Shadow of a Hero Page 15

  ‘And thank you for bringing me,’ she said. ‘And for telling me. I think it’s going to be a help . . . when I’m used to it, I mean. I . . . I always thought it was just because I came so late I was a bit of a nuisance.’

  ‘Oh, no, darling!’

  ‘But it’s true.’

  ‘It isn’t true in any way that matters.’

  The road was twisting beside the river now, the cab growling round the sharp bends. Any moment they’d be in Potok.

  ‘Have you tried to find her again?’ said Letta. ‘Your mother, I mean. I asked Grandad about her once, but he just shook his head and I knew I mustn’t ask again.’

  ‘He has not forgiven himself. He’s trying to find out something, now that the barriers are down, but so many people have disappeared . . . I’m not sure I any longer want to know . . .’

  They were silent again until they rounded the last bend and saw the old East Gate of Potok – the only one left – ahead of them. On either side of it the battlemented walls showed here and there among the red-tiled roofs. In front of it several hundred people were dancing a sundilla, the weaving chain-dance it took only a dozen dancers to start, and then anyone who felt like it could join in, while the bystanders clapped with the music. All the traffic had slowed and was nudging through, as the dancers wove in and out among the cars.

  Letta watched them pass. She didn’t know what to think or how to feel. Lapiri had seemed so pure, so simple, but it was there that Momma’s own momma had stood by a grave in somebody else’s mourning and watched somebody else’s daughter being dug out of the ground, and known that she would probably never see her own daughter again. That was the picture that kept coming back.

  Two chains of dancers went snaking by on either side of the cab. One lot wore national dress and carried baskets of flowers which they tossed across the roof of the cab to the other lot. They were laughing with excitement and happiness, but some of them, Letta thought, might have had fathers or grandfathers who had driven out to Lapiri and carried Momma’s momma away, blindfolded, with Junni’s body in a sack in the back of the car.

  ‘If Junni hadn’t been drowned,’ she whispered, ‘I wouldn’t be here today.’

  ‘Try not to brood about it, darling,’ said Momma. ‘It was a long time ago and we might as well enjoy our last few days in Varina.’

  Deliberately, as if to show what she meant, she had begun to clap her hands in rhythm to the dance. But two nights later black cars had come and men had taken Grandad out of his bed and whisked him away. Just like the old days.

  Still standing in the aisle of the aeroplane Letta bent and kissed Momma’s forehead and whispered, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘At least you can now see why I prefer to live in England,’ said Momma, grimly, and closed her eyes.

  Letta felt her way to her seat and sat thinking about Lapiri until the stewardess came back with tea. Grandad, who seemed to have been half-asleep, straightened and looked decidedly perkier.

  ‘There is champagne also,’ she whispered, ‘since you are travelling first class. We keep a little French champagne for the VIPs. I will say I made a mistake . . .’

  ‘At the moment tea means more to me than all the vintages of France,’ said Grandad. ‘Sugar, please, but not that plasticized milk. Ah!’

  He smiled at her and cradled the cup beneath his nose to sniff the steam. He looked relaxed and calm, like an old man Letta had noticed on the road to Lapiri, sitting at his door in the sun with his dog’s head on his lap.

  ‘What happened after they took me away?’ he asked.

  Letta pulled herself together and started to tell him all she’d seen, being woken, finding Nigel and then Mollie, struggling through to the hotel, his telephone call, Van, Otto Vasa’s speech, and then waiting and waiting for the car . . .

  ‘. . . in the end they didn’t dare bring it into Potok,’ she said. ‘The crowd would have wrecked it. We had to walk out to the Jirin Gate. They gave us an escort, real heavies. We saw other cars burning, and shops being looted. Then there was a road-block, a barricade, you know. Some of the men there had guns. And they wouldn’t let us through till they’d checked again with Otto Vasa. After that it was easy. Somebody went and fetched the car and we drove all the rest of the way.’

  ‘Did you see any signs of military activity?’

