Shadow of a Hero Read online

  He shrugged as he put the telephone down.

  ‘I feel myself to be a drip attempting to wear away the great stone of ignorance,’ he said. ‘Journalists have such short, inaccurate memories. Because I was thrown down some steps on Tuesday, they think to consult me on Slovene matters on Friday. By Monday they will have forgotten that I and Varina exist.’

  ‘You got my note? I did the best I could. It sounded quite hopeful about Slovenia, didn’t it?’

  ‘There was a good report in the Telegraph as well, but thank you, my darling. Yes, it is a sliver of hope. The Slovenes are a reasonable people – a rare phenomenon in the Balkans. Tell me some gossip. What has Angel been up to?’

  LEGEND

  The Kas Kalaz

  THE PASHA OF Potok pursued hotly after Restaur Vax and Lash the Golden, seeking vengeance for the death of his son.

  ‘Let us cross the mountains,’ said Lash. ‘The Pasha of Falje is at odds with the Pasha of Potok. He will not trouble us.’

  ‘To cross the mountains our best road runs through Kalaz, and I would welcome the chance to speak with the Kas Kalaz, for we need his aid,’ said Restaur Vax. ‘But is there not a feud between you and Kalaz?’

  ‘Indeed there is such a feud,’ said Lash, ‘and many lives have been taken. My own grandfather killed the uncle of the present Kas Kalaz, in fair fight, close by the Iron Gates, and threw him into the river.’

  ‘So you cannot go by Kalaz,’ said Restaur Vax.

  ‘I will go by goat-paths and the paths of the hunter, and over the Neck of Ram,’ said Lash. ‘And you will go through Kalaz and speak with the Kas, and we will meet in three days’ time at the Old Stones of Falje.’1

  So they agreed, but what Lash had not said was that beneath the Neck of Ram lived a shepherd who had a fair daughter. Then Restaur Vax rode over the Eastern Pass and came to Kalaz, where he made himself known to the Kas, and spoke very strongly with him, saying that the time was ripe to drive the Turk from Varina. The Kas was an old man, and wasted with illness so that he could not rise from his chair, but he looked fiercely at Restaur Vax and said, ‘The word is that you have a bandit as your companion, a man called Lash.’

  ‘It is so,’ said Restaur Vax.

  ‘There is blood yet to be paid between us,’ said the Kas. ‘This man’s grandfather trapped my uncle by a trick at the Iron Gates, and slew him and threw his body in the river. I would see the debt paid before I die.’

  ‘Would you not sooner see the Turk driven from the land?’ said Restaur Vax.

  ‘Sooner than all the earth,’ said the Kas Kalaz.

  ‘While brother slays brother and neighbour lies in wait for neighbour it cannot be done,’ said Restaur Vax. ‘The time is ripe, but we must plan with a single mind, endure with a single heart and smite with a single arm. Let the debt be forgotten.’

  ‘Blood can never be forgotten,’ said the Kas Kalaz. ‘But it can be frozen for a season. Therefore by the bones of St Joseph I swear that the Kas Kalaz will seek no vengeance from Lash or the clan of Lash until the Turk is driven from the land.’

  Then he said to his eldest son who stood at his side, ‘You hear this? When you yourself are the Kas Kalaz and Restaur Vax sends word to you to come, you will leave both your harvest and your hunting, you and all the men of Kalaz, and go with him to fight the Turks, and all feuds will be frozen.’

  ‘By the bones of St Joseph I will do it,’ said the son of the Kas Kalaz.

  Well pleased, Restaur Vax rode on his way and camped by the Old Stones of Falje. For a day and a night and another morning he waited for Lash the Golden, and when the sun was high in the sky he saw a woman come running down the mountain. She fell at his feet half-dead from weariness, but he lifted her up and she said, ‘Ride swiftly to the shepherd’s house below the Neck of Ram, for the son of the Kas Kalaz is there with his men, and he has seized Lash the Golden and put a rope about his neck and vowed that he will hang him at sunset.’

  ‘How came the son of the Kas Kalaz there?’ said Restaur Vax. ‘I feasted with him in Kalaz town but two nights past.’

