Peter Dickinson - Shadow of a Hero

‘Why not Minna Vax?’ said Letta.

‘I’ll come to that.’

‘I’m sorry. It must have been . . . oh, there aren’t words!’

‘Yes, it was very bad. Even I understood it was very bad, though they still didn’t tell me anything. Minna was always afraid I might go crazed again. I did, once or twice, for a few days. All I knew was that my mother had left me and something very bad had happened. I didn’t want to know what that something was. I tried to bury even the knowledge I had, to hide it away. I wanted Minna to be my mother. I wanted to be Junni, but she wouldn’t let me. I was Kanors, not Vari. Worse trouble would come if I tried to be Vari – bloodlines are very important in these remote villages. Furthermore, she told me that my mother and father had been scholars, so I must be one too. My mother had taught me to read and write – Minna couldn’t – and the Communists had set up schools so that they could teach everyone to be Communists too, but our little school was very primitive and our teacher wanted to send me to a grande school. Minna agreed at once, and the villagers clubbed together to pay for my needs.

‘I was delighted to go. It was a way of hiding, of burying, the bad secret which I must never know. It was a way of starting to be somebody new. I felt I had no name. I wasn’t Junni or Minna, Vari or Kanors. I think that is why I worked so hard at school. I was a prize pupil. I hadn’t been that before. I was a kind of new person. Do you see?

‘Anyway they sent me to university, here in Potok, when I was barely sixteen. I met your father. We had known each other only a fortnight when he asked me to marry him. He had reasons of his own, but for me it was a door into a new world, and I could go through it and close it behind me and forget everything I had been before. I would have my own name at last. Minna Ozolins. We bribed officials to let me marry so young.

‘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.’