Shadow of a Hero

AUGUST 1990

ONE GOOD THING, nothing to do with Varina, happened. The recession, which had taken Angel away, brought Biddie back. Her parents were feeling the pinch, and decided that in order to pay for their own holiday in Greece, they would have to let their Devon cottage for the priciest part of the season and spend the rest of the summer holidays in Winchester.

Biddie rang at breakfast.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘How was Romania? Don’t tell me now. We got back last night. What are you doing this afternoon?’

‘Nothing special.’

‘Shall we choose presents? In time, for once?’

‘Great.’

‘Pick you up at two?’

‘Make it one-thirty. I want to get back and have tea with Grandad. He’s been at a health farm. He’s only just back.’

‘What about Richoux?’

‘Do that first?’

‘Fine.’

They rang off. That was a fairly typical Biddie call. Her parents were extremely tough with her – mediaeval, Angel used to say. They were tough about homework, tough about being out after dark, tough about clothes, tough about dragging her off to Devon all the holidays and most weekends, and fiendishly tough about the telephone. At one point there was trouble with Angel, who didn’t think that anything less than an hour-and-a-half counted as a serious telephone call, but then Biddie’s dad, who was a thoroughgoing gadget-nerd, fixed a timer to the telephone which cut it off after three minutes whether you called her or she called you, unless she used a special key which she had to ask for. What’s more it kept it cut off for another five minutes, so you couldn’t just make a series of three-minute calls. This meant that Letta’s friendship with Biddie had been mostly a school thing, so it was especially pleasing and comforting that Biddie had called pretty well the moment she got back.

Choosing birthday presents was a ritual, much more important than the Christmas present ritual. Because of the way their holiday comings and goings had worked out, they’d usually had to wait for the start of the winter term, and then they’d cruise the gift-shops in the High Street looking for things under five pounds and awarding them points out of ten for idiocy. If they couldn’t find two objects scoring at least eight, they bought each other cards instead. Then they’d finish up having hot chocolate at Richoux.

Letta loved Richoux, even crammed with tourists, as it was in August. It was a bit posh and a bit ye-olde, but nothing like as fake as it might have been. They were lucky and got a table in a niche, where they settled down and looked at each other. Biddie had hardly changed at all, Letta decided. She had a very square face with coarse black hair, black eyebrows, dark brown eyes, whitish freckled skin and a wide mouth. Letta guessed that if she never saw her again till she was sixty, she’d still recognize her at once. In their old school, everyone had known that Biddie was about the cleverest pupil they’d had there, ever, and she was going to get all sorts of scholarships, and finish up famous. It was lovely now to be with her. Theirs wasn’t the sort of friendship you had to work to keep going, like the one with Angel. It was simply there, a fact.

‘You’ve changed,’ said Biddie.

‘I was just thinking you hadn’t.’

‘I have, too. At least I’ve struck. I’ve told Mum and Dad that now we’re going to different schools they’ve got to let me have other ways of getting to hang out with you. We get home for weekends from this school, so I’ve said I won’t always be coming down to Devon with them. I’m going to be staying with you instead, if it’s OK with your mum.’

‘That’s great! I’m sure Momma won’t mind. What did your parents say?’

‘They’re thinking about it. They’ll say OK in the end. They know what matters and what doesn’t. Tell me about Romania. I found your card when I got home.’

‘Not Romania, Varina.’

‘It had a Romanian stamp.’

‘It won’t next year. Don’t you remember, I spent most of last hols helping my sister-in-law in St Albans fix coaches and hotels and things to get to our culture festival?’

‘Oh, yes. How did it go?’

‘The first half was brilliant. Best thing that’s ever happened in my life. I can’t imagine anything as exciting, ever again. I felt as if I’d come home, as if a huge piece of me had always been missing and now I was all joined up again. And Grandad was there – he was our last proper prime minister – and everyone cheered him everywhere he went. He was a total hero. And then, out of the blue, the Romanians arrested him in his pyjamas and took him away. They let Mum and me come along after, to see he was all right, but they practically kept their guns pointing at us all the time until we were on the plane and out of the country.’

‘Wow!’

‘Our people – the Varinians, I mean – were pretty well rioting about it when we left. Burning cars and smashing foreigners’ houses. And after we’d gone the Romanians sent the army along, and the Varinians went and stood in front of them and wouldn’t let them into the city.’

‘It sounds pretty scary.’

‘It is. And there’s a horrible man called—’

‘I mean real armies. That’s big guns and tanks and planes doing rocket attacks if things go wrong . . . What’s up?’

Letta had felt the blood drain from her face. She closed her eyes and bowed her head. It was almost the same words Grandad had used, bringing this sudden lurch into horror, here in the snug, smug, coffee-scented tea-room in a town where there hadn’t been actual fighting – war, blood, bodies, cannon-shattered homes – since heaven knows when. Vivid as a nightmare she saw three war-planes screaming over the shoulder of Mount Athur. She saw St Joseph’s Square, the crowds racing for shelter. One of them was Parvla. She tripped and fell. The crowds milled over her.