  ‘Lash visited me,’ said the woman, ‘but my father learnt of his coming and went secretly over the mountains to the son of the Kas Kalaz and told him where his enemy lay. They came at dawn, while Lash still slept, but I was milking the goats and hid, and heard what was said. Then I ran to find you, for Lash had told me where he was to meet you. Now go, and go swiftly.’

  ‘You must come with me, for I do not know the path,’ said Restaur Vax.

  ‘I am over-weary,’ said the woman. ‘Who among men could have run as I have run this morning?’

  Then Restaur Vax put her on his horse and they went by goat-paths and the paths of the hunter over the mountain. Where the way was steep he led the horse by the bridle, and where it was level he ran with his hand in the stirrup. Eleven kolons2 he ran between her coming and the sunset, and the sun was low in the sky when they crossed the Neck of Ram and came down to the shepherd’s house. There they found Lash the Golden with the rope about his neck, and the son of the Kas Kalaz making ready to hang him.

  ‘Do not do this,’ said Restaur Vax. ‘You have sworn by the bones of St Joseph that the feud is frozen.’

  ‘Not so,’ said the son of the Kas Kalaz. ‘My oath is still free. It was the Kas Kalaz who swore, and I in my turn swore for the time when my father is dead and I am the Kas Kalaz.’

  Restaur Vax spoke strongly with him, trying to persuade him, but he would not hear, for the feud was old and very bitter, with many deaths. Then, as the rim of the sun touched the Neck of Ram, a man came running up the mountain and fell at the feet of the son of the Kas Kalaz and wept, and then stood and embraced him and called him by his father’s name. By this he knew that his father had died, and he was now the Kas Kalaz, and the oath he had sworn was binding.

  So he gave orders, and the rope was taken from the neck of Lash the Golden and the bonds that bound him were loosed, and the Kas Kalaz embraced him and said, ‘The blood between us is frozen, and we are brothers, until we have driven the Turk from Varina.’

  But Restaur Vax took Lash aside and said, ‘Speak with honour of this woman all your days, my friend. I have travelled by the path on which she ran to save you, and by St Joseph I myself could not have done it.’

  Then Lash was ashamed.

  1 The Old Stones of Falje. A bronze age trilith, unique in the Balkans in its design.

  2 The kolon is not a precise measure. Any considerable distance is traditionally described as seven, eleven or seventeen kolons.

  WINTER 1989/1990

  CHRISTMAS FELT STRANGE that year. Usually the holidays began with Letta and Biddie and Angel mooching around Winchester together on the pretence of helping each other buy presents. In fact Angel was far too impatient not to have bought all hers weeks before, so all she could do was enjoy a good wail about the ghastly mistakes she’d made; while Biddie knew exactly what she wanted and where to find it and could get the whole lot in half a morning, so they normally spent most of their time helping Letta, looking in shop windows, and rotting their teeth with soft drinks.

  That year there was none of that. Biddie’s parents had bought a cottage in Devon and whisked her off there, while Angel’s dad, who’d lost his job in the summer when his firm had folded, took the family up north because he’d had an offer up there and wanted them to see what they felt about moving. Normally Letta would have missed them badly. Being almost an only child, they counted as sisters to her, Biddie particularly. She and Biddie had been born within a few hours of each other, in the same ward of the Royal but on different days, Letta late on the 28th of August and Biddie early on the 29th, and though they didn’t actually meet again until junior school, when they were seven, they had immediately struck up a friendship; and then, when they had found out about the birthdays and being born in the same ward, they had felt Oh, yes, of course, so that now it was as if they had known each other all their lives.

  But that Christmas she didn’t
have time to miss Biddie, even. All she wanted to do was stay at home with Grandad, listening to the news coming in about the uprising in Romania and watching the television reports, the swirling crowds in the streets of Bucharest, the snipers and tear gas, the lurch of the picture as the cameraman ducked for cover, and the exhausted faces of ordinary people tense with excitement or weeping with joy while they stammered in smattered English into the microphones. Poppa, who was in England for once, would get home and shout before he was through the door, ‘What’s happening? Anything new?’ and Letta would gabble out the news. Momma, astonishingly, started coming home before half-past six, though usually before Christmas she was working till all hours to get her desk cleared, and she didn’t stop to shop and sent out for pizzas instead, though every now and then she would laugh, and shake her head as if she was shaking away tears and say, ‘It’s nothing to do with us any longer, you know.’

