Peter Dickinson - Shadow of a Hero

‘Oh, no, darling!’

‘But it’s true.’

‘It isn’t true in any way that matters.’

The road was twisting beside the river now, the cab growling round the sharp bends. Any moment they’d be in Potok.

‘Have you tried to find her again?’ said Letta. ‘Your mother, I mean. I asked Grandad about her once, but he just shook his head and I knew I mustn’t ask again.’

‘He has not forgiven himself. He’s trying to find out something, now that the barriers are down, but so many people have disappeared . . . I’m not sure I any longer want to know . . .’

They were silent again until they rounded the last bend and saw the old East Gate of Potok – the only one left – ahead of them. On either side of it the battlemented walls showed here and there among the red-tiled roofs. In front of it several hundred people were dancing a sundilla , the weaving chain-dance it took only a dozen dancers to start, and then anyone who felt like it could join in, while the bystanders clapped with the music. All the traffic had slowed and was nudging through, as the dancers wove in and out among the cars.

Letta watched them pass. She didn’t know what to think or how to feel. Lapiri had seemed so pure, so simple, but it was there that Momma’s own momma had stood by a grave in somebody else’s mourning and watched somebody else’s daughter being dug out of the ground, and known that she would probably never see her own daughter again. That was the picture that kept coming back.

Two chains of dancers went snaking by on either side of the cab. One lot wore national dress and carried baskets of flowers which they tossed across the roof of the cab to the other lot. They were laughing with excitement and happiness, but some of them, Letta thought, might have had fathers or grandfathers who had driven out to Lapiri and carried Momma’s momma away, blindfolded, with Junni’s body in a sack in the back of the car.

‘If Junni hadn’t been drowned,’ she whispered, ‘I wouldn’t be here today.’

‘Try not to brood about it, darling,’ said Momma. ‘It was a long time ago and we might as well enjoy our last few days in Varina.’

Deliberately, as if to show what she meant, she had begun to clap her hands in rhythm to the dance. But two nights later black cars had come and men had taken Grandad out of his bed and whisked him away. Just like the old days.

Still standing in the aisle of the aeroplane Letta bent and kissed Momma’s forehead and whispered, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘At least you can now see why I prefer to live in England,’ said Momma, grimly, and closed her eyes.

Letta felt her way to her seat and sat thinking about Lapiri until the stewardess came back with tea. Grandad, who seemed to have been half-asleep, straightened and looked decidedly perkier.

‘There is champagne also,’ she whispered, ‘since you are travelling first class. We keep a little French champagne for the VIPs. I will say I made a mistake . . .’

‘At the moment tea means more to me than all the vintages of France,’ said Grandad. ‘Sugar, please, but not that plasticized milk. Ah!’

He smiled at her and cradled the cup beneath his nose to sniff the steam. He looked relaxed and calm, like an old man Letta had noticed on the road to Lapiri, sitting at his door in the sun with his dog’s head on his lap.

‘What happened after they took me away?’ he asked.

Letta pulled herself together and started to tell him all she’d seen, being woken, finding Nigel and then Mollie, struggling through to the hotel, his telephone call, Van, Otto Vasa’s speech, and then waiting and waiting for the car . . .

‘. . . in the end they didn’t dare bring it into Potok,’ she said. ‘The crowd would have wrecked it. We had to walk out to the Jirin Gate. They gave us an escort, real heavies. We saw other cars burning, and shops being looted. Then there was a road-block, a barricade, you know. Some of the men there had guns. And they wouldn’t let us through till they’d checked again with Otto Vasa. After that it was easy. Somebody went and fetched the car and we drove all the rest of the way.’

‘Did you see any signs of military activity?’

‘They’d pasted newspaper over the windows so that we couldn’t see out, but we had to stop twice and the officer got out for a bit and came back and I heard orders being given.’

‘And you thought Otto Vasa was horrible.’

‘Yes. I hope Lash wasn’t really like that.’

‘In what way horrible?’

‘I don’t know. Oh yes, I do. At first I just decided he thought much too much of himself, as if he was the festival – I know he’d paid for most of it so he was a bit entitled – but I couldn’t stand the way people like Mr Orestes fawned on him – Van too, I’m afraid – and you could see how he loved it at the same time as he despised them for it – all that. And of course Minna Alaya had warned me about him . . . But really, it was the way he talked about you when he was whipping the crowd up, as if you weren’t a real person, just something like Restaur’s banner which he could say big, noble things about . . . And then lying, too. I heard Momma telling him you were all right and they were treating you OK, but he talked about you being in prison, and tortured . . . And he talked about you as if you were dead . And then, when he came back into the room after he’d been pouring out all this sob-stuff and he didn’t think anyone was looking, he was so pleased with himself that he winked! I hate him!’

Grandad sipped and nodded and sipped again.

‘How do you interpret the wink?’ he said. ‘He winked to someone in particular, I take it.’

‘Some kind of a henchman who’d given him a thumbs-up. I think they were saying, “We’ve done it. We’ve brought it off. This is what we wanted.” I mean that was what Van was saying, too.’

‘Interpret further, my darling. Did the wink celebrate a chance opportunity successfully seized, or a deliberate plan carried through?’

‘I don’t know. The plan, I suppose. I’m just guessing. Why?’

‘Naturally I asked many times what I had done to deserve this treatment. In the end I was informed that I had broken the conditions of my visa, which I took to mean that I had taken part in political activities. I had been extremely careful not to, but I was aware from the first that efforts were being made to provoke me into political statements, in particular by one or two of Otto Vasa’s entourage.’

‘The one he winked to was a skinny little man with a big moustache.’

‘That could be Nirvan Orestes, a cousin of our Hector’s. He is certainly of the party which would like to provoke an immediate confrontation with the Romanian government, if not outright rebellion.’

‘You mean one of them actually told the Romanians?’

‘I’m afraid it is all too probable. As always, I am much more use to them as a name and a symbol, than as a living person with opinions of my own. Ah, well. What about you, my darling? It is sad for you that our lovely adventure should end like this.’

Letta didn’t say anything.

‘No?’ he asked.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘Something had to happen. It was too lovely. It wasn’t real. Did Momma tell you she’d taken me to Lapiri?’

‘She did.’

‘And on the way back she told me what happened there?’

‘Yes.’

‘At first I wished she hadn’t. It seemed to spoil everything. And then I thought it’s better to know. You can’t pretend everything’s a pretty dream when it isn’t. Those people out in the Square – there must be a lot of them who’d do things like that to each other. I expect some of them have. You’ve got to know that, too.’