Shadow of a Hero (30 page)

‘Didn’t you want to strangle him?’

‘Pretty well, but I managed not to let him see. In fact, in a funny sort of way, I’d begun to enjoy myself. He thought he was using me, the way he’d done from the start, but actually now I was using him. So I wrote a harmless little bit about us all going to meet Grandad at the airport when the Communists let him out, and then I settled down to learn that bloody speech. It was pure rant about Varina’s inalienable rights, and how our enemies
were
still trying to take them from us, but the spirit of Restaur Vax and Lash the Golden, et cetera, et cetera. You know Otto likes people to think he’s some kind of reincarnation of Lash?

‘That took the rest of the day. We sat in the office, and then we drove around, and Otto got out and saw people while I sat in the car with the blinds drawn, learning my lines. Then we went back to the summer palace and I ran through the speech with him. I really hammed it up, and he was pleased as Punch. I couldn’t stand another supper with his gang of creeps, so I said my foot was hurting and I’d better go to bed. I lay in next morning too, and hung around getting more and more nervous most of the afternoon until a car arrived to take me to the rally.

‘It was in the meadows below St Valia, where the camp had been for the festival. They had a stage up, and a sound system, and they smuggled me in through the ruins with Jagu to keep an eye on me, so that I kept out of sight till the time came for my big moment. Jagu was on top of the world. He said it was the biggest rally they’d had for months. There might be a few trouble-makers around, but I’d know who were our people by their yellow sashes. They had a band, and marching, and then a pathetic woman talking about what the Serbs had done to the village where she’d been living in Croatia . . .’

‘Was that true?’

‘I should think so. There’ve been quite a few refugees from the north, I gathered later – I’ll come to that. Anyway the chairman-figure who was introducing the speakers cut her short and said that was the sort of thing Varina had got to expect if we didn’t take our destiny into our own hands,
and
everyone cheered – at least it sounded like everyone from where I was, but it was probably pretty well orchestrated because at that point Otto strode on and whipped up the cheering like mad and stood there saluting and triumphant for several minutes – I could see him sort of haloed from behind – and then got them quiet and began to speak.

‘He started off quietly, saying that the future of Varina was in the balance, but first they must honour the past, and the hero Restaur Vax, who had given his life for his country. He talked a bit about Grandad’s doings in the war – rather good and honest-sounding – and then he said that the oppressors of Varina had attempted to deny the family of Restaur Vax their natural, God-given right to attend the funeral, but that he, Otto Vasa, had refused to accept that and had arranged for one member of the family to be there, whatever the oppressors might decree.

‘Then Jagu gave me a push and I climbed up on to the platform and Otto came over and shook my hand and slapped me on the back and led me up to the microphone. There was a lot of cheering which went on quite a while, and I had time to get used to the lights.

‘It was a huge crowd, I don’t know – twenty thousand? A lot of them were wearing yellow sashes, especially at the front, but quite a few weren’t, and after a bit I realized that at least half of those weren’t cheering either. I made signs to them to quiet down, and in the end they did. Otto had gone back to his seat but I could see him out of the corner of my eye. As soon as they’d let me, I started in on the bit I’d written for him about meeting Grandad at the airport. I saw Otto relax
and
begin saying something to the fellow on his right.

‘You remember that bit finished with me saying how much Grandad had meant to the family? Well, instead of going on about Varina being his real family I said I’d got Grandad’s last letter with me, to my sister, and I’d read it to them to show what sort of a man he was. I saw Otto sit up with a jerk and frown, but I pretended not to notice. I skipped the bit about not trusting the Romanian post and started in on the marmalade and the crumpets, and he relaxed and went on muttering to the chap next door to him. So I don’t think he was listening when I got to what Grandad said about what was going on in Varina.

‘That was when everything changed. It’s difficult to explain. Everybody had gone very quiet. You’d have said it was reasonably quiet before, between the cheering, but there were coughs and murmurs and so on, the sort of background noise you get with any big crowd, but the sound system meant the speakers could be heard without yelling, so it had been quiet enough. Now it was dead quiet. I could hear the river. Every single person in the whole crowd was listening with all their attention to what I was saying.

