Shadow of a Hero

AUGUST 1990

THE CAR DROVE right out to the furthest corner of the airport, where a plane was waiting, guarded by a dozen soldiers. When they climbed aboard they found Grandad sitting with his eyes closed at the back of the first-class compartment. He looked old and ill, but smiled and let himself be kissed and patted their hands, but then he lay back and closed his eyes again while the plane taxied round to the terminal to pick up the rest of the passengers.

The passengers were in a very bad mood, as they’d been kept waiting six hours for Momma and Letta to arrive. Two soldiers with guns stood beside the cabin crew and watched them keenly as they shuffled past. The soldiers left only when the doors were about to shut for the plane to leave.

It was evening, and as the plane climbed Letta could see further and further into the west, across a vast, already darkening landscape to the final barrier of mountains, hard-edged against fiery-banded sky. Some of that was Varina, she knew. One of those distant hummocks could be Mount Athur. She wondered whether she would ever see it again.

There was no-one else in the first-class compartment, so they had a stewardess to themselves. She stood and went through the motions with the usual plastic smile while the safety instructions were read out on the intercom, in French and English and Romanian. When the seat-belt sign went off she came and asked if they would like anything to drink. It took Letta a long moment to realize that she had spoken in Field.

Grandad opened his eyes and smiled. The stewardess glanced swiftly to see whether any of the other cabin staff were in earshot and whispered, ‘Unaloxistu.’ There were tears in her eyes.

‘May you live to see it,’ said Grandad, and then, in English, ‘Will you try to make us some tea? Real tea. My daughter will show you how.’

‘Mollie gave me some Jackson’s tea-bags for you,’ said Momma.

‘She should rule the world,’ said Grandad.

Being in first class, the seats were in sets of two, not three. Letta had automatically put herself next to Grandad, with Momma on the other side of the aisle, but now that she’d talked to him and touched him and decided that he wasn’t hurt, only very tired and sad, she realized this wasn’t fair on Momma. She must be just as worried. So when Momma came back from showing the stewardess about warming the pot and putting enough tea-bags in and seeing that the water was really boiling – oh, such English things to be doing, and it would still be horrible UHT milk! – Letta stood up and gestured silently that they should change seats. Momma shook her head.

‘I’m dead,’ she whispered. ‘All I want to do is sleep. Thank God that’s over. I wish we’d never come.’

She said it in English. For a moment Letta’s heart seemed to stop. Her mouth half-opened and she felt her face go white, but Momma didn’t seem to notice. She was already turning to sit down. Letta stayed where she was, in the aisle, too stunned to move.

A picture of Lapiri formed in her mind. That had been only two days back.

It had started the evening before. Momma had said, ‘Tomorrow I’m going to Lapiri. I’d like you to come too, Letta. There’s something I want to show you.’

Letta had said, ‘Oh, but . . .’

There’d been plans she’d made, friends she’d arranged to meet. She’d started to explain, but stopped, because she could see Momma was upset. And then it had been Poppa, who almost never let you see what he was feeling, who had said, ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to give that a miss. We’d like you to go.’

There’d been something in his voice. Letta hadn’t understood what, but she’d known it mattered so she’d stopped arguing and gone out to try and find one of her friends to tell them she wasn’t going to make it.

Then, next morning, they’d left Potok and the festival, just Momma and Letta, in a weird old taxi which someone had painted bright yellow with Marlboro ads on the side to try and give it a sophisticated New York look. They had driven, juddering on every pot-hole, twenty miles along the flanks of Mount Athur and then, almost at a walking pace, along a winding unmetalled road, over a shoulder of the mountain and down into a still and secret wooded valley. They had come through the wood and found a small dark lake with a few houses and a tiny white church reflected from its surface, and a single immense sweep of mountain rising beyond. Momma had asked the driver to stop.

‘This is Lapiri,’ she had said. ‘This is where I grew up.’

They had climbed out and stood and looked. When Letta had got her camera out, Momma had put her hand down without a word and stopped her. Then, though the track went on, no worse than before, they had walked round the lake and into the hamlet.

Nobody came to Lapiri. Certainly no foreigners. People had stared, and fallen silent. Momma had walked up to two elderly women and said, ‘Is Minna Vari still alive?’

