‘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 bazouks1 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.’
At that the woman blessed him and brought out bread and peaches and wine, and while he ate she said, ‘You are too fine a man to be a priest, and moreover my husband was an old man, and he died, so I am a widow.3 I have three good fields on the mountain, and a sound hut, and twenty-seven sheep. You could do worse.’
Restaur Vax looked her over. She was a handsome woman.
‘It is a fair offer,’ he said. ‘One day I may return. But first I must go to fight the Turks.’
‘If you must go, you must go,’ said the woman.
She went into the house and brought out a sword which she had kept hidden among her roof-beams.
‘This was my husband’s sword,’ she said. ‘It was his father’s, and his father’s before him. But my husband gave me only daughters, and it will be long before either of them bears a son, and longer still before he will wear it. Take it with my blessing, and fight the Turks.’
Restaur Vax tested the sword, bending it across his knee, and it sprang singing back to straightness. So he put it through his belt, beneath his priest’s gown, and thanked the woman and went on his way.
1 Bashi-bazouks were Turkish irregulars, often indistinguishable from brigands. In Varinian bazouk denoted any Turkish soldier of low rank.
2 Count Axur was the largely legendary last count of Varina, who is said to have resisted the Turkish conquest until his death in battle.
3 Like Orthodox priests, those of the Church of Varina are permitted to marry, but, presumably as an attempt to compromise with Roman Catholic doctrines of celibacy, they may only marry widows.
AUTUMN 1989
THE SECRETARY TURNED out not to be beautiful, but he still could have been a spy, Letta thought. He was a plump, twitchy little man with clever dark eyes, about thirty-something, she guessed. His name was Mr Jaunis (pronounced Jones, roughly, because that is how Varinian works) but he at once told Letta to call him Teddy. She decided not to make up her mind whether she liked him for a bit. It wasn’t that his smiling brightness seemed forced, but it didn’t tell you much. It was like the twinkle on a sheet of water, which might hide anything below the surface, or nothing.
Dutifully, Letta called him Teddy. He came by train from London and walked up the hill from the station. One of his afternoons was Tuesday, when Letta was late home from school because of Choral Soc, so it was only Fridays that the three of them had tea together. The first time he was horrified by crumpets, though they were Sainsbury’s best, and he insisted on reading the list of ingredients on the packet. When he’d decided they wouldn’t kill him, he consented to try a corner of Letta’s but wouldn’t allow her to butter it, though melted butter is at least half the point of having crumpets at all. Letta noticed Grandad watching the by-play over his spectacles with a look of sharp amusement, but when she began to act up herself, coaxing and teasing, he gave a tiny shake of his head, and she stopped.
‘You will have to be more cautious,’ he said after Mr Jaunis had left.
‘I don’t think he realized.’
‘I think perhaps he did. He is a clever and ambitious young man.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought being a secretary was all that ambitious.’
‘It is only two afternoons a week, and for the moment he is not going to let some rival have the chance. The position has its possibilities, apart from the simple one of knowing what I am up to. I am an old man, he may think, and I prefer not to be over-wearied with work. No doubt I would welcome a trusted assistant who could speak for me at times, using my name . . .’
‘You aren’t going to let him!’
‘He has just discovered that. This afternoon he brought me papers to sign – an appeal to various world leaders, a statement to the press, a memorandum to the British Foreign Office and another to the American State Department, and so on. We had settled the texts last Tuesday, but I found both memoranda now contained an extra paragraph, not very significant, but on a delicate point. I told him to take them away and bring them back next Tuesday without it.’
‘You mean he was trying to make you say things you didn’t agree with!’
‘That would have been stupid, and he is far from stupid. I might well have agreed to the addition if he had suggested it while we were settling the text. He knew that, and was just testing my reactions.’
‘Anyway, what is there to disagree about? Don’t we all just want Varina to be a proper country on its own, like it used to be?’
‘That is the romantic view, and since we are a romantic people that is what practically every Varinian would vote for, if it came to a vote. But the historical argument is not strong. Since the mythical days of Count Axur we were a precariously separate country for just over two years, more than a hundred and fifty years ago, from the expulsion of the Pashas until the Treaty of Milan. Then for the next eighty years we were a quasi-autonomous Prince-Bishopric, first under the nominal rule of the Turks and then under the
Austrians.’