‘Are you OK?’ said Biddie.

‘It mustn’t happen,’ whispered Letta. ‘Nothing’s worth that, nothing.’

She shook her head violently, willing the nightmare away, and pulled herself together.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m OK.’

‘Of course it isn’t worth it,’ said Biddie. ‘I wish I knew why anyone thinks it is. We’re all the same underneath, aren’t we?’

‘I am more different than you think,’ said Letta, in Field.

Biddie looked blank. Letta said it again in English.

‘But that’s just language,’ said Biddie.

‘No it isn’t, it’s . . . let me think . . . Yes, listen. Sometimes I dream in English, and sometimes I dream in Field, like I was talking just now. I’ve always done it, but since I came back from Potok – I don’t know – well, it isn’t quite the same me doing the dreaming. I’ve got a sort of overlap. You know, like a wonky TV signal, with a sort of shadow-line because you’re seeing two pictures . . . Anyway, we are different. It isn’t just language. It isn’t just having our own cheeses and legends and dogs and our own kind of Christianity and things like that. It’s something that’s kept us going on being Varinians for hundreds of years, when everyone else was trying to stop us. We aren’t like anyone else, and nobody can make us.’

‘Just now you said it wasn’t worth it. Now you’re sort of saying it is.’

‘I don’t know. I really don’t know!’

Then the waitress came and they ordered their chocolate and to calm herself down Letta asked about Greece, and then they talked about Angel until it was time to go present-hunting. As they came out into the High Street Letta glanced up at the low, drab cloud-base and felt a vague sense of release, then realized that at the shadow-edge of her mind she had still been seeing that intense blue southern sky across which the war-planes had swept.

When she got home she found a motor bike blocking the driveway, a huge, brand-new beast of a thing, glistening purple and white and black. There were black leathers draped on the banisters and a crash helmet striped with the Varinian colours on the hall table. Hell, she thought, I’d much rather have Grandad to myself, but at least it might mean there’s news from Potok. She made the tea, put an extra mug on the tray and carried it up.

A man was talking as she climbed the last flight. She knew the voice. Steff. Steff on a bike like that? Grandad answered, called to her to come in when she knocked, and went on as she backed her way through the door.

‘. . . never been natural traders. We have relied on outsiders living among us to create wealth, and then of course have envied them. How many of the crowd in the Square last month were aware of standing in a place where there was a major massacre of Jews in 1852? They had come to the Prince-Bishop’s palace for protection but he had shut his doors against them.’

‘Was that horrible old Pango?’ said Letta, still with her back to the room as she nudged the tray onto the cluttered table. (It couldn’t be Steff – he’d have been on his feet, helping her.)

‘His successor,’ said Grandad. ‘Pango had encouraged the Jews to settle in Potok.’

‘Hi, Sis,’ said the other man.

‘Van!’

‘Didn’t want you to jump like that with the tray in your hands. How’s life treating you?’

‘That’s not your bike!’

‘It is, too.’

‘Bike?’ said Grandad.

‘A great glistening monster painted our colours,’ said Letta. ‘Where did you get it? How fast does it go?’

‘A hundred-and-forty, supposed to,’ said Van. ‘I haven’t been over the ton. It’s a BMW.’

‘A gift?’ said Grandad in his quietest voice.

‘Not half!’ said Van. ‘Otto made quite a splash of handing it over. He sprang a farewell party on me in Vienna, and handed the bike over when the champagne was flowing. There’s a few things he wants me to do for him over here, and I’ve got to have transport, but mainly it’s to make up for being booted out of Varina.’

‘Booted out!’ said Letta. ‘Like Grandad?’

‘That’s right.’

‘In your pyjamas?’

She’d asked that seriously, without thinking, just trying to imagine the scene, but laughed at herself when Van laughed. Even Grandad smiled.

‘We had a tip-off,’ said Van. ‘We’ve been getting pretty good intelligence, so we had a couple of hours to set something up. I talked it over with Otto. I wanted to go into hiding, but he said it was too soon for that sort of thing, so we made them come and get me. We let them think I was just drinking with a few pals in this torno, the one with the pink umbrellas in Jirin Road, and they came swooping up in three of those black stretch limos to grab me, but our people poured out from every house in the street and blocked them in, so they radioed the army for help and I got up on a table and did my young-hero bit and said I was going quietly to save bloodshed. Then I let them take me and put me on a plane to Vienna. It was supposed to be only a stop-over for me there, but Otto had fixed things up for us both to get off so that he could spring the party and the bike on me.’

‘You mean they threw him out too?’ said Letta, with a leap of the heart.

‘He’d got some business to see to. They can’t sling him out that easily – he’s a Romanian citizen.’

‘I thought he was an exile, like Grandad,’ said Letta.

‘The difference is that he chose to live in Austria,’ said Grandad, still in that quiet voice which Van appeared not to notice. ‘I, for my part, was forced to live in England.’

