Authors: Peter Dickinson
So the Pashas gathered at Potok. Then the Pasha of Slot said, ‘Let these Christian swine understand the full measure of our vengeance. Let us take their bishop, Bishop Pango, and crucify him on the walls of Potok, where all Varina may see him.’
The Pasha of Falje said, ‘I have word that he has fled to the Monastery of St Valia, where there are many secret ways and places of hiding.’
The Pasha of Aloxha said, ‘My Captain of
Bazouks
is a man who does not know pity or fear. Let him take command, and he will find this infidel.’
So the Captain gave orders and the
bazouks
surrounded the great monastery, and seized all who fled. They broke down the doors and found the Fathers at prayer, but with blows and insults they herded them into the courtyard. The Captain of Bazouks looked silently at them.
Then he said, ‘Where is your bishop? My masters, the Pashas, would speak with him, but not one hair of his beard will they harm.’
But the Fathers saw that he lied and did not answer.
Then the Captain stood the Fathers in line before him and said, ‘Very well, since you are foolish old men, I must show you that I will have my way. Let every fifth old fool stand forward.’
He walked along the line of Fathers, beckoning each fifth one forward. And a certain Father Stephan, counting swiftly to his right, changed places with the Father on his left, pushing him roughly aside, and when the Captain of Bazouks stood before him this Father shook and trembled as if with fear, and seemed to wish to change his place again. And the Captain of Bazouks, having seen what he did, smiled in his beard and said, ‘You have missed your count, old man, for it is now you who are the fifth one. Stand forward.’
When he had passed in this manner all down the line, the Captain made the Fathers he had chosen kneel down, with necks outstretched, and he posted a
bazouk
beside each one, with his scimitar drawn and ready to smite, and said, ‘Now which of you will tell me where Bishop Pango is
hidden?
If none will, then all that I have chosen will die on my signal. Moreover they will die in vain, for I will then burn this monastery with fire, and leave no stone standing on its fellow, and your bishop will die among the ruins.’
Still not one Father spoke, so he gave the signal and they died. Of the rest, some he whipped and some he tortured, but still all held their silence. Then with blows and insults he drove them from the monastery, and his
bazouks
brought fire, and burned it. Levers too they brought and heaved the stones apart. And many secret ways and places of hiding they uncovered, but Bishop Pango they did not find.
But the Fathers took the road from Potok towards the Danube, those who were less hurt helping those who were more hurt. At the river they sent word to a certain man who had a boat, which he brought secretly to them by night. And Bishop Pango stood before them at the water’s edge and said, ‘I leave you, and I leave this beloved land so that I may journey through Christendom, where I will tell the Princes of the Church and the Princes of the Peoples of the sufferings of our nation under the oppression of the Turks. Be brave, and trust in God, and in a little while I will return.’
Now the Fathers urged him to go quickly, before the Turks took thought where he might be and pursued and found him, but he said, ‘I must stay another hour, so that in this place, on the sacred soil of Varina, we may sing a full Mass together for our dead brothers, and especially for the soul of Father Stephan, who knowingly moved into my fifth place in the line, and died so that I might live.’
So on the shore of the Danube, above Slot, where the Chapel of the Blessed Stephan
1
now stands, they sang the full Mass for the Dead. None heard, and none came by. Then Bishop Pango boarded the boat and left them.
1
The Chapel has recently been demolished by the Communist regime, on the pretext that the site was needed for a navigation light.
AUGUST 1990
THEY WOKE IN
the dewy dawn, tried to stretch away their aches and stiffness, and took their turns at the improvised latrines, leaving the coach-loos for the elderly. When they started to cook their breakfasts from the store-truck the soldiers who had been left to keep an eye on them gathered hungrily round. Some of them wanted to try out their English, but mostly they were interested in Western food. They thought the instant coffee was terrific compared to what they could get in Romania. They liked peanut butter, but not Marmite.
‘It’s funny,’ said someone as she delicately spread her bread. ‘You have to be English to like Marmite. I know I couldn’t live without it.’
‘So you English now?’ said the soldier who was standing by, wolfing his third peanut-butter sandwich. ‘You say before you Varinish.’
