; they write ‘Long live Birker, true friend of the country’ on the wall of his house! Isn’t that interesting?”

“It’s all down to your fiancé’s political wisdom,” the King replied. “It turned the situation around completely.”

“I always said you were a wonderful king,” said Ortrud, nuzzling closer up to him.

“Tell me, Ortrud, did you miss me?”

“Very much, my dear.”

They kissed again and sat down.

“And then you know,” she went on, “I must confess in all honesty, when you vanished like that I was afraid I would never be your wife, and I would never know the great change they told me about that is so important in a woman’s life. My
mother always said how difficult it was to find a husband for a royal princess. Monarchs are getting rarer by the day.”

“What? Did you think I might go off with someone else? That’s not very nice of you.”

“Oh no! I didn’t think that; only my mother. Once you disappeared, you were impossible to trace. I don’t understand how you managed to make yourself so invisible. You really must tell me where you went, when you were on the loose. What were you doing in your shirtsleeves in Kansas City?”

“I never went there. And I wasn’t ‘on the loose’. I was gathering experience. I mixed with all sorts of people, I got involved in stormy events, I got to know life.”

“And what did it teach you?”

“Oh, so many things. Above all, that it isn’t very interesting.”

“What?”

“Well, that life … ”

“I don’t understand you.”

“You don’t need to. It’s enough that you realise that I have learnt how good it is that there are little princesses in the world like you … in a world where there are still kings.”

“Tell me, Oliver, but truly … did you miss me?”

“Of course. Very much. The fact is, I did talk to another woman … ”

“What sort of woman?” Ortrud cried out in terror. “Oliver … you betrayed me all the time, I know!”

“Of course I didn’t. It wasn’t like that at all.”

“Don’t tell me, I know what men are like. Tell me, what sort of woman was she? I’m sure she was dreadful. Who did you like best?”

“Well, you see, Ortrud, in Venice there was a girl, a dear, really interesting girl. Completely different from you … ”

“I can imagine what sort of girl she was. A common
baroness
, or a minister’s wife, yes?”

“Er … er … yes, more or less. Very common, actually. That was why I liked her.”

“And so?”

“So nothing.”

Ortrud became very angry.

“Since you brought this up, you’d better give me the full story. What was this woman? Did you kiss her?”

“How could you think that? We just talked. But I didn’t want to tell you. I only mentioned her because, you know, she was completely different to you, but then she also looked a great deal like you. And I turned to her, I am sure, because properly speaking, the two of us … ”

But he stopped, suddenly concerned. Princess Ortrud was really not the sort of woman you can tell everything to.

“And what about the two of us?” she asked anxiously.

Oliver dropped the earnest tone of voice he had been using and answered instead as if he were still addressing his people from the palace balcony:

“I realised I could no longer fritter my time away. I had to return to the throne as quickly as I could to marry you. Truly.”

Ortrud gazed at him with suitable awe.

“You know, Oliver, it’s wonderful how you foresee
everything
, and can plan for everything.”

“To be sure.”

“And that the real reason you went away was so you could return and people would really be pleased to see you.”

“Yes, my girl. History teaches us that kings have to travel abroad from time to time, like husbands. Otherwise you get bored with them.”

“Wonderful! And I thought it was the end of the world when you sent me back to Mama. Only, I don’t understand, how when … do you remember … that evening … how did you know that a few seconds later the revolution would begin?”

“I could sense it. That’s how it is. The soul of a statesman is like a Geiger counter.”

“And what a bad time it was for a revolution. Do you remember?”

“Couldn’t have been worse. You never went through that change that is so important in the life of a woman.”

“And I never have since.”

“But I was more than willing to help you make that change, believe me.”

“Truly? … But then the sea serpent came.”

“Yes, the sea serpent. The fate of Alturian kings. But then it went away again. And now it’s done what it had to, and it’ll never trouble us again.”

“Are you sure about that, Oliver? Completely sure, that there won’t be a revolution this time?”