Letta decided to change the subject.

‘Are you going back to Glasgow?’ she said.

‘No point,’ said Van. ‘I haven’t got a house, I haven’t got a girl-friend and I haven’t got a job.’

‘What!’

‘When I decided to stay on in Potok, I called them up and resigned. They’d have fired me anyway for overstaying my leave. Don’t worry, Sis. I shan’t be out begging in the High Street. Sue’s selling the house, so there’ll be a bit of money after the mortgage is paid off, and I’ve got a few things to do for Otto, so he’s paying me a retainer.’

‘Where are you going to live?’

‘Here, if Momma will let me. You’re in my old room, but Steff’s looks empty. Don’t look so baffled, Sis – it’s only a couple of months.’

‘I’m sorry. I was just surprised.’

‘Let us establish an island of calm in the hurricane of events,’ said Grandad. ‘Let’s have our tea and crumpets.’

‘God, you’re not going to light the fire,’ said Van. ‘It’s roasting in here already.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Letta. ‘You can’t have crumpets without. If you don’t like it you can go and move your bike. You’ll have to, anyway, before Momma gets home. She comes swooping in there. You don’t want it scrunched, I imagine.’

‘Oh, all right,’ said Van. ‘Do a couple for me. Plenty of butter, please. Drooling with it, OK?’

He lounged out and clumped down the stairs.

Letta heard Grandad sigh.

‘Is this all right?’ she whispered. ‘I don’t like it.’

‘It’s not entirely Van’s fault,’ said Grandad. ‘Popular enthusiasm is hard to resist. I had a visit from my policeman this morning.’

‘The tall thin one who met us at the airport?’

‘Yes. He is a good friend, in so far as he can afford to be. He has been putting together a file on Vasa. Some of this I knew already, but some I did not. After the war there was a penniless, parentless urchin who ran away from a camp for war orphans and fetched up in Vienna . . .’

‘Was he really a Varinian?’

‘He seems to have spoken Field as his first language.’

‘Bother. I suppose that pretty well proves it.’

‘I’m afraid so. Anyway, he ran errands for black-marketeers, and then worked for himself in the black market. There was a shortage of building materials. He found ways to supply them. He got to know the government officials who awarded the state building contracts, and became wealthy. All this I knew. But now my friend tells me that there is evidence that at some stage Vasa contacted the Ceauşescu regime and undertook various financial dealings for them when they were salting away their fortunes outside their country. Some of that money will have found its way into his pockets. So now he is genuinely enormously rich. He has several houses, a vast castle in Carpathia, a wife who is an Archduchess in her own right or some such nonsense. But he has no country. He is trying to buy himself one.’

‘He can’t do that!’

‘If we succeed in making Varina free, we will be citizens of the poorest country in Europe. And to the truly poor the rich are rich by magic. They have a secret. If you make a very rich man your president, he will use his magic to make your country as rich as he is.’

‘That’s nonsense.’

‘It is powerful nonsense. However, we think Vasa is not relying solely on his wealth. There are well-placed people in Bucharest who were once members of the Ceauşescu regime, with which Vasa had many contacts. Van himself has told us that Vasa is getting good intelligence. And does it not strike you that this motor cycle was bought and painted in our colours in a remarkably short time? Perhaps Vasa knew some time earlier that Van was about to be expelled.’

‘You mean he arranged it himself?’

‘Perhaps. Your friend Parvla has already told us that Van is a very popular figure, more popular with some than Vasa himself. Vasa would not tolerate that for long, I think.’

‘But it still doesn’t make sense. Why should the Romanians be helping Otto Vasa stir things up? Don’t they want it all to simmer down?’

‘Of course. That is what the Romanian government wants, officially. But the army itself contains many nationalist extremists, and there are local politicians who would be glad to gain popularity by whipping up anti-Varinian sentiment. I now think it may have been a combination of these which originally abducted me, and the central government then took over and decided to spirit me out of the country.’

‘So it wasn’t Otto Vasa’s idea after all?’

‘I don’t know. As I told you, he has many contacts with powerful officials who are still in place. He knows things which they would much rather keep secret, so he is in a strong position both to bribe and blackmail them.’

‘But what’s in it for him? He doesn’t want the Romanians to crack down on us either, does he? He wants Varina independent, just like we do, only he wants to be boss.’

‘He has the mentality of a bandit. He will believe that when the time comes he can ride the tiger.’

‘It sounds terrifying.’

‘It is.’

‘Why don’t you tell Van?’

‘He will have heard stories of this kind and dismissed them as lies to discredit Vasa. He will not believe them, even from me. I must . . .’

‘He’s coming back.’

‘. . . forty-three Jews died in the Square. Others were hunted down in their homes.’

‘We did this?’ said Letta, as Van came panting in. ‘Us Varinians?’

‘The great-great-grandparents of many of those whom you saw.’

‘Ancient history,’ said Van. ‘What can you expect if the price of bread goes up ten times in a month. Crumpets ready?’