‘Yes, I know all that, but it doesn’t make any difference. We know what we are and where we belong, don’t we?’
‘We know it only too well. That is part of the difficulty. It makes it harder for us to share the knowledge with our neighbours. Remember, there are areas in all three provinces in which there are more Serbs, or more Romanians, or more Bulgarians, than there are Varinians. And then, my darling, what are we to say to the realists who ask us how a country of three hundred thousand people, landlocked, with barely a town larger than an English village, apart from Potok, how could such a country survive economically in the modern world?’
‘I don’t know. There are lots of tiny countries . . . I mean how big’s Luxemburg? Oh, come off it, Grandad! I know how you’d vote, and so do you!’
‘Yes, of course. Whether it would work or not, we would have to prove to ourselves, and not leave it to the rest of the world to tell us it wouldn’t. But that is not the real argument. The real argument comes in three parts. First, what is the best that we can hope for? Second, what should we demand, as a bargaining position, in order to achieve that best? And third, what promises or threats, what tools or weapons, do we have to bargain with?’
‘Weapons? Do you mean actual weapons?’
‘Some of us do. Some of us want nothing less than everything and would do nothing less than everything to get it.’
‘What do you mean? Hijacking? Murder? Like the IRA?’
‘I will tell you a story. During the war some of my people ambushed a German patrol. Lives were lost on both sides in the gun battle. My people thought that a fair price. But the Germans came to the nearest village and burnt it to the ground and shot all the men and the older boys and took the women and children to camps where many of them died also. My people were outraged, but it merely hardened our resolve. We immediately raided down into territory which the Germans thought they held securely, so as to show them that we were prepared to pay for our freedom not only with our own lives but also with the lives of those we loved.’
‘That’s horrible. But it’s different, isn’t it? I mean it was war.’
‘The IRA will tell you they are fighting a war against an invading power.’
‘But it isn’t true.’
‘It is in their eyes. And with us it is certainly true in the case of the Romanian province. Even by the standards of Eastern Europe the Romanian regime is peculiarly disgusting. They have a policy of trying to turn all its people into robots, all the same as each other and all worshipping their abominable dictator, Ceauşescu. To this end the army is sweeping peasants out of their ancestral villages, and bulldozing the houses and settling the people into dreary identical concrete towns, far from their own fields and farms. The English papers have other things to write about, but Mr Jaunis has reliable information that the process has now reached Varina. There has been fighting between the Romanian army and some of our own people in the Lower Olta valley.’
‘But that’s different. They’ve got to fight, haven’t they? I mean if people come to smash your home and drive you away.’
‘Yes, in the end you must fight, though you know that it will only mean the army returning in greater force, with greater ferocity. It has happened before. I told you, small nations have long memories. There were never fewer than nine thousand Germans, well-trained and heavily armed, trying to control our western province in the war, and they still did not succeed.’
‘Isn’t there anything we can do? Us, here? Shall I write to our MP? Oh, there must be a Romanian Embassy. Why aren’t we chaining ourselves to the railings, or something?’
‘By all means write to your MP.’
‘I’ll get Biddie and Angel to write too. I’ll tell them what to say. What about the Embassy?’
‘A vigil is being organized, for next week.’
‘Magic! Can I go? Next week’s half-term, and Momma’s said I can go to London and meet Mollie and Nigel and go Christmas shopping. That won’t take all day.’
Grandad started to say something, and stopped and did his trick with the invisible fingers instead. Then he said, ‘We have got away from the subject. I was trying to explain that there are perfectly honourable Varinian patriots who would argue that the only effective form of protest would be not a vigil but a car bomb.’
‘They can’t! That would be absolutely criminal!’
‘Worse than a crime, a mistake, as Napoleon said.’
‘Did he? He was a jerk anyway. What about the vigil? Is it all right if I go? If we time it right, I could take my sleeping-bag and vigil all night and join up with Mollie and Nigel next day.’
‘No,’ said Grandad sharply, but then shook his head, not at Letta but at himself.
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘There isn’t an earthly Momma would let me. I’ll do exactly what you tell me. Things must be quite tricky enough for you already, without me butting in.’
‘I am pleased – oh, far more than pleased – that you should want to learn Formal, and listen to boring lectures about the politics of my country. One day I hope you will be able to go there, to see where you come from. But it is not your country, despite your name, and despite your talking Field as easily as a native. You are an English girl. You will live your life in this country, marry an Englishman, bear English children. That is your future.’
