If You're Reading This, I'm Already Dead Read online

  Did you see what I did there? The oldest trick in the book. Chapter 1, paragraph 1 in the politician’s manual: “If you want the people to love you, start a war.”

  And I didn’t even have to read the instructions. I was entirely self-taught, a natural. I didn’t have to stop to think about it; I just took to it like a duck to water. It was instinctive. In a bit of a hole? No problem, let’s just kill a few people—or a lot of people. The more the merrier.

  I looked at those poor bastards I had come to rob and I could tell that they didn’t love me. But that didn’t matter because all I had to do was give them somebody to hate—then they would love me! And they did. It worked like a charm. It always does. I never stopped to consider who might die, who might suffer, who might lose arms and legs and eyes, how many widows there might be, how many orphans. I never gave it a thought. I just invited them to a war and, damn them all to hell, every last one of them, man, woman and child, RSVP’d saying, “Thanks a lot, we’d love to come.” And you know where that ends, don’t you? It ends up with an old man pissing his pants in a tin caravan, waiting to get blown to bits.

  What the hell is wrong with us? What is it that’s cracked or twisted or bent inside our heads? We all queued up to join the party when the Kaiser asked, and even four years of that shit wasn’t enough to cure us. Twenty years later, just enough time to grow another crop of sons, and we’re at it again, killing each other. We can’t get enough of killing each other

  Those poor bloody Albanoks had taken a pounding off the Serbs—God alone knows how many of them died, and there was hardly a house in that town without its share of bullet holes—but they just couldn’t wait to get started again. You would have thought that if some madman turned up in town with a plan for another nice war they would have queued up to lynch him but, no, the military band struck up and everybody started marching. Every time. Every bloody time.

  Still, I can’t complain. It worked for me. When I came through the arch on my camel with half the town following, the other half had already run ahead to start the celebrations. There were cooking fires set up all over the courtyard with pots boiling over them. Street vendors brought their barrows up from the marketplace to cash in on the fun. Children were running round every place, and all around the courtyard people were singing and dancing around little groups of musicians—small, hairy men with the look of Gypsy cut-throats, who gazed adoringly at Mrs. MacLeod.

  No, war or no war, my conscience was clear. I had no more concern for the Albanoks than I did for that girl in the beer cellar. Everybody was having fun. Everybody was a volunteer. Everybody was sitting round swapping stories about how well they knew me and what I’d said to them and all the money that I had thrown around—not that they caught any themselves, but that bloke over there, he had a friend who got five, no, seven, no fifteen gold pieces! It was exactly as Sarah said it would be, clever, beautiful Sarah, who knew and understood that it doesn’t matter how life is, it’s how it appears to be that counts. It doesn’t matter what’s right in front of our noses, it’s what we see that counts, and it doesn’t matter what the truth is because the only thing that’s worth a damn is what we choose to believe.

  You should’ve seen the welcome when I arrived, how they clapped and cheered. I’ve seen the same thing in the boxing booth. Some farm boy, fresh from the fields, well fed, well rested, on his day off, meets up with a rum-soaked, punch-drunk, middle-aged slugger with a nose too broken to breathe through, ribs aching, crying out for another drink, on his tenth fight of the night, and he lands a lucky punch and the rummy goes down and the crowds cheer in that same hungry, look-at-me way. They all want a piece of the kid. They all want to be his pal. They all rush up to shake his hand and clap him on the back. Except they didn’t touch me. You can’t slap a king on the back. You can’t shake hands with a king—not unless he asks you. That would be disrespectful. So they picked on Max instead, as the next best thing.

  They were all over him as I went up the castle steps, girls rushing up to be kissed, men rushing up to give him a drink. Me they just looked at. It can be lonely, being a king.

  “Be good,” I said.

  “I’m always good.”

  “And look after the camel.”

  “I always look after the camel.”

  “And don’t get drunk.”

  “I always get drunk.”

  “And look after Sarah—and Tifty!” But I don’t think he heard me.

