Shadow of a Hero Read online

  ‘Oh, yes, of course. “Restaur Vax and the Bishop”. Is that Bishop Pango?’

  ‘In the Legends all bishops are Bishop Pango, all heroes are Restaur or Lash the Golden, all enemies are Turks, and all traitors are Greeks, Serbs, Romanians or Bulgars. The world is a simple place, in legends.’

  LEGEND

  Restaur Vax and the Bishop

  BISHOP PANGO1 WAS a proud, proud man. On his left hand he wore three rings, and on his right five. He knew more Latin than the Pope and more Greek than the Patriarch.2 When he came to the seminary the young men who were studying to be priests were brought before him, one by one, so that he could test them and know their worth.

  Last of all Restaur Vax stood before him, and the Bishop tested him with a hard question. Restaur Vax answered him perfectly.

  ‘Good,’ said the Bishop. ‘We will make you a priest.’

  ‘I would sooner fight the Turks,’ said Restaur Vax.

  The Bishop frowned, and tested him with a harder question. Again Restaur Vax answered him perfectly.

  ‘Good,’ said the Bishop. ‘When you have done being a priest, we will make you a bishop.’

  ‘I would sooner fight the Turks,’ said Restaur Vax.

  The Bishop frowned and bit his lip and tested him with the hardest question he knew. For the third time Restaur Vax answered perfectly.

  ‘Good,’ said the Bishop. ‘When I myself am taken hence, you will sit on my throne.’

  ‘I would sooner fight the Turks,’ said Restaur Vax.

  ‘How can you fight the Turks?’ said the Bishop. ‘Seven hundred years they have been our masters. You have neither sword nor gun nor horse. You had far best be a priest.’

  ‘Without sword or horse or gun I will fight the Turks,’ said Restaur Vax.

  The Bishop took a ring from his left hand.

  ‘With this you may buy yourself a sword,’ he said.

  He took two rings from his left hand.

  ‘With these you may buy yourself a gun,’ he said.

  He took four rings – all but his great Bishop’s ring – from his right hand.

  ‘With these you may buy yourself the best horse in the mountains,’ he said. ‘Now I have nothing to give you but my blessing. Go and fight the Turks.’

  1 Pango XIV (1766–1850) Bishop Supreme of Varina from 1818 and Prince-Bishop from 1829. During the period leading up to the War of Independence he was more than once arrested by the Turkish authorities on suspicion of support for nationalist leaders, but he was released because of the popular unrest and international pressure. The nature of his support for nationalist ideals remains unclear. He may well have examined the young Restaur Vax for the priesthood.

  2 The National Church of Varina was, and remains, unique. At the Great Schism of 1054 it announced its allegiance to both Rome and Byzantium, accepting Pope and Patriarch as equal spiritual heads. Both major Churches pronounced the Varinian compromise heretical, but with characteristic obstinacy the Church of Varina still insists that it accepts only the joint authority. The authority is theoretical. In practice it goes its own way.

  AUTUMN 1989

  IT MUST HAVE been high summer when they started reading the Legends, the summer before the demo outside the Romanian Embassy. Their house was half-way up the hill, and Grandad’s room was at the top, at the back, so from his window you could see right down over Winchester, with the green tops of the trees poking up between the rain-washed slates, and the squat tower of the cathedral dim in the valley.

  Letta remembered that because Grandad had talked about staring out of his schoolroom window at the hillside above his father’s farm, and she had imagined its sun-baked brown harshness and the difference from what she was actually seeing had struck her. Then there had been the summer holidays, and then things had begun to change.

  It started with several visits, three at least, from the men Grandad called ‘the policemen’. She knew because he was tired, and told her it was from having to talk English. His English was fluent, but with a thick, gravelly accent and a quaint way of twisting sentences inside out. After one of the visits he said, ‘I find the American accent particularly hard to attend to.’