  ‘They’d pasted newspaper over the windows so that we couldn’t see out, but we had to stop twice and the officer got out for a bit and came back and I heard orders being given.’

  ‘And you thought Otto Vasa was horrible.’

  ‘Yes. I hope Lash wasn’t really like that.’

  ‘In what way horrible?’

  ‘I don’t know. Oh yes, I do. At first I just decided he thought much too much of himself, as if he was the festival – I know he’d paid for most of it so he was a bit entitled – but I couldn’t stand the way people like Mr Orestes fawned on him – Van too, I’m afraid – and you could see how he loved it at the same time as he despised them for it – all that. And of course Minna Alaya had warned me about him . . . But really, it was the way he talked about you when he was whipping the crowd up, as if you weren’t a real person, just something like Restaur’s banner which he could say big, noble things about . . . And then lying, too. I heard Momma telling him you were all right and they were treating you OK, but he talked about you being in prison, and tortured . . . And he talked about you as if you were dead. And then, when he came back into the room after he’d been pouring out all this sob-stuff and he didn’t think anyone was looking, he was so pleased with himself that he winked! I hate him!’

  Grandad sipped and nodded and sipped again.

  ‘How do you interpret the wink?’ he said. ‘He winked to someone in particular, I take it.’

  ‘Some kind of a henchman who’d given him a thumbs-up. I think they were saying, “We’ve done it. We’ve brought it off. This is what we wanted.” I mean that was what Van was saying, too.’

  ‘Interpret further, my darling. Did the wink celebrate a chance opportunity successfully seized, or a deliberate plan carried through?’

  ‘I don’t know. The plan, I suppose. I’m just guessing. Why?’

  ‘Naturally I asked many times what I had done to deserve this treatment. In the end I was informed that I had broken the conditions of my visa, which I took to mean that I had taken part in political activities. I had been extremely careful not to, but I was aware from the first that efforts were being made to provoke me into political statements, in particular by one or two of Otto Vasa’s entourage.’

  ‘The one he winked to was a skinny little man with a big moustache.’

  ‘That could be Nirvan Orestes, a cousin of our Hector’s. He is certainly of the party which would like to provoke an immediate confrontation with the Romanian government, if not outright rebellion.’

  ‘You mean one of them actually told the Romanians?’

  ‘I’m afraid it is all too probable. As always, I am much more use to them as a name and a symbol, than as a living person with opinions of my own. Ah, well. What about you, my darling? It is sad for you that our lovely adventure should end like this.’

  Letta didn’t say anything.

  ‘No?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘Something had to happen. It was too lovely. It wasn’t real. Did Momma tell you she’d taken me to Lapiri?’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘And on the way back she told me what happened there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘At first I wished she hadn’t. It seemed to spoil everything. And then I thought it’s better to know. You can’t pretend everything’s a pretty dream when it isn’t. Those people out in the Square – there must be a lot of them who’d do things like that to each other. I expect some of them have. You’ve got to know that, too.’

  ‘Yes, my darling. But when you have learnt that lesson you have a still harder one to learn. There are also a lot of people who would not.’

  They
landed at Heathrow in the late evening. The other passengers were made to wait while two men came aboard and led Grandad and Momma and Letta away, not through the usual passenger channels. The men were polite. Grandad knew one of them. They were shown into a small bare room and Momma and Letta were asked to sit down while Grandad was taken through into another room. After a bit, one of the men came back and beckoned to Letta. The man behind the desk in the second room was the same one who’d brought Grandad back to Winchester last year. He asked Letta to tell him what she’d seen when Otto Vasa came back from the balcony after making his speech. He made a note, stood up, and shook hands with Grandad.

  ‘Well, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry for you that it’s ended like this, and we’ll do the best we can with the Romanians. I’ll talk to my colleagues in Paris. They have a bit more influence there. I think that’s all. There’s a car ready to take you back to Winchester. Goodbye, Miss Ozolins. It was nice to meet you again.’

