Shadow of a Hero (2 page)

‘It is not for you or for me,’ he said. ‘It is somehow for all mankind. If there is nobody left in the world whom the single word
Anastrondaitu
can
pierce to the heart, then a great treasure will have become buried beyond human reach. Well now, enough of that. No, one thing more. It is for you too. It is more than a treasure. It is life itself. I have survived experiences which, if it had not been for this thing . . .’ and he tapped the worn old grammar book with the two fingers of his left hand, ‘. . . would either have killed me or driven me mad. Oh, may you never have the same need, my darling! Now we must get on.’

Letta was too astonished to work well. Grandad never spoke about what had been done to him. If anyone asked what had happened to his hand he would glance at it and say, ‘Frost-bite,’ and change the subject. Occasionally strangers came to visit him. They talked to him in his room, and after they’d gone he usually seemed a bit depressed. Once Letta had asked who they were and he’d said they’d been policemen, just checking that he still wasn’t plotting to assassinate the Queen. That had been one of his unsmiling jokes, of course, but it had also been a way of telling her he didn’t want to be asked.

What did she know about him, really? Not much, though she felt closer to him than anyone else in the family, and he seemed to feel the same. ‘We arrived together,’ he used to say, meaning that in the same week she’d been born he’d been allowed out of Varina to join his daughter in England. And they were the two who were mostly at home. Poppa was a road engineer, always flying round the world to advise on tricky bits of highway building, and Momma worked for IBM outside Winchester and often didn’t get home till late.

But there was more to their closeness than that.
Letta
was pretty well certain that she’d been born by accident. After all, Momma had been getting on for forty, with a really good job, and a grandchild on the way when she’d become pregnant. And it was a bit the same about Grandad. Nobody’d ever really expected the Communists would let him out, though there’d been a terrific campaign, and Momma must have been really happy when it happened, still, now she’d got this old man to think about as well as the baby . . . Momma was a perfectly good mother. She did everything she was supposed to, and took trouble over it, but somehow there was a sort of barrier between her and Letta. They didn’t touch or hug much, or talk about things that mattered. Letta felt closer to her eldest brother Steff, whom she saw only four or five times a year, than she did to Momma. And Poppa was away too much for her to get to know him well, either, if you could. She wasn’t sure about that either. So Grandad was the person who mattered most in her life. They shared a sort of out-sidishness, accidentalness, not-quite-fittingness as members of the family. They didn’t talk about any of this, but Letta was pretty sure that Grandad knew about it and felt it too.

But what else? Last birthday he’d been eighty-one. And years before that, when he was still almost a young man, he’d been Prime Minister of Varina for a fortnight, ‘because I had the same name as my great-grandfather’. Another of his jokes. He never said any more about it than that. Then the Communists had taken over and put him in prison, and he’d stayed there over thirty years. He never talked about that either. Today was the first time Letta had heard him even hint at it.

About twenty minutes later, he sighed and closed the grammar.

‘Neither of us is paying attention,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry, but . . .’

‘We are both thinking of other things. It’s my fault. I should not have talked about the past. What shall we do instead?’

‘Well, there’s the goat-boy book. We never finished that.’

Grandad made a face.

‘I think we can spare ourselves that,’ he said.

Letta had done her first lessons from the book, which was even more battered than the grammar, simple stories written years and years ago for children to start learning Formal, but whoever had written it – she was called Anya Orestes, Grandad said, though the title page was missing – didn’t seem to have had much idea what children are interested in, so the stories were the worst kind of soppy-pretty, and boring with it.

‘Couldn’t you read me the poem about the blood feud? I’m sure I’d understand some of it.’

‘Not enough, and that would spoil it for both of us. Let’s try one of these. They’re still a bit beyond you. I was keeping them for later.’

‘What are they?’

