(That was what he really wanted to know.)
‘Last night. I stayed with him on the way down.’
‘Why didn’t you stay with Steff and Mollie?’ said Momma, refusing, as always, to notice the fact that her sons didn’t get on with each other. ‘It’s only a few miles different.’
‘I took a cup of tea off Mollie,’ said Van. ‘Don’t you want the wine, Momma?’
She shrugged and spread her hands with a twisting motion, as if she were wringing out an invisible cloth, a gesture she never used to make but which Letta had seen again and again on the streets of Potok. It meant almost anything you wanted it to mean.
Grandad was still watching Van.
‘Wasn’t I given some almond brandy?’ he said. ‘Did that find its way home? We will need it after the dumbris.’
‘In any case,’ said Van, ‘Mollie’s spare room is pretty well chock-a-block with paperwork for next year’s festival.’
‘Next year’s festival?’ said Momma.
There was a silence.
‘They aren’t seriously going to try and have another festival next year?’ she said.
‘It has been suggested,’ said Grandad, ‘but I, for one, was not aware that the project was sufficiently far advanced to fill a whole bedroom with paperwork.’
He spoke drily, but Letta could hear he was both surprised and angry.
‘It isn’t like that,’ she said. ‘At least according to Nigel. He says they were hardly back before people were ringing up wanting to book places. Mollie kept telling them how iffy it was, but they still insisted on putting their names down and some of them are sending money. She’s just keeping track.’
‘It’s not at all iffy,’ said Van. ‘It’s going to be in Listru.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake! Listru’s in Bulgaria!’ said Momma.
‘Listru is in the Southern Province of Varina and we have a perfect right to hold a festival there,’ said Van.
‘What do you mean “we”?’ snapped Momma. ‘This is childish. You can’t do anything. It isn’t your business any more. I’m not talking about you, Poppa, but . . . Oh, Van! Letta! You’ve got British passports. This is where your life is going to be! This is where you belong! Varina’s over!’
‘You wouldn’t have said that a month ago,’ said Van, teasing, not seeming to notice how upset Momma was becoming. ‘Half Potok saw you dancing the sundilla in the Square.’
‘Yes, I know. Yes, I had a good time . . .’
‘Tears streaming down your face,’ said Van.
‘Listen. I was saying goodbye. I was happy once in Potok, long ago, when Steff and you were born. And now I was saying goodbye, because I knew I could never go back. It wasn’t real any more.’
She banged her fist onto the table so that the teapot rattled on the tray.
‘I think it was the reallest thing I’ve ever known,’ said Letta.
She couldn’t help it. She had to say it. It was true, and it mattered to her not to pretend, in spite of understanding why Momma felt the way she did. Momma drew a breath to yell at her, held it, and let it out.
‘Of course it was lovely, darling,’ she said carefully. ‘Especially lovely for you, with everything so happy, and no memories from before.’
‘Until they came for Grandad,’ said Letta.
‘Exactly,’ said Momma. ‘And that was when it stopped being a lovely dream and started being real.’
‘I don’t buy that,’ said Van. ‘That happened because our country is occupied by foreign powers. It’s got nothing to do with being real. In a real Varina it wouldn’t have happened.’
‘In a real world it did,’ said Momma. ‘And trying to hold a festival in Listru will only make it happen again, worse. The Bulgarians can be just as nasty as the Romanians – nastier, if anything. And anyone who tries to get there from outside will be just wasting their money. All they’ll do is sit in a coach for four days and then get turned back at the frontier.’
‘There are ways past frontiers, if you know how,’ said Van.
‘Van, please!’ said Momma. ‘Can’t you see what dangerous nonsense you’re talking? Poppa, do say something.’
‘It need not be dangerous, or nonsense,’ said Grandad. ‘For myself, I think we should attempt to hold a second festival.’
‘We’re going to hold one,’ interrupted Van. ‘We’re not talking about a few coaches being stopped at the frontiers, we’re talking about a hundred thousand native Varinians from the Northern Province all crossing the Danube together.’