  I went bounding up the steps and stood on the top landing outside the castle door, waving like a windmill as the people cheered and shouted. I looked down and saw the Professor at the foot of the staircase, turning his head from side to side, searching the crowd with his blind eyes while people surged and jostled all around him like waves around a drowning man. I would have gone to get him but I reckoned there was still time for one more wave and a cheer or two and, when I looked back, Kemali was coming up the steps with the Professor on his arm and Zogolli as his rearguard.

  The doors of the castle opened, servants bowed us through and, with a final cheer, we went inside.

  Kemali showed us to his private office, ordered coffee, cakes and extra chairs and, since it appeared he was ready for a nice chat, I shook my whiskers at him, gave him one of my special “harrumphs” and turned round to look out the window, legs apart, fists knotted behind my back. Down below, down at the bottom of the hill, I could see the harbor and our little boat—Varga’s boat—all brown and shining like a polished nut, waiting for us, and the sea, twinkling as if somebody had taken a bucket of stars and spilled them out, all the way to the horizon, the way my mother used to swill water across the stone floor in the cheese house. Looking down from up there I suddenly felt how far we had come—not just from Budapest, but from a circus caravan to the steps of a throne. We had climbed very high and it was an awful long way back down, so the only thing to do was to keep climbing.

  There was a knock at the door and two men entered carrying plates of cake and trays of rattling, chinking coffee cups. I sat down and, when everybody was served and the waiters had gone, Kemali turned to me with a tolerant smile and said, “Now, what do you want?”

  Well, naturally, not knowing what he had said, there was only one thing to say to that. I shook my head slowly, as if in despair at his amazing denseness, said “Fssht!” at him through my mustache and took a big gulp of coffee.

  “I think,” said the Professor, “what the Heaven-born one means is that his intentions must be obvious.”

  “Not to me.”

  “Oh, but they are to me,” said Zogolli, slicking down his oily hair.

  Kemali gave him another one of those “I’ve been meaning to have a word with you” looks.

  I ate a cake. It kept my mouth busy, and when it was well stuffed with coffee-soaked cake I said, “Let’s all invade Serbia,” in a booming voice.

  “Forgive me, Excellency, I didn’t understand a word of that,” said Kemali. He looked at Zogolli. “Did you understand a word of that?”

  Zogolli shrugged.

  “And there you have the problem in a nutshell,” said the Professor. “The Heaven-born one speaks very poor Turkish.”

  “But he’s a Turk.”

  “Barely a word, I’m afraid.”

  “But he is the son of the Sultan himself.”

  “Therefore no ordinary Turk, and therefore he speaks no ordinary Turkish. The Heaven-born one spent his youth enclosed in the Harem and there he learned a beautiful and stately dialect, formed in seclusion centuries ago and preserved, perfectly, behind the walls of the Harem, as if in amber.”

  Kemali sat with his mouth open until he decided to fill it with a bit of cake. He chewed thoughtfully for a bit and then he said, “You’re telling me he speaks no Turkish except for some secret dialect dreamed up for women hundreds of years ago.”

  “Exactly,” said the Professor.

  “I can’t believe it. I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous. Have you ever heard of such a thing, Zogoll
i?”

  “Oh yes, sir. Everybody knows all about that. It’s really quite famous.”

  Kemali turned back to the Professor. “And you too can speak this strange language?”

  “Of course.”

  “May I ask how you came to learn it?”

  “Because I also grew up in the Harem. As well as acting as his all-unworthy vizier, I am the uncle of the Heavenborn one and brother—indeed the favorite brother—of the great Mehmet, Sultan and Caliph himself.”

  “The favorite brother of the Sultan,” said Kemali. “Forgive me—that is a remarkable claim.”

  “But surely it is obvious. When, in accordance with the will of God, dear Mehmet came to the throne, all our other brothers were garroted but, in his great love and charity, he merely blinded me. May I live a thousand years to sing of his generosity.”

  “Oh, a thousand years is barely enough,” Kemali said. “So, to cut a long story short, you want us to accept a king who cannot communicate, a recluse who has spent his life locked up with his mummy and his aunties.”

