Shadow of a Hero

SEPTEMBER 1991

LETTA WAS STARING out of the window of what used to be Grandad’s room, and was now going to be hers. When he’d left for Varina she had come up here once a week to dust and sweep and air, so that if he came back he could move straight in. She’d known in her heart that he wasn’t coming back, but it had been a sort of magic, a way of looking after him, as if, by pretending that one day he would come back, he had to stay alive for it to be true. Even now, when the magic hadn’t worked, she was glad that she’d done it.

Almost as soon as the news had come she’d asked Momma, not knowing how to put it without hurting, if she could move up here, and Momma had seemed pleased and said, ‘Yes, of course. He’d like that.’

She’d begun by clearing a lot of Grandad’s books into boxes, not anything in Field or Formal, and not the battered old Wordsworths and Walter Scotts he’d used to teach himself English, but the political ones and the ones in languages she couldn’t read. She’d worked steadily until the thought came to her that school was starting tomorrow, and that meant it must be exactly a year since she’d sat here talking about whether he had to go back to Varina. A wave of sadness washed through her at the thought that she would never see him again, so she stopped sorting and stood by the window, not really crying but seeing the roofs and the tree-tops mistily.

It was all right, she told herself. He’d said he wanted to die in Varina. She didn’t mind that the Romanians had said they couldn’t all go out to the funeral. Horrible Otto Vasa was sure to have hijacked it, of course, and even if he hadn’t, it would still have been a great public thing, a nation mourning its hero. It would all have been about Restaur Vax, not Grandad. Grandad was crumpets oozing with butter. He was a boy who had stared out of a schoolroom window, hating Past Conditional Optatives. He was an outlaw who’d slipped down from the hills by night to hold his almost unknown daughter on his lap. The hero was a sort of shadow. Grandad was the solid, living person who had cast the shadow. He was what mattered.

Someone on the stairs! But there was no-one in the house! Then she heard the uneven tread, climb and drag, climb and drag, and her fright changed to a different kind of tension. Things had never been right between her and Van since the accident. For a few days she’d managed to avoid any questions by always visiting him at the same time as Momma, but then there’d come a visit when she’d known at once that something was badly wrong, and he’d practically ordered Momma to go and talk to the Sister about something and as soon as she was out of earshot he’d said, ‘I’ve had a card from a chap called Andrei – friend of Otto’s. It had a lot of red roses on it. He asked me whether they were the right colour. What’s up? You sent me this.’

He held up her card with its field of yellow daisies. She’d gulped, though she’d known it was bound to happen sooner or later.

‘I’m sorry,’ she’d said. ‘I didn’t want you to worry.’

‘You lied to me.’

‘I thought I’d better.’

‘None of your business, Sis. So what happened?’

‘We went out to the garage. Your clothes and books were there OK, but there was nothing in the secret compartments.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t see it. How on earth could that have happened? I hadn’t taken my eyes off the machine. I’d slept with it, even . . .’

‘I suppose somebody could have been following you and seen the accident.’

He’d thought about it, and nodded.

‘You told Hector red, I suppose,’ he’d said. ‘I haven’t had a squeak out of him, you know . . . Well, don’t lie to me again, Sis. It’s not up to you to decide what’s good for me, see?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she’d said, miserably, feeling the new lie inside her, like vomit she had to keep down. The feeling was still there now, after a whole year. There seemed to be no way she could tell him, and she wouldn’t get rid of it until she had. She wiped her eyes, turned and waited till he put his head round the door.

‘Moving in?’ he said with a sharp smile.

‘Do you mind? Momma said it was OK. In fact, she said it was a good idea.’

He nodded and limped across to look at the half-empty book-shelves.

‘No,’ he said, harshly. ‘It’s all yours. I’m not stepping into the old boy’s shoes.’

He turned and looked at her with the same hard, angry smile.

‘Aren’t you going to ask me where I’ve been?’ he said.

