Momma looked vaguely at the scrambled eggs, then pulled herself together and said, ‘Oh, thank you, Letta. Well done. Got something for yourself? Be a saint and put the stuff in my basket in the fridge, will you?’
Grandad just raised a hand and smiled tiredly at her as she left. Letta didn’t mind. It meant she could read while she ate, and she had a mountain of homework still to do.
Next afternoon she got home and found men putting a telephone into Grandad’s room, which meant he had to come downstairs for tea and she did the crumpets in the toaster, instead of the proper way on a toasting-fork in front of his gas fire. (Grandad used to say, ‘When all England’s triumphs and mistakes are forgotten, mankind will still owe her four priceless gifts – bread sauce to go with turkey, steak-and-kidney pudding, marmalade, and hot buttered crumpets.’)
‘What’s going on?’ said Letta. ‘I mean, a telephone! You hate telephones, and anyway you get about three calls a year.’
‘The world is falling apart. This is a minor symptom of its collapse.’
‘The world’s been falling apart ever since I can remember. At least once a month. Then they have a summit . . .’
‘No more summits,’ said Grandad. ‘It takes two equal world powers to compose a summit.’
‘They must have forgotten to tell Mount Everest.’
‘No doubt that is why Mount Everest is still there. But soon the USSR will cease to exist. China is permanently contemplating the chaos in its own navel. With whom can the US President hold a summit?’
‘Do you mean he’s going to start ringing you up instead? Is it a hot line? Can I have a go? There’s a lot of things I’m aching to tell him.’
‘Fortunately for his peace of mind it is not a hot line. If you would be kind enough to stuff your mouth with crumpet so that you can’t interrupt, I will tell you what is going on. The Eastern Bloc is falling apart. It seemed like a great unshakable slab of stone, but it is cracking into separate pieces. At the moment everybody in the West is very happy about this. They think they have won the Cold War, and soon instead of the dreadful old Communist enemy there are going to be a lot of nice friendly democratic nations to trade with. But they are going to be disappointed. First, because democracy takes a lot of practice, and there isn’t time for that. Second, because there is no money, and soon there will be no food. And third, because the crumbling of the great block is not going to stop when the nations you see in your atlas have separated from each other. You see, most of those nations are not nations at all, but are themselves composed of a number of smaller nations . . .’
‘Like Varina?’
‘We are smaller than most, but still we are a nation. Small nations have long memories. There are three things, my darling, which bind people into a nation – the place they live, though they may share it with others; the language they speak, though they may also speak the language of their rulers; and their memories, which are theirs alone.
‘What do they remember? They remember their victories and their wrongs, but not, of course, their defeats and the wrongs that they themselves have done. In effect they remember chiefly their enemies. Sometimes those enemies are big and distant conquerors, like the Turks in the Legends or the Germans in my own lifetime, but mostly their ancient enemies are other small nations, just across the border, with whom there have been cattle raids and blood feuds and wife-snatchings for generation after generation, back and forth.
‘Now these small nations are going to bring their memories out and patch and repair and renew them and parade them up and down, all their victories which tell them they can conquer, all their wrongs which tell them to trust none but themselves. Czechoslovakia will fall apart, Yugoslavia will fall apart, the USSR will fall into twenty fragments, and the Eastern Bloc, that great slab, will have become not the pieces of shaped stone which the West was hoping to use, but a heap of pebbles. Discontented pebbles, because after all the upheavals they will have nothing that they want, not wealth, not comfort, not peace, not plenty, nothing. Nothing but their nationhood. Think. A heap of infuriated pebbles. That is the future of Eastern Europe.’
‘Us too? Varina?’
‘Ah, we are the centre of the universe, of course.’
‘We’re the centre of our universe. I mean, everyone is, to themselves, I think . . . Oh! Are they giving you a telephone because they want you to do something? They aren’t going to make you go back! Please don’t. I’ll be miserable without you. I suppose I shouldn’t say that, if you want to, but it’s true!’
‘And I should be miserable without you, my darling. Between us we will do our best to resist their idiot demands.’
‘Can’t you tell them you’re too old? I mean, you’re terrific for eighty-one, but . . .’
‘Of course I am far, far too old. In practical terms the idea is ridiculous. But it is not me they want, it is my name. If a waxwork dummy were called Restaur Vax, that would suit them as well. Better, perhaps. Even at eighty-one there is a danger that I may have ideas of my own.’
‘Of course you have.’
‘Occasionally, but I suppress them.’
He shook his head, as if at somebody else’s stupidity, and fell silent.
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘If you want to, I mean. I’m really interested.’
‘I promised your mother I would not involve you in my political affairs.’
‘You aren’t involving me. I’ll involve myself if I want to, but I don’t see how unless I know what’s what.’
‘I suppose that is reasonable. Where were we?’
‘Names. And suppressing ideas.’
‘Yes. A name, you see, has no ideas, and for most of my life I have been not myself but my name. Suppose your name were not Letta Ozolins but, say, Florence Nightingale or Margaret Thatcher or . . .’
‘Kylie Minogue?’
‘A singer?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Then people would think of you differently, wouldn’t they? They’d expect you to sing, or to order people about, or to want to be a nurse. In my case they expected me to be a hero. My grandfather, you see, was both a rogue and a fool. He used the fact that he was Restaur Vax’s son to make himself rich, and thus wasted his real inheritance, which was the family’s name and honour. He then squandered what he had got, and had nothing to leave his son but one farm. My father named me Restaur Vax in the feeble hope that I would somehow restore the family honour. Already at school my name was a burden. People expected great things of me. I would have none of it, and chose to become a schoolmaster. I thought I had found a way to be myself.
‘When the Germans invaded Yugoslavia to crush the Serbs I was teaching at Virnu, in our western province – part of Yugoslavia, as you know. Being Varinians, we resisted the Germans, as we have always resisted invaders, though we had no fondness for the Serbs. Whatever my name, I think I too would have joined the Resistance, but before I could make up my mind men came to me saying, “We need you to lead us.” Me? What did I know about fighting? But of course it wasn’t me they needed. It was my name. That is how I became a Resistance leader.
‘Before long our northern and southern provinces, in Romania and Hungary, had joined us. Romania joined the war on the German side and tried to conscript our men into their army, to go and fight in Russia, but the men just ran away into the hills and joined the Resistance. So soon we had German troops in all three provinces, trying to control us.