‘This isn’t the Thames,’ said Momma. ‘Have you seen the Danube?’
‘Course I have,’ said Van. ‘There’s quite a few boats. We can build rafts and tow them. How are they going to stop us? Are they going to turn their guns on raft-loads of women and children?’
‘If they thought no-one was looking, they might well,’ said Grandad. ‘If we were to reach such a confrontation, I would not take the risk. I would prefer to negotiate with the Bulgarian regime. We could for instance offer to postpone the proposed referendum, which they certainly see as provocative . . .’
‘Not on your life!’ said Van, cutting in again. ‘That’s going to happen. It’s not negotiable.’
‘Oh, Van!’ said Momma. ‘You’re talking as if you could make the Bulgarians do what you want. And the Serbs and Romanians. You can’t. Do you imagine you can fight them? They’ve got armies, with tanks and guns and war-planes. It won’t be like old Restaur Vax fighting the Turks any more. It will be hell.’
‘It’s not going to be like that,’ said Van. ‘In any case Restaur Vax didn’t win that war – not by himself. What he did was make enough of a nuisance of himself for long enough for the British and the French and the Austrians to get tired of having this mess on their doorsteps and tell the Turks they’d got to lay off. That’s what we’ve got to do now. The trick is to stir things up and keep them stirred until everyone, even the Americans, realizes we’re not going to go away and they make the occupying powers give us what we want. If we can’t stir things up one way, we’ll stir them another.’
‘What do you mean?’ snapped Momma.
Van just looked at her, saying nothing. He wasn’t simply teasing. There was something else, some meaning in the tense silence, which Letta didn’t understand.
‘As Van says, that is the trick,’ said Grandad quietly. ‘I think there is very little difference among any of us over that. The argument is about how the trick is to be performed. Ideally we should persuade the outside powers that our cause is just, which it is, that we are prepared to be obstinate about it, which we are, but also reasonable, which we are not. To attempt to hold a cultural festival in the old capital of one of our three provinces fills the bill as neatly as can be expected. I think we shall be prevented, but I will certainly act as if I intended to go, and if I am allowed to I shall do so.’
‘So will I,’ said Letta.
Momma rose, grabbed everyone’s mugs and banged them onto the tray.
‘I think you’re all mad,’ she said in English. ‘I see I shall have to talk to Steff. Open the door for me, please, Letta.’
She marched out, catching a pleat of her skirt on a loose screw on the door-plate. She ripped it free and tramped on down the stairs. As Letta was closing the door she turned and caught Grandad’s eye. He made a minute gesture with his hand for her to push off, so she took the pack of crumpets and left. As she went down the first flight she heard Grandad’s voice asking a question, and Van’s answering, cautious but obstinate. Then they were out of earshot.
Momma was already on the phone, saying ‘Hello, darling. Is your father there? Can I have a word with him?’
Letta patted her shoulder comfortingly, but got no response, so she went into the sitting-room and started flicking through the TV channels. There seemed to be nothing but dreary cricket and ancient Westerns. Van used to be good at cricket, she remembered. When she was small Momma had once taken her to watch him having a trial for the Hampshire Sec
ond XI. Cricket was like the sundilla, she thought. Probably all countries have something like that, meaningless and boring to anyone outside, but really important to people inside. Look at baseball, for heaven’s sake! Momma thought cricket was meaningless and boring – she’d only gone to watch because Van had been playing. But she’d cried while she’d danced the sundilla. Despite what had happened at Lapiri, she wasn’t really free, and she never would be.
She wanted to keep Varina as a kind of frill, a flavour, an old book you don’t read any more. It was cooking kalani and dancing at midnight in St Joseph’s Square. If Potok fell to ruins, if nobody remembered the dances, or knew how to cook kalani and trozhl and dumbris, if nobody dreamed in Field, if no-one could ever be pierced to the heart again by the single word anastrondaitu, Momma would say it was a pity, but that was all. She would say that she and her family had their own lives to live, here, now, in England. That was what really mattered. She would mean it, too, but still she would be lying.
