‘There must have been some sort of a crisis on, because everyone was scurrying about, only that grinning oaf Jagu stuck to me like a limpet until, mainly to get rid of him, I said I was tired and my foot was hurting and I was going to go and lie down. He said OK, and took me up to my room and told me to stay there, and then, do you know what the bastard did? He went out and locked the door! That was the final straw. I wouldn’t have taken it from Otto, and I certainly wasn’t going to from a jerk like Jagu.
‘It was a pretty stupid thing to do anyway, because it wasn’t that sort of lock. I mean, it was to keep people out, not in. It was just screwed to the inside of the door, and the bolt went into a bracket which was screwed on too. All I had to do was unscrew the bracket with my penknife. By that time the bustle had died down. I’d heard several cars leaving.
‘I wasn’t running away. There was no way I could have made it into Potok without transport. I just wanted to show myself, and them, that I wasn’t going to be treated like that. I was thirsty, so I decided to find myself a drink and headed for the kitchens. There seemed to be no-one around. I didn’t like the smell of the tap-water and I was looking for something else when a couple of maids appeared. They’d heard my stick on the stone floor, they said. Anyway, they knew who I was from seeing me at Otto’s rallies when I’d been there before and they rushed over and started sobbing about Grandad, and what a fine man he’d been, and how much the country was going to miss him, and how frightened everyone was about what might happen without him.’
‘Really? In Otto Vasa’s house? They were saying that?’
‘They were just a couple of serving-maids hired from the town. They weren’t Otto’s people. But yes, I was surprised too. One of them said she had two sisters in the western province, and she knew all about what was happening up in Croatia, and she was scared stiff that it might start happening where her sisters were if the Serbs were given the slightest excuse to start ethnic cleansing around there.
‘Then they looked at each other and I could see they were frightened at what they’d been saying and they changed the subject and talked about last year’s festival. One of them said I’d met her cousin then, and – you know how everyone in Potok is related to everyone else and they all seem to know each other? – it turned out the cousin was one of the people I wanted to see, so I asked her to give him my love and say I hoped to see him after the rally, but could he keep quiet about me being there till then.
‘Then we heard a car come back. It was a false alarm, actually, but they were obviously scared of losing their jobs if they were found talking to me, and my foot had begun to act up again, so they found me some mineral water and I went back to my room and screwed the door shut and took a couple of Codeine and lay down, and – you know, this is very odd, but almost for the first time since I’d got to Vienna I began to feel happy about what I was doing. I felt in control of my life again. I lay on my bed, thinking about the two girls, and how ordinary and real they had seemed, and how much more they mattered to me than creeps like Andrei and Jagu. And then I managed to have a nap.
‘Well, not much else happened that day. Otto came back and about half a dozen of us had supper together and he was full of his big, vague ideas about Varina claiming its proper place in the world – he asked if I wanted to be UN Representative, and it wasn’t a joke. And he talked quite a bit about what a mistake it had been, giving in to the Bulgarians over the Listru festival, but of course my grandfather had been a sick man by then. In the old days, when he’d had real fire in his belly, et cetera, et cetera . . . And all the while I could feel the others watching me to see how I took it. Ah, well . . .
‘Next morning, I’d asked to have breakfast in my room to rest my foot, and the girl who brought my tray up was one of the two I’d talked to the day before, the one with the cousin, remember? I could see she was pretty nervous. She put her finger to her lips and put the tray on the bed and just lifted the corner of the cloth and pointed, so I nodded to show I’d understood, and thanked her as if I’d never seen her before, and let her go. Want to guess what was under the cloth?’
‘I don’t know. A key? No, a message from your friends.’
‘Right. And . . .’
‘Give up.’
‘Grandad’s last letter.’
‘No! What did he say? Where is it?’
‘Come to that in a mo. I’m telling you all this because the letter was for you.’
‘Oh! Give it to me! Now! Please!’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t got it. Not my fault. You’ll see why. Let me go on. The message was from a chap called Riccu, not the girl’s cousin, but his cousin, a teacher at the University, very bright, full of ideas, a really good guy. I hadn’t known him that well, but I’d met him a few times last year, because he’d been very interested in what Otto was up to, very keen, but now he started off bluntly by saying he’d been working as Grandad’s secretary for the last year. In fact he’d been with him when he died. Riccu was at his desk when he heard a thud from next door and he’d gone in and found Grandad on the floor. He was conscious, and he tried to say something, but then he closed his eyes and he was dead. The first thing Riccu did after he’d called for help was to take all the important papers off Grandad’s desk, including the letter he was writing to you, and hide them, because he knew what was going to happen as soon as the news got out. And it did. A gang of Otto’s people swept in and took over, and seized all the papers they could find and they were actually trying to get Grandad’s body out of the house when some of Riccu’s lot showed up and there was pretty well a pitched battle and only then did the police start taking notice – Riccu says they are never around when Otto’s people want to make trouble. They calmed things down and took the body off to the morgue. There was a bit more – obviously Riccu had been scrawling in a hurry, but the chief thing was that he begged me not to commit myself till I’d had the chance to talk to somebody who wasn’t on Otto’s side.
‘I wasn’t as shaken as you’d think. Ever since the accident, I’ve been brooding about what happened last year, and how I got myself into the position I did, and more and more I’ve come to think I was being used. And I’d hardly heard from them, as if they didn’t give a damn once I was laid up with my foot and couldn’t be any use to them. I wouldn’t have gone to Otto now if I could have thought of any other way of getting into Varina. What’s more, I’d already done what Riccu wanted, talked to somebody who wasn’t on Otto’s side – those two girls in the kitchen.’
‘My friend Parvla says the same. She was thrilled when Grandad came back, and she started talking about him and Otto Vasa working together, and then she started to go off Vasa, and now she’s frightened. She was praying for Grandad every night. I haven’t heard from her since he died.’
‘Right. Well, then I read Grandad’s letter to you. It started off saying he was going to have to wait for someone to carry it out of the country because he thought it likely that anything he mailed from Romania would get opened and read. And then he said some of what you’d expect, you know, thanking you for yours and saying he was a bit tired, and he was missing you, even more than he missed crumpets and marmalade. Then he said things had been going fairly well for him here and it shouldn’t be long now before he could stop being so careful about just seeming to be a moderating influence and letting Otto carry on much as he wanted, because he’d at last got evidence that Otto was working hand in glove with the old Ceauşescu gang in Bucharest, and the main question now was how or when he could use it.’
‘Wow!’
‘He didn’t say a lot about that, actually. He went back to chat. He’d paid a visit to his father’s farm, and he was hoping to get out to Lapiri for a funeral, Minna somebody . . .’