‘The Legends. A collection of folk-tales about the War of Independence. We Varinians are great story-tellers, you know, but for us the story is far more important than the truth. Years ago, before the war, I was walking in the mountains and an old shepherd told me a story about a bandit, or hero – the word he used means both things – who was trapped in a cave by his enemies – the shepherd showed me the cave – and because they were afraid to fight him in the dark, with the light
behind
them, they had built a great fire at the cave entrance to suffocate him. But rather than die like that he had charged out through the flames and, with his clothing all on fire, had fallen on his enemies and slain them and then died himself.’

‘How horrible.’

‘Stories of heroism tend to be horrible as soon as you think about them. Well, I slept that night at a village in the valley. A travelling film show was set up, showing a Western of some sort, silent, which ended in exactly the way my friend had described.’

‘You mean he was lying?’

‘Not exactly. He had seen the film and been struck by the episode, so he had made it part of his landscape. Now for him it was true. Well, these legends are of that nature. There are varying levels of – ah, let’s call it creativity in them. But there are also notes pointing out some of the more outrageous falsehoods. I find the language rather stilted, even by Formal standards, but I think you will find the stories amusing.’

‘Are there any about Restaur Vax? Not you, I mean – the old one. Steff used to tell me them, but I don’t really remember.’

‘That is what they are. Legends are about heroes and heroines and villains, so this is the history of the War of Independence as if almost the only people who fought in it were Restaur Vax and Lash the Golden and Selim Pasha. Let’s see . . . ah, yes, I’m afraid the first one is missing. See what you make of this.’

Letta took the book. It was almost falling to bits, and the paper was the colour of brown bread, covered with small, cramped print. At the top of the left-hand page was the end of a sentence,
something
to do with a baby laughing, followed by an almost unreadably tiny footnote. A new story started opposite.
Restaur Vax and
 . . .

‘What’s
opiscu
?’ she said.

‘Drop the
o
and turn the
c
into a
zh
.’

‘Oh, yes, of course. “Restaur Vax and the Bishop”. Is that Bishop Pango?’

‘In the Legends all bishops are Bishop Pango, all heroes are Restaur or Lash the Golden, all enemies are Turks, and all traitors are Greeks, Serbs, Romanians or Bulgars. The world is a simple place, in legends.’

LEGEND

Restaur Vax and the Bishop

BISHOP PANGO
¹
WAS
a proud, proud man. On his left hand he wore three rings, and on his right five. He knew more Latin than the Pope and more Greek than the Patriarch.
²
When he came to the seminary the young men who were studying to be priests were brought before him, one by one, so that he could test them and know their worth.

Last of all Restaur Vax stood before him, and the Bishop tested him with a hard question. Restaur Vax answered him perfectly.

‘Good,’ said the Bishop. ‘We will make you a priest.’

‘I would sooner fight the Turks,’ said Restaur Vax.

The Bishop frowned, and tested him with a harder question. Again Restaur Vax answered him perfectly.

‘Good,’ said the Bishop. ‘When you have done being a priest, we will make you a bishop.’

‘I would sooner fight the Turks,’ said Restaur Vax.

The Bishop frowned and bit his lip and tested him with the hardest question he knew. For the third time Restaur Vax answered perfectly.

‘Good,’ said the Bishop. ‘When I myself am taken hence, you will sit on my throne.’

‘I would sooner fight the Turks,’ said Restaur Vax.

‘How can you fight the Turks?’ said the Bishop. ‘Seven hundred years they have been our masters. You have neither sword nor gun nor horse. You had far best be a priest.’

‘Without sword or horse or gun I will fight the Turks,’ said Restaur Vax.

The Bishop took a ring from his left hand.

‘With this you may buy yourself a sword,’ he said.

He took two rings from his left hand.

‘With these you may buy yourself a gun,’ he said.

He took four rings – all but his great Bishop’s ring – from his right hand.

‘With these you may buy yourself the best horse in the mountains,’ he said. ‘Now I have nothing to give you but my blessing. Go and fight the Turks.’

¹
Pango XIV (1766–1850) Bishop Supreme of Varina from 1818 and Prince-Bishop from 1829. During the period leading up to the War of Independence he was more than once arrested by the Turkish authorities on suspicion of support for nationalist leaders, but he was released because of the popular unrest and international pressure. The nature of his support for nationalist ideals remains unclear. He may well have examined the young Restaur Vax for the priesthood.