The women had stared at her, still silent, not even accepting that they had understood her.

‘I am Minna Kanors,’ she had told them.

Their looks had changed to amazement, and then to smiles and handshakes.

‘This is my daughter Letta,’ Momma had said, and Letta had found herself being kissed by crones and hugged by smelly old men with bristly chins while the news was cried from house to house and more old people came hurrying out for more kisses and hugs and greetings, with Letta still trying to guess why Momma, whose unmarried name had of course been Vax, had told them she was Minna Kanors. And now small gifts began to be brought – a couple of figs, an almond biscuit, strips of dried fish from the lake (practically pure salt), doll-size mugs of fiery clear peach brandy. At last the whole gang of them, about fifteen, all old (anyone under fifty was probably in Potok for the festival), had led them off to a one-roomed house, barely bigger than a kennel, leaning against the church, and there in a wooden bed they’d found an old woman, quite blind and almost deaf, and they’d bellowed in her ear to tell her that Minna Kanors had come to see her, bringing her daughter.

‘This was my foster-mother,’ Momma had whispered.

The blind woman had smiled and nodded and whispered Momma’s name, and Momma had sat on a stool by the bed. Letta had bent and kissed the chill, shrivelled cheeks, and then they’d all gone back into the sunlight, leaving Momma and the old woman together. They’d asked Letta questions, not about England or America, not about swimming-pools (she didn’t see any TV masts and later Steff had told her that they probably couldn’t get any signals at Lapiri because of the mountains) but about family. How many sons? Two only? And just the one daughter? Well, one daughter was enough to look after the parents in their old age. And only two grandchildren? Tsk tsk. She’d mentioned Grandad. Restaur Vax? Ah, yes, a very great man, but she hadn’t been sure they’d been talking about the right Restaur Vax, because two of the old men insisted on leading her off to see the cell where the Hermit of Lapiri had lived, four or five mossy stones beside a dribbling stream in the middle of the wood . . .

Momma had allowed her to take photographs when they went back to the taxi, but she obviously hadn’t wanted to talk. They were off the cart-track and onto the metalled road before she said anything, and even then, though there was no way the driver could have heard her above the growls and rattles of his cab, she spoke in English and kept her voice down, almost to a whisper, low and strained.

‘There is something I have to tell you,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to, but it’s important to both of us. It may help you to understand why things aren’t . . . aren’t easy, quite, between us . . . not like they ought to be with a mother and daughter. There’s a sort of block, isn’t there? Something in the way?’

‘Not really. Well, yes, sometimes, I suppose . . . Honestly, you don’t have to worry, Momma. I’m used to it. It doesn’t matter.’

‘It does matter, but I can’t help it . . .’

She paused, sighed, drew a breath and began.

‘Well, I was born about three years before the Germans came. No, four, it must have been. Your grandfather was teaching at Virnu, in Yugoslavia. I don’t remember any of that time. When the Germans came he joined the Resistance – he had no other choice, I accept that. He sent me and my mother to Lapiri because Romania was pro-German and he thought we would be safer there, but soon there were Germans in Romania too. My mother had been born in Lapiri, so she used her family name, Kanors. If anyone asked, I was her illegitimate daughter. As far as I knew I had no father, though I remember being woken at night once, and a man being there who took me onto his lap and talked to me. The villagers knew who I was, of course, but they don’t tell things to strangers. Lapiri was my childhood, the only world I knew. I had a friend of my own age, Junni. She had no father, too. We were like twin sisters, never apart. I think I was as happy as a child can be.

‘Then the Germans were driven out, and I remember a confused and frightening time, car journeys, and cheering crowds, and huge rooms, and town-smells, and strangers looking after me, and my mother, when I saw her, seeming unhappy and worried, and pretending not to be. And this man who said he was my father . . . I didn’t want a father, I wanted Junni. But there was a day when the man took me onto his lap and told me stories, and when important people came to talk to him he sent them away. My mother was there. I could see she’d been crying. Then the man said goodbye.