  Another time Momma told Letta to be sure to take her key to school as Grandad would be out when she got home. She happened to be at the window and saw the car drive up. A very tall blond young man got out and opened the passenger door for Grandad and helped him up the front steps. Letta met them at the door. Grandad said, ‘This is my granddaughter, Letta,’ and the man gave a quick smile that didn’t mean anything and said, ‘Hi, Letta. Then you’re in good hands, sir,’ and ran down the steps.

  Letta made a pot of tea, but when she took it up she found Grandad in bed, in his shirt-sleeves, making notes on a clipboard. He thanked her and stopped work to drink and nod and smile while she chatted, mostly about her friend Angel’s latest absurdities. When he gave her the cup back he said, ‘When Momma comes home, would you ask her if she can spare me a few minutes?’

  Letta did, but the ‘few minutes’ were still going on an hour later. Part of Momma’s way of proving to herself that she wasn’t sacrificing her family to her job was to see that there was a proper cooked supper. Even if it was just her and Letta, because Poppa was away and Grandad was tired and only wanted a snack in his room, there’d be at least two courses and sometimes three, hot and ready at eight o’clock, but that evening Letta realized it wasn’t going to happen so she made scrambled eggs and took a tray up. Momma and Grandad hadn’t been having one of their rows, she saw as soon as she went in. It was too serious for that.

  Momma looked vaguely at the scrambled eggs, then pulled herself together and said, ‘Oh, thank you, Letta. Well done. Got something for yourself? Be a saint and put the stuff in my basket in the fridge, will you?’

  Grandad just raised a hand and smiled tiredly at her as she left. Letta didn’t mind. It meant she could read while she ate, and she had a mountain of homework still to do.

  Next afternoon she got home and found men putting a telephone into Grandad’s room, which meant he had to come downstairs for tea and she did the crumpets in the toaster, instead of the proper way on a toasting-fork in front of his gas fire. (Grandad used to say, ‘When all England’s triumphs and mistakes are forgotten, mankind will still owe her four priceless gifts – bread sauce to go with turkey, steak-and-kidney pudding, marmalade, and hot buttered crumpets.’)

  ‘What’s going on?’ said Letta. ‘I mean, a telephone! You hate telephones, and anyway you get about three calls a year.’

  ‘The world is falling apart. This is a minor symptom of its collapse.’

  ‘The world’s been falling apart ever since I can remember. At least once a month. Then they have a summit . . .’

  ‘No more summits,’ said Grandad. ‘It takes two equal world powers to compose a summit.’

  ‘They must have forgotten to tell Mount Everest.’

  ‘No doubt that is why Mount Everest is still there. But soon the USSR will cease to exist. China is permanently contemplating the chaos in its own navel. With whom can the US President hold a summit?’

  ‘Do you mean he’s going to start ringing you up instead? Is it a hot line? Can I have a go? There’s a lot of things I’m aching to tell him.’

  ‘Fortunately for his peace of mind it is not a hot line. If you would be kind enough to stuff your mouth with crumpet so that you can’t interrupt, I will tell you what is going on. The Eastern Bloc is falling apart. It seemed like a great unshakable slab of stone, but it is cracking into separate pieces. At the moment everybody in the West is very happy about this. They think they have won the Cold War, and soon instead of the dreadful old Communist enemy there are going to be a lot of nice friendly democratic nations to trade with. But they are going to be disappointed. First, because democracy takes a lot of practice, and there isn’t time for that. Second, because there is no money, and soon there will be no food. And third, because the crumbling of the great block is not going to s
top when the nations you see in your atlas have separated from each other. You see, most of those nations are not nations at all, but are themselves composed of a number of smaller nations . . .’

  ‘Like Varina?’

  ‘We are smaller than most, but still we are a nation. Small nations have long memories. There are three things, my darling, which bind people into a nation – the place they live, though they may share it with others; the language they speak, though they may also speak the language of their rulers; and their memories, which are theirs alone.

  ‘What do they remember? They remember their victories and their wrongs, but not, of course, their defeats and the wrongs that they themselves have done. In effect they remember chiefly their enemies. Sometimes those enemies are big and distant conquerors, like the Turks in the Legends or the Germans in my own lifetime, but mostly their ancient enemies are other small nations, just across the border, with whom there have been cattle raids and blood feuds and wife-snatchings for generation after generation, back and forth.