He spoke urgently but sounded grim and tired. Letta looked at him, and saw that for the moment he really seemed to be eighty-something.
‘Did Momma make you say that?’ she said.
He hesitated, shrugged and then said, ‘It was one of the things we agreed. I am not to involve you actively in Varinian politics.’
‘Momma’s much Englisher than I’ll ever be. You can’t tell me what I’m going to be, not even you, Grandad. I’m going to choose for myself. Poppa isn’t English, really.’
‘No, but nor is he Varinian any longer. He is an exile, a citizen of Exilia. There is no country he can ever call home. Perhaps women are more sensible about such things than men.’
‘You aren’t allowed to talk like that any more. The gender police will come after you. Do you know about the gender police? It was something Angel saw in a sketch on the telly. They hang around in plain clothes and pick you up for making sexist remarks.’
‘I will plead senility. Listen, my darling. This is important. Not for what I agreed with your momma, but for your sake and mine. I want you to be very cautious, now that this sort of thing is starting to happen, about how you involve yourself in Varinian affairs. All exile communities are full of factions and trouble-makers, and ours is no exception. Because you are my granddaughter, and the great-great-great granddaughter of Restaur Vax, my namesake, there will always be people trying to use you for their own ends and purposes. I will not have you so used. Do you understand?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Which is about as much understanding as can be hoped for in affairs of this sort.’
‘Are you going to the vigil?’
‘I am booked to inaugurate it by handing in a protest at the Embassy, or at least attempting to, as they will certainly refuse to accept it.’
‘If I fix Momma, can I come with you? I won’t tell anyone you’re my grandad. I’ll just mingle and vigil for a bit.’
‘You must make it clear to your momma that I did my best to dissuade you.’
‘She won’t know you had anything to do with it.’
‘How will you achieve that? It seems highly implausible.’
‘Tsk, tsk, Grandad. You’re not supposed to know anything about it. Just give me Mr Jaunis’s phone number. It’s OK, I’m not going to ring him myself.’
She grinned teasingly at him as she wrote it down, then loaded the tray and took it downstairs. Momma would still be at least half an hour before she got home, so she rang up her nephew Nigel – the one who was three months older than her – and chatted for a bit, then asked if Steff was home.
Steff was Nigel’s father, the older of Letta’
s two brothers. Although he’d been grown up when she was born he’d always, ever since she could remember, been her chief ally in the family, especially when it came to getting round Momma about something. She started to explain about the vigil.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘They sent me a leaflet. I actually thought of going. I’m having the day off anyway to look after Donna while Mollie takes you two shopping, but I decided it wouldn’t be much fun for her. Well, what about it?’
She told him. He laughed.
‘I’ll put it to Mollie,’ he said. ‘It sounds just her line of business. What’s the betting she’ll have taken the whole show over by the time Grandad gets there?’
LEGEND
Lash the Golden
WHEN RESTAUR VAX came to Talosh an old woman met him by the gate and knew him. She cast dust on her head and said to him, ‘Your father is dead. The Pasha of Potok came with his bazouks and slew him. Your brother and sister they have taken away. Your roof-tree they have burnt. Your walls they have cast down. Your fields they have ploughed with salt. You have no more place among us.’
‘Why have they done this thing?’ said Restaur Vax.
‘The son of the Pasha was hunting and saw your sister and would have taken her, but your father smote him with his staff and drove him away.’
Restaur Vax stood silent. Then he said, ‘I will not ask you to give me bread, lest the Turks should do the same to you.’
The woman put her hand into her basket and brought out a fresh-baked loaf and broke it in two and gave him half.
‘I and your grandmother drew water at the same well,’ she said. ‘What are the Turks to me?’
Then Restaur Vax climbed the hill and saw the ruin of his father’s farm and wept.1 When he had wept an hour he paced distances this way and that, and then loosed the earth with his sword and uncovered a great stone, but he could not move it with his hands. As he was levering at the stone with a hoe-handle which the Turks had broken, a stranger came down the hill, a man of the old blood2 with yellow hair and beard. He stood two hands’-breadths taller than ordinary men. Though all but bazouks were forbidden to bear weapons, he carried a musket at his back and two fine pistols in his belt. He saw Restaur Vax levering at the stone.
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