‘We’re both,’ they all said.
‘What you want here?’ said the soldier, pointing towards the horizon. ‘Nothing is for you in these mountains, no motor car for all people, no oil-well, no swim-pool. What you do here?’
Several voices answered. ‘We’re going home.’ ‘That’s where we belong.’ ‘We want to see what Varina is like.’
‘Varina no place,’ he said patronizingly, and drew a map with his finger in the air. ‘Romania
here
. Yugoslavia here. Hungaria here. Where now Varina?’
‘There!’ they shouted, flinging out their arms towards the mountains.
He shrugged and held out his mug for more coffee.
They had tidied up the campsite as best they could and it was already getting too hot for comfort when permission came through for them to move on. The officer who brought it didn’t bother to hide the fact that he thought they shouldn’t be there at all, and insisted on escorting them the whole way to Potok. Two hours after they set off there was another delay at a proper check-point manned by soldiers, where for a few horrible minutes it looked as if their escort and the check-point commander were going to agree to turn them back. Mollie gave a sigh of relief as she settled into her seat and the coach moved on.
‘They were trying to tell us Potok was full up,’ she said, ‘and there wasn’t any more room.’
‘Was that the border, do you think?’ said Nigel. ‘Will there be an actual sign saying Varina?’
‘If there’s a sign it will say Cerna-Potok,’ said Steff. ‘There is no such place as Varina on Romanian maps.’
‘Look, there’s a flag!’ said Mollie.
It hung at an upstairs window, and they all cheered it, and the next, and the next, but soon they gave up because there were too many to cheer. By then they’d begun to see another sign that they must truly be in Varina now. Letta had more uncertain feelings about this one. Almost every blank surface – the walls of barns, the buttresses of bridges, crags by the wayside as the road snaked up into the mountains – carried
the
same three letters, as huge as the space would allow, sometimes carefully lettered, sometimes daubed fiercely on in seven slashes of paint:
VAX
‘I hope they know which one they mean,’ said Nigel.
‘They mean both,’ said Minna, twisting round from the seat in front of them. ‘They are the same. For us he has never died.’
Like Momma, about a third of the women in the coach were called Minna. This one was forty at least. Her hair had a lot of grey in it and her clothes were as shapeless as her body, and Letta had decided she was rather sad, but now her eyes were wet and glittered behind the tears, so that she looked almost a little crazy. Her expression crystallized Letta’s feelings of unease. Letta knew and loved Grandad and admired him no end. She was sure there wasn’t anyone else in the whole world quite like him. She was glad that other people could feel that, too. But she also knew that he was an old man, who even when he was feeling fully well got tired quite soon. That he was coming to open the festival was lovely, happy-making for everyone. They would see and hear him, and he would be in his own country again after all these years, and they’d all be glad for each other’s sake as well as their own, and so on.
But really there wasn’t anything much he could
do
.
One old man can’t change everything, but here was Minna looking as if she expected Grandad to take hold of Varina, to pick up the three pieces of it between his hands and mould them gently into
a
single piece and put them down again in their place, one country now, never to be taken apart again. And Minna herself would happily die if that would help him do it. No, Letta thought. I’m thirteen and you’re forty, but I know it’s a fairy story and you don’t.
At first the road climbed steadily along a mountain flank. The surface was good and the curves gentle, so the convoy sped along. Then they turned off up a narrower, steeper road, with huge pot holes unmended since last winter. An endless ladder of hairpins took them grindingly up and up and over a ridge which was a huge spur of the great Carpathian chain. The pass was bleak and barren, between snow-capped peaks. Beyond it the road swooped down towards a wide valley, with a fair-sized river wriggling along the bottom.
Letta’s ears popped and popped again as they took the downward hairpins. The road levelled and swung round a shoulder, and there, far below them, lay a town, a jumble of red ridged tiles, the domes of small whitewashed churches, larger domes on one big church, a ruined something on the hillside beyond with a mass of tents alongside it. She counted the five bridges and knew it must be Potok. The big church must be the Cathedral of St Joseph, and the ruin was the old monastery of St Valia.