  “What a ridiculous idea! His Excellency Halim Eddine, the Heaven-born …”

  “Actually, I should probably mention, the free and independent state of Albania is very modern in its outlook. This ‘Heaven-born’ business? It’s a bit old-fashioned for our tastes. We’re looking for a more down-to-earth kind of king, one whose farts don’t smell of roses. Forgive my interruption—what was it you were saying?”

  To his great credit, the Professor never even cracked a smile over that and, while I helped myself to some more cake, he went on, “His Excellency Halim Eddine is by no means a recluse. Yes, he passed his early years in the seclusion of the Harem, but the days of his youth he spent in study abroad, mastering the arts of war at the German Imperial Military Academy. He is the model of a modern monarch and he speaks excellent German.”

  Kemali jumped up. “He speaks German? Wunderbar!” And then he turned to me and said, “Welcome to Albania.”

  I had no idea what to say, but then the Professor said, “I have just been explaining the unusual circumstances of Your Highness’s upbringing in the Harem of the royal palace, how it is that you speak no Turkish, despite being the son of the Sultan, my brother, who mercifully blinded me instead of having me strangled, and that you speak excellent German, thanks to spending years at the Imperial Military Academy,” and stuck his face in his coffee cup.

  “Thank you very much,” I said. “Thank you very much.” I said it again to give myself a moment. Then I put my cup down on Kemali’s desk, stood up, flicked the cake crumbs off the front of my uniform and shook him by the hand, saying, “Thank you very much,” again, just to make sure.

  There was a lot of vigorous hand-shaking for a bit and then Kemali said, “Now, what do you want?”

  “Just one more slice of cake might be nice,” I said.

  “Oh, if only kings could be satisfied with a slice of cake—don’t you agree, Zogolli?”

  Zogolli simpered.

  “My dear sir, if a slice of cake was the height of your ambition then you really would be the ideal monarch.”

  “Well,” I said, “I am a man of simple wants. Modest accommodations—”

  “There is a palazzo. A small shell hole in the roof. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed.”

  “In that case, I—”

  “A country estate not too many miles from here—farms, woodlands, a lake.”

  “All of this is more than ample.”

  “Naturally, anticipating the needs of any future sovereign, the interim government has established a personal treasury based on a percentage of all harbor dues and customs duties.”

  “Naturally and I feel sure—”

  “It has already grown to some four millions of leks.”

  “Really? So much? Is that a lot?”

  My grand vizier, Professor von Mesmer, nodded into his coffee cup. “Four million anything is a lot.”

  “I see you have provided admirably for my arrival. And is there a harem? I brought a few dancing girls with me but, perhaps …”

  “No,” said Kemali, “there is no harem.”

  “Pity. Pity. Never mind, we can sort something out later. Anyway, it all sounds excellent and I think the thing to do is to get my bags moved in and then we can get on with the whole business of a coronation and running the country. And so on.”

  Kemali smiled at me with that soft, uncle-ish smile of his and said, “Yes, but what do you want?”

  I shook my whiskers at him again. “Hasn’t this been explained to you? Surely you’ve been told? Tell him, Mr. Grand Vizier.”

  The Professor took a big breath and he repeated his speech from the pier, all that stuff about hearing the anguished cries of the proud people of Albania and taking up the awful burden of the throne.

  “Yes, yes,” said Kemali. “I understood all that. The thing is, I’ve racked my brains and Zogolli here, well, Zogolli has been through all the files—haven’t you, my boy?” He gave a little chuckle. “Anyway, the thing is—and you’ll laugh when you hear this—but nobody can seem to recall sending for a king.”

  Max was surprisingly disappointed about the harem. We were about halfway down a bottle of brandy in my private quarters and he was still going on about it. “No harem? No flaming harem? I mean you, an Oriental potentate, and no harem—how are you supposed to hold your head up?”

  “Franz Josef seems to manage without one.”

  “He’s an old man.”

  “And the Kaiser.”

