Shadow of a Hero

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 thought 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.’

‘That’s silly.’

‘Silly but normal. It is nothing exclusive to Varina. It happens wherever there isn’t enough of something important to go round – money, justice, power. There will always be some who will settle for nothing less than what they believe to be rightfully theirs. They are the Vaxites. The Pangoists are the ones who calculate the most they are likely to get, and settle for that.’

‘But Restaur Vax had done all the work. He’d made it happen. Then they booted him out.’

‘It was what they could get. There is never enough justice to go round. Besides, there are times for heroes, and times when it is better for heroes to do the decent thing and recede into legend.’

Letta looked at him, puzzled. He’d changed. Only slightly – perhaps she wouldn’t have noticed if she’d been seeing him every day. He was still brown from the Varinian sun, and sat as straight as ever in his stiff chair, but he seemed somehow smaller. His hands looked older than she’d remembered, with hummocked veins under the loose, blotched skin. And his voice sounded sad – nothing a stranger would have heard, but Letta’s ears caught the note.

‘Are you all right?’ she said.

‘The doctors say I am doing very well for my age. Why?’

‘You sound unhappy. Underneath, I mean. Or angry.’

‘I’m sorry. I’ve missed you. And now, instead of having worthwhile conversations with my granddaughter I shall have to spend my days doing what I can to prevent our modern Vaxites and Pangoists from ruining everything with their stupid quarrels.’

‘Which are you?’

He smiled and put his hands together in the old way, with the ghosts of his left-hand fingers resting against the living ones of his right hand.

‘You will tell no-one?’ he asked. ‘Very well. Between us two only, I am an onion. At the outside you have my name, like the brown onion skin you throw away. Next there is a Pangoist layer, not thick, because I want those I talk to to believe I am someone they can do business with. But inside that I am a Vaxite. I demand everything we are entitled to. No, wait, this is still not the centre, but it is a good thick layer, and it means that those who wish to do business with me must realize that I, too, mean business. If I demand less than everything, they will fob me off with less than they might have yielded, and I shall find that I have betrayed both myself and my country. Then, inside that I am a Pangoist. In the end I will take what I can get.’

‘Oh.’

‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, my darling. But suppose there had been no Bishop Pango, no Treaty of Milan. Suppose my namesake had insisted on fighting on, demanding complete independence, what would have happened? The great powers who imposed the treaty would have lost patience, sympathy with little Varina would have ebbed away, we would have become no more than the naughty child in the European nursery, and the Turks would have been left to crush us out of existence. There might well have been no Varina at all today.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘The same is even truer now. We would not be fighting against muskets and scimitars and clumsy cannon. The Serbs and Bulgarians and Romanians all have modern armies, with modern weapons. How many rocket attacks, how long an artillery bombardment, do you think it would take to reduce the buildings around St Joseph’s Square – our lovely cathedral, our ridiculous palace – to heaps of golden rubble?’

‘Don’t! It won’t happen, will it? Not nowadays?’

‘Nowadays is a very frail notion. It certainly could happen, though I believe the odds are still on the side of reason. But if Otto Vasa is given his head, I will no longer think so. He already has a considerable following.’

‘Parvla went to a huge rally of his.’

‘Parvla?’

‘Didn’t I tell you? The friend I met at the festival. I got a letter from her this morning. Van made a speech at the rally. She says every girl in her valley is in love with him.’

‘She doesn’t live in Potok?’

‘No. I write to a place called Kalavani, but that’s only where she goes to collect the letters. She lives in a farm up a side-valley – it’s an hour’s walk, she says. It must be perfectly lovely. She says you look right out down the valley, and there’s a waterfall that comes over the cliff beside it so it’s cool in the summer . . .’

‘Saludors.’

‘That’s right! Parvla Saludors. You’ve been there! She never said!’

‘No, I’ve not been there, but my friend Miklo Saludors used to talk about that waterfall on hot days in the mountains.’

‘Parvla’s father? No, her grandfather?’

‘Her great-uncle, I should think. He was some years younger than me. He had no children. He was engaged to be married, but he was one of my companions on the peace mission, whom the Russians shot and buried in the clay-pit.’

‘I don’t understand how people can do things like that.’

‘May you not. May you simply be aware that such things happen, and that ordinary-seeming people are capable of doing them. What else does Parvla tell you?’

‘Oh, everything is wonderful and they’re going to try and have a referendum on independence – that was what the rally was about – but bread is getting terribly expensive because the Romanians are making things difficult and her geese have just hatched and her sister is pregnant again. I’m afraid she thinks Otto Vasa’s wonderful. I don’t know what to say to her about that.’

‘Tell her it’s hard for you to judge, as you’re not there.’

‘Could you tell me a bit more about your friend Miklo? She’d be thrilled to know you knew him.’

‘I imagine she is already aware of that.’

‘She’d have told me.’

‘Not necessarily. For all our excitability, we are a reticent people.’

‘You mean she might have thought it was pushy to tell me?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘But is it OK if I . . .’ Letta began, and stopped when Grandad held up a finger. He thought for a few moments.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘This is perhaps a little unwise, but I will write a note on Miklo for you to send to your friend.’

‘That would be terrific! She’d be thrilled! Why is it unwise?’

‘Because if she were to show it to the wrong people, it could be taken by them to make it seem as if I were approving the use of Miklo’s name as that of a martyr for the cause of freedom. This is exactly the sort of thing that Otto Vasa is doing when he speaks at these rallies.’

‘Oh, in that case . . . couldn’t you just tell her things that don’t matter, you know, the sort of jokes you tell about friends?’

‘Perhaps I could, but then, well . . . I owe it to Miklo not to deny what he meant to me. That is more important than being wise. But if I do this, then perhaps – who am I to complain about the use of Miklo’s name for political ends? – if I do this then perhaps it would not be out of place for you to suggest in your letter that you are not absolutely sure how far Otto Vasa is to be trusted.’

‘Not absolutely sure, hell! I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw an elephant. He’s the most absolutely world-beating utter downright untrustworthy jerk anyone could hope to meet!’

‘I respect your judgement, my darling, but if you put it in those terms your friend will close her mind. For the time being all we can do is work by hints and suggestions. We must sow the seeds of doubt and hope they grow. Vasa at some point is going to reveal his true nature. We cannot make it happen, but we can help our countrymen to be ready, when it does, to see him for what he is.’

‘What is he, anyway? I mean, a Vaxite or a Pangoist?’

‘Neither. Both Vax and Pango were patriots. They loved their country, in their different ways, worked for it, fought for it, and if need be would have died for it. Vasa is also a patriot, but of a different kind. His country is simply an extension of himself. Varina must will what Vasa wills. There is no other source of right or wrong. He is a Vasaist.’