‘Minna Vari.’
‘That’s right.’
‘She was Momma’s foster-mother. You’ve got to tell her. That’s important. What else?’
‘Nothing. That was where he’d got to when he died.’
Letta burst into tears. They rushed up into her head, filling her face and streaming down her cheeks. She turned to the window, seeing only a foggy rectangle of light, groped for the sill and leaned there, sobbing. Vaguely she was aware of Van hobbling to her side and putting his arm round her, but he didn’t try to say anything, just let her cry the fit out until she was able to master it, shake herself, drag her sleeve across her eyes and say, trying to make a joke of it, ‘You better have a good reason why you haven’t got my letter.’
‘I have, Sis,’ he murmured. ‘I think you’ll understand. Tell me when you’re ready.’
‘I’m all right. Go on.’
He went back to the chair but waited while she found some tissues and mopped herself up.
‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘I wrote a note for Riccu saying I was glad to hear from him and I wanted to talk to him and I’d be careful, but I didn’t put it under the cloth, which was just as well, because Jagu showed up before my tray was collected. He said Otto wanted to see me. Otto was all smiles. We got into one of his cars and he took me down to his office in Potok, and gave me the speech he wanted me to make at the rally. He said I’d better learn it by heart, so that I could make it look as if I was making it up as I went along.
‘I said OK, but as I’d come all this way to represent the family I’d like to be able to put in something personal about Grandad, and what he’d meant to me and my brother and sister, and he said that was all right provided I kept it short. I said I would, and I’d finish that bit by saying that of course Varina was Grandad’s real family, and that would get me into the speech he’d given me. Then I asked him how Grandad had died, as if I didn’t know, and he told me he’d been ill for a while, and hadn’t been doing very much, and had passed away in his sleep, and it had all been very serene. “A good death for a hero,” he said. He went all gruff, as if there was a lump in his throat. That was what finally made my mind up. About whether to trust him or Riccu, I mean.’
‘Didn’t you want to strangle him?’
‘Pretty well, but I managed not to let him see. In fact, in a funny sort of way, I’d begun to enjoy myself. He thought he was using me, the way he’d done from the start, but actually now I was using him. So I wrote a harmless little bit about us all going to meet Grandad at the airport when the Communists let him out, and then I settled down to learn that bloody speech. It was pure rant about Varina’s inalienable rights, and how our enemies were still trying to take them from us, but the spirit of Restaur Vax and Lash the Golden, et cetera, et cetera. You know Otto likes people to think he’s some kind of reincarnation of Lash?
‘That took the rest of the day. We sat in the office, and then we drove around, and Otto got out and saw people while I sat in the car with the blinds drawn, learning my lines. Then we went back to the summer palace and I ran through the speech with him. I really hammed it up, and he was pleased as Punch. I couldn’t stand another supper with his gang of creeps, so I said my foot was hurting and I’d better go to bed. I lay in next morning too, and hung around getting more and more nervous most of the afternoon until a car arrived to take me to the rally.
‘It was in the meadows below St Valia, where the camp had been for the festival. They had a stage up, and a sound system, and they smuggled me in through the ruins with Jagu to keep an eye on me, so that I kept out of sight till the time came for my big moment. Jagu was on top of the world. He said it was the biggest rally they’d had for months. There might be a few trouble-makers around, but I’d know who were our people by their yellow sashes. They had a band, and marching, and then a pathetic woman talking about what the Serbs had done to the village where she’d been living in Croatia . . .’
‘Was that true?’
‘I should think so. There’ve been quite a few refugees from the north, I gathered later – I’ll come to that. Anyway the chairman-figure who was introducing the speakers cut her short and said that was the sort of thing Varina had got to expect if we didn’t take our destiny into our own hands, and everyone cheered – at least it sounded like everyone from where I was, but it was probably pretty well orchestrated because at that point Otto strode on and whipped up the cheering like mad and stood there saluting and triumphant for several minutes – I could see him sort of haloed from behind – and then got them quiet and began to speak.
‘He started off quietly, saying that the future of Varina was in the balance, but first they must honour the past, and the hero Restaur Vax, who had given his life for his country. He talked a bit about Grandad’s doings in the war – rather good and honest-sounding – and then he said that the oppressors of Varina had attempted to deny the family of Restaur Vax their natural, God-given right to attend the funeral, but that he, Otto Vasa, had refused to accept that and had arranged for one member of the family to be there, whatever the oppressors might decree.
‘Then Jagu gave me a push and I climbed up on to the platform and Otto came over and shook my hand and slapped me on the back and led me up to the microphone. There was a lot of cheering which went on quite a while, and I had time to get used to the lights.
‘It was a huge crowd, I don’t know – twenty thousand? A lot of them were wearing yellow sashes, especially at the front, but quite a few weren’t, and after a bit I realized that at least half of those weren’t cheering either. I made signs to them to quiet down, and in the end they did. Otto had gone back to his seat but I could see him out of the corner of my eye. As soon as they’d let me, I started in on the bit I’d written for him about meeting Grandad at the airport. I saw Otto relax and begin saying something to the fellow on his right.
‘You remember that bit finished with me saying how much Grandad had meant to the family? Well, instead of going on about Varina being his real family I said I’d got Grandad’s last letter with me, to my sister, and I’d read it to them to show what sort of a man he was. I saw Otto sit up with a jerk and frown, but I pretended not to notice. I skipped the bit about not trusting the Romanian post and started in on the marmalade and the crumpets, and he relaxed and went on muttering to the chap next door to him. So I don’t think he was listening when I got to what Grandad said about what was going on in Varina.
‘That was when everything changed. It’s difficult to explain. Everybody had gone very quiet. You’d have said it was reasonably quiet before, between the cheering, but there were coughs and murmurs and so on, the sort of background noise you get with any big crowd, but the sound system meant the speakers could be heard without yelling, so it had been quiet enough. Now it was dead quiet. I could hear the river. Every single person in the whole crowd was listening with all their attention to what I was saying.
‘In fact Otto took a moment or two to catch on. I saw him jump up and make a signal and I grabbed the mike and carried on. I’d learned this bit by heart because I’d known they’d never let me get away with it so it didn’t matter when somebody snatched the letter out of my hand. There were several of them, trying to wrestle the mike away from me and somebody got an arm-lock round my throat but I got it all out, the whole bit about Otto working with the old Ceauşescu gang, before some bastard stamped on my foot and I yelled and collapsed – God, it hurt!
‘In fact I don’t know what happened next but I must have managed to crawl to the front of the platform because people were trying to grab me from below and I was fighting them off, and then I heard them yelling that they were friends – there was a colossal racket going on and my foot was still screaming at me – and I let them help me down, and then I must have fainted.