  “Well, if you ask me, and not to appear disloyal or anything, I don’t think the Kaiser’s all that bothered about that sort of thing, but I am.”

  “Christ,” I said, “you’ve got Tifty here. She’s enough for any man.”

  “Oh, you know what Tifty’s like. She’s like licorice. The more you get, the more you want, and I think it’s a diabolical liberty not supplying a king with his reasonable requirements. It’s like asking somebody to bring their own beer to a wedding.”

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. We were at the bit where Kemali told me, in the kindest way possible, that nobody had invited me to become king after all.

  I suppose that’s what they call “a cliff-hanger” at the pictures. Somebody pulls a gun, the audience gasps and then the credits roll with a few little flashes of what’s to come in next week’s thrilling episode. It’s exciting—but only because you don’t know what’s coming next. Will he live? Will he die? Well, you know I lived. That’s why I’m waiting to die in my little tin caravan now. So there’s no point in a cliff-hanger. There’s no point in wondering, “How is the brave, handsome, daring and courageous Otto going to get out of this one? Is the adventure over? Can he still become King of the Albanoks and escape with his life?” when you know very well that I did both of those things, since it says in my papers that I am seventy-three years old and the former king of Albania. It’s there in black and white. It’s an official document. It must be true. Do you think your government would lie to you? Think carefully before you answer, and write nothing down. I am going to make what passes for a cup of tea.

  That was a waste of time. This stuff is tea in the same sense that little girls sit you down between a doll and a stuffed poodle, hand you a cup and tell you that it’s tea. This tea is tea, complete in every respect except for one of its vital ingredients, the other of which is hot water. Still, it’s a comfort. Going through the ritual. Boiling a kettle. Pouring it into a pot. Pouring it out again into a cup. That’s what makes it tea in just the way that a bit of paper is money or a circus acrobat is a king—because we all agree that it is and for no other reason. I suppose there must be some memory of tea left in that pot, something that can be soaked up from the brown stains on the inside, tea in homeopathic doses, a souvenir of tea I drank a thousand years ago without stopping to consider the wonderfulness of something like that, brought from the other side of the world just to be drunk in a time before the world conspired to blow itself up.
/>   I want to go to bed. No, there’s no point going to bed. Lying in bed I’d be just as cold and just as scared as I am now and I’d rather sit here and talk to you than lie there talking to myself. What I want is to be asleep, deeply, deeply asleep, but not so deep that I can’t notice how warm and comfortable I am. I want to sleep the way I did when I was a little boy, when sleep would suddenly overtake me as I sat beside the fire, fall on me like a great unshakeable weight and, after a bit, my father would pick me up and carry me off to bed, my face against his neck, and I would know I was going, carried off through the air in strong arms that would never let me go, to a bed where the sheets were cold but only until my little furnace body made them warm again. Now my bed is always cold. I have no heat left in me. I must be getting ready for a long, cold sleep.

  But, before that, I have to tell my story.

  When Kemali told us that he couldn’t remember sending for a king, well, that was the first time I felt really scared. I remembered all the things that the Professor had told us—about how the only Turk the Albanoks liked better than a dead Turk was a live one they could torture to death, and how he fully expected to be sitting on a sharpened spike by the end of the week, and I didn’t like it.

  But working in the circus teaches you to think quick, and when you’re doing that, when the knives are flying through the air, when the horse kicks, when the barrels are falling or the tightrope turns out to not to be where your foot thought it was going to be, then time changes. For the people in the audience, it’s just a tick of the clock but, up on the rope, it’s all the afternoon. If you get it right, you’ve got all afternoon to get it right, hours and hours to do the thing that you know how to do before you’ve even thought about doing it. If you get it wrong then you’ve got all afternoon to fall down and down and down to the sawdust, trying to remember how to fall, and cursing yourself all the way for where you went wrong. It’s a miracle to me that anybody ever bothered with making a clock or that clocks can be taught to measure time the same for everybody when it goes by differently for all of us. When I was a little boy there was a whole year between Christmases. These days, each year lasts a month, but last week I was a boy of twenty.