“Quite sure. You must trust in my statesmanlike wisdom and foresight.”

At that moment a terrible clamour was heard in the distance.

“What’s that? Is someone shouting?” the King asked.

“Someone, you say?” Ortrud gazed at him with eyes full of reproach. “Shouting? Don’t be ridiculous. It isn’t ‘someone’, it’s the mob, and they’re not shouting, they’re screaming. It’s the sea serpent!”

They both ran to the window. Just as on that other evening, a huge crowd darkened the scene outside the palace.

“The whole country is here,” the King exclaimed. “What is this?”

“Oliver!” Ortrud said petulantly. “There’s going to be another revolution. Another revolution, and then … ”

“Nonsense!” the King said, with a wave of the hand, and went to the internal telephone.

“Colonel Mawiras-Tendal please.”

A moment later the Colonel stood before them.

“What’s going on out there?” the King asked.

“The Princess’ mother, the Gracious Empress Hermina, arrived unexpectedly this evening. Dr Delorme quickly got together a little crowd to celebrate, and now they are marching to the railway station to greet her. I was just about to inform Your Highness.”

Marcelle and Sandoval were walking in the hoary forest of Dinant, in whose deeps Merlin the magician lies somewhere asleep, still working his spells.

“Isn’t it beautiful here?” said Sandoval.

“Very beautiful. Let’s sit for a bit; I’m tired.”

They sat down, and for a long time were silent. Sandoval was working on a composition in his head. “Brown”, he thought, “then a little red over there … this tree is particularly fine.” Then his glance fell on Marcelle’s face. It was distant, thoughtful.

“Tell me,” he asked suddenly. “Do you still miss Oscar?”

“Me?” she asked, alarmed. “Yes. No. No, truly no. Because I know very well that we could never be right for each other.”

“No? But you were so good together: like two lovebirds.”

“Yes, that’s true. But that’s because somehow I always knew there was something strange about him.”

“How do you mean?”

“You know, at first I thought he was a little bit stupid. But now I realise, he was always just a king.”

A
NTAL SZERB'S LAST NOVEL
, written just two or three years before his appalling death in 1944, is his most thoroughly genial. The sly wit, benign good humour and capacity to surprise us at every turn are not new to his writing, but the sunniness of its view of humankind is. Devised in a world of tramping jackboots, the setting and tone have more in
common
with the Bohemia of
The Winter's Tale
than with Hitler's Bohemia-Moravia. Humankind may be venal, self-deceiving and self-important, and things are never quite what they seem, but there is not a harsh word in the whole book. Indeed,
readers
coming to it by way of Szerb's acknowledged masterpiece,
Journey
by
Moonlight
(1937), might be somewhat disconcerted by its apparent frivolity. Certain themes will of course be familiar, as will the subtle and pervasive irony, but gone, apparently, are the darker spiritual questionings, the confrontation with inner demons, the brooding sense of psychological
determinism
; and the manner is now unswervingly playful. What, such readers might wonder, has become of the writer's high
seriousness
?

Those, however, who arrive by way of his first novel,
The
Pendragon
Legend
(1934), might find it a natural development of Szerb's earlier, more nonchalant ‘neo-frivolist' style, his practice of exploring real philosophical questions through the most seemingly irresponsible means. In
Pendragon
the trick was to parody different forms of popular (English) fiction, and play them off against each other to explore the instability of the self.
Oliver VII
takes this theme a step further. Licensed perhaps by his reading of Pirandello, Szerb now focuses on the
connection
between role-play and inner identity in a world where
illusion
and reality are inextricably confused. As with Pirandello, the formal artifice of the production carries the theme. Venice
is treated so stagily that ‘at times the whole scene seems to wobble'. Every major character hides behind some form of disguise—not least the royal hero who, oppressed by
convention
, plots a coup against his own throne, goes into exile, moves effortlessly into the role of confidence trickster, and ends up impersonating himself. But Szerb is no mere imitator of the Italian illusionist. Whatever casual resemblance there may be to
Henry IV
, the novel serves a very different vision of the world. What Oliver learns about the self looks not back but forward to the French existentialists, as well as insisting on less fashionable notions of responsibility and integrity.

