Shadow of a Hero Read online

  ‘But if it happens, can I go? Please? Will you help me persuade Momma?’

  ‘Yes indeed. You must go while you can, on any basis available. So should your momma. I will tell her so.’

  Letta stared at him. He had spoken quietly, but in the same tone of authority he’d used when he’d stopped the argument between Mr Orestes and Mr Jaunis.

  ‘It may be our one chance,’ he explained. ‘As far as I can see there is no settlement in the Balkans which all the participants could regard as reasonable. In fact there never has been. So fighting will take place, and it may be severe. But for this year, at any rate, everybody is still too shaken and exhausted and uncertain to start on fresh turmoil, so there may for a while be an illusion of peace. After that, who knows? But certainly while the opportunity is there, all who regard themselves as Varinians should return and renew their knowledge of who and what they are. If the festival takes place, they should come to that. If not, they should go as tourists. It may be twenty years before they can do so again.’

  ‘All right. You work on Momma. And if she digs her heels in I’ll go with Mollie. She’s bound to want to. Do you know she’s insisting on everyone talking Field at Sunday lunch? And Steff’s backing her up. Nigel is not amused.’

  ‘She has not started to learn Formal yet?’

  ‘It won’t be long now. And I’ll tell you what. I bet she’ll take it in her stride and when she gets to the Conditional Optative she’ll decide that it’s no big deal, and shall I be not amused!’

  LEGEND

  The Muster at Riqui

  RESTAUR VAX TRAVELLED north and south, east and west through the mountains, and wherever he had not a feud Lash the Golden went with him. At each place Restaur Vax spoke strongly with the chieftain and elders, saying that the time was ripe to drive out the Turks. But each chieftain answered in the same manner, having consulted with his elders: ‘Gladly would we fight the Turks, but we cannot do it alone. We are too few. When others have come to your standard, we will come also.’

  ‘The Kas Kalaz has sworn that he will come,’ said Restaur Vax.

  But the chieftains still said that others must come first. And so they waited, each on the other.

  Then Restaur Vax said to them, ‘If all of you swear at one time, then will you fight?’

  To that they agreed.

  So he sent messages to all of them, saying, ‘Come to the Chapel at Riqui, so that each may see the other swear upon the shoulder-blade of St Joseph, which is there.1 Come on the full moon after Ascension, that you may arrive after dusk and leave before dawn, so the Turks will not know of our meeting. Bring your best men to witness the oath.’

  But to the Kas Kalaz he sent word, saying, ‘Come with all of your men, and mules, and much straw and sackcloth, and cords. Be at the Chapel at Riqui on the night before the full moon.’

  Moreover word was brought to the Pasha of Potok saying, ‘The chiefs of Varina will muster at the Chapel at Riqui on the night of the full moon after Ascension, and there they will swear a confederacy to rise and drive out the Turks. Restaur Vax will be there, who killed your son, and also Lash the Golden.’

  Hearing this, the Pasha gathered his bazouks, seven thousand of them.2 And he set spies on the roads who brought word to him, saying, ‘Indeed, such-and-such a chieftain has left his place and is travelling with his best men towards Riqui.’ Thus he knew that the message had been true.

  Then he divided his bazouks into companies and sent them at rapid march north, west and east, to come upon Riqui from all sides, telling the commanders, ‘Find good hiding and wait a few kolons away from Riqui until sunset, and then close in on the place when the moon is a hand’s-breadth up the sky. There will be a full moon to show you your way. Then, at the sound of my side-drum, rush down all together and slay them, sparing only Restaur Vax, that I may slay him with my own hands.’

  So it was done, and done well. In secrecy and silence the bazouks closed in upon Riqui and lay along the hilltops looking down into the hollow. There by the Chapel they saw fires, and the shapes of men around, to whom one spoke in a boastful voice.