Letta shook her head. I’m not going to tell myself that lie, she thought. Even if something like what happened at Lapiri happens to me, I will never tell myself that lie.
I hope.
LEGEND
The Daughter of Olla
MEN CAME TO Restaur Vax while he was shearing his sheep by the bridge of Avar, and told him that Selim Pasha was besieging Potok with seventeen thousand bazouks. He said nothing until he had lifted the fleece cleanly from the ewe between his knees. Then he laid his shears aside and stood.
To each of the men in turn he said, ‘Go now to such-and-such a chieftain and tell him what you have told me. Bid him come to the Old Stones of Falje on the eve of the next new moon.’
But to the last man of all he said, ‘Go west and south, beyond the furthest border. Ask those whom you meet for the place where the mountains are wildest and the law is least. There you will find Lash the Golden. Give him this half-piece of silver, and say no other word.’
So the men departed. Then Restaur Vax said to his wife, ‘You are my treasure and my joy, but Selim Pasha is besieging Potok with seventeen thousand bazouks, and I alone can hold the chieftains together, to drive him out once more. So give me your blessing and your leave, and when it is done I will return.’
She said, ‘If you must go, you must go. I give you my leave and my blessing.’
He said, ‘Men will seek you here to use you, because I am who I am. Take your daughters and our son1 to the cave where we were betrothed, and you will be safe.’
So they loaded three mules with all that they could carry, food and gear and guns, and Restaur Vax with his son in his arms led his family to the cave below the ridge of Avar, and saw them well-housed, and journeyed on to the Old Stones of Falje.
Now in Potok there were certain Greek merchants who feared for their lives and their goods should the city fall. They said among themselves, ‘Restaur Vax is no help. He is no more than a mountain brigand. Let us open the gates to Selim Pasha and he will protect us.’
So two of them went secretly to Selim in his camp and stood before him and said, ‘We will open the gates to you, if you will protect us and ours when you sack the city.’
But Selim smiled in his beard and shook his head. He took a peach and crushed it in his hand so that the juices ran between his fingers and said to them, ‘I hold Potok in the palm of my hand. My bazouks could take it in a morning, were I to give the order.’
He tossed the spoiled peach aside and said, ‘What use is Potok to me, while Restaur Vax is alive in the mountains? Bring him into my hands, and then I will protect you when the city falls.’
At that the Greeks were dismayed and returned to the city and took council. And one said, ‘A summer ago I travelled in the mountains, and at the bridge of Avar I traded with a woman who nursed a new-born child, her man being away. She spoke to me pleasantly but told me nothing of herself. There was, however, another woman, old and wandering in her wits, who told me that the first woman was the wife of Restaur Vax, and the child was his son, and that during the wars the woman had hidden in a cave far up the mountain until Restaur Vax had come to claim her as his bride. Now, no doubt, the woman is returned to that cave to hide. Let us therefore ask Selim for a safe conduct through his lines and take our Greek servants, whom we trust, and go and find this cave and seize this child, and then we can make Restaur Vax do our bidding for the child’s safety.’
So they agreed. But there was in this house a servant-woman, a Varinian named Olla, who, mistrusting the Greeks and knowing that they had stolen secretly from the town and returned, lay on the boards above, listening through a crack. And she had a small daughter, not eight years old. Olla took thought about how she should warn Restaur Vax, but the Turks ringed the city close about and she could see no way through for herself. So she took a butter barrel, just large enough for her daughter to curl within, and she made a fastening for the lid so that it could be opened from inside, and since she could not herself write, she taught her daughter what to say, and carried the barrel down to the river by night and set it floating on the current, which carried it away.
But the river was in spate with the snow-melt and the barrel jarred heavily against a boulder, so that the child was stunned and the barrel itself broke and the child was washed away down the stream and cast up on a sandbank far from the city.
There she was found by Lash the Golden, who was journeying to join Restaur Vax and fight the Turks once more. He had slept among bushes and woken at sunrise and gone to the river to bathe his face. Finding the child he turned her over and at first thought her drowned, but hoping that perhaps she yet lived, he made a fire and dried her and wrapped her in his coat and rubbed her limbs until she choked and opened her eyes.
