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 Stephan1 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.