She hadn’t been meaning to. When Van had simply disappeared, in the middle of a physiotherapy course for his foot, they’d all guessed that he was trying to get to Grandad’s funeral, whether the Romanians let him or not. He couldn’t have done it alone. He’d have had to ask Otto Vasa for help, and if it wasn’t for Otto Vasa Grandad might very well still be alive. While half of what used to be Yugoslavia boiled into war close by, Grandad had gone back to Varina to try to prevent the same thing happening there, but Otto Vasa kept on stirring things up. Grandad was tired, and old, and his doctors kept telling him to rest, but he hadn’t been able to. And then, twelve days ago, the man Grandad used to call his policeman had rung Momma in the evening to say that Grandad was dead. That was all he knew.

Whatever Van thought about politics, he must have known what Momma and the rest of the family would feel about his having anything to do with Otto Vasa. Now he was pretty well forcing Letta to talk about it.

‘Varina, I suppose,’ she said. ‘Or didn’t they let you in? Or did they throw you out again?’

‘Not exactly. They didn’t let me in, but I went. They didn’t throw me out, but I left. Do you want to know?’

‘Do you want to tell me?’

He lowered himself into Grandad’s chair, leaning on his stick and moving with care. She could see his foot must be quite a bit worse than it had been when he’d left.

‘Not much,’ he said, ‘but I’d better. You’re the right person. OK. When those bastards in Bucharest told us we couldn’t attend the old boy’s funeral – not even his own daughter, for God’s sake! – I said the hell with them – I’m going. I called Otto’s office in Vienna and talked to a bloke called Andrei and said they’d got to get me through to Potok, somehow. Andrei’s a slimy little turd. He’s spent the whole of the last year doing his best to see I don’t have any contact with Otto, and of course he tried to put me off, but I told him I was coming anyway, and when I got to Vienna he was all smiles and couldn’t do enough for me. He said there was no question of the Romanians giving me a visa and they’d have to smuggle me in.’

‘That sounds pretty romantic.’

‘Just what I thought, but it wasn’t, it was just uncomfortable. We went in one of Otto’s cars, a big Merc. There were four of us, the driver, Andrei, a grinning thug called Jagu, and me. When we got to a frontier we just hoicked up the back seat-cushion and I curled up in a special compartment underneath. It had an odd smell, mechanical, but not motor car mechanical. It took me a bit of time to place it, and then I remembered. Light oil and graphite. Know what that means, Sis?’

‘No.’

‘Guns . . . You don’t look surprised.’

‘Not really. Were you?’

‘No. Look, Sis – I’ve got something to explain. You remember those packages I asked you to look for in my bike after my accident, only they weren’t there?’

Letta didn’t hesitate. She looked him in the eyes and said, ‘They were there, actually. I gave them to Grandad. They were a bomb, weren’t they?’

He stared at her. The knuckles of the hand which was holding his stick went white.

‘I did it for Varina,’ she said.

‘So did we all,’ he snapped. ‘God! If I’d known . . . So you lied to me twice, Sis?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

She waited, watching him think the thing through. He shook his head and shrugged.

‘Leaves a nasty taste, doesn’t it?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, it’s turned out all right, somehow. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked you in the first place. Let’s call it quits. Where were we? Yes, it was about that. These people, Andrei and the others, they’ve got a way of cornering you. They sort of nudge you into a position where you’re doing things you’re not at all sure you want to, only there doesn’t seem any way out unless you’re going to make things worse for something you really care about. That was what happened then. I didn’t like it at all. And all the way, while we were heading south in the Merc I began to feel more and more that the same sort of thing was happening again. There was something up between Andrei and Jagu, a joke they knew about and I didn’t. And my foot was hurting – I’d had to do a lot more tramping around on my way out than it’s used to, and Jagu kept offering to carry me, as if I were a baby. Not much fun.

