The fact that the emperor spoke English did not strike me as surprising in the least. It would have been rather absurd if, at the moment of his demise (or perhaps something else—I never quite understood it myself), he had resorted to expressing himself in a language defiled by the decrees of the Council of People’s Commissars.
Far more bewildering to me were the orderlies—what their presence signified, I could not fathom at all. Yet, I had never particularly understood my own poetry, long suspecting that authorship was a dubious affair. And all that is required of one who takes up the pen and bends over a sheet of paper is to align the many scattered keyholes within their soul in such a manner that a ray of sunlight might suddenly fall through them onto the paper.