Shadow of a Hero (3 page)

‘Do you mean he’s going to start ringing you up instead? Is it a hot line? Can I have a go? There’s a lot of things I’m aching to tell him.’

‘Fortunately for his peace of mind it is not a hot line. If you would be kind enough to stuff your mouth with crumpet so that you can’t interrupt, I will tell you what is going on. The Eastern Bloc is
falling
apart. It seemed like a great unshakable slab of stone, but it is cracking into separate pieces. At the moment everybody in the West is very happy about this. They think they have won the Cold War, and soon instead of the dreadful old Communist enemy there are going to be a lot of nice friendly democratic nations to trade with. But they are going to be disappointed. First, because democracy takes a lot of practice, and there isn’t time for that. Second, because there is no money, and soon there will be no food. And third, because the crumbling of the great block is not going to stop when the nations you see in your atlas have separated from each other. You see, most of those nations are not nations at all, but are themselves composed of a number of smaller nations . . .’

‘Like Varina?’

‘We are smaller than most, but still we are a nation. Small nations have long memories. There are three things, my darling, which bind people into a nation – the place they live, though they may share it with others; the language they speak, though they may also speak the language of their rulers; and their memories, which are theirs alone.

‘What do they remember? They remember their victories and their wrongs, but not, of course, their defeats and the wrongs that they themselves have done. In effect they remember chiefly their enemies. Sometimes those enemies are big and distant conquerors, like the Turks in the Legends or the Germans in my own lifetime, but mostly their ancient enemies are other small nations, just across the border, with whom there have been cattle raids and blood feuds and wife-snatchings for generation after generation, back and forth.

‘Now these small nations are going to bring their
memories
out and patch and repair and renew them and parade them up and down, all their victories which tell them they can conquer, all their wrongs which tell them to trust none but themselves. Czechoslovakia will fall apart, Yugoslavia will fall apart, the USSR will fall into twenty fragments, and the Eastern Bloc, that great slab, will have become not the pieces of shaped stone which the West was hoping to use, but a heap of pebbles. Discontented pebbles, because after all the upheavals they will have nothing that they want, not wealth, not comfort, not peace, not plenty, nothing. Nothing but their nationhood. Think. A heap of infuriated pebbles. That is the future of Eastern Europe.’

‘Us too? Varina?’

‘Ah, we are the centre of the universe, of course.’

‘We’re the centre of
our
universe. I mean, everyone is, to themselves, I think . . . Oh! Are they giving you a telephone because they want you to do something? They aren’t going to make you go back! Please don’t. I’ll be miserable without you. I suppose I shouldn’t say that, if you want to, but it’s true!’

‘And I should be miserable without you, my darling. Between us we will do our best to resist their idiot demands.’

‘Can’t you tell them you’re too old? I mean, you’re terrific for eighty-one, but . . .’

‘Of course I am far, far too old. In practical terms the idea is ridiculous. But it is not me they want, it is my name. If a waxwork dummy were called Restaur Vax, that would suit them as well. Better, perhaps. Even at eighty-one there is a danger that I may have ideas of my own.’

‘Of course you have.’

‘Occasionally, but I suppress them.’

He shook his head, as if at somebody else’s stupidity, and fell silent.

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘If you want to, I mean. I’m really interested.’

‘I promised your mother I would not involve you in my political affairs.’

‘You aren’t involving me. I’ll involve myself if I want to, but I don’t see how unless I know what’s what.’

‘I suppose that is reasonable. Where were we?’

‘Names. And suppressing ideas.’

‘Yes. A name, you see, has no ideas, and for most of my life I have been not myself but my name. Suppose your name were not Letta Ozolins but, say, Florence Nightingale or Margaret Thatcher or . . .’

‘Kylie Minogue?’