‘Anyway, we finished up jolting along over what weren’t much more than mule-tracks to reach Otto’s place without actually going through Potok. He’s managed to install himself in the Prince-Bishop’s summer palace. It’s up in the hills, a couple of miles south of Potok. The Communist bosses had had it as a perk, so it’s been looked after. In fact it’s pretty luxurious. Otto was there, very friendly as always, and very sympathetic about my foot. He said he was planning a big rally in honour of Grandad the evening before the funeral, and he wanted me to speak about the old boy, as a representative of the family, and I’d got to keep under cover till then in case somebody spotted me and I got thrown out. I didn’t like that at all. Two whole days. I’ve got friends in Potok I wanted to see. I wanted to know what was going on, what people really thought. I didn’t get a chance to object because at that point he was called away and sent a message back saying he wouldn’t be around till the evening.

‘There must have been some sort of a crisis on, because everyone was scurrying about, only that grinning oaf Jagu stuck to me like a limpet until, mainly to get rid of him, I said I was tired and my foot was hurting and I was going to go and lie down. He said OK, and took me up to my room and told me to stay there, and then, do you know what the bastard did? He went out and locked the door! That was the final straw. I wouldn’t have taken it from Otto, and I certainly wasn’t going to from a jerk like Jagu.

‘It was a pretty stupid thing to do anyway, because it wasn’t that sort of lock. I mean, it was to keep people out, not in. It was just screwed to the inside of the door, and the bolt went into a bracket which was screwed on too. All I had to do was unscrew the bracket with my penknife. By that time the bustle had died down. I’d heard several cars leaving.

‘I wasn’t running away. There was no way I could have made it into Potok without transport. I just wanted to show myself, and them, that I wasn’t going to be treated like that. I was thirsty, so I decided to find myself a drink and headed for the kitchens. There seemed to be no-one around. I didn’t like the smell of the tap-water and I was looking for something else when a couple of maids appeared. They’d heard my stick on the stone floor, they said. Anyway, they knew who I was from seeing me at Otto’s rallies when I’d been there before and they rushed over and started sobbing about Grandad, and what a fine man he’d been, and how much the country was going to miss him, and how frightened everyone was about what might happen without him.’

‘Really? In Otto Vasa’s house? They were saying that?’

‘They were just a couple of serving-maids hired from the town. They weren’t Otto’s people. But yes, I was surprised too. One of them said she had two sisters in the western province, and she knew all about what was happening up in Croatia, and she was scared stiff that it might start happening where her sisters were if the Serbs were given the slightest excuse to start ethnic cleansing around there.

‘Then they looked at each other and I could see they were frightened at what they’d been saying and they changed the subject and talked about last year’s festival. One of them said I’d met her cousin then, and – you know how everyone in Potok is related to everyone else and they all seem to know each other? – it turned out the cousin was one of the people I wanted to see, so I asked her to give him my love and say I hoped to see him after the rally, but could he keep quiet about me being there till then.

‘Then we heard a car come back. It was a false alarm, actually, but they were obviously scared of losing their jobs if they were found talking to me, and my foot had begun to act up again, so they found me some mineral water and I went back to my room and screwed the door shut and took a couple of Codeine and lay down, and – you know, this is very odd, but almost for the first time since I’d got to Vienna I began to feel happy about what I was doing. I felt in control of my life again. I lay on my bed, thinking about the two girls, and how ordinary and real they had seemed, and how much more they mattered to me than creeps like Andrei and Jagu. And then I managed to have a nap.

‘Well, not much else happened that day. Otto came back and about half a dozen of us had supper together and he was full of his big, vague ideas about Varina claiming its proper place in the world – he asked if I wanted to be UN Representative, and it wasn’t a joke. And he talked quite a bit about what a mistake it had been, giving in to the Bulgarians over the Listru festival, but of course my grandfather had been a sick man by then. In the old days, when he’d had real fire in his belly, et cetera, et cetera . . . And all the while I could feel the others watching me to see how I took it. Ah, well . . .

‘Next morning, I’d asked to have breakfast in my room to rest my foot, and the girl who brought my tray up was one of the two I’d talked to the day before, the one with the cousin, remember? I could see she was pretty nervous. She put her finger to her lips and put the tray on the bed and just lifted the corner of the cloth and pointed, so I nodded to show I’d understood, and thanked her as if I’d never seen her before, and let her go. Want to guess what was under the cloth?’

