Shadow of a Hero

SUMMER 1989

WHEN LETTA WAS born she was much the youngest in the family. Her two brothers were already grown up, and she had a nephew who was three months older than she was. At least now she had a niece, Donna, who was only two-and-a-half.

Letta’s brothers had been born far away in Varina, but she was born in England, in the Royal Hampshire County Hospital at the top of the hill in Romsey Road, Winchester. She knew it well, because Momma drove past it every Saturday morning on her way to Sainsbury’s, so when she was small she used to imagine that Varina was another place like the Royal, a huge, muddled brick building with old parts and new parts, a place for babies to get born into and sometimes go back to be measured and tested and be given horrible injections and lied to about how brave they were, but mostly to wait, and wait, and wait.

Even when she was older and understood that Varina was a whole piece of country about the size of Hampshire (though to confuse things it was also pieces of three other countries), parts of the hospital picture still popped up in her picture of it. She knew there were real mountains in Varina, with snow on them half the year round, and blazing hot summers, and brown-faced women in black dresses driving donkeys with huge baskets of maize on either side, and things like that, very very foreign, but then the blank spaces would fill up with doctors in white coats, and nurses with syringes, and waiting rooms where you sat for hours, and the ordinary people had worried, unhappy looks on their faces, and nobody told you what was happening.

One morning, later still – she must have been twelve – she told her grandfather about this, because she thought it might amuse him, and also waste a little of the Formal Varinian lesson he gave her on Sundays, after breakfast. He put the tips of his fingers together. Two of them were missing on his left hand, but you could almost see their ghosts where they pressed against their right-hand opposites. He looked at her over his fingertips and wrinkled up his forehead.

‘You saw more truly than you know,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Varina is like that these days. Ah well, let us get on. Where were we? Optative conditionals, I think.’

There were two Varinian languages, Field and Formal. Letta had talked Field for as long as she’d talked English. She’d never had to think about it. That was what it was for, talking, and writing letters and so on. Letta was talking Field with Grandad now. Formal was for poems, and important speeches, and serious books. It had words in it which nobody ever said except at times like funerals, and weird grammar, too. Who needs the Negative Passive Conditional Optative, for heaven’s sake?

Grandad seemed to hear the question in her sigh.

‘How I used to hate these,’ he said. ‘My desk was by the window, and I could see the hillside above my father’s farm. We were beaten for every mistake. I had many beatings that year. You are a far better scholar than ever I was.’

‘I mean, what are they for?’ said Letta. ‘If ever I get to Varina I’m not going to go to the supermarket and – hang on while I work it out – when I get to the check-out with all this stuff in my basket and then I find I’ve left my purse at home, I’m not going to say “Would that my purse had not been left behind!” Am I?’

‘You would not find a supermarket in Varina, and if there were one you would find almost nothing on the shelves to fill your basket.’

‘Really? But . . . Anyway, just suppose . . .’

‘First you must express the wish for me in Formal.’

‘Oh, hell. Fayaletu bijon?’

‘Fayo is a weak irregular deponent, remember. And you must modify the noun.’

‘Hell and hell! Let’s see . . . Gefayaleto . . . no, Gefayalento bijoñ?’

‘Well done. You had bad luck choosing Fayo. We used to call it the pig-verb. Now, suppose you found this supermarket and suppose you were able to fill your basket and suppose there were any chance of your having the money to pay for what you had bought, and suppose you then said to the check-out clerk – if such a creature were conceivable in Varina – Gefayalento bijoñ, why, she would certainly burst out laughing.’

‘What’s the point, then?’

‘The point is not to bury a great treasure beyond human reach. For instance, my great-grandfather, your great-great-great-grandfather, when he was in exile in Rome, wrote a poem retelling one of our stories about a feud between two families over a piece of mountain pasture. At the end of it a father finds the bodies of his three sons, killed in an ambush. He stands on the mountain track and thinks about the disputed field. He sees it in his mind, after the snow melts, the swathes of bright mountain flowers with the sweet new grass springing between. The last line of the poem is a single word. Anastrondaitu. Can you tell me what that means?’

‘Is it strondu with the twiddly bits?’

‘Yes.’

‘“If only it had not been remembered”, then?’

‘Yes, and no. Yes, because that is what it literally means. No, because as a single word, complex but exact, coming after the simple words describing the pasture, it pierces right to the heart with its loss and grief. My darling, I would never force you to learn Formal. It is no use unless you genuinely want to.’

‘But I do!’

This was old stuff. The family had argued it through and through. Momma had been against the idea, because she said it was a waste of time when Letta should be doing English schoolwork, and Letta – partly to please Grandad, partly because she thought it might be interesting, but mainly to get her own way with Momma about something – had insisted she did want to learn Formal, and Poppa, who usually kept out of arguments between his wife and his father-in-law, had this time taken Letta’s side. It would be difficult for her to back out now. Besides, whatever he said, Grandad would have been desperately hurt. Again, he seemed to read her thought.

‘It is not for you or for me,’ he said. ‘It is somehow for all mankind. If there is nobody left in the world whom the single word Anastrondaitu can pierce to the heart, then a great treasure will have become buried beyond human reach. Well now, enough of that. No, one thing more. It is for you too. It is more than a treasure. It is life itself. I have survived experiences which, if it had not been for this thing . . .’ and he tapped the worn old grammar book with the two fingers of his left hand, ‘. . . would either have killed me or driven me mad. Oh, may you never have the same need, my darling! Now we must get on.’

