Shadow of a Hero Read Online Free

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.
    ‘Varinians aren’t easy to lead. Our national sport is the blood feud. There were a dozen groups in the mountains, often as eager to fight each other as the Germans. The only name under which they would sometimes consent to co-operate was that of Restaur Vax. So, nominally at least, I was accepted as leader of the Resistance, and when peace came it was I whom the Varinians expected to go to the victorious Allies and tell them what we had done to ensure their victory, and in their gratitude they would make us a separate nation again, all three hundred thousand of us, as we used to be under the Prince-Bishopric, and had always been in our own minds. No longer would we be ruled from Sofia and Belgrade and Bucharest. We would rule ourselves, from Potok.
    ‘I knew roughly what was going to happen, though it was far worse than even I had feared, but because of my name I was forced to go. The Russians provided us with a safe conduct and an escort, but before we had gone a hundred miles our escort was replaced. The new escort then arrested us. My companions were shot, without trial, massacred beside the road and buried in a clay-pit, but because of my name, which might possibly still be used to bargain with, I was kept alive. Eighteen years I spent in camps in Siberia . . .’
    ‘Was that where you lost your fingers?’
    ‘Yes, but not in fact from frost-bite. There was a misunderstanding. It is not important. Where was I?’
    ‘Eighteen years in Siberia. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’
    ‘I would like you to understand. Well, then, for reasons I still know nothing about, I was sent back to Bulgaria and spent another twelve years in prison . . .’
    ‘But it was better than Siberia?’
    ‘Prison is prison. Physically it was, I suppose, better, but there was a spirit in the camps in Siberia, among the inmates, I mean – not all of them, of course – a sort of sullen undefeatability. I didn’t find that in sleazy, deceitful Bulgaria. There! You see, in spite of all I know I am speaking and thinking like a Varinian peasant. Hatred and contempt for Bulgaria is in my bloodstream. Ah, well. At last my name came to my rescue. Very few people outside Varina have heard of