‘I don’t know. A key? No, a message from your friends.’

‘Right. And . . .’

‘Give up.’

‘Grandad’s last letter.’

‘No! What did he say? Where is it?’

‘Come to that in a mo. I’m telling you all this because the letter was for you.’

‘Oh! Give it to me! Now! Please!’

‘I’m afraid I haven’t got it. Not my fault. You’ll see why. Let me go on. The message was from a chap called Riccu, not the girl’s cousin, but his cousin, a teacher at the University, very bright, full of ideas, a really good guy. I hadn’t known him that well, but I’d met him a few times last year, because he’d been very interested in what Otto was up to, very keen, but now he started off bluntly by saying he’d been working as Grandad’s secretary for the last year. In fact he’d been with him when he died. Riccu was at his desk when he heard a thud from next door and he’d gone in and found Grandad on the floor. He was conscious, and he tried to say something, but then he closed his eyes and he was dead. The first thing Riccu did after he’d called for help was to take all the important papers off Grandad’s desk, including the letter he was writing to you, and hide them, because he knew what was going to happen as soon as the news got out. And it did. A gang of Otto’s people swept in and took over, and seized all the papers they could find and they were actually trying to get Grandad’s body out of the house when some of Riccu’s lot showed up and there was pretty well a pitched battle and only then did the police start taking notice – Riccu says they are never around when Otto’s people want to make trouble. They calmed things down and took the body off to the morgue. There was a bit more – obviously Riccu had been scrawling in a hurry, but the chief thing was that he begged me not to commit myself till I’d had the chance to talk to somebody who wasn’t on Otto’s side.

‘I wasn’t as shaken as you’d think. Ever since the accident, I’ve been brooding about what happened last year, and how I got myself into the position I did, and more and more I’ve come to think I was being used. And I’d hardly heard from them, as if they didn’t give a damn once I was laid up with my foot and couldn’t be any use to them. I wouldn’t have gone to Otto now if I could have thought of any other way of getting into Varina. What’s more, I’d already done what Riccu wanted, talked to somebody who wasn’t on Otto’s side – those two girls in the kitchen.’

‘My friend Parvla says the same. She was thrilled when Grandad came back, and she started talking about him and Otto Vasa working together, and then she started to go off Vasa, and now she’s frightened. She was praying for Grandad every night. I haven’t heard from her since he died.’

‘Right. Well, then I read Grandad’s letter to you. It started off saying he was going to have to wait for someone to carry it out of the country because he thought it likely that anything he mailed from Romania would get opened and read. And then he said some of what you’d expect, you know, thanking you for yours and saying he was a bit tired, and he was missing you, even more than he missed crumpets and marmalade. Then he said things had been going fairly well for him here and it shouldn’t be long now before he could stop being so careful about just seeming to be a moderating influence and letting Otto carry on much as he wanted, because he’d at last got evidence that Otto was working hand in glove with the old Ceauşescu gang in Bucharest, and the main question now was how or when he could use it.’

‘Wow!’

‘He didn’t say a lot about that, actually. He went back to chat. He’d paid a visit to his father’s farm, and he was hoping to get out to Lapiri for a funeral, Minna somebody . . .’

‘Minna Vari.’

‘That’s right.’

‘She was Momma’s foster-mother. You’ve got to tell her. That’s important. What else?’

‘Nothing. That was where he’d got to when he died.’

Letta burst into tears. They rushed up into her head, filling her face and streaming down her cheeks. She turned to the window, seeing only a foggy rectangle of light, groped for the sill and leaned there, sobbing. Vaguely she was aware of Van hobbling to her side and putting his arm round her, but he didn’t try to say anything, just let her cry the fit out until she was able to master it, shake herself, drag her sleeve across her eyes and say, trying to make a joke of it, ‘You better have a good reason why you haven’t got my letter.’