Letta was too astonished to work well. Grandad never spoke about what had been done to him. If anyone asked what had happened to his hand he would glance at it and say, ‘Frost-bite,’ and change the subject. Occasionally strangers came to visit him. They talked to him in his room, and after they’d gone he usually seemed a bit depressed. Once Letta had asked who they were and he’d said they’d been policemen, just checking that he still wasn’t plotting to assassinate the Queen. That had been one of his unsmiling jokes, of course, but it had also been a way of telling her he didn’t want to be asked.

What did she know about him, really? Not much, though she felt closer to him than anyone else in the family, and he seemed to feel the same. ‘We arrived together,’ he used to say, meaning that in the same week she’d been born he’d been allowed out of Varina to join his daughter in England. And they were the two who were mostly at home. Poppa was a road engineer, always flying round the world to advise on tricky bits of highway building, and Momma worked for IBM outside Winchester and often didn’t get home till late.

But there was more to their closeness than that. Letta was pretty well certain that she’d been born by accident. After all, Momma had been getting on for forty, with a really good job, and a grandchild on the way when she’d become pregnant. And it was a bit the same about Grandad. Nobody’d ever really expected the Communists would let him out, though there’d been a terrific campaign, and Momma must have been really happy when it happened, still, now she’d got this old man to think about as well as the baby . . . Momma was a perfectly good mother. She did everything she was supposed to, and took trouble over it, but somehow there was a sort of barrier between her and Letta. They didn’t touch or hug much, or talk about things that mattered. Letta felt closer to her eldest brother Steff, whom she saw only four or five times a year, than she did to Momma. And Poppa was away too much for her to get to know him well, either, if you could. She wasn’t sure about that either. So Grandad was the person who mattered most in her life. They shared a sort of out-sidishness, accidentalness, not-quite-fittingness as members of the family. They didn’t talk about any of this, but Letta was pretty sure that Grandad knew about it and felt it too.

But what else? Last birthday he’d been eighty-one. And years before that, when he was still almost a young man, he’d been Prime Minister of Varina for a fortnight, ‘because I had the same name as my great-grandfather’. Another of his jokes. He never said any more about it than that. Then the Communists had taken over and put him in prison, and he’d stayed there over thirty years. He never talked about that either. Today was the first time Letta had heard him even hint at it.

About twenty minutes later, he sighed and closed the grammar.

‘Neither of us is paying attention,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry, but . . .’

‘We are both thinking of other things. It’s my fault. I should not have talked about the past. What shall we do instead?’

‘Well, there’s the goat-boy book. We never finished that.’

Grandad made a face.

‘I think we can spare ourselves that,’ he said.

Letta had done her first lessons from the book, which was even more battered than the grammar, simple stories written years and years ago for children to start learning Formal, but whoever had written it – she was called Anya Orestes, Grandad said, though the title page was missing – didn’t seem to have had much idea what children are interested in, so the stories were the worst kind of soppy-pretty, and boring with it.

‘Couldn’t you read me the poem about the blood feud? I’m sure I’d understand some of it.’

‘Not enough, and that would spoil it for both of us. Let’s try one of these. They’re still a bit beyond you. I was keeping them for later.’

‘What are they?’

‘The Legends. A collection of folk-tales about the War of Independence. We Varinians are great story-tellers, you know, but for us the story is far more important than the truth. Years ago, before the war, I was walking in the mountains and an old shepherd told me a story about a bandit, or hero – the word he used means both things – who was trapped in a cave by his enemies – the shepherd showed me the cave – and because they were afraid to fight him in the dark, with the light behind them, they had built a great fire at the cave entrance to suffocate him. But rather than die like that he had charged out through the flames and, with his clothing all on fire, had fallen on his enemies and slain them and then died himself.’

‘How horrible.’

‘Stories of heroism tend to be horrible as soon as you think about them. Well, I slept that night at a village in the valley. A travelling film show was set up, showing a Western of some sort, silent, which ended in exactly the way my friend had described.’

‘You mean he was lying?’

‘Not exactly. He had seen the film and been struck by the episode, so he had made it part of his landscape. Now for him it was true. Well, these legends are of that nature. There are varying levels of – ah, let’s call it creativity in them. But there are also notes pointing out some of the more outrageous falsehoods. I find the language rather stilted, even by Formal standards, but I think you will find the stories amusing.’

‘Are there any about Restaur Vax? Not you, I mean – the old one. Steff used to tell me them, but I don’t really remember.’

‘That is what they are. Legends are about heroes and heroines and villains, so this is the history of the War of Independence as if almost the only people who fought in it were Restaur Vax and Lash the Golden and Selim Pasha. Let’s see . . . ah, yes, I’m afraid the first one is missing. See what you make of this.’

Letta took the book. It was almost falling to bits, and the paper was the colour of brown bread, covered with small, cramped print. At the top of the left-hand page was the end of a sentence, something to do with a baby laughing, followed by an almost unreadably tiny footnote. A new story started opposite. Restaur Vax and . . .

‘What’s opiscu?’ she said.

‘Drop the o and turn the c into a zh.’

‘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.’