‘And then my mother came to my room and woke me and helped me to dress in the dark and we crept through passages and down stairs and through cellars and came out in a dark street where men were waiting, with guns. They led us, stopping often, through twisting streets. We got into a car, my mother and I and two of the men, and drove without any lights through the dark. It was very bumpy, not a proper road, but I fell asleep. To my joy I woke in my own room at Lapiri.

‘I ran out to look for Junni, but I found her house in mourning. She had missed me as much as I’d missed her, and she’d gone off one morning alone. They thought she must have gone to look for me, but she’d fallen into the lake and drowned. Her mother was all in black. She didn’t tell me about the lake. She held me close and said that Junni had gone to the Virgin and St Joseph. I thought these must be places like the town where I had been, and soon she’d come back, like I had. I didn’t understand anything. Nobody told me anything true. They thought they were being kind to me, I suppose, not telling me. All I knew was that Lapiri wasn’t a happy place any more, and everyone was afraid.

‘Then, next day I think, my mother said I must hide for a while, and she might be going away too, but I mustn’t worry. She smiled and patted and stroked me, but I could feel she was frightened like everyone else. Her cousins took me to a cave in the mountain. They said I mustn’t come out. They brought me food at night. I don’t know how long I stayed there. I don’t even remember being there. Only sometimes in a shadowy way I can see somebody, a child, sitting in a dark place and staring at a big white patch – that would be the mouth of the cave, I suppose – with her knees drawn up to her chin and her arms round them and just rocking, rocking, rocking . . .

‘The next thing I remember is being back at Lapiri, but not in our house, in Junni’s. It was several months later, but I didn’t know that. I only learned much later what had happened. Almost as soon as I had hidden, the Communists had come. The villagers had seen their cars across the lake and were ready. Junni’s mother took off her mourning and my mother put it on. They told the Communists that it was I who had drowned. They showed them Junni’s grave. The Communists made my mother watch while they dug the body up. She identified it as mine. They took her and it away, my mother blindfolded, and the body in a sack which they tossed in the back of one of their cars as if it had been potatoes. The people of Lapiri watched in silence.

‘You met Junni’s mother just now. Minna Vari. When they went to fetch me from the cave they found me crazed, so I became Minna’s crazed daughter. She cared for me, watched over me, was utterly patient with me, as if I had been her own child. I don’t remember any of that time. It’s like the cave. I can – I don’t know – feel in a shadowy sort of way somebody looking after me, my guardian, who would never let anything else that was bad happen to me. I suppose I thought it was my mother, but it can only have been Minna. I think without her I might have stayed crazed all my life.

‘But when I came to myself, she sort of withdrew a little. She told me that I must now be called Junni Vari, and that I must never tell anyone that my real name was Minna Kanors . . .’

‘Why not Minna Vax?’ said Letta.

‘I’ll come to that.’

‘I’m sorry. It must have been . . . oh, there aren’t words!’

‘Yes, it was very bad. Even I understood it was very bad, though they still didn’t tell me anything. Minna was always afraid I might go crazed again. I did, once or twice, for a few days. All I knew was that my mother had left me and something very bad had happened. I didn’t want to know what that something was. I tried to bury even the knowledge I had, to hide it away. I wanted Minna to be my mother. I wanted to be Junni, but she wouldn’t let me. I was Kanors, not Vari. Worse trouble would come if I tried to be Vari – bloodlines are very important in these remote villages. Furthermore, she told me that my mother and father had been scholars, so I must be one too. My mother had taught me to read and write – Minna couldn’t – and the Communists had set up schools so that they could teach everyone to be Communists too, but our little school was very primitive and our teacher wanted to send me to a grande school. Minna agreed at once, and the villagers clubbed together to pay for my needs.

‘I was delighted to go. It was a way of hiding, of burying, the bad secret which I must never know. It was a way of starting to be somebody new. I felt I had no name. I wasn’t Junni or Minna, Vari or Kanors. I think that is why I worked so hard at school. I was a prize pupil. I hadn’t been that before. I was a kind of new person. Do you see?

‘Anyway they sent me to university, here in Potok, when I was barely sixteen. I met your father. We had known each other only a fortnight when he asked me to marry him. He had reasons of his own, but for me it was a door into a new world, and I could go through it and close it behind me and forget everything I had been before. I would have my own name at last. Minna Ozolins. We bribed officials to let me marry so young.