‘I have, Sis,’ he murmured. ‘I think you’ll understand. Tell me when you’re ready.’

‘I’m all right. Go on.’

He went back to the chair but waited while she found some tissues and mopped herself up.

‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘I wrote a note for Riccu saying I was glad to hear from him and I wanted to talk to him and I’d be careful, but I didn’t put it under the cloth, which was just as well, because Jagu showed up before my tray was collected. He said Otto wanted to see me. Otto was all smiles. We got into one of his cars and he took me down to his office in Potok, and gave me the speech he wanted me to make at the rally. He said I’d better learn it by heart, so that I could make it look as if I was making it up as I went along.

‘I said OK, but as I’d come all this way to represent the family I’d like to be able to put in something personal about Grandad, and what he’d meant to me and my brother and sister, and he said that was all right provided I kept it short. I said I would, and I’d finish that bit by saying that of course Varina was Grandad’s real family, and that would get me into the speech he’d given me. Then I asked him how Grandad had died, as if I didn’t know, and he told me he’d been ill for a while, and hadn’t been doing very much, and had passed away in his sleep, and it had all been very serene. “A good death for a hero,” he said. He went all gruff, as if there was a lump in his throat. That was what finally made my mind up. About whether to trust him or Riccu, I mean.’

‘Didn’t you want to strangle him?’

‘Pretty well, but I managed not to let him see. In fact, in a funny sort of way, I’d begun to enjoy myself. He thought he was using me, the way he’d done from the start, but actually now I was using him. So I wrote a harmless little bit about us all going to meet Grandad at the airport when the Communists let him out, and then I settled down to learn that bloody speech. It was pure rant about Varina’s inalienable rights, and how our enemies were still trying to take them from us, but the spirit of Restaur Vax and Lash the Golden, et cetera, et cetera. You know Otto likes people to think he’s some kind of reincarnation of Lash?

‘That took the rest of the day. We sat in the office, and then we drove around, and Otto got out and saw people while I sat in the car with the blinds drawn, learning my lines. Then we went back to the summer palace and I ran through the speech with him. I really hammed it up, and he was pleased as Punch. I couldn’t stand another supper with his gang of creeps, so I said my foot was hurting and I’d better go to bed. I lay in next morning too, and hung around getting more and more nervous most of the afternoon until a car arrived to take me to the rally.

‘It was in the meadows below St Valia, where the camp had been for the festival. They had a stage up, and a sound system, and they smuggled me in through the ruins with Jagu to keep an eye on me, so that I kept out of sight till the time came for my big moment. Jagu was on top of the world. He said it was the biggest rally they’d had for months. There might be a few trouble-makers around, but I’d know who were our people by their yellow sashes. They had a band, and marching, and then a pathetic woman talking about what the Serbs had done to the village where she’d been living in Croatia . . .’

‘Was that true?’

‘I should think so. There’ve been quite a few refugees from the north, I gathered later – I’ll come to that. Anyway the chairman-figure who was introducing the speakers cut her short and said that was the sort of thing Varina had got to expect if we didn’t take our destiny into our own hands, and everyone cheered – at least it sounded like everyone from where I was, but it was probably pretty well orchestrated because at that point Otto strode on and whipped up the cheering like mad and stood there saluting and triumphant for several minutes – I could see him sort of haloed from behind – and then got them quiet and began to speak.

‘He started off quietly, saying that the future of Varina was in the balance, but first they must honour the past, and the hero Restaur Vax, who had given his life for his country. He talked a bit about Grandad’s doings in the war – rather good and honest-sounding – and then he said that the oppressors of Varina had attempted to deny the family of Restaur Vax their natural, God-given right to attend the funeral, but that he, Otto Vasa, had refused to accept that and had arranged for one member of the family to be there, whatever the oppressors might decree.

‘Then Jagu gave me a push and I climbed up on to the platform and Otto came over and shook my hand and slapped me on the back and led me up to the microphone. There was a lot of cheering which went on quite a while, and I had time to get used to the lights.