In fact it is to the preoccupations of
Journey by Moonlight
—both overt and hidden—that
Oliver
more directly speaks. The parallels are so many and so pointed it is hard not to see the later novel, for all its lightness of tone, as a return to unfinished business. The progress of the young King sheds more than a passing light on what happens to Mihály, the protagonist of
Journey by Moonligh
t. Both begin as misfits who feel stifled by convention, yearn for the ‘real life' of the world ‘beyond the fences' and contrive to escape by
characteristically
underhand means. Finding themselves in Venice, they head for its dubious underside in quest of adventure. Events force them to take stock of who they are, what they really want, and where their loyalties lie, and they are forced to choose—between two women, and whether to return to the old life. But whereas Mihály meekly submits to being fetched home ‘like a truanting schoolboy', Oliver goes back for his own, distinctly honourable, reasons.

The intimate connection with the earlier novel is confirmed by a steady stream of allusions. A character lost in the ‘
narrow
little backstreets' of Venice imagines the water swirling blackly in between them, as if ‘still heaving with the
forgotten
corpses of past ages'—a note more appropriate to the
morbidly nostalgic hero of
Journey
. More usually these echoes are given a farcical twist, as when rotund little Pritanez, the corrupt Finance Minister of Alturia, locked in a room in circumstances of comic indignity, is heard complaining from afar. The description evokes that wonderfully mysterious moment in
Journey
when Mihály is enchanted by the sound of wailing from behind a wall: ‘There was a profound, tragic desolation in the song, something not quite human, from a different order of experience.' The echo in
Oliver VII
verges on self-parody.

Themes are echoed too, only to be re-examined. To take just one example: the adolescent theatricals which, in the
earlier
novel, shape the adult lives of all their participants like a destiny, are replaced by a set of altogether more adult games, played for different purposes and to entirely different effect. Oliver's various role-plays are entered into deliberately, with an ever-watchful eye on the consequences. Through them he acquires a fund of insight into both the world and himself and, in distinct contrast to Mihály, he comes to accept the role he has been allotted in life. For him, a man defines
himself
by doing what his situation requires.

In
Oliver VII,
Szerb is also seeing off demons that haunted both Mihály and his own younger self. The moral,
psychological
and indeed sexual confusions that
Journey
holds up for such unsparing scrutiny, in all their pathos and absurdity, had a painful resonance for their creator. Beneath the surface of the 1937 novel swarms a vigorous underlife of private reference. Mihály, haunted by the dead Tamás, the aloof, pale, fastidious young man for whom he once entertained clearly homoerotic feelings, is very much an alter ego of the writer himself. In real life, at the age of 18, increasingly troubled by his feelings for a schoolmate called Benno Terey, Szerb wrote a novella entitled
Who Killed Tamás Ulpius
?
In it, as Csaba Nagy has
shown, he attempted to exorcise once and for all the
ambiguous
elements in his love for the young man. The tale commits in effect a double murder, of the beloved person, now seen as a malign influence, and of the youthful Szerb himself: it is in fact a kind of joint suicide, one which finds its direct echo in
Journey
. The 1937 novel seems to suggest that Szerb, both as a Catholic and a newly married man, like Mihály, on his
honeymoon
, felt the need for an even deeper understanding of what happened, and perhaps a more thorough purgation. So steely is the intelligence at work that the issues are left, in the final chapter, clarified but unresolved, and the hero's ignominious return to Budapest is yet another self-betrayal, another defeat. The ending of
Oliver VII
is in direct contrast. While it too leaves us with lurking ironies and unanswered questions—every page of the novel presents a new surprise, and there are signs, for example, that Princess Ortrud may not long remain the convenient
ingénue
she has so far appeared—Oliver, unlike Mihály, does achieve a capacity for moral action to match the insight he has gained into his own divided self and divided loves, and his relationship with the now-forbidden lover ends in a scene of real dignity.