  Neither telephone stopped ringing, with old Varinian friends, unheard of for years, wanting to swap excitements, and almost everyone in England, it sometimes seemed, reporters and politicians and historians and mysterious people who seemed to have no connection with Varina at all, anxious to know what Grandad thought.

  The rest of the family arrived on Christmas Eve, Mollie and Steff and Nigel and little Donna from St Albans, and Letta’s other brother, Van, and his Scottish girl-friend Susan from Glasgow, where they both worked in TV studios. The house throbbed with excitement and tension and the frustration of being so far away. There was so much electricity in the air, Steff said, that if they could have found a way of plugging the cooker into it they could have cooked their Christmas dinner for nothing.

  On Christmas Day itself came the news that the Ceauşescus had been caught and executed, and Poppa opened the champagne then and there, and Momma, incredibly, turned on the oven but forgot to put the turkey in, so they didn’t have lunch till half-past five, and Letta and Nigel tripped Poppa up and held him down with Van’s help and wouldn’t give him any more champagne until he’d taught them the missing verses of ‘The Two Shepherds’ and they sang it all over the house and made up English versions to tell their friends, and still the telephones were ringing and ringing, Varinians all over the world now wanting to talk to Grandad and wish him a happy Christmas and saying, ‘Next year in Potok.’

  Then, while the dust of the old year’s explosions settled greyly onto the new year, and the days went by, Romania and the countries round about dropped out of the news, mostly. The United States had invaded Panama and there was a revolt in Liberia and trouble between Russia and Lithuania and a civil war starting in Azerbaijan, and so on. Still, the people you met, kids at school, even – because Letta had a foreign name and some of them knew that her family came from around there – often talked about Romania, shiny-eyed and romantic. The uprising had been so obviously a Good Thing, because Ceauşescu and his gang had been such horrors. And then the news started coming through about things like the orphanages where all the kids were tied into their cots because there weren’t enough people to look after them, and they all had AIDS from transfusions of infected blood, but still people talked as if all that was over, and there was going to be democracy and foreign medicine and emergency aid and everything would be all right. Of course there were terrible problems still, but now that Ceauşescu was gone they could all be sorted out. Letta found this depressing. First, she knew from Grandad it wasn’t like that. And second, Varina was one of the problems.

  About three weeks into the term she got back from school and found that Grandad had visitors, two men in heavy dark suits. Grandad introduced them as Mr Kronin and Mr Dashik. Mr Dashik said, ‘How do you do?’ in English, with a strong accent, as he shook hands. Letta answered in English so as not to seem rude.

  ‘Letta speaks good Varinian,’ said Grandad, ‘so there’s no need for you to deploy your linguistic skills. They have come from Potok to see me, my darling. We are all three amazed that such a thing is possible.’

  ‘That’s wonderful!’ said Letta. ‘My first real Varinians! You must have been there during the uprising? What happened? They never even mentioned Varina on the news over here, not once.’

  Mr Dashik smiled and shook his head in a puzzled way.

  ‘Everything happened,’ he said. ‘It was like a dream, a dream in which happenings rush at you and are gone and before you know who or where you are, another happening is rushing at you and you have no time to remember anything. Like that. At first we were so afraid. The police seemed to know everything. But there were rumours, and in certain places on the mountains one could pick up Italian TV reports, and crowds began to gather in Potok and the police told them to disperse and fired on them when they did not go and killed three men and two women and a child – I was there, and I saw it happen – and we began to throw stones. Then more police came and more crowds, and they chased us through the streets but we gathered again and threw stones. But many of the police were unwilling to shoot. In Varina, you know, everybody is somebody’s cousin . . .’

  ‘You mean the police were Varinians!’ said Letta.

  ‘Some of them, of course,’ said Mr Dashik, surprised that she didn’t realize.

  ‘The local Secretary of the Communist Party was my sister’s husband’s uncle,’ said Mr Kronin. ‘He was a hard-line Ceauşescu supporter and had done very well for himself. Everybody was afraid of him. He came out into the Square thinking to cow the uprising with the terror of his presence, but the crowd caught him and hanged him. I was not there, but if I had been I wouldn’t have lifted a finger to save him, family or not family.’

