Shadow of a Hero

AUGUST 1990

THE FOLK CONCERT took place in the ruined cloisters of St Valia, a large square open space, its rough grass hummocky with buried masonry and its yellow walls patterned with the remains of archways and illegible tablets. The English contingent had not yet adjusted to Varinian notions about time. They arrived about half an hour before the concert was supposed to start and found almost no-one else there, and the sound system still being set up.

‘I’m dead beat,’ said Mollie. ‘I’ll have a nap. And let’s find somewhere near an entrance, so that we can slip away.’

‘Not in front of that speaker, Nidge,’ said Steff. ‘I value my ear-drums.’

‘I’ve got some ear-plugs,’ said Mollie.

‘It’s meant to be loud, Mum,’ said Nigel.

They found a bank of turf against the outer wall. Donna slept, sprawling and inert, and Mollie did her trick of having a nap sitting bolt upright, with her head balancing on her neck. She said anyone could learn to do it and it was just as refreshing as sleeping lying down.

Steff read. Letta and Nigel chatted and watched the crowd beginning to stream in. The sun went down and the ruined bell-tower glowed with floodlighting against the darkening sky. By the time the stars were fully out the cloisters seemed crammed, but more and more people kept pushing their way in, squeezing the mass tighter and tighter, or scrambling up the crumbling walls and perching along them.

Mollie woke and muttered to Steff, who glanced around and then said, ‘OK, listen. This might get out of hand. If it does, don’t try and get to the door. We’ll go over the wall here. I’ll lift Nidge up and then pass Donna to him. Then Letta, then Millie. Somebody will give me a leg-up. Shouldn’t happen, but just in case. Got it?’

They nodded. It was another of those differences. In England there’d have been crush barriers and marshals, and ambulances ready, because they’d been doing this sort of thing for years and knew what might happen. In Varina everything was new. This was the beginning of a new world, before rules, before problems, before disasters. It was alarming but exciting too, and somehow, Letta felt, pure.

‘Hey! There’s Uncle Van!’ said Nigel.

‘Where? I want to talk to him,’ said Mollie.

She cupped her hands round her mouth and called. It was another of her tricks. Nigel said he’d seen her hail a taxi across Piccadilly Circus in the rush hour. She did it without yelling. She just flung her call and it carried. Like now. Van looked round, wildly at first, then spotted Mollie and came struggling over, causing a commotion in the crush, as half a dozen other people tried to follow him. He arrived panting and tousled, but obviously on a terrific high.

‘How’s everyone?’ he shouted. ‘Isn’t this great! Got some friends here want to meet you.’

He introduced them as they arrived. They were native Varinians, all at the same fever-pitch of excitement as Van. Everybody had to shake hands with everyone. A pretty young woman gave Steff a smacking kiss and cried out, ‘Now I have kissed both grandsons of Restaur Vax!’

Her friends all cheered.

‘And where is Letta?’ she asked, and flung her arms round her and kissed her and then stood back, holding her by the shoulders.

‘And you, you live with him in the same house!’ she said. ‘Van says you have tea with him every day! And is he well? Is he still . . . ?’

She couldn’t bring herself to say the words, but instead held her hands cupped but rigid, a few inches apart in front of her, and made them quiver, as if there was some precious object between them which she was testing to see if it was still sound.

‘He’s fine,’ said Letta. ‘Bright as a bird. Of course he gets tired sometimes. But mostly you wouldn’t guess he was anything like eighty. I’m very fond of him.’

‘Fond?’ said the woman with a startled laugh.

(You aren’t supposed to be fond of a hero. That’s quite wrong. What you do with a hero is worship him.)

‘Oh, look,’ said Mollie. ‘Something’s going to happen at last. Listen, Van. Message from Poppa. Grandad will be at the Palace Hotel at twelve tomorrow, opposite the cathedral. He’d like to say hello, and he’s not going to have much time for us after that.’

‘I’ll be there.’

‘Allow a bit extra. The Square’s going to be packed solid.’

(One of Steff’s family’s complaints about Van was that he was hopeless about keeping appointments.)

‘Don’t worry, Mollie. Historic moment. Wouldn’t miss it for the world. OK, Steff, Nigel, Sis. Be seeing you.’

‘Typical Uncle Van,’ said Nigel automatically as the group plunged back to join their other friends, but it wasn’t typical at all, Letta thought. She’d never seen her brother in that kind of state before.

Now the spotlights came on and a band appeared, a standard group with guitars, bass, drums, and a primitive synthesizer. The singer was a pale, hungry-looking blonde woman in jeans and crazy high heels. They waved to the crowd, fiddled with their mikes, and were just set when one of the spotlights popped. Everyone laughed. Then they were off. Letta reached across to Mollie for ear-plugs. The speakers were large, but they’d been turned up well beyond the point where they could take the bass, so every chord was threaded with an appalling, tooth-rattling metallic buzz – just like a Western concert, only far, far worse. All round her the Varinians were bellowing their national anthem, rejoicing.