Then, not knowing where she was or to whom she spoke, she whispered the lesson which her mother had taught her, saying, ‘I am the daughter of Olla, who is a servant-maid among the Greeks of Potok. My mother has heard her masters planning to seek the cave where the wife of Restaur Vax is in hiding, so that they may take his son and give him to Selim Pasha in exchange for their own safety.’
She closed her eyes and opened them again and said her lesson through, and again a third time, and then she died. At that Lash wept, and carried her to a priest, giving him silver for her burial, and then, going by goat-paths and the paths of the hunter, he hastened all day and all night and came at noon on the second day to the ridge above the Avar, below which lay the cave. There he heard shots, and ran with all speed, and saw men attacking the cave, while one held them at bay from within.
Seeing by their dress that these men were Greeks he lay down and took good aim and shot one man, and a second, and a third, so that the rest turned to flee. Then Lash the Golden drew his sword and fell upon them, cutting them down as they ran. When they were all slain or fled away he returned to the cave.
There he found Restaur’s wife and saluted her as the mother of heroes, for it was she who had held the cave until he came, using two guns, with her daughters loading one while she fired the other. He took them to a place of safety and journeyed on to the Old Stones, where he found Restaur Vax speaking strongly with the chieftains who had gathered there. Now, many were reluctant to take weapons once more and fight the Turk. They said, ‘What is Potok to us? It is spring, and we have our fields to sow and our flocks to drive to the high pastures.’ But Lash stood up before them and told them of the child who had carried the message, and they were shamed. For they said in their hearts, ‘If this child, this daughter of Olla, can die thus for Varina, how should not we, who are grown men and chieftains, do as much?’
1 Theodore Vax (1825–1870). Restaur Vax’s poem ‘Prayer for my Son’ (op. cit.) refers to the baby as having been born on the mountain, and baptized in blood, with the smoke of gunpowder for incense.
SEPTEMBER 1990
‘I THINK THAT’S absolutely horrible,’ said Letta, putting the book down. ‘I mean, she was only eight! She didn’t know what she was doing! She didn’t choose! Her m
other stuffed her into this barrel and threw her in the river and it went wrong and she got drowned, only she lived just long enough to give the message. And I bet she didn’t even know she was doing that, or what it meant, or anything. It was just something she had to get rid of before she could die. So they blub over her and think how noble they are and decide to go and fight the Turks after all. They just used her! It’s disgusting!’
‘One of the functions of legend is to make the disgusting tolerable,’ said Grandad. ‘There is in fact a poem by my great-grandfather about the daughter of Olla which makes much the same point. It’s called “Patriotism”. In fact it’s a difficult and obscure poem, very gloomy in tone, but I think what he’s saying is that patriotism is like the child’s message, something we don’t understand but we’ve still got to pass on, at whatever cost.’
‘He was using her too.’
‘I suppose so, but in his case . . .’
‘Hold it. That’s the telephone.’
Letta jumped up and ran downstairs. She and Grandad were alone in the house. It was the last day of school holidays. Momma was at work. Poppa was back in Bolivia, and Van was off on his bike somewhere up north. In fact he was supposed to have been back for lunch, and Letta was a bit cross with him for not letting her know, as she’d got it all ready, and she and Grandad had waited for him, too, when she’d been really hungry. She guessed the telephone would be him now, saying where he’d got to, all charm. She picked the receiver up, ready to snap, and gave the number.
‘May I speak to Letta Ozlins?’ said a woman’s voice.
‘Ozolins,’ said Letta automatically. ‘That’s me.’
‘I’m afraid I have some bad news for you,’ said the voice. ‘Will you please sit down?’
Letta’s heart gave a desperate thud and her throat went dry. She groped for the chair and sat.
‘All right,’ she managed to say.
‘This is the Royal Hospital,’ said the voice. ‘It’s about your brother Van. Is that his full name?’
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