‘It was a huge crowd, I don’t know – twenty thousand? A lot of them were wearing yellow sashes, especially at the front, but quite a few weren’t, and after a bit I realized that at least half of those weren’t cheering either. I made signs to them to quiet down, and in the end they did. Otto had gone back to his seat but I could see him out of the corner of my eye. As soon as they’d let me, I started in on the bit I’d written for him about meeting Grandad at the airport. I saw Otto relax and begin saying something to the fellow on his right.

‘You remember that bit finished with me saying how much Grandad had meant to the family? Well, instead of going on about Varina being his real family I said I’d got Grandad’s last letter with me, to my sister, and I’d read it to them to show what sort of a man he was. I saw Otto sit up with a jerk and frown, but I pretended not to notice. I skipped the bit about not trusting the Romanian post and started in on the marmalade and the crumpets, and he relaxed and went on muttering to the chap next door to him. So I don’t think he was listening when I got to what Grandad said about what was going on in Varina.

‘That was when everything changed. It’s difficult to explain. Everybody had gone very quiet. You’d have said it was reasonably quiet before, between the cheering, but there were coughs and murmurs and so on, the sort of background noise you get with any big crowd, but the sound system meant the speakers could be heard without yelling, so it had been quiet enough. Now it was dead quiet. I could hear the river. Every single person in the whole crowd was listening with all their attention to what I was saying.

‘In fact Otto took a moment or two to catch on. I saw him jump up and make a signal and I grabbed the mike and carried on. I’d learned this bit by heart because I’d known they’d never let me get away with it so it didn’t matter when somebody snatched the letter out of my hand. There were several of them, trying to wrestle the mike away from me and somebody got an arm-lock round my throat but I got it all out, the whole bit about Otto working with the old Ceauşescu gang, before some bastard stamped on my foot and I yelled and collapsed – God, it hurt!

‘In fact I don’t know what happened next but I must have managed to crawl to the front of the platform because people were trying to grab me from below and I was fighting them off, and then I heard them yelling that they were friends – there was a colossal racket going on and my foot was still screaming at me – and I let them help me down, and then I must have fainted.

‘When I came to, I was being jostled about but people seemed to be holding me up and trying to support me and there was this hullabaloo going on, so I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying. I realized they were trying to push their way out through the crowd, but then someone pointed back over our shoulders and we swung round to look and there was Otto, up on the platform in the spotlights, absolutely purple with rage and yelling, though no-one could hear him – he’d completely lost it – and all the while his hands were tearing something into smaller and smaller shreds and scattering them onto the stage. I don’t think he realized what he was doing, but it must have been Grandad’s letter. That’s why I haven’t got it. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s all right. It was worth it. Go on.’

‘Oh, well, it was chaos, fights going on everywhere between the yellow-sashes and the others, and yells and boos and whistles and cat-calls, and the yellow-sashes trying to get organized cheering going, and being drowned out. The people I was with went struggling on till we were right at the edge of the crowd, and they made a space for me and took off my shoe and somebody fetched water from the river and they bathed my foot, which helped a bit – it was swelling up like a balloon – and by the time they’d done that, things had quietened down a bit, and Otto had got control of himself, but he made the mistake of trying to carry on with his rally.

‘It was a disaster, from his point of view. They never let him get a word out. The more he tried to rant and bully them into silence, the louder they cat-called. He’d got the microphone and the sound system, but they drowned him out. Then they started chanting Grandad’s name. Vax! Vax! Restaur Vax! Over and over and over. They destroyed him. You know, they destroyed him with Grandad’s name! What’s the joke?’

‘What you just said. I hope he was watching. Tell you later. Go on.’

‘We saw one extraordinary thing. You know there’d been fighting? There was a gang of yellow-sash thugs over to our left, and now we realized they were fighting among themselves. Some of them had taken their yellow sashes off and were trying to make the others do the same. And then all the lights went out and the sound system went off – it was pretty well dark by now – we decided afterwards that Vasa’s people must have done that as a way of getting him out of the jam he was in. There was still a lot of yelling and shoving and fighting, but the people I was with found a stretcher and carried me back into Potok, to one of their flats, and went out to find a doctor or a nurse who could do something about my foot.