The songs from then on were rock versions of old Varinian folk-songs, most of which Letta had heard, but not, of course, like this, with electronics and a band which kept trying to liven things up with a heavy rock beat. But she thought the singer was pretty good, with throaty bubbling low notes and soft trailing-away high ones which made her spine tingle. The lead guitarist, on the other hand, was doubly dire, a pretty awful musician and an older version of God’s-gift, but ten times worse.

After the band there were bagpipes. Varinian bagpipes are the sort you work with a little pair of bellows under your elbow, instead of blowing into the bag like Scottish pipes. This is just as well, as half the point is the dancing. Varinians would regard standing-still pipers, or even marching-around ones, as shirkers. The pipers were all men, but they wore short frilly skirts so that everyone could see the steps, a sort of twiddling jig, starting pretty fast and getting faster and faster until the fingers on the pipe were a blur and the legs were almost a blur too. And all the time the top half of the body, which was dressed in a stiff jacket with buttons all up the front and complicated patterns of gold thread, had to stay as still as a statue, with a calm statue-face above it, and only the tassel on the little round hat flopping wildly to and fro. Several pipers started together, playing the same tune, and the crowd picked up the beat by clapping, and then gradually clapping faster until one of the dancers missed a step and dropped out, and so on until just one dancer was left, piping and twirling, and he was the winner.

‘Is Mr Orestes this good?’ whispered Letta.

‘Nothing like,’ said Nigel. ‘It’s amazing. It ought to be in the Olympics. Then we’d be sure of getting at least one gold.’

After the pipers came a real folk band with weird but beautiful instruments. The male singer had a strange, bleating tenor, but apparently that was how the songs were supposed to be sung. Letta enjoyed them but she sensed that the crowd wasn’t so keen. To them this was pretty ordinary, something they could do for themselves at home.

Then there was another round of piping, and then an old woman was helped onto the stage. She looked pretty frail and needed a stick to walk, but she held herself straight and wore a wonderful long black dress, covered with sequins, which looked at least as old as she was, and a feather boa. Her hair was shining white, her face thin and beaky, with heavy eye-shadow and thick pale make-up. Everyone had started cheering the moment she appeared, and she stood there, looking surprised but gracious, while the Master of Ceremonies, a fat, anxious, smiling man, tried to introduce her through the clamour.

‘Who is this?’ Letta asked Steff.

‘Minna Alaya,’ he said. ‘She was a film star in Germany. Silent films, you know, so the accent didn’t matter. Grandad told me she’s the most beautiful woman he’s ever met.’

The woman held up her hands and the cloisters fell silent for her, while the MC adjusted the microphone.

‘They asked me to do something,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know what. These are such happy times at last, aren’t they? All I could think of was to read a poem they taught me at school. So long ago. Some of you older ones will know it too, I think. But then the Communists took these poems away from us. Why? They are not about politics. No, but they took them away because they wanted to stop us being the people we are, and these poems are one of the many things that make us the people we are. Us Varinians. Don’t be afraid because it’s in Formal. It isn’t difficult.’

With quivering hands she took out a pair of spectacles and put them on her nose and then unfolded a piece of paper and held it so that she could read it by spotlights.

‘“The Stream at Urya”.’

A slow, long sigh breathed from the crowd, followed by utter silence. Letta had felt her own lungs join the sigh, because this was so right. Grandad had chosen ‘The Stream at Urya’ to read with her because he said it was the easiest of all Restaur Vax’s poems, his last, written as he was dying in Rome, remembering the stream below his father’s farm. There seemed to be nothing to it, only short simple sentences about the hot sky and the hard bare hills, and the naked rocks, and the thin stream tumbling through. Because it was easy, Grandad said, it was the first piece of proper Formal, not counting silly little stories like the goat-boy book, which children used to be taught in school.

The woman read the first two lines in a clear voice, but half-way through the third she faltered, and went on, but choked again, and stopped. Her glasses seemed to be misting up, and she was finding it difficult to see the words. She stumbled through a half-line from memory, and this time when she stopped again, somebody in the crowd prompted her. With a gesture of thanks she went on, and next time she faltered it was as if the whole audience picked her up and murmured the words with her. Letta saw Steff’s lips moving, and beyond him the reflected spotlight lit a row of faces, and almost every one of them was saying the lines too.

But they were young! They couldn’t possibly have learnt ‘The Stream at Urya’ in school before the Communists came. And yet they knew the words. Almost everyone in the audience, though many of them must have been born in a time when it was dangerous to have the book in your house, knew the whole poem by heart. In carefully faint murmurs, so as not to drown the thin old voice, they carried the woman through to the end.

Then they cheered her for about ten minutes. Slowly the cheers changed to cries for an encore, until she held up her hands for silence. Her make-up was streaked with tears. The MC produced an enormous yellow handkerchief and she wiped the tears away and held herself erect.

‘No,’ she said in a clear voice. ‘Please don’t ask me to read it again. I think my heart would burst.’

So they cheered and cheered while she limped to the edge of the stage, where hundreds of arms reached out to help her down.

Letta was wiping her own face with a Kleenex when Nigel said, ‘What was all that about?’

‘You’ll have to learn Formal,’ said Letta smugly.