  ‘Now these small nations are going to bring their memories out and patch and repair and renew them and parade them up and down, all their victories which tell them they can conquer, all their wrongs which tell them to trust none but themselves. Czechoslovakia will fall apart, Yugoslavia will fall apart, the USSR will fall into twenty fragments, and the Eastern Bloc, that great slab, will have become not the pieces of shaped stone which the West was hoping to use, but a heap of pebbles. Discontented pebbles, because after all the upheavals they will have nothing that they want, not wealth, not comfort, not peace, not plenty, nothing. Nothing but their nationhood. Think. A heap of infuriated pebbles. That is the future of Eastern Europe.’

  ‘Us too? Varina?’

  ‘Ah, we are the centre of the universe, of course.’

  ‘We’re the centre of our universe. I mean, everyone is, to themselves, I think . . . Oh! Are they giving you a telephone because they want you to do something? They aren’t going to make you go back! Please don’t. I’ll be miserable without you. I suppose I shouldn’t say that, if you want to, but it’s true!’

  ‘And I should be miserable without you, my darling. Between us we will do our best to resist their idiot demands.’

  ‘Can’t you tell them you’re too old? I mean, you’re terrific for eighty-one, but . . .’

  ‘Of course I am far, far too old. In practical terms the idea is ridiculous. But it is not me they want, it is my name. If a waxwork dummy were called Restaur Vax, that would suit them as well. Better, perhaps. Even at eighty-one there is a danger that I may have ideas of my own.’

  ‘Of course you have.’

  ‘Occasionally, but I suppress them.’

  He shook his head, as if at somebody else’s stupidity, and fell silent.

  ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘If you want to, I mean. I’m really interested.’

  ‘I promised your mother I would not involve you in my political affairs.’

  ‘You aren’t involving me. I’ll involve myself if I want to, but I don’t see how unless I know what’s what.’

  ‘I suppose that is reasonable. Where were we?’

  ‘Names. And suppressing ideas.’

  ‘Yes. A name, you see, has no ideas, and for most of my life I have been not myself but my name. Suppose your name were not Letta Ozolins but, say, Florence Nightingale or Margaret Thatcher or . . .’

  ‘Kylie Minogue?’

  ‘A singer?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Then people would think of you differently, wouldn’t they? They’d expect you to sing, or to order people about, or to want to be a nurse. In my case they expected me to be a hero. My grandfather, you see, was both a rogue and a fool. He used the fact that he was Restaur Vax’s son to make himself rich, and thus wasted his real inheritance, which was the family’s name and honour. He then squandered what he had got, and had nothing to leave his son but one farm. My father named me Restaur Vax in the feeble hope that I would somehow restore the family honour. Already at school my name was a burden. People expected great things of me. I would have none of it, and chose to become a schoolmaster. I thought I had found a way to be myself.

  ‘When the Germans invaded Yugoslavia to crush the Serbs I was teaching at Virnu, in our western province – part of Yugoslavia, as you know. Being Varinians, we resisted the Germans, as we have always resisted invaders, though we had no fondness for the Serbs. Whatever my name, I think I too would have joined the Resistance, but before I could make up my mind men came to me saying, “We need you to lead us.” Me? What did I know about fighting? But of course it wasn’t me they needed. It was my name. That is how I became a Resistance leader.

  ‘Before long our northern and southern provinces, in Romania and Hungary, had joined us. Romania joined the war on the German side and tried to conscript our men into their army, to go and fight in Russia, but the men just ran away into the hills and joined the Resistance. So soon we had German troops in all three provinces, trying to control us.