‘A singer?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Then people would think of you differently, wouldn’t they? They’d expect you to sing, or to order people about, or to want to be a nurse. In my case they expected me to be a hero. My grandfather, you see, was both a rogue and a fool. He used the fact that he was Restaur Vax’s son to make himself rich, and thus wasted his real inheritance, which was the family’s name and honour. He then squandered what he had got, and had nothing to leave his son but one farm. My father named me Restaur Vax in the feeble hope that I would somehow restore the family honour. Already at school my name was a burden. People expected great things of me. I would have none of it, and chose to become a schoolmaster. I thought I had found a way to be myself.

‘When the Germans invaded Yugoslavia to crush the Serbs I was teaching at Virnu, in our western province – part of Yugoslavia, as you know. Being Varinians, we resisted the Germans, as we have always resisted invaders, though we had no fondness for the Serbs. Whatever my name, I think I too would have joined the Resistance, but before I could make up my mind men came to me saying, “We need you to lead us.” Me? What did I know about fighting? But of course it wasn’t me they needed. It was my name. That is how I became a Resistance leader.

‘Before long our northern and southern provinces, in Romania and Hungary, had joined us. Romania joined the war on the German side and tried to conscript our men into their army, to go and fight in Russia, but the men just ran away into the hills and joined the Resistance. So soon we had German troops in all three provinces, trying to control us.

‘Varinians aren’t easy to lead. Our national sport is the blood feud. There were a dozen groups in the mountains, often as eager to fight each other as the Germans. The only name under which they would sometimes consent to co-operate was that of Restaur Vax. So, nominally at least, I was accepted as leader of the Resistance, and when peace came it was I whom the Varinians expected to go to the victorious Allies and tell them what we had done to ensure their victory, and in their gratitude they would make us a separate nation again, all three hundred thousand of us, as we used to be under the Prince-Bishopric, and had always been in our own minds. No longer would we be ruled from Sofia and Belgrade and Bucharest. We would rule ourselves, from Potok.

‘I knew roughly what was going to happen, though it was far worse than even I had feared, but because of my name I was forced to go. The Russians provided us with a safe conduct and an escort, but before we had gone a hundred miles our escort was replaced. The new escort then arrested us. My companions were shot, without trial, massacred beside the road and buried in a clay-pit, but because of my name, which might possibly still be used to bargain with, I was kept alive. Eighteen years I spent in camps in Siberia . . .’

‘Was that where you lost your fingers?’

‘Yes, but not in fact from frost-bite. There was a misunderstanding. It is not important. Where was I?’

‘Eighteen years in Siberia. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

‘I would like you to understand. Well, then, for reasons I still know nothing about, I was sent back to Bulgaria and spent another twelve years in prison . . .’

‘But it was better than Siberia?’

‘Prison is prison. Physically it was, I suppose, better, but there was a spirit in the camps in Siberia, among the inmates, I mean – not all of them, of course – a sort of sullen undefeatability. I didn’t find that in sleazy, deceitful Bulgaria. There! You see, in spite of all I know I am speaking and thinking like a Varinian peasant. Hatred and contempt for Bulgaria is in my bloodstream. Ah, well. At last my name came to my rescue. Very few people outside Varina have heard of Restaur Vax, though he was not merely our national hero but one of the great European poets. I mean that, my darling. This is not mere patriotism. He is fit
to
rank with Goethe and Byron and Victor Hugo, except that he wrote in a language known by only three hundred thousand people . . .’

‘And anyway they speak Field most of the time.’

‘That too. Still, even the ignorant can respond to the notion of a hero-poet. Now his great-grandson, bearing the same name, once a fighter against Hitler, elected leader of his people, thirty years a prisoner of the Communists, et cetera, et cetera . . . My case was an easier cause to publicize than many just as deserving. I was in the end released as part of a trade-deal, the British government of the time wishing to be able to reply to critics who rightly said that they should not be having commercial dealings with the unspeakable Bulgarian regime. I was a bit of icing on the cake of commerce, allowing them to claim that they had insisted on an increase in human rights being part of the deal. About a dozen political prisoners were released. Several thousand remained in prison. But because of my name I was one of those dozen. So, as with everything else in my life, it was my name that sent me to prison, having saved me from being massacred by the roadside, and my name that, thirty years later, released me again.’