²
The National Church of Varina was, and remains, unique. At the Great Schism of 1054 it announced its allegiance to both Rome and Byzantium, accepting Pope and Patriarch as equal spiritual heads. Both major Churches pronounced the Varinian compromise heretical, but with characteristic obstinacy the Church of Varina still insists that it accepts only the joint authority. The authority is theoretical. In practice it goes its own way.

AUTUMN 1989

IT MUST HAVE
been high summer when they started reading the Legends, the summer before the demo outside the Romanian Embassy. Their house was half-way up the hill, and Grandad’s room was at the top, at the back, so from his window you could see right down over Winchester, with the green tops of the trees poking up between the rain-washed slates, and the squat tower of the cathedral dim in the valley.

Letta remembered that because Grandad had talked about staring out of his schoolroom window at the hillside above his father’s farm, and she had imagined its sun-baked brown harshness and the difference from what she was actually seeing had struck her. Then there had been the summer holidays, and then things had begun to change.

It started with several visits, three at least, from the men Grandad called ‘the policemen’. She knew because he was tired, and told her it was from having to talk English. His English was fluent, but with a thick, gravelly accent and a quaint way of twisting sentences inside out. After one of the visits he said, ‘I find the American accent particularly hard to attend to.’

Another time Momma told Letta to be sure to take her key to school as Grandad would be out when she got home. She happened to be at the window and saw the car drive up. A very tall
blond
young man got out and opened the passenger door for Grandad and helped him up the front steps. Letta met them at the door. Grandad said, ‘This is my granddaughter, Letta,’ and the man gave a quick smile that didn’t mean anything and said, ‘Hi, Letta. Then you’re in good hands, sir,’ and ran down the steps.

Letta made a pot of tea, but when she took it up she found Grandad in bed, in his shirt-sleeves, making notes on a clipboard. He thanked her and stopped work to drink and nod and smile while she chatted, mostly about her friend Angel’s latest absurdities. When he gave her the cup back he said, ‘When Momma comes home, would you ask her if she can spare me a few minutes?’

Letta did, but the ‘few minutes’ were still going on an hour later. Part of Momma’s way of proving to herself that she wasn’t sacrificing her family to her job was to see that there was a proper cooked supper. Even if it was just her and Letta, because Poppa was away and Grandad was tired and only wanted a snack in his room, there’d be at least two courses and sometimes three, hot and ready at eight o’clock, but that evening Letta realized it wasn’t going to happen so she made scrambled eggs and took a tray up. Momma and Grandad hadn’t been having one of their rows, she saw as soon as she went in. It was too serious for that.

Momma looked vaguely at the scrambled eggs, then pulled herself together and said, ‘Oh, thank you, Letta. Well done. Got something for yourself? Be a saint and put the stuff in my basket in the fridge, will you?’

Grandad just raised a hand and smiled tiredly at her as she left. Letta didn’t mind. It meant she
could
read while she ate, and she had a mountain of homework still to do.

Next afternoon she got home and found men putting a telephone into Grandad’s room, which meant he had to come downstairs for tea and she did the crumpets in the toaster, instead of the proper way on a toasting-fork in front of his gas fire. (Grandad used to say, ‘When all England’s triumphs and mistakes are forgotten, mankind will still owe her four priceless gifts – bread sauce to go with turkey, steak-and-kidney pudding, marmalade, and hot buttered crumpets.’)

‘What’s going on?’ said Letta. ‘I mean, a telephone! You hate telephones, and anyway you get about three calls a year.’

‘The world is falling apart. This is a minor symptom of its collapse.’

‘The world’s been falling apart ever since I can remember. At least once a month. Then they have a summit . . .’

‘No more summits,’ said Grandad. ‘It takes two equal world powers to compose a summit.’

‘They must have forgotten to tell Mount Everest.’

‘No doubt that is why Mount Everest is still there. But soon the USSR will cease to exist. China is permanently contemplating the chaos in its own navel. With whom can the US President hold a summit?’