  When all was ready the Pasha ordered his side-drum to be sounded, and the bazouks drew their scimitars and rushed down into the hollow. But when they came near the Chapel they saw that those who had stood by the fires had not moved, for they were not men but dummies of straw and sackcloth, bound with cords, while the man who had spoken to them was not to be seen. (He was Lash the Golden, and at the sound of the side-drum he had run into the dark and hidden in a pit that had been prepared.)

  Now from behind the bazouks, seeing them against the light and not themselves to be seen, the chieftains and their best men shot them down, firing swiftly and hotly, so that they fell like barley before the sickle. Then the bazouks lost courage, knowing themselves betrayed, and ran into the dark where the men of Varina met them and slew them with dagger and with sword. Seven thousand bazouks they slew round the Chapel at Riqui, and not one came back alive to Potok. And the Pasha of Potok was slain in fair fight by Restaur Vax, before the door of the Chapel.

  Then in the dawn the chieftains gathered to take their oath, and each said to the other, ‘How came the Pasha of Potok here with so many bazouks? This was no chance coming. A traitor must be among us.’ For Restaur Vax had told them only that he had learnt from a scout that a captain of bazouks had seen one of the chieftains on the road, and had recognized him, and was coming with his company to find what was afoot. For that they had prepared the ambush.

  Now, however, Restaur Vax stood before them and said, ‘There is no traitor among us. It was I who sent word of our muster to the Pasha of Potok. His blood is upon all our heads, yours as well as mine, and the Turks will surely take vengeance on all who are here. So whether you choose to swear the oath or not you will do well to forget all feuds and stand by each other in the struggle, or you will all die.’

  The chieftains acknowledged the truth of his saying, and all of them in turn swore their oath at the Chapel at Riqui.3

  1 At the time of the Phanariote oppression (see here) the bones of St Joseph were removed from the cathedral of Potok, and distributed to a number of holy sites throughout Varina, for safety.

  2 The numbers are greatly exaggerated. Apart from this, the oral tradition of the Riqui Incident, which occurred on 22 May 1819 and is usually regarded as the start of the War of Independence, has remained remarkably faithful to the facts.

  3 Restaur Vax never admitted that it was he who lured the Pasha into the ambush at Riqui, but even in his own time it was universally believed that he was responsible.

  SPRING/SUMMER 1990

  MR JAUNIS AND Mr Orestes were Joint Honorary Secretaries of VIBI, which stood for Varinians in the British Isles and was pronounced Veeby. Letta had once been telling Biddie and Angel about it when Angel said, ‘Veeby? Honestly! Only total wimps would belong to something called Veeby! What’s with the Isles, anyway? Or are there covens of you in places like Muck and Harris? Why couldn’t they call it Varinians in Britain? VIB? I think VIB’s got much more punch.’

  ‘It means nostril,’ Letta said.

  Biddie had been drinking tooth-rot, and choked on it. By the time they’d cleaned her up, Angel was away on something else.

  Anyway, Letta had once asked Mr Jaunis how many Varinians there actually were in the British Isles.

  ‘According to our records, seven hundred and eighty-three,’ he’d said. ‘And six hundred and ninety of them are members of VIBI, a figure which we believe speaks highly of our commitment to our homeland.’

  When Letta went up to St Albans just after Easter, as usual, to stay for a few days with Steff and Mollie and Nigel and Donna, she found that almost all seven hundred and eighty-three seemed to be wanting to make it out to Potok for the festival of culture at the beginning of August, though it still wasn’t anything like certain that it was going to happen, or if it did that the Romanians would let them in. Even so, everybody was behaving as if it was all fixed.
r />   Letta spent most of her time answering the telephone and putting brochures in envelopes and helping to keep the lists up to date on Mollie’s PC. Using the telephone was thrilling, because she got to talk to real Varinians in Varina. Mollie’s Field was nothing like up to that yet, and nor was Nigel’s, and Steff was out at work all day, so they really needed Letta. It wasn’t easy. The line kept breaking, and the voices when they came through were crackly and distorted, and besides that, things seemed to be in pretty good chaos at the far end. There were only two hotels in Potok, so the festival organizers were borrowing the students’ rooms at the University, but they were overflowing already, as more and more people kept wanting to come from all over the world. Some Varinians could speak a bit of English, but with the lines so bad it was much easier to be sure about things if the speakers at both ends were using a language they were comfortable with, so now Letta found herself talking Varinian – which, except with Grandad, had always been a sort of extra in her life, something she could perfectly well do without but which she kept going because it was a habit and felt right, though she didn’t know if she’d talk it with her own children – anyway, she found herself talking Varinian because she had to, talking to an unseen voice in Varina, all that way over those terrible lines – and it was real. The first time she put the receiver down she found she was crying.