Oliver VII
, then, far from a mere afterthought to Szerb's more ‘significant' novels, is a source of new understanding of them. Indeed it is only when the three novels are taken together that the prevailing spirit of his art can be fully understood. Over the eight years his values have not so much changed as clarified, and
Oliver VII
is in some ways their most direct expression. The ‘neo-frivolism' alluded to in
Pendragon
can now be seen as the subtle business it is. Szerb nowhere expands this concept into a formal philosophy—that would hardly have been in the spirit—but its implications are many and various. Its essence was caught by the religious
historian
Károly Kerényi, who said of the writer that “he never
took himself seriously”. This was more than a compliment; it exactly reflected the value Szerb attached to the ‘self' as in ‘self-interested' and ‘self-important'. If personality is plural—as Freud, and Pirandello, knew, and
Pendragon
wittily
demonstrated—then the different selves that make it up will include some very odd bedfellows. For Szerb's mentors, if that is what they were, the consequences are potentially tragic: reality is unknowable, and the poor battered ego is locked into a hopeless struggle for stability. Szerb turns that conclusion on its head. Since life, for him, is a joyous,
miraculous
thing, and love not entirely an illusion, the instability of the ‘self' is in fact a form of release. Its inconsistent nature, and the endlessly ingenious strategies it devises to keep its end up, are necessarily comic. The art that grows from this
realisation
is too benign for satire, too shrewd for sentimentality; it pulls off that almost impossible trick of accommodating a disillusion bordering on cynicism with an amused, indeed delighted, acceptance of the world with all its faults. Its
origins
may lie as much in Szerb's religious predisposition as in any psychological theory, but the message it sends out was not a bad one for its time.

In October 1942, the questions of identity and loyalty that feature so strongly in Szerb's fiction took a new and urgent form. A lifelong Catholic and a sincere if somewhat free-thinking Christian, he found himself reclassified as a Jew (by descent) and therefore an alien in the land of his birth. Religious affiliation was no longer a defence. Now it was his turn to choose: between living out the role he had been so cruelly allotted, and the chance to flee. At first he simply clung to hope, while his scholarly works were banned, and
Oliver
, passed off as a translation from the English of a supposed A H Redcliff, sank without trace (his widow kept it in a drawer for the next twenty years). He lost the right to
teach in his university; was summoned for periods of forced labour. Next came the yellow star and the ghetto. Ahead lay the death camps. He was presented with repeated
opportunities
to escape; someone arranged an academic post for him at Columbia University. Each time he sadly but firmly declined. Some of those close to him, such as the poet Agnes Nemes Nagy, thought he acted from naive optimism, misplaced idealism or the misguided notion that his fame as a scholar and writer gave him exemption; and those factors may have played some part. But there was also a real commitment to Hungary and to his work there (“How can I teach students who haven't read their Vörösmarty?”); and, even more, an unshakeable loyalty to those he loved. In 1944 he was
officially
granted permission to emigrate, but stayed because the Arrow Cross threatened reprisals against his wife. Similarly, just weeks before his horrific death in January 1945, he rejected help because his younger brother was in the same camp. On another occasion, he simply refused to leave if it meant abandoning his old colleagues and friends Gábor Halász and György Sárközy. (It made no difference. They survived not much longer than he did.) Friends wrote of the ‘mood of resignation' that came over him, and the way he continued to put others first, to think of their needs when his own prospects were becoming so dark. It is impossible not to connect these attitudes with the values enshrined in his books, not least
Oliver VII
. Indeed, almost all the qualities that made Antal Szerb such a remarkable human being seem to find expression in his radiantly benign last novel.

LEN RIX

August 2007