‘Next thing, Riccu turned up. He said the police were looking for me. His lot had friends in the police, and there was a rumour going round about someone being arrested at the rally, a foreigner. Riccu thought they meant me. It would have been something Otto had laid on, to stir things up still further, arresting Restaur Vax’s grandson on the eve of the funeral . . .’

‘He sort of did that with Grandad, didn’t he? Last year? Pretending he was being beaten up in prison when he was on his way back to England, really.’

‘I remember. In fact I asked him about that, and he just grinned and said it was politics. I’m afraid I thought it was OK at the time.’

‘What happened next?’

‘Oh, a jolly old doctor showed up, who’d actually known Grandad before the war. He couldn’t do much, but he gave me some aspirin, and then about a dozen of us sat round talking all night. I couldn’t have gone to sleep anyway. My foot was throbbing like a jungle drum, but even so I was a lot happier than I’d felt for ages. Riccu said he’d known I’d got his message and Grandad’s letter because the kitchen-maid had told him, and he’d guessed I hadn’t let on because she’d not got into trouble. They’d gone along to the rally, he and his friends who’d been helping Grandad, to heckle a bit and try and let people know that not everyone was wild about Otto, but there weren’t a lot of them. Most of the non-yellow-sashes had been more or less neutral, ordinary Varinians, who’d gone along – I don’t know – to try and find out what they thought, I suppose. You see, Otto hadn’t just been keeping me under wraps to prevent me being seen. As well as that, he didn’t want me to find out that what Grandad had said in his letter was true. He’d been immensely popular a year ago. He could have done anything he liked with Varina then, almost. But then things started getting worse and worse in Croatia, and his own people threw their weight around trying to frighten the opposition off the streets, and rumours began to spread about Otto’s friends in Bucharest, so people went off him. They still desperately want a free Varina, just as you and I do and Grandad did, but not with Otto Vasa in charge. And not his way. Not his sort of Varina. The rally was a last throw, an effort to whip up a great frenzy of enthusiasm, and use that to hijack Grandad’s funeral and give himself a fresh start. But it didn’t work. Grandad fixed him, after all, despite being dead.’

‘You and Grandad.’

‘I suppose so.’

He was sitting on Grandad’s chair with his foot up on the stool which Letta used to use for toasting crumpets. It was obviously still hurting. He must have had a lot of pain from it while he was away. His face was drawn, and lined. He looked ten years older than he had before the accident, and for the first time Letta could see that what Minna Alaya had said about his being the spit image of Grandad might be true.

‘Is that all?’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that, but what about the funeral, and how did you get away, and what’s happening now? Is it going to be all right?’

‘God knows,’ he said. ‘Anything could happen. All you can say is, it’s better than it might have been, because people have seen through Otto, at least for the moment. But they’re still pretty discontented, not just about independence. Prices keep shooting up, and there’s a lot of racketeering and corruption, and deep distrust of the Romanian and Bulgarian governments, and fear of the Serbs . . . I think all you can say is we aren’t going out of our way to pick quarrels with anyone, and that’s what Otto was trying to set up. But if somebody chooses to pick a quarrel with us, well, I think we’ll fight. It’ll be pretty well hopeless if we have to do it on our own, but we’ll do it. It’s nothing like over yet, Sis.

‘I went to the funeral. I couldn’t risk trying to get into the cathedral, so I stood in the crowd in St Joseph’s Square. A lot of people recognized me. They kept coming up and shaking my hand. The service was relayed from the cathedral. There wasn’t any trouble. It was very respectful. Moving, I suppose. A lot of people were crying, men as well as women. After the service they drove the hearse round the Square, very slowly, while people crowded to touch it, and then they halted in front of the palace while the mayor made an oration from the balcony. It was supposed to have been Otto, but he’d cried off. The poor old mayor didn’t make much of an oration, in fact he had trouble getting the words out, he was so choked.