‘In fact Otto took a moment or two to catch on. I saw him jump up and make a signal and I grabbed the mike and carried on. I’d learned this bit by heart because I’d known they’d never let me get away with it so it didn’t matter when somebody snatched the letter out of my hand. There were several of them, trying to wrestle the mike away from me and somebody got an arm-lock round my throat but I got it all out, the whole bit about Otto working with the old Ceau
ş
escu gang,
before
some bastard stamped on my foot and I yelled and collapsed – God, it hurt!

‘In fact I don’t know what happened next but I must have managed to crawl to the front of the platform because people were trying to grab me from below and I was fighting them off, and then I heard them yelling that they were friends – there was a colossal racket going on and my foot was still screaming at me – and I let them help me down, and then I must have fainted.

‘When I came to, I was being jostled about but people seemed to be holding me up and trying to support me and there was this hullabaloo going on, so I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying. I realized they were trying to push their way out through the crowd, but then someone pointed back over our shoulders and we swung round to look and there was Otto, up on the platform in the spotlights, absolutely purple with rage and yelling, though no-one could hear him – he’d completely lost it – and all the while his hands were tearing something into smaller and smaller shreds and scattering them onto the stage. I don’t think he realized what he was doing, but it must have been Grandad’s letter. That’s why I haven’t got it. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s all right. It was worth it. Go on.’

‘Oh, well, it was chaos, fights going on everywhere between the yellow-sashes and the others, and yells and boos and whistles and cat-calls, and the yellow-sashes trying to get organized cheering going, and being drowned out. The people I was with went struggling on till we were right at the edge of the crowd, and they made a space for me and took off my shoe and somebody fetched water from the river and they bathed my foot, which
helped
a bit – it was swelling up like a balloon – and by the time they’d done that, things had quietened down a bit, and Otto had got control of himself, but he made the mistake of trying to carry on with his rally.

‘It was a disaster, from his point of view. They never let him get a word out. The more he tried to rant and bully them into silence, the louder they cat-called. He’d got the microphone and the sound system, but they drowned him out. Then they started chanting Grandad’s name.
Vax! Vax! Restaur Vax!
Over and over and over. They destroyed him. You know, they destroyed him with Grandad’s name! What’s the joke?’

‘What you just said. I hope he was watching. Tell you later. Go on.’

‘We saw one extraordinary thing. You know there’d been fighting? There was a gang of yellow-sash thugs over to our left, and now we realized they were fighting among themselves. Some of them had taken their yellow sashes off and were trying to make the others do the same. And then all the lights went out and the sound system went off – it was pretty well dark by now – we decided afterwards that Vasa’s people must have done that as a way of getting him out of the jam he was in. There was still a lot of yelling and shoving and fighting, but the people I was with found a stretcher and carried me back into Potok, to one of their flats, and went out to find a doctor or a nurse who could do something about my foot.

‘Next thing, Riccu turned up. He said the police were looking for me. His lot had friends in the police, and there was a rumour going round about someone being arrested at the rally, a foreigner.
Riccu
thought they meant me. It would have been something Otto had laid on, to stir things up still further, arresting Restaur Vax’s grandson on the eve of the funeral . . .’

‘He sort of did that with Grandad, didn’t he? Last year? Pretending he was being beaten up in prison when he was on his way back to England, really.’

‘I remember. In fact I asked him about that, and he just grinned and said it was politics. I’m afraid I thought it was OK at the time.’

‘What happened next?’