  Mollie thought Letta must be upset because of the anxiety, at her age. She didn’t really understand when Letta explained. But Letta rang Grandad that evening and told him, and he knew. Anyway, Mollie found her so useful that she asked her to stay on till the day before the new term started, and by then Letta was so accustomed to saying ‘Oyu?’ when she picked up the phone that when she got home she had to remind herself to say ‘Hello?’

  She went up again for half-term, and by then everyone was almost sure that the festival really was going to take place. In fact the return of the exiles now seemed like water flowing towards the sea, something that’s got to happen. It will get there somehow in the end. There’d been an election in Romania but Mr Kronin’s brother was still high up in the Ministry of Culture and could pull the right strings. It was he who’d managed to wangle Grandad his visa. There was still a chance that the new government would turn tough. They seemed to be mostly ex-Communists who’d managed to stop supporting Ceauşescu in time, and they’d won the election by some fairly dirty tricks, including getting the miners to come out and beat up the opposition – at least that’s what the opposition said. But they were going to land themselves in a fair-sized international row if they tried turning the exiles back at the last moment. There were too many of them for that, and from too many places, from every country in Europe, for a start, from the USA and Canada, from New Zealand and Australia – a lot of Varinians had settled out there – and a dozen other countries round the world.

  The second half of the term lasted a century. It would have seemed slow and pointless anyway, because the end of the school year is always a drag, and next term Angel would be living up in Yorkshire and Biddie would be at a boarding school for gifted children to which her parents had decided to send her. All that added to the dreary sense of things ending. At least there was the festival to look forward to.

  By now Mollie had found a good Field-speaker to help her, so Letta stayed at home for the first week of the holidays, getting herself sorted out, and then went up to St Albans. It was a typical Mollie exercise, only on a larger scale than usual. There were eleven coaches coming from all over Britain and joining up at the ferry. There were also two trucks of stores and camping equipment. The organizers in Potok were still bouncing with excitement and confidence, and full of assurances that there were going to be food and beds for everyone, but Mr Jaunis – largely to put a spoke in Mr Orestes’ wheel – had kept shaking his head and wanting to send a VIBI delegation out to Potok to check up. Mollie, despite being so thick with Mr Orestes, had backed him up. The delegation came back pretty gloomy. Most of the temporary accommodation wasn’t yet built and didn’t look as if it was going to be; there was very little to buy in the shops; inflation was several hundred per cent; you could buy things on the black market, for dollars or marks, but that was illegal; and so on.

  So Mollie’s PC had clicked into action, fizzing off letters to everyone, explaining the problem and asking for a bit more money and the loan of good tents, and the last of the answers were still coming in when Letta arrived. Everybody paid up. Not one person grumbled. People volunteered to drive hundreds of miles getting the tents together. An exile who was manager of a Safeway’s outside Coventry called and said, ‘Don’t worry about the stores. Just send me the truck and the cheque and I’ll do the rest.’ There was, unbelievably, a whole two days with nothing left to arrange before the coaches moved off.

  It was five o’clock in the morning and drizzling gently when the taxi took them over to Luton. Each coach had two coach-captains, to check the lists and solve problems. Donna, who’d slept all the way from St Albans, had woken up at last and Mollie was giving her her breakfast when one of the coach-captains, a skinny, fussed-looking woman called Anne, pushed past some people who were still stowing their hand luggage and said, ‘They keep asking if Restaur Vax is really going to be there.’