‘So I went through the door and closed it behind me. Only, at night, when I was asleep, it would open again and dreams would slip through and come to me. I would be standing by the lake, looking across at the houses and the church below the mountain, beginning to walk round towards them, knowing all the while that something was going to happen . . . and then I would wake moaning and shuddering and your father would hold me in his arms and try to comfort me.

‘In the end he persuaded me that I must go back and make my peace with Lapiri. We borrowed bicycles. The journey took almost all day. Minna welcomed me, but when I told her we were married she was obviously upset. I thought it was because we had not been married in church – she was very religious. She asked us to wait and went out. We heard the church door open and shut – you saw how close it was – and we thought she was praying for our sinfulness. When she came back she asked your father to leave us alone as she had something to tell me. That is when I learned what had happened to my mother, and to Junni, and what my true name was, and what it meant to be the daughter of Restaur Vax.

‘You see, in the eyes of the Communists your grandfather was a non-person. There was only one Restaur Vax, an old hero who had fought the Turks. We were told some of the stories, but not others, not in schools. He had written no poems – none of that. But your grandfather, no, nothing at all. And no-persons can’t have living children. If the Communists were to learn who I really was, I would become a no-person too. Remember, I was a Communist. We all were, us prize students who were going to run the country one day. Minna hadn’t sent your father away because she wanted me to hear the story alone. She didn’t know if she could trust him not to inform the authorities.’

‘That’s awful! Your own husband!’

‘It was the world we lived in, darling . . . Well, when she’d finished we held each other close and wept for what we’d both lost. I don’t believe anyone had ever seen Minna weep, but she did then. She said, “When you were crazed, you were my own daughter.” I knew what she meant. I said, “And you were my own mother.” And it was true.’

She paused. Her face worked at the memory. Letta took her hand and Momma squeezed back and shook her head and went on.

‘It was dark. I found your father and walked with him by the lake and told him. We ate with Minna and slept on her floor. Next day we rode back to Potok. But as soon as we were able we went out to Lapiri again and were re-married, by the old rite, in the church. Minna made the lace for my veil and baked the bride-bread. I made my peace with Lapiri.

‘After that I was happy – happy for the first time since my early childhood. We were elite, we had good jobs, good lives compared to most people. We took trouble to seem loyal little Communists, though like everyone else we made plans about how we might escape to the West if ever the chance arose. And when the boys were born we sneaked off and had them baptized in the church at Lapiri. I still had my nightmare from time to time, but now that I knew what it meant I could bear it. Then we made a friend, an official in the security ministry. I asked her, not telling her why, if she could find out anything about what had happened to my mother. I don’t think it was she who betrayed us, I think she was just indiscreet, but another friend warned us that the secret police now knew of my interest. We decided to leave. We spent all the money we had on bribes, and we were lucky too – I think you know that part of the story.’

‘Poppa told me. He made it sound funny, as if it had all happened to somebody else. I suppose it was terrifying, really.’

‘If it had gone wrong I should never have seen my sons again. But your father was brave and clever, and it was all right in the end. Only when it was over, I started having my nightmare again, as bad as it had ever been. It took me a long time to get rid of it.’

She looked down at her hand, still twined into Letta’s, and gently withdrew it.

‘Well, that’s all,’ she said. ‘If there’s anything you want to know, ask now. I don’t want to talk about it again if I can help it. But I thought – we thought, your father and I – that you’ve a right to know why . . . well, why it’s been difficult for me to have a daughter of my own. Do you understand?’

‘Not really . . . well, sort of. When you were my age, you mean . . . ?’

‘That’s part of it. I’ve got no maps, no clues, about what it’s like to be an ordinary child, growing up in safety and comfort. It’s almost as if I couldn’t afford to know. Suppose I’d never had a mother I could remember, I think that might have been easier. But I do remember her. I adored her. We were very close. We slept in the same bed – there wasn’t room for another one. And then we were punished. Dreadfully, dreadfully punished. When you’re a child, everything happens for a reason. It’s always somebody’s fault . . . Oh, Letta, I’ve longed to love you, love you easily, I mean. I do love you, really I do! But I daren’t let it be easy. Do you understand?’