‘And they want you to take it back to Varina now? Hey! You could change it by deed poll. Angel’s dad changed his name because he wanted to be double-barrelled.’

Grandad smiled and shook his head.

‘It is my name. I have grown to the shape of it,’ he said. ‘Anyway, it has not yet come to that. Part of the deal under which I was released was that the British government guaranteed the Bulgarians that I would not take part in political activities.’

‘Is that what the policemen keep coming to see you about?’

‘Approximately.’

‘And they’ve changed their minds? Is this a different lot? You said there was an American the other day.’

‘There are always people interested in fishing in troubled waters. But what is mainly happening at the moment is that the people I call the policemen have realized that none of the three regimes which control Varina can last, and that many Varinians will believe that the time has come to try once more for independence. Inevitably, because of my name, and whatever the British government may have promised, they will come to me, so the policemen have decided that they will have more control of events if I am acting under their protection. I am seen as a moderating influence – a ridiculous concept in Varinian terms. We are not a moderate people. So they have allowed the main organization of Varinians in exile to provide me with a telephone – which the policemen will no doubt tap – and a part-time secretary.’

‘Wow! A beautiful spy!’

‘May I be so fortunate. I was talking all this over with your momma last night.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She didn’t like it, of course. Long ago she had quite reasonably decided that her future was to forget her own roots and transplant herself here and grow fresh roots and become an Englishwoman. Still, in the end she said what Varinian women have had to say to their men for the past twelve centuries – “If you must go, you must go.”’

‘Well, don’t forget you’ve got to get my permission too.’

‘Of course.’

‘And I’m not going to give it.’

‘You forbid me to take part in any political activities?’

‘Oh, no. That’s all right. I’m talking about going. I’m not one of those stupid women who say “If you must go, you must go.”’

‘Go where?’

‘Varina, of course. You can’t go back and start politicking in Varina unless I can come too. All right?’

‘I hear and obey.’

Letta stuck out her chin and glared at him like all the tyrants who have ever sat on thrones.

‘Good!’ she said.

LEGEND

The Woman at the Avar Bridge

RESTAUR VAX CAME
to the bridge over the Avar, and found it guarded by three
bazouks
¹
who took tolls from all who passed. This oppression had lasted many years.

‘Little priestling, you must pay the toll,’ said the Corporal of Bazouks.

‘This bridge was built by Count Axur,’
²
said Restaur Vax, ‘and he decreed it free for all to pass. That is the law.’

‘Count Axur is dead seven hundred years,’ said the Corporal of Bazouks. ‘Among the living, the law is our law.’

‘Not so,’ said Restaur Vax. ‘For I am going to send you to where you may beg an audience of Count Axur, and be instructed in matters of law by him.’

He held his staff before him and the Corporal of Bazouks rushed forward and smote at him with his scimitar. But Restaur Vax parried the blow and with the after-stroke drove the butt of his staff into the
bazouk
’s stomach, and smote him with his knee
as
he fell forward, and thus stunned him. The other two
bazouks
then rushed at Restaur Vax but he ran to meet them on the crown of the bridge, where the passage was wide enough for only one, and the first one he smote with the butt of his staff and with his knee, as before, stunning him also, and when the second turned to run, he followed him and felled him with a blow to the head. Then he picked up the three bodies and tossed them into the river, which carried them away. And he threw their weapons after them.

Then the woman who kept the inn by the bridge came to her door and said, ‘Why have you done this to me? You have slain three Turks at my door. I can run with my daughters to the hills, but the Turks will come and burn my roof in vengeance.’

Restaur Vax, knowing she spoke the truth, said in his heart, ‘Somewhere I shall find myself a sword.’ He took from his wallet the first ring that the Bishop had given him, a ring of fine silver set with opals and garnets, and gave it to the woman, saying, ‘Take your goods and your daughters and hide in the mountains. Return when the Turks have gone, and sell this ring and buy timber and hire labour, and build your roof anew.’