Shadow of a Hero (18 page)

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.