‘I think so,’ said Letta. She knew she didn’t really. She could see what Momma had been telling her, but it was outside her. She couldn’t take hold of it, draw it into her, make it her own. Not yet, anyway. The whole terrible story, and how it went on and on, ripple after ripple, through life after life, all because Grandad had been who he had been. That must have been difficult for Momma too, more difficult than Letta had ever realized, welcoming home this old man she barely knew, but who had shaped her whole life by being who he was, bearing the name he bore.

‘And thank you for bringing me,’ she said. ‘And for telling me. I think it’s going to be a help . . . when I’m used to it, I mean. I . . . I always thought it was just because I came so late I was a bit of a nuisance.’

‘Oh, no, darling!’

‘But it’s true.’

‘It isn’t true in any way that matters.’

The road was twisting beside the river now, the cab growling round the sharp bends. Any moment they’d be in Potok.

‘Have you tried to find her again?’ said Letta. ‘Your mother, I mean. I asked Grandad about her once, but he just shook his head and I knew I mustn’t ask again.’

‘He has not forgiven himself. He’s trying to find out something, now that the barriers are down, but so many people have disappeared . . . I’m not sure I any longer want to know . . .’

They were silent again until they rounded the last bend and saw the old East Gate of Potok – the only one left – ahead of them. On either side of it the battlemented walls showed here and there among the red-tiled roofs. In front of it several hundred people were dancing a sundilla, the weaving chain-dance it took only a dozen dancers to start, and then anyone who felt like it could join in, while the bystanders clapped with the music. All the traffic had slowed and was nudging through, as the dancers wove in and out among the cars.

Letta watched them pass. She didn’t know what to think or how to feel. Lapiri had seemed so pure, so simple, but it was there that Momma’s own momma had stood by a grave in somebody else’s mourning and watched somebody else’s daughter being dug out of the ground, and known that she would probably never see her own daughter again. That was the picture that kept coming back.

Two chains of dancers went snaking by on either side of the cab. One lot wore national dress and carried baskets of flowers which they tossed across the roof of the cab to the other lot. They were laughing with excitement and happiness, but some of them, Letta thought, might have had fathers or grandfathers who had driven out to Lapiri and carried Momma’s momma away, blindfolded, with Junni’s body in a sack in the back of the car.

‘If Junni hadn’t been drowned,’ she whispered, ‘I wouldn’t be here today.’

‘Try not to brood about it, darling,’ said Momma. ‘It was a long time ago and we might as well enjoy our last few days in Varina.’

Deliberately, as if to show what she meant, she had begun to clap her hands in rhythm to the dance. But two nights later black cars had come and men had taken Grandad out of his bed and whisked him away. Just like the old days.

Still standing in the aisle of the aeroplane Letta bent and kissed Momma’s forehead and whispered, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘At least you can now see why I prefer to live in England,’ said Momma, grimly, and closed her eyes.

Letta felt her way to her seat and sat thinking about Lapiri until the stewardess came back with tea. Grandad, who seemed to have been half-asleep, straightened and looked decidedly perkier.

‘There is champagne also,’ she whispered, ‘since you are travelling first class. We keep a little French champagne for the VIPs. I will say I made a mistake . . .’

‘At the moment tea means more to me than all the vintages of France,’ said Grandad. ‘Sugar, please, but not that plasticized milk. Ah!’

He smiled at her and cradled the cup beneath his nose to sniff the steam. He looked relaxed and calm, like an old man Letta had noticed on the road to Lapiri, sitting at his door in the sun with his dog’s head on his lap.

‘What happened after they took me away?’ he asked.

Letta pulled herself together and started to tell him all she’d seen, being woken, finding Nigel and then Mollie, struggling through to the hotel, his telephone call, Van, Otto Vasa’s speech, and then waiting and waiting for the car . . .

‘. . . in the end they didn’t dare bring it into Potok,’ she said. ‘The crowd would have wrecked it. We had to walk out to the Jirin Gate. They gave us an escort, real heavies. We saw other cars burning, and shops being looted. Then there was a road-block, a barricade, you know. Some of the men there had guns. And they wouldn’t let us through till they’d checked again with Otto Vasa. After that it was easy. Somebody went and fetched the car and we drove all the rest of the way.’