  ‘Varinians aren’t easy to lead. Our national sport is the blood feud. There were a dozen groups in the mountains, often as eager to fight each other as the Germans. The only name under which they would sometimes consent to co-operate was that of Restaur Vax. So, nominally at least, I was accepted as leader of the Resistance, and when peace came it was I whom the Varinians expected to go to the victorious Allies and tell them what we had done to ensure their victory, and in their gratitude they would make us a separate nation again, all three hundred thousand of us, as we used to be under the Prince-Bishopric, and had always been in our own minds. No longer would we be ruled from Sofia and Belgrade and Bucharest. We would rule ourselves, from Potok.

  ‘I knew roughly what was going to happen, though it was far worse than even I had feared, but because of my name I was forced to go. The Russians provided us with a safe conduct and an escort, but before we had gone a hundred miles our escort was replaced. The new escort then arrested us. My companions were shot, without trial, massacred beside the road and buried in a clay-pit, but because of my name, which might possibly still be used to bargain with, I was kept alive. Eighteen years I spent in camps in Siberia . . .’

  ‘Was that where you lost your fingers?’

  ‘Yes, but not in fact from frost-bite. There was a misunderstanding. It is not important. Where was I?’

  ‘Eighteen years in Siberia. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

  ‘I would like you to understand. Well, then, for reasons I still know nothing about, I was sent back to Bulgaria and spent another twelve years in prison . . .’

  ‘But it was better than Siberia?’

  ‘Prison is prison. Physically it was, I suppose, better, but there was a spirit in the camps in Siberia, among the inmates, I mean – not all of them, of course – a sort of sullen undefeatability. I didn’t find that in sleazy, deceitful Bulgaria. There! You see, in spite of all I know I am speaking and thinking like a Varinian peasant. Hatred and contempt for Bulgaria is in my bloodstream. Ah, well. At last my name came to my rescue. Very few people outside Varina have heard of Restaur Vax, though he was not merely our national hero but one of the great European poets. I mean that, my darling. This is not mere patriotism. He is fit to rank with Goethe and Byron and Victor Hugo, except that he wrote in a language known by only three hundred thousand people . . .’

  ‘And anyway they speak Field most of the time.’

  ‘That too. Still, even the ignorant can respond to the notion of a hero-poet. Now his great-grandson, bearing the same name, once a fighter against Hitler, elected leader of his people, thirty years a prisoner of the Communists, et cetera, et cetera . . . My case was an easier cause to publicize than many just as deserving. I was in the end released as part of a trade-deal, the British government of the time wishing to be able to reply to critics who rightly said that they should not be having commercial dealings with the unspeakable Bulgarian regime. I was a bit of icing on the cake of commer
ce, allowing them to claim that they had insisted on an increase in human rights being part of the deal. About a dozen political prisoners were released. Several thousand remained in prison. But because of my name I was one of those dozen. So, as with everything else in my life, it was my name that sent me to prison, having saved me from being massacred by the roadside, and my name that, thirty years later, released me again.’

  ‘And they want you to take it back to Varina now? Hey! You could change it by deed poll. Angel’s dad changed his name because he wanted to be double-barrelled.’

  Grandad smiled and shook his head.

  ‘It is my name. I have grown to the shape of it,’ he said. ‘Anyway, it has not yet come to that. Part of the deal under which I was released was that the British government guaranteed the Bulgarians that I would not take part in political activities.’

  ‘Is that what the policemen keep coming to see you about?’

  ‘Approximately.’

  ‘And they’ve changed their minds? Is this a different lot? You said there was an American the other day.’

  ‘There are always people interested in fishing in troubled waters. But what is mainly happening at the moment is that the people I call the policemen have realized that none of the three regimes which control Varina can last, and that many Varinians will believe that the time has come to try once more for independence. Inevitably, because of my name, and whatever the British government may have promised, they will come to me, so the policemen have decided that they will have more control of events if I am acting under their protection. I am seen as a moderating influence – a ridiculous concept in Varinian terms. We are not a moderate people. So they have allowed the main organization of Varinians in exile to provide me with a telephone – which the policemen will no doubt tap – and a part-time secretary.’

  ‘Wow! A beautiful spy!’

  ‘May I be so fortunate. I was talking all this over with your momma last night.’

  ‘What did she say?’