‘Oh, a jolly old doctor showed up, who’d actually known Grandad before the war. He couldn’t do much, but he gave me some aspirin, and then about a dozen of us sat round talking all night. I couldn’t have gone to sleep anyway. My foot was throbbing like a jungle drum, but even so I was a lot happier than I’d felt for ages. Riccu said he’d known I’d got his message and Grandad’s letter because the kitchen-maid had told him, and he’d guessed I hadn’t let on because she’d not got into trouble. They’d gone along to the rally, he and his friends who’d been helping Grandad, to heckle a bit and try and let people know that not everyone was wild about Otto, but there weren’t a lot of them. Most of the non-yellow-sashes had been more or less neutral, ordinary Varinians, who’d gone along – I don’t know – to try and find out what they thought, I suppose. You see, Otto hadn’t just been keeping me under wraps to prevent me being seen. As well as that, he didn’t want me to find out that what Grandad had said in his letter was true. He’d been immensely popular a year ago. He could have done anything he liked with Varina then, almost. But then things started getting
worse
and worse in Croatia, and his own people threw their weight around trying to frighten the opposition off the streets, and rumours began to spread about Otto’s friends in Bucharest, so people went off him. They still desperately want a free Varina, just as you and I do and Grandad did, but not with Otto Vasa in charge. And not his way. Not his sort of Varina. The rally was a last throw, an effort to whip up a great frenzy of enthusiasm, and use that to hijack Grandad’s funeral and give himself a fresh start. But it didn’t work. Grandad fixed him, after all, despite being dead.’

‘You and Grandad.’

‘I suppose so.’

He was sitting on Grandad’s chair with his foot up on the stool which Letta used to use for toasting crumpets. It was obviously still hurting. He must have had a lot of pain from it while he was away. His face was drawn, and lined. He looked ten years older than he had before the accident, and for the first time Letta could see that what Minna Alaya had said about his being the spit image of Grandad might be true.

‘Is that all?’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that, but what about the funeral, and how did you get away, and what’s happening now? Is it going to be all right?’

‘God knows,’ he said. ‘Anything could happen. All you can say is, it’s better than it might have been, because people have seen through Otto, at least for the moment. But they’re still pretty discontented, not just about independence. Prices keep shooting up, and there’s a lot of racketeering and corruption, and deep distrust of the Romanian and Bulgarian governments, and fear of the Serbs . . . I think all you can say is we aren’t going out
of
our way to pick quarrels with anyone, and that’s what Otto was trying to set up. But if somebody chooses to pick a quarrel with us, well, I think we’ll fight. It’ll be pretty well hopeless if we have to do it on our own, but we’ll do it. It’s nothing like over yet, Sis.

‘I went to the funeral. I couldn’t risk trying to get into the cathedral, so I stood in the crowd in St Joseph’s Square. A lot of people recognized me. They kept coming up and shaking my hand. The service was relayed from the cathedral. There wasn’t any trouble. It was very respectful. Moving, I suppose. A lot of people were crying, men as well as women. After the service they drove the hearse round the Square, very slowly, while people crowded to touch it, and then they halted in front of the palace while the mayor made an oration from the balcony. It was supposed to have been Otto, but he’d cried off. The poor old mayor didn’t make much of an oration, in fact he had trouble getting the words out, he was so choked.

‘That took pretty well all morning, and then they drove out to Talosh to bury him in the family grave, and absolutely anybody who had a car or could hitch a lift drove out after them to watch. I went with nine other people in the old doctor’s car. We couldn’t get near the church because of the jam – the road’s just one-track – and I wasn’t up to walking the last half-mile. It was very hot and still. The grapes were just getting ripe in the vineyards. There were hundreds – oh, I don’t know, maybe thousands – of us out there among the scrub and the boulders in that belting sun, watching those tiny figures down in the graveyard. Far too far off to hear anything. Grasshoppers and cicadas buzzing away. I don’t believe anybody moved a
muscle
or said a word all the time they were by the grave.

‘Then the bigwigs left and the men began filling in the earth and we all went down and filed past the grave in silence. My friends took turns to carry me, but they put me down at the entrance and I hobbled past on my own. We’d all picked up a handful of earth or a few pebbles on the hillside, and as we went past the grave, we added it to the mound. I felt that everybody in all Varina was with us, moving quietly past and saying thank you.’

‘I wish I’d been there.’

‘You were, Sis. You were.’

Neither of them spoke for a while. Letta was crying, but somehow not with grief. Van left her alone, not trying to help or comfort her till she was ready.