‘Did you see any signs of military activity?’

‘They’d pasted newspaper over the windows so that we couldn’t see out, but we had to stop twice and the officer got out for a bit and came back and I heard orders being given.’

‘And you thought Otto Vasa was horrible.’

‘Yes. I hope Lash wasn’t really like that.’

‘In what way horrible?’

‘I don’t know. Oh yes, I do. At first I just decided he thought much too much of himself, as if he was the festival – I know he’d paid for most of it so he was a bit entitled – but I couldn’t stand the way people like Mr Orestes fawned on him – Van too, I’m afraid – and you could see how he loved it at the same time as he despised them for it – all that. And of course Minna Alaya had warned me about him . . . But really, it was the way he talked about you when he was whipping the crowd up, as if you weren’t a real person, just something like Restaur’s banner which he could say big, noble things about . . . And then lying, too. I heard Momma telling him you were all right and they were treating you OK, but he talked about you being in prison, and tortured . . . And he talked about you as if you were dead. And then, when he came back into the room after he’d been pouring out all this sob-stuff and he didn’t think anyone was looking, he was so pleased with himself that he winked! I hate him!’

Grandad sipped and nodded and sipped again.

‘How do you interpret the wink?’ he said. ‘He winked to someone in particular, I take it.’

‘Some kind of a henchman who’d given him a thumbs-up. I think they were saying, “We’ve done it. We’ve brought it off. This is what we wanted.” I mean that was what Van was saying, too.’

‘Interpret further, my darling. Did the wink celebrate a chance opportunity successfully seized, or a deliberate plan carried through?’

‘I don’t know. The plan, I suppose. I’m just guessing. Why?’

‘Naturally I asked many times what I had done to deserve this treatment. In the end I was informed that I had broken the conditions of my visa, which I took to mean that I had taken part in political activities. I had been extremely careful not to, but I was aware from the first that efforts were being made to provoke me into political statements, in particular by one or two of Otto Vasa’s entourage.’

‘The one he winked to was a skinny little man with a big moustache.’

‘That could be Nirvan Orestes, a cousin of our Hector’s. He is certainly of the party which would like to provoke an immediate confrontation with the Romanian government, if not outright rebellion.’

‘You mean one of them actually told the Romanians?’

‘I’m afraid it is all too probable. As always, I am much more use to them as a name and a symbol, than as a living person with opinions of my own. Ah, well. What about you, my darling? It is sad for you that our lovely adventure should end like this.’

Letta didn’t say anything.

‘No?’ he asked.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘Something had to happen. It was too lovely. It wasn’t real. Did Momma tell you she’d taken me to Lapiri?’

‘She did.’

‘And on the way back she told me what happened there?’

‘Yes.’

‘At first I wished she hadn’t. It seemed to spoil everything. And then I thought it’s better to know. You can’t pretend everything’s a pretty dream when it isn’t. Those people out in the Square – there must be a lot of them who’d do things like that to each other. I expect some of them have. You’ve got to know that, too.’

‘Yes, my darling. But when you have learnt that lesson you have a still harder one to learn. There are also a lot of people who would not.’

They landed at Heathrow in the late evening. The other passengers were made to wait while two men came aboard and led Grandad and Momma and Letta away, not through the usual passenger channels. The men were polite. Grandad knew one of them. They were shown into a small bare room and Momma and Letta were asked to sit down while Grandad was taken through into another room. After a bit, one of the men came back and beckoned to Letta. The man behind the desk in the second room was the same one who’d brought Grandad back to Winchester last year. He asked Letta to tell him what she’d seen when Otto Vasa came back from the balcony after making his speech. He made a note, stood up, and shook hands with Grandad.

‘Well, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry for you that it’s ended like this, and we’ll do the best we can with the Romanians. I’ll talk to my colleagues in Paris. They have a bit more influence there. I think that’s all. There’s a car ready to take you back to Winchester. Goodbye, Miss Ozolins. It was nice to meet you again.’