‘When I came to, I was being jostled about but people seemed to be holding me up and trying to support me and there was this hullabaloo going on, so I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying. I realized they were trying to push their way out through the crowd, but then someone pointed back over our shoulders and we swung round to look and there was Otto, up on the platform in the spotlights, absolutely purple with rage and yelling, though no-one could hear him – he’d completely lost it – and all the while his hands were tearing something into smaller and smaller shreds and scattering them onto the stage. I don’t think he realized what he was doing, but it must have been Grandad’s letter. That’s why I haven’t got it. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s all right. It was worth it. Go on.’
‘Oh, well, it was chaos, fights going on everywhere between the yellow-sashes and the others, and yells and boos and whistles and cat-calls, and the yellow-sashes trying to get organized cheering going, and being drowned out. The people I was with went struggling on till we were right at the edge of the crowd, and they made a space for me and took off my shoe and somebody fetched water from the river and they bathed my foot, which helped a bit – it was swelling up like a balloon – and by the time they’d done that, things had quietened down a bit, and Otto had got control of himself, but he made the mistake of trying to carry on with his rally.
‘It was a disaster, from his point of view. They never let him get a word out. The more he tried to rant and bully them into silence, the louder they cat-called. He’d got the microphone and the sound system, but they drowned him out. Then they started chanting Grandad’s name. Vax! Vax! Restaur Vax! Over and over and over. They destroyed him. You know, they destroyed him with Grandad’s name! What’s the joke?’
‘What you just said. I hope he was watching. Tell you later. Go on.’
‘We saw one extraordinary thing. You know there’d been fighting? There was a gang of yellow-sash thugs over to our left, and now we realized they were fighting among themselves. Some of them had taken their yellow sashes off and were trying to make the others do the same. And then all the lights went out and the sound system went off – it was pretty well dark by now – we decided afterwards that Vasa’s people must have done that as a way of getting him out of the jam he was in. There was still a lot of yelling and shoving and fighting, but the people I was with found a stretcher and carried me back into Potok, to one of their flats, and went out to find a doctor or a nurse who could do something about my foot.
‘Next thing, Riccu turned up. He said the police were looking for me. His lot had friends in the police, and there was a rumour going round about someone being arrested at the rally, a foreigner. Riccu thought they meant me. It would have been something Otto had laid on, to stir things up still further, arresting Restaur Vax’s grandson on the eve of the funeral . . .’
‘He sort of did that with Grandad, didn’t he? Last year? Pretending he was being beaten up in prison when he was on his way back to England, really.’
‘I remember. In fact I asked him about that, and he just grinned and said it was politics. I’m afraid I thought it was OK at the time.’
‘What happened next?’
‘Oh, a jolly old doctor showed up, who’d actually known Grandad before the war. He couldn’t do much, but he gave me some aspirin, and then about a dozen of us sat round talking all night. I couldn’t have gone to sleep anyway. My foot was throbbing like a jungle drum, but even so I was a lot happier than I’d felt for ages. Riccu said he’d known I’d got his message and Grandad’s letter because the kitchen-maid had told him, and he’d guessed I hadn’t let on because she’d not got into trouble. They’d gone along to the rally, he and his friends who’d been helping Grandad, to heckle a bit and try and let people know that not everyone was wild about Otto, but there weren’t a lot of them. Most of the non-yellow-sashes had been more or less neutral, ordinary Varinians, who’d gone along – I don’t know – to try and find out what they thought, I suppose. You see, Otto hadn’t just been keeping me under wraps to prevent me being seen. As well as that, he didn’t want me to find out that what Grandad had said in his letter was true. He’d been immensely popular a year ago. He could have done anything he liked with Varina then, almost. But then things started getting worse and worse in Croatia, and his own people threw their weight around trying to frighten the opposition off the streets, and rumours began to spread about Otto’s friends in Bucharest, so people went off him. They still desperately want a free Varina, just as you and I do and Grandad did, but not with Otto Vasa in charge. And not his way. Not his sort of Varina. The rally was a last throw, an effort to whip up a great frenzy of enthusiasm, and use that to hijack Grandad’s funeral and give himself a fresh start. But it didn’t work. Grandad fixed him, after all, despite being dead.’
‘You and Grandad.’
‘I suppose so.’
He was sitting on Grandad’s chair with his foot up on the stool which Letta used to use for toasting crumpets. It was obviously still hurting. He must have had a lot of pain from it while he was away. His face was drawn, and lined. He looked ten years older than he had before the accident, and for the first time Letta could see that what Minna Alaya had said about his being the spit image of Grandad might be true.
‘Is that all?’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that, but what about the funeral, and how did you get away, and what’s happening now? Is it going to be all right?’
‘God knows,’ he said. ‘Anything could happen. All you can say is, it’s better than it might have been, because people have seen through Otto, at least for the moment. But they’re still pretty discontented, not just about independence. Prices keep shooting up, and there’s a lot of racketeering and corruption, and deep distrust of the Romanian and Bulgarian governments, and fear of the Serbs . . . I think all you can say is we aren’t going out of our way to pick quarrels with anyone, and that’s what Otto was trying to set up. But if somebody chooses to pick a quarrel with us, well, I think we’ll fight. It’ll be pretty well hopeless if we have to do it on our own, but we’ll do it. It’s nothing like over yet, Sis.
‘I went to the funeral. I couldn’t risk trying to get into the cathedral, so I stood in the crowd in St Joseph’s Square. A lot of people recognized me. They kept coming up and shaking my hand. The service was relayed from the cathedral. There wasn’t any trouble. It was very respectful. Moving, I suppose. A lot of people were crying, men as well as women. After the service they drove the hearse round the Square, very slowly, while people crowded to touch it, and then they halted in front of the palace while the mayor made an oration from the balcony. It was supposed to have been Otto, but he’d cried off. The poor old mayor didn’t make much of an oration, in fact he had trouble getting the words out, he was so choked.
‘That took pretty well all morning, and then they drove out to Talosh to bury him in the family grave, and absolutely anybody who had a car or could hitch a lift drove out after them to watch. I went with nine other people in the old doctor’s car. We couldn’t get near the church because of the jam – the road’s just one-track – and I wasn’t up to walking the last half-mile. It was very hot and still. The grapes were just getting ripe in the vineyards. There were hundreds – oh, I don’t know, maybe thousands – of us out there among the scrub and the boulders in that belting sun, watching those tiny figures down in the graveyard. Far too far off to hear anything. Grasshoppers and cicadas buzzing away. I don’t believe anybody moved a muscle or said a word all the time they were by the grave.