  LEGEND

  The Pomegranate Trees

  RESTAUR VAX SENT letters to Bishop Pango in Rome, saying, ‘Return, for the Pashas have fled, and our country is ours.’

  Bishop Pango answered, ‘In a little while.’

  Restaur Vax wrote again, saying, ‘Return, for we need both your counsel and your blessing.’

  Bishop Pango answered, ‘My blessing is always with you, and my counsel is that the Pashas are not fled for ever.’

  A third time Restaur Vax wrote, saying, ‘Return. Your counsel is wise, but we are strong in our mountains. The Pashas cannot drive us out. All that is needed is your presence among us.’

  Then Bishop Pango sent for the messenger and told him, ‘Say this to Restaur Vax. “There was once a king who married a woman from the far south, and he loved her greatly and gave her many gifts, but still she repined. And when he asked her why, she told him that she yearned for the things of her own land, and above all for the sight and scent of a pomegranate tree in the spring. So the king sent south for pomegranate trees, enough to fill an orchard, but it was a far journey and a hard one, and when they came at last all but four of the trees were dead. These he gave to his gardener, saying, ‘Make me a garden, and let there be a pomegranate tree at its centre, for my queen to see and smell when it flowers in the spring.’

  ‘“The gardener had never grown such a tree, and knew nothing of its culture, but he knew his king for an angry man when his wish was not fulfilled. Therefore he built for his king four gardens, each with a pomegranate tree at its centre. One tree he both pruned and dunged. One he pruned and did not dung. One he dunged and did not prune. And the fourth he neither dunged nor pruned. So the trees prospered or stayed or failed according to their nature.

  ‘“Then in the spring the gardener led his king and his queen to a garden filled with roses and with lilies and with amaranth, and at its centre a young pomegranate tree heavy with blossom, so that it scented all the garden. The queen clapped her hands with pleasure and the king rewarded the gardener with praise and with gold. So the gardener left them to delight in their tree, and sent for his workmen and said, ‘Let the other three gardens be ploughed, and wheat sown in their place, that my master may not know of them, the two gardens where the tree at the centre is a poor thing with only few leaves, and the fourth where it is dead.’”

  ‘My son, that gardener was a wise man. Moreover he had four trees of which to make trial, and we have but two. Let us not grow them in the same garden.’

  By this Restaur Vax knew that the Bishop would not come.

  AUGUST 1990

  LETTA WAS TRYING to write to Angel. It should have been a way of helping her settle down, but it wasn’t. Nothing was. Nothing would be, either, at least not until tomorrow, when Grandad got back from the health farm which Momma had insisted on his going to, as soon as they were home from Varina.

  Tomorrow. So that meant it was exactly a fortnight since she’d been sitting in the plane staring out at the mountains of Varina, dark beneath the sunset. The coaches hadn’t come till almost a week later, with everybody on them except a few fanatics who’d insisted on staying behind. Van was one of those. According to Nigel he’d had some kind of shattering row with Poppa, which was extraordinary, because Poppa never had rows with anyone, but it mightn’t have been just about not coming home.

  Apparently as soon as Grandad was arrested, Otto Vasa had completely hijacked the festival, turning it into a series of rallies to demand total independence for Varina. He’d organized a sort of bodyguard for himself, who wore yellow sashes and paraded at the rallies like soldiers, drilling and marching to shouted orders. He’d actually tried to have it hushed up that Grandad was safely out of the country, because it would be more of an outrage if he were in prison in Bucharest. Worst of all, he’d taken Van around everywhere with him, and talked about him as the third Restaur Vax. According to Nigel, Van had lapped it up, but Letta knew he mightn’t be being fair, because of the permanent needle between Van and Steff.

  Then the Romanian army had shown up and tried to take charge, and there’d been a terrifying confrontation just outside Potok, with a great mass of unarmed Varinians facing up to the soldiers with their tanks and guns, but Otto Vasa’s henchmen seemed to have known they were coming and had got some foreign TV crews there, so the army had backed down because of the cameras and Otto Vasa had taken all the credit.

