Her action does him good. He stops trembling, smiles at the glass in his hand, sips very little then says, “You care about politics so must belong to some little party or other. Which?”
“We call ourselves The Decembrists.”
“After the group who planned to assassinate the Russian Czar in 1825?”
She nods and explains, “We would have preferred a name recalling the great Soviet Revolutionaries of 1917, but their achievement went bad under Lenin, turned rotten under Stalin, collapsed under Gorbachev. So we chose the name of that earlier lot.”
“Who also failed.”
“Yes, but Pushkin nearly joined them and Tolstoy admired them.”
Chuckling he says, “So you broke in here to assassinate the Czar of Fredonia! You nearly succeeded. I might have died of a heart attack.”
“I did not want to kill you,” cries Vera, distressed. “I once loved you. You were my hero when I was a tiny girl.”
Seriously and sadly Rudi whispers, “O dear.”
She tells him, “You gave hope to so many of us with that speech you made in the seventies. My mother and father…”
“Don’t remind me,” he begs but she raises her voice: “My mother and father listened to you on the radio with tears wetting their faces. You said the People’s Republic of Fredonia would now take her own unique path to Democratic Socialism. All censorship was now abolished. Everywhere we would be allowed to say what we thought about everything.”
She leans so far forward that her hair falls down to hide her face and she puts a hand on the bed to support herself. He pats it gently, quietly singing in a cracked voice a line of their national anthem: “Hail, hail Fredonia, land of the free”, then switches to another song once popular with Socialists: “For all that, and all that, it’s coming yet for all that, that man to man the wide world o’er shall brothers be for all that.”
Vera sits up and says abruptly, “I am a woman.”
“In a true democracy, women count as men.”
“Then count me out.”
“Why?”
“You retracted everything you said in that great speech.” “I was an idiot then, Vera,” he mourns, “not a liar. I believed every word of that speech. Under Communism from time to time many leaders announced that the old rules were softening to let freedom in. Even Chairman Mao announced that a thousand flowers would be allowed to contend. Fools who acted on these announcements soon learned their mistake. I was a simpleton who believed what Khrushchev said about a thaw…”
“It was Brezhnev.”
“So it was. I was then the Commissar in charge of National Health, and at once ordered that every political dissenter who had been registered insane should be released from our lunatic asylums. I declared this over the radio as a reason for public rejoicing. An hour later I was strapped to an operating table with electric wires attached to parts of me that — that — that I will not embarrass an attractive young woman by mentioning.”
“You’ve already told me what parts.”
“I must be senile if I told you that, but yes, it happened. Two days later I announced that my previous speech had been the result of a mental breakdown, and that I was retiring from politics for the good of my health. That was certainly true. I remained under house arrest until the Soviet Union collapsed.”
“We all knew you had been coerced into taking back that announcement. And a man called Grolsh coerced you? And you handed power over to him when we elected you President?”
“Grolsh is not totally evil, Vera. He has more wives and children than he can support out of his private fortune, even with Mafia backing, so has not wholly dismantled our Welfare State. Single mothers still receive family benefits. Our health service is not wholly privatised. I am the doctor who mainly founded it in 1947. Surely some of it still functions, my little Decembrist?”
“Don’t change the subject!” cries Vera. “You were elected President in 1990 because you were the only politician who had tried to defend Democracy under the Communists. We still loved and trusted you then.”
“And rightly!” he cries, greatly excited. “I declared over the radio that Fredonia would become Europe’s first democratic Socialist nation. Shops and small businesses and collective farms would be given to the folk working them. Big state businesses would become co-operatives owned and managed by their employees. Water, mineral resources, energy, newspapers, education and, above all, justice would be maintained for the people’s benefit by the people working them with the support of their elected parliament. No wonder people cheered and cheered and cheered that speech.”
“Fraud. Hypocrite. Whited sepulchre,” says Vera. “Why did you go back on all that?”
“I never did. That is why they keep re-electing me.”
“You must know the election results are faked,” she states with huge contempt.
Sighing he says, “They must be, with old Grolsh in charge.”
“But why is he in charge? Why has nothing you promised to do happened? Everything in Fredonia now belongs to global corporations and the international Mafia. More and more young people nowadays are drug addicts and vandals. Disease, crime, deaths in police custody are always increasing. The streets are full of beggars and most of us are poorer than we were under the Communists.”
“True!” says Rudi nostalgically. “Under that regime there was widespread social equality for everyone who was not a Party member. It was equality of scarcity of course. Shoppers stood in queues for hours. Most folk had only four or five really satisfying meals per week. But we had no beggars and nobody starved because nobody was penniless. There was full employment because everyone without a productive job was paid by the state to spy on their neighbours.”
“Are you defending the regime that scorched your balls off?”
“No,” says Rudi, sighing.
“Then why has Fredonia got worse since you became our President?”
Rudi shakes his head in bewilderment and says, “I don’t know. I signed documents making it legal for plumbers to own their own shops and farmers to own their own fields, and in swarmed middle men — brokers — there is an unpronounceable French name for such people…”
“Entrepreneurs,” Vera tells him.
“These entry-pruners swarmed in and asset-stripped the whole nation. I kept announcing that this should not be happening, but that did not stop them and nobody else I knew tried to. A President’s speeches cannot change history when his lawyers, judges, civil servants with everyone else in his government and official opposition are being bribed by global companies while being openly paid out of the public purse. So I became what I am — a hollow figurehead, more useless than a scarecrow. Scarecrows at least keep predatory birds away from grain that is needed for bread. I am a sham, Vera. You are right to despise me, but…”
He is interrupted by music.
The opening chords of the Fredonian national anthem sound near, but muffled. Rudi says, “Excuse me a moment,” takes a phone from beneath his pillow, presses a button on it, says, “Yes?” and presses another button which makes the caller’s voice loud enough for Vera to hear. It says, “Rudi. Grolsh speaking.”
“Why?” asks Rudi.
“I want a word with you.”
“Say it.”
“I must say it to your face. Now. At once.”
“Why?”
“Rudi, there is a national emergency. Very serious. Very urgent.”
“Oho! Where exactly are you, Grolsh?”
“Outside your bedroom door.”