  Letta sensed others in earshot craning to listen.

  ‘He’s flying out in two days’ time with his daughter and son-in-law,’ said Mollie. ‘He’ll be there.’

  Somebody behind Letta sighed with relief, or content. The coach-captain worked her way back up the aisle, repeating the news. Letta caught Nigel’s eye. He gave his head a little shake and she nodded agreement. They’d already settled that they weren’t going to tell anyone that Restaur Vax was their grandad, unless they were asked. It was lovely that everyone wanted him there so much, but that wasn’t anything to do with them. They were just a couple of young Varinians, no different from any of the others.

  They sang most of the way to Dover, and waved their Varinian flags (purple and black and white, courtesy of VIBI) at anyone who was looking whenever they came to a halt. The M25 was jammed at the Thames tunnel, which meant an anxious fifty-minute wait, but Mollie’s schedules allowed for that sort of thing and they made it to Dover with time to spare. So did the two trucks and the other ten coaches, though the one from Liverpool only just. Van was supposed to be on the Edinburgh coach, but he didn’t come and say hello so Letta and Nigel went to look for him. They found him in one of the bars with a group of friends. He raised a hand and came over.

  ‘Hi, Sis,’ he said. ‘Hi, Nigel.’

  ‘Isn’t this terrific,’ said Letta. ‘I’m sorry Susan’s not coming. Mollie says she changed her mind.’

  ‘We’ve split up,’ said Van.

  ‘Oh! I’m sorry.’

  ‘Forget it. These things happen. Tell the others not to mention it, will you? OK, see you later.’

  He turned and went back to his friends.

  ‘That’s a pity,’ said Mollie when they told her. ‘I really like her.’

  ‘Typical Van,’ said Steff.

  They spent their first night at three big motels near Cologne, and then, because they were going the long way round through Hungary, they did a tremendous dash down the autobahn almost as far as Vienna. (It would have been quicker to go through Yugoslavia, but there was some kind of trouble brewing there, between the Serbs and the Croats, and somebody might have decided they weren’t going to let eleven coach-loads of Varinians through.) Next morning they started at dawn and headed east towards Budapest, and still on east, though Varina now lay almost behind them to the south.

  That afternoon they reached the Romanian frontier at Bors, and there there was a three-hour hold-up while the committee argued with customs officials, who seemed to think they were bringing their truck-load of stores in order to sell them on the black market. They were really hoping to be bribed, Steff said. At last they let the convoy move on again.

  Hungary had been a bit different from the West, but not too obviously. The roa
ds had been worse, and the towns and villages had looked strangely old-fashioned, with fewer cars and a lot more people on bicycles. There’d been horses and mules, and even oxen, working in the fields, or pulling carts, or just plodding along the roads with enormous strange loads on their backs. Romania was the same, only much more so. After Bors they turned south through an enormous level plain, with mountains blue and vague on the horizon to their left. The soil in the fields seemed good, and often the crops were neat and strong, but the people looked poor, sad and exhausted, though they stared and then smiled and waved as the glossy air-conditioned coaches rushed by, full of foreigners singing and waving unknown flags. Letta almost felt that it was tactless of the travellers to be there at all, so happy and excited, and so unbelievably richer and more comfortable, even the poorest of them, than the workers in the fields.

  The other enormous change, of course, was the heat. She didn’t feel it in the coach, but she could see it even through the tinted windows, the fierce sunlight radiating off the baked and dusty earth, or steaming up from marshes, or making hard-edged shadows under groups of trees where tired cattle lay and twitched. The coaches stopped every two hours so that the passengers could stretch their legs, and when Letta reached the doorway the heat blasted up at her off the road, and going out into the sunlight was like walking through a barrier. Then the coach, when she climbed back inside, felt not just cool but freezing.