  Then Mollie had managed to get the coaches organized to bring everyone home early, so that was the last anyone knew.

  The maddening and extraordinary thing was that, though the radio and TV and the papers were full of what was happening in the old Yugoslavia, even the World Service hardly ever mentioned Varina. Letta found a short bit in the Independent about Grandad being thrown out, and once or twice, in background articles about how dangerous things were getting between the Serbs and the Bosnians and the Croats, there were mentions of Macedonia and Varina being places waiting to explode, but there was nothing ever about how, or why, let alone what it was like to be there. Letta felt that she had been part of something huge and wonderful – the most important thing in her life, maybe – which had then gone wrong, like a good dream turning to a nightmare. But it was real, it had happened, it was still happening, still huge. Only if she walked down into Winchester there were all those people, shoppers, tourists roaming dazedly about, buskers playing folk instruments, and as far as they were concerned it wasn’t there.

  And now there was this letter from Angel, making jokes about it. Typically Angel, about the horrors of having to live in darkest Yorkshire, where she’d never be able to make friends with anyone because she couldn’t understand the weird way they talked, and how she was going to pine away in exile and die, so she’d decided to run away and turn up on Letta’s doorstep talking in a foreign accent and saying she was really a Varingian freedom fighter on the run from the secret police . . . A month ago it might have been funny, even the joke about spelling Varinian wrong might have been funny, but it didn’t work for Letta now.

  She struggled through two sides of her answer. She had to do at least four, which wasn’t fair because Angel’s writing was twice the size of hers, and on top of that she’d finished up with one of her poems. Letta didn’t write poems, and if she had she certainly wouldn’t have made everyone read them, the way Angel did. This one was called ‘Christina’. It was from a film they’d all seen on the box last Christmas, one of those terrific old film stars standing in the prow of the ship which is taking her away into exile, but of course in Angel’s poem it was Angel.

  They’d gone to visit Grandad on his health farm a couple of days ago, and Letta had asked him if there was another poem like ‘The Stream at Urya’ which she could have a go at until he came back. He’d suggested one called ‘Receding Mountains’. It was only fifteen lines long, but two of them were a bit tricky, he’d said. The old Restaur Vax had written it, not long before he died, remembering how he’d leaned on the rail of the boat and looked back when he’d left Varina for the last time. Letta thoug
ht she might try turning it into English and sending it to Angel. It would fill a page, anyway.

  She got the book down and read the poem through again. She still couldn’t see how the two tricky lines meant what she thought they had to, but the rest of it she liked almost more than ‘The Stream at Urya’. Despite the strange old words and the twiddly bits which gave them their exact meanings, there were still lines which could make her skin crawl and prickle the hair on her nape. Hopeless, of course, to try and do that in English . . .

  She stopped writing and fell into a day-dream, a fantasy. She was in a small, dark room in Rome, standing invisible behind a chair where an old man sat at a table. No, he wasn’t old, not really, just poor and tired and ill, and everyone had forgotten him, but you’d never know that from what he was doing now. Letta watched the long-nibbed pen scratch its way across the paper. The man had left Varina almost forty years before, but he remembered the moment and made it all new, the young fighter saying goodbye to the mountains, the mountains which had been his allies and friends, unchanging in defeat and victory. Goodbye for a little while. Soon he would return . . .

  Only he’d never been allowed to. Letta reached out her invisible hand and laid it weightless on his shoulder. He paused for a moment in his writing, then went on.

  Forty years in exile, and all because of that dreadful old fox, Bishop Pango. First thing Letta would do when Grandad got home was tell him what she thought of Bishop Pango.

  * * *

  ‘You do him an injustice,’ said Grandad. ‘Without him we might not be a people at all today. Sixty years ago, you know, when Romania was at least nominally a democracy, our northern province sent two members to the parliament in Bucharest. They were not on speaking terms with each other, because they belonged to opposing parties. One was a Vaxite and one was a Pangoist.’