Only he’d never been allowed to. Letta reached out her invisible hand and laid it weightless on his shoulder. He paused for a moment in his writing, then went on.
Forty years in exile, and all because of that dreadful old fox, Bishop Pango. First thing Letta would do when Grandad got home was tell him what she thought of Bishop Pango.
* * *
‘You do him an injustice,’ said Grandad. ‘Without him we might not be a people at all today. Sixty years ago, you know, when Romania was at least nominally a democracy, our northern province sent two members to the parliament in Bucharest. They were not on speaking terms with each other, because they belonged to opposing parties. One was a Vaxite and one was a Pangoist.’
‘That’s silly.’
‘Silly but normal. It is nothing exclusive to Varina. It happens wherever there isn’t enough of something important to go round – money, justice, power. There will always be some who will settle for nothing less than what they believe to be rightfully theirs. They are the Vaxites. The Pangoists are the ones who calculate the most they are likely to get, and settle for that.’
‘But Restaur Vax had done all the work. He’d made it happen. Then they booted him out.’
‘It was what they could get. There is never enough justice to go round. Besides, there are times for heroes, and times when it is better for heroes to do the decent thing and recede into legend.’
Letta looked at him, puzzled. He’d changed. Only slightly – perhaps she wouldn’t have noticed if she’d been seeing him every day. He was still brown from the Varinian sun, and sat as straight as ever in his stiff chair, but he seemed somehow smaller. His hands looked older than she’d remembered, with hummocked veins under the loose, blotched skin. And his voice sounded sad – nothing a stranger would have heard, but Letta’s ears caught the note.
‘Are you all right?’ she said.
‘The doctors say I am doing very well for my age. Why?’
‘You sound unhappy. Underneath, I mean. Or angry.’
‘I’m sorry. I’ve missed you. And now, instead of having worthwhile conversations with my granddaughter I shall have to spend my days doing what I can to prevent our modern Vaxites and Pangoists from ruining everything with their stupid quarrels.’
‘Which are you?’
He smiled and put his hands together in the old way, with the ghosts of his left-hand fingers resting against the living ones of his right hand.
‘You will tell no-one?’ he asked. ‘Very well. Between us two only, I am an onion. At the outside you have my name, like the brown onion skin you throw away. Next there is a Pangoist layer, not thick, because I want those I talk to to believe I am someone they can do business with. But inside that I am a Vaxite. I demand everything we are entitled to. No, wait, this is still not the centre, but it is a good thick layer, and it means that those who wish to do business with me must realize that I, too, mean business. If I demand less than everything, they will fob me off with less than they might have yielded, and I shall find that I have betrayed both myself and my country. Then, inside that I am a Pangoist. In the end I will take what I can get.’
‘Oh.’
‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, my darling. But suppose there had been no Bishop Pango, no Treaty of Milan. Suppose my namesake had insisted on fighting on, demanding complete independence, what would have happened? The great powers who imposed the treaty would have lost patience, sympathy with little Varina would have ebbed away, we would have become no more than the naughty child in the European nursery, and the Turks would have been left to crush us out of existence. There might well have been no Varina at all today.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘The same is even truer now. We would not be fighting against muskets and scimitars and clumsy cannon. The Serbs and Bulgarians and Romanians all have modern armies, with modern weapons. How many rocket attacks, how long an artillery bombardment, do you think it would take to reduce the buildings around St Joseph’s Square – our lovely cathedral, our ridiculous palace – to heaps of golden rubble?’
‘Don’t! It won’t happen, will it? Not nowadays?’
‘Nowadays is a very frail notion. It certainly could happen, though I believe the odds are still on the side of reason. But if Otto Vasa is given his head, I will no longer think so. He already has a considerable following.’
‘Parvla went to a huge rally of his.’
‘Parvla?’
‘Didn’t I tell you? The friend I met at the festival. I got a letter from her this morning. Van made a speech at the rally. She says every girl in her valley is in love with him.’
‘She doesn’t live in Potok?’
‘No. I write to a place called Kalavani, but that’s only where she goes to collect the letters. She lives in a farm up a side-valley – it’s an hour’s walk, she says. It must be perfectly lovely. She says you look right out down the valley, and there’s a waterfall that comes over the cliff beside it so it’s cool in the summer . . .’
‘Saludors.’
‘That’s right! Parvla Saludors. You’ve been there! She never said!’
‘No, I’ve not been there, but my friend Miklo Saludors used to talk about that waterfall on hot days in the mountains.’
‘Parvla’s father? No, her grandfather?’
‘Her great-uncle, I should think. He was some years younger than me. He had no children. He was engaged to be married, but he was one of my companions on the peace mission, whom the Russians shot and buried in the clay-pit.’
‘I don’t understand how people can do things like that.’
‘May you not. May you simply be aware that such things happen, and that ordinary-seeming people are capable of doing them. What else does Parvla tell you?’
‘Oh, everything is wonderful and they’re going to try and have a referendum on independence – that was what the rally was about – but bread is getting terribly expensive because the Romanians are making things difficult and her geese have just hatched and her sister is pregnant again. I’m afraid she thinks Otto Vasa’s wonderful. I don’t know what to say to her about that.’
‘Tell her it’s hard for you to judge, as you’re not there.’
‘Could you tell me a bit more about your friend Miklo? She’d be thrilled to know you knew him.’
‘I imagine she is already aware of that.’
‘She’d have told me.’
‘Not necessarily. For all our excitability, we are a reticent people.’
‘You mean she might have thought it was pushy to tell me?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘But is it OK if I . . .’ Letta began, and stopped when Grandad held up a finger. He thought for a few moments.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘This is perhaps a little unwise, but I will write a note on Miklo for you to send to your friend.’
‘That would be terrific! She’d be thrilled! Why is it unwise?’
‘Because if she were to show it to the wrong people, it could be taken by them to make it seem as if I were approving the use of Miklo’s name as that of a martyr for the cause of freedom. This is exactly the sort of thing that Otto Vasa is doing when he speaks at these rallies.’
‘Oh, in that case . . . couldn’t you just tell her things that don’t matter, you know, the sort of jokes you tell about friends?’
‘Perhaps I could, but then, well . . . I owe it to Miklo not to deny what he meant to me. That is more important than being wise. But if I do this, then perhaps – who am I to complain about the use of Miklo’s name for political ends? – if I do this then perhaps it would not be out of place for you to suggest in your letter that you are not absolutely sure how far Otto Vasa is to be trusted.’