Shadow of a Hero (19 page)

‘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.