  ‘And then the people in Belgrade took over the broadcasts and told us that the Ceauşescus had been executed,’ said Mr Dashik. ‘And by now a lot of the police had changed sides, so we had guns and we could shoot back, and Mr Kronin here led the party that took over the Communist headquarters where they were still trying to destroy all their files . . .’

  ‘It was a great shock to read the files and discover how many people one trusted had been in the pay of the police,’ said Mr Kronin. ‘Good friends, neighbours, colleagues at work, drinking companions . . .’

  He shook his head.

  There was a silence. It was like when somebody’s died and their name comes up. There was a boy called Mickey in another class at school who’d been hit by a runaway truck last spring. Like that.

  ‘I suppose you had to read them,’ said Letta.

  ‘Terrible things had been done,’ said Mr Dashik. ‘They could not simply be forgotten.’

  ‘As a people we have no talent for forgetting,’ said Grandad. ‘Remember The Mountain Pasture?’

  ‘Anastrondaitu,’ murmured Mr Kronin, shaking his head again. ‘I have sometimes felt that there is all our history in that one word.’

  Another silence, and then Grandad said, ‘Well, gentlemen, I hope you have time to sample the delights of the British crumpet. You will? Excellent. Letta, if you would get some more cups and crumpets and perform your office . . .’

  When the visitors had gone Grandad said, ‘What did you mean by calling our friends “real” Varinians? Am I not a real Varinian? Or Mr Jaunis or Mr Orestes? Or your momma and poppa? I will except you, for the moment.’

  He was amused, but there was a faint sharpness in his tone.

  ‘You are, of course,’ said Letta. ‘I don’t know about the others. It’s sort of shadowy. I mean, Mr Orestes seems a bit realler than Mr Jaunis, I don’t know why. I suppose Poppa might be, except that he’s become a sort of nowhere person . . . What did you call him, once?’

  ‘A citizen of Exilia,’ said Grandad, ‘never to belong to any country of which there is a map. What about your momma?’

  ‘Oh, I think she’s still a real Varinian underneath. Don’t you? That’s why she keeps trying so hard not to be. Steff’s pretty real in his quiet way. I don’t know Van well enough to say. What were they here for? Just to see you, like an ancient monument? Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean that! Really!’

>   Grandad was tired but he laughed, which he didn’t do often.

  ‘In fact they came to ask me if I would inaugurate a festival of Varinian culture in Potok this summer.’

  ‘Oh, I know all about that.’

  ‘You do? It is not yet publicly announced.’

  ‘Nigel told me. Momma wanted to talk to Mollie about something last night and she asked me to get the number because her hands were wet, and Nigel said Mollie was out whooping it up with Mr Orestes at the Varinian Dance Society. You know Mollie’s gone really to town about Varina since the vigil? She’s learning Field and she’s joined Mr Orestes’ Dance Society – he’s a hot number at it, Nigel says, and now they’re mad keen to take a team out to the festival. Have I said the wrong thing?’

  ‘No, my darling. Tell me about the Dance Society.’

  ‘Oh. Nigel’s been to see, but he decided it wasn’t him. You know what boys are like about dancing.’

  ‘English boys. In Varina dance is regarded as a primarily masculine activity. Go on.’

  ‘Actually one of the girls told Nigel she thought Mr Orestes was sexy. Can you imagine? He did a sort of exhibition, playing bagpipes and dancing at the same time with his feet going so fast they’re an absolute blur. And he wowed them all. He’s a real fanatic, Nigel said. Anyway, he’s got Mollie hooked. She’s making herself a national costume, can you believe? Are you going to go, Grandad? Do you think we can all go?’

  ‘I shall have to think about it. The new authorities in Bucharest are unlikely to welcome any manifestation of cultural independence in a minority population. They have a large and restive Hungarian minority in the north of the country, whom they won’t want to encourage. On the other hand they will want to prove their liberal credentials, and if the festival brings in a large number of exiles, which I think it may, that will provide useful hard currency. Still, it will take some careful diplomacy. Fortunately Mr Kronin’s brother is a senior official in the new Ministry of Culture. I had better talk to Hector. Mollie too, perhaps, before she looses her organizational fervour on the project . . .’