Everyone was pointing and chattering. Potok vanished and came again several times as the road wound its way down. And then they were there. The town seemed to have no outlying bits. At one moment the coaches were passing scrubby precipitous hillsides, with here and there a tiny stone-walled field or a terraced vineyard, and the next they were in a street of battered old houses,
all
plastered the same blotchy orange-yellow, with shuttered windows and heavy crooked doors which hadn’t been painted for years, and wide overhanging eaves like hat brims. It was so narrow that in places, if the coach windows had opened, you could have reached out and touched the walls on both sides.
The street was crowded with pedestrians, who all stopped what they were doing to cheer the coaches as they churned slowly through. Two women in black, with lined weather-beaten old faces, climbed through the open door and came down the aisle, handing out nosegays of rosemary and bay and marjoram tied with ribbon in the national colours. They didn’t want any money. When they got down some of the travellers did so too.
‘Let’s walk for a bit,’ said Nigel. ‘Is that OK, Mum? We won’t get lost.’
Mollie looked at Steff. She usually left family decisions to him.
‘Don’t see why not,’ he said. ‘Difficult to get lost in a place this size. If in doubt ask for the University, and when you’re there, look for the British contingent.’
So Nigel and Letta jumped down and waited while the coach took the stench of its exhaust slowly away, and then followed up the street. It was slow going, as every few yards somebody would stop them and ask where they were from. Letta realized they must be obviously not native Varinians with their Marks & Spencer clothes and their pale northern skins. It had been a terrific summer back home, but their tans still looked washy beside those of the people who lived all the time under these southern skies.
‘Where are you from?’ they were asked, time and again, and when they answered, ‘England,’ the next question, almost always, was, ‘Has Restaur Vax come with you?’
‘Not with us,’ Letta told them. ‘We came out on a coach, but he’s a bit old for that, so he’s flying to Bucharest. He’s supposed to be here tomorrow.’
Next, people wanted to know about England, and to try out the English they’d learnt in school, and just be friendly. They didn’t seem to find it odd, either, that Letta could rattle away in Field or that Nigel couldn’t, but there was something about their smiles which gave Letta a feeling that they thought the way she spoke was a bit peculiar. Or perhaps they were simply amused by her eagerness and excitement, which she certainly felt. Being in a country where everybody spoke Field, as the normal thing, was wonderful. She felt like a bird released into the air.
Nigel was tugging at her sleeve. She looked ahead. The coaches were out of sight.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I don’t want Mum worrying.’
(Typical Nigel. He was the worrier, not Mollie.)
So they hurried as best they could, until they found the road blocked almost from side to side by a scrum of people milling round a centre where a man was being hoisted into the air, amid cheers which mingled with hoots and laughter as he was dropped and then hoisted again, to sit on his bearers’ shoulders, waving both arms overhead in triumphant greeting.
‘Hey! It’s Uncle Van!’ said Nigel.
It was, too. He’d had his back to them, but the churn of the crowd turned him until Letta could
see
her brother’s long, normally moody face, now smiling and excited.
‘What’s he think he’s doing?’ said Nigel. ‘This isn’t
The Prisoner of Zenda
. Bet you he’s told them who his grandad is.’
Letta found Van interesting, and thought she might have liked him if she’d known him better, but Nigel, naturally enough, had picked up Steff’s attitude. And certainly Van didn’t just look like the star of some old sword-play romance. He seemed to feel like that too, the True Heir come back to his oppressed people. They’d be storming the castle next, while he held twenty men-at-arms at bay on the stairway to the young queen’s bedroom.
‘Who do they cheer?’ said a woman crushed against the wall beside her.
‘His name’s Van Ozolins,’ said Letta. ‘He’s just come on the coach from Scotland.’
‘Scotland?’ said the woman, impressed. ‘Still he is one of us. He has the face of our men.’
Letta knew what she was talking about. She’d already seen dozens of versions of it on the streets of Potok. Grandad had it, too. He used to joke about it and quote a poem by the other Restaur Vax about Varinian men which started off, ‘Combative, wiry, hound-faced, crazed with honour . . .’ Yes, that was Van all right.