‘That took pretty well all morning, and then they drove out to Talosh to bury him in the family grave, and absolutely anybody who had a car or could hitch a lift drove out after them to watch. I went with nine other people in the old doctor’s car. We couldn’t get near the church because of the jam – the road’s just one-track – and I wasn’t up to walking the last half-mile. It was very hot and still. The grapes were just getting ripe in the vineyards. There were hundreds – oh, I don’t know, maybe thousands – of us out there among the scrub and the boulders in that belting sun, watching those tiny figures down in the graveyard. Far too far off to hear anything. Grasshoppers and cicadas buzzing away. I don’t believe anybody moved a muscle or said a word all the time they were by the grave.

‘Then the bigwigs left and the men began filling in the earth and we all went down and filed past the grave in silence. My friends took turns to carry me, but they put me down at the entrance and I hobbled past on my own. We’d all picked up a handful of earth or a few pebbles on the hillside, and as we went past the grave, we added it to the mound. I felt that everybody in all Varina was with us, moving quietly past and saying thank you.’

‘I wish I’d been there.’

‘You were, Sis. You were.’

Neither of them spoke for a while. Letta was crying, but somehow not with grief. Van left her alone, not trying to help or comfort her till she was ready.

Downstairs the front door slammed. A moment later Momma’s voice called up, ‘Van! Van! Is he back? Where are you?’

‘Left my knapsack in the hall,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back.’

‘I want to know how you got out. And everything else.’

‘OK. I’ll be back.’

He eased himself onto his feet and limped to the door, but turned with his hand on the handle.

‘Must be tea-time,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a memorial banquet. Got any crumpets?’

Next morning, because it was the first day of term, Letta left early. The postman was coming up the steps as she opened the front door.

‘One for you,’ he said. ‘Fancy stamp, too.’

It was from Parvla. Letta opened it as she walked up the hill. Several sheets of the slanting, dutifully looped handwriting. (Parvla thought Letta’s neat italic very odd and tricky to read.) A photograph, a bit out of focus, gaudy colours, flowers, brown bits, a white cross with writing on it, nothing making sense. Of course not, she’d got it upside down.

She turned it and it became a mound, a grave, dug out of sun-parched soil among yellow tussocks of grass which she could hardly see because all the space around was covered with wreaths and sheaves of gladioli, carnations, and gaudy daisy-shaped things. The photograph must have been taken the day after Van had been there, because the flowers were already shrivelling with the heat. The cross was not on the mound but a bit to one side. It didn’t look official, and Van hadn’t mentioned it. Somebody had nailed two bits of wood together, driven the upright into the ground and written three words on the cross-piece, one middling, one short and one long. Because the focus was slightly blurred, Letta wouldn’t have been able to read them if she hadn’t known what they must be.

Restaur Vax. Anastrondaitu.

Why that? What did it mean? Somebody wishing Grandad had been forgotten? Surely not, unless . . . yes, perhaps, for his sake at least, that he’d been left in peace, to die in peace, far away in Winchester. That’s how Momma would have read it, anyway.

Or perhaps it wasn’t about Grandad at all, but about his name, and the other Restaur Vax, and everything that went with them, the whole marvellous, bitter, deceitful past. That? Only last night there’d been a programme about Croatia, smashed towns, refugees, lives that had lost their meaning, all because of things that had been said and done long, long ago. And not just Croatia. All round the world the same. If only this, or that, or that, had not been remembered!

Did she think so too, Letta, in safe England, walking up the hill to start a new term at the same old school? No past at all? No memories? No Field, no Formal, no dancing the sundilla? No Legends, no ‘Stream at Urya’, no songs about boastful shepherds, no dumbris, not even the word itself on Grandad’s grave?

No. Somehow it still had to be worth it. You can’t have everybody the same. That was what Ceauşescu had wanted, wasn’t it? So somehow it had to be worth it.

But anastrondaitu.

It pierced her to the heart.

THE END