Twelve Thousand Days

by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne

  I set out to find Joe on the second night, also crisp and moonlit. I tramped along a bog road, serenaded by barking dogs, intoxicated by the turf smoke. It began to snow. Overjoyed, I thought I was like the Brothers Grimm, going out to collect stories in the countryside around Kassel at the beginning of the nineteenth century – obviously I knew very little about the Brothers Grimm, or I wouldn’t have drawn any comparisons. I imagined them as middle-aged men, did not know that they were about my age when they began to collect tales, did not know that they seldom if ever went out tramping around the countryside, in winter or summer, but relied on their friends, often women, to send them the stories in letters. But it was a magical association, which quickened my step and helped me overcome my fear of the crazy dogs, and my shyness at barging in on a complete stranger.

  I would tell Bo about this, and I knew he would be pleased, and proud of his good student, following in his own footsteps. For he, as a young student, had tramped the countryside in Kerry, and in Iceland, seeking out storytellers and collecting their tales. I felt, under the starry night, that I was part of a chain of tradition that certainly went back to the age of romanticism, to 1812, the year of the publication of the Grimms’ collection of fairy tales, the groundbreaking book that was the catalyst for folktale collecting and comparative folklore studies all over Europe. I was simultaneously a participant in that great project that had been going on for almost two hundred years: the folklore project, the tradition project. I was becoming one of the conservationists who both discover and save the culture of the world. That’s what I felt, crunching through the snow, under the stars.

  Like the B&B, Joe Mac Eachmharcaigh’s house was cheek by jowl with a derelict whitewashed cottage, grass and weeds abundant on its collapsing thatched roof; the beautiful ruined old cottage was side by side with a modern home. But Joe didn’t live in a big bungalow. His home was a little prefab hut, what was known in Donegal as a chalet. Turf smoke puffed out of a steel pipe that served as a chimney. No dog, until I knocked on the door. Then a ferocious barking and a man’s voice saying Druid do bhéal, druid do bhéal! Or something like that.

  Joe was shocked to see me on the doorstep, a stranger in the snow.

  ‘Tar isteach a thaisce!’

  He welcomed me into his room.

  It was like stepping into an oven, wonderfully hot after the freezing temperature outdoors. And the room was cosy. Outside, the house looked like a temporary office on a building site. But this grim exterior led to a traditional Donegal kitchen. A range in the middle of the gable wall, a table under the window. Down at the back wall, a red settle bed. Just like the old cottage I had often stayed in as a child.

  The room embraced me with its warmth. I felt perfectly at home. It was like opening a shabby old book and entering a fairy tale. My excitement surged.

  Joe was old. Maybe sixty, maybe seventy, maybe eighty. I couldn’t tell. Old is old. He was tall, with a wrinkled face the colour of turf dust, strong nose, wide mouth. Dressed any old way, an old jumper, some sort of ancient trousers, too big for him.

  The first thing he did was introduce me to his aunt, who lay, all day and night, in the bed at the back of the house. A tiny white-haired woman, she was playing with her rosary beads. She was delighted to meet me, and welcomed me a thousand times.

  ‘Would you like a fag?’ Joe asked.

  ‘I would,’ she said.

  He propped her up a bit on a pillow, lit a Woodbine and put it in her hand. She smoked happily, half lying against the pillow.

  ‘Would you like one?’ Abruptly he turned to me, as if he had just remembered that I was there. He had a slight stutter that disappeared once he spoke at any length.

  I declined but accepted the offer of a cup of tea. The cup looked as if it hadn’t been washed, but I drank the tea anyway. Asked my question about the story. No, he hadn’t heard it. But if I wanted to come back tomorrow he would tell other stories. He knew lots of stories. He knew dozens. I should come at night – like now – because he’d be busy during the day.

  He spoke a mixture of Irish and English. I spoke only Irish to him, and he understood my Dublin Irish, but was afraid that I would not understand his strong Donegal dialect. So he said things like, ‘an bealach mór, nó an bóthar, nó the road.’ To make sure I would get it.

  Next day I hitchhiked to Falcarragh, a village that is a bit bigger than Gortahork. In a small hardware shop there I found a cassette recorder, and purchased it for what was quite a princely sum: £50. But I earned a good salary, I could afford things. I was not going to miss the opportunity to record Joe now that I was walking in the footsteps of the Brothers Grimm. I also bought a bottle of whiskey. Bo did this when he was visiting his storytellers, sometimes, if they were the type who liked a drink. He would buy one of the little bottles – a quarter, a naggin? But I didn’t want to take any chances so I splashed out on a full-size one.

  Joe told three or four stories, over the week, and sang many songs. The stories are long Märchen, or fairy tales – ‘The Boy Who Wanted to Know What Fear Is’, ‘The Brave Tailor’, and ‘The Maiden of Light’.

  He sat at the side of the table facing the window, and I sat in the corner under the cupboard where he kept his tea and sugar and other groceries. The cassette recorder, a silver box about the size of a box of Uncle Ben’s rice, sat on the blue and red oilcloth. I used the batteries, because I was reluctant to use his electricity. It was a simple machine to operate – you slipped the empty cassette cartridge into its slot, and closed it. There was a row of keys or buttons at one end of the recorder. One with a warning red dot was the Record key. There were two for Fast Forward and Rewind, and another two for Play and Stop. Joe waited expectantly while I fiddled with the machine. He held the little microphone himself.

  I pressed the Record button: you had to press hard to get it going.

  ‘Bhfuil sé ag obair? Is it going?’

  ‘Tá. One, two, three.’

  I tested it. Stopped it. Rewound. Pressed Play.

  Joe’s voice, a little anxious, played back. He smiled. My ‘one, two, three’ was on the cassette too, sounding muffled and childish.

  ‘Tá sé ag obair!’

  ‘Okay. We’ll start now!’

  I pressed the Record button again.

  ‘Bhfuil scéal ar bith agat?’

  ‘Táim chun scéal a inseacht duit anois agus sé an scéal atá mé chun inseacht duit ná Maighdean an tSolais …’

  He inclined his head on one side, and began to tell the story. His voice rises and falls. He looks at me as he begins but as the tale goes on he looks at the window, he gets drawn into his own story, carried away by it, although now and then he withdraws from it and makes a comment on a character or an action.

  ‘Bhí sí maith dó, nach raibh?’ He looks at me as he describes an episode in which a girl carries out impossible tasks for the hero, and then spreads out a tablecloth on the ground and gives him all the food and drink he could desire.

  I was transported by joy. The story was one of the great international fairy tales, unknown in the storybook tradition or Disneyworld, but one of those that was outstandingly popular in Irish oral tradition in the past. I did not know it very well and was interested in hearing it told. But what was more enthralling was the sense I had of listening to something that had been handed down from mouth to mouth for many generations. There was, in the little hot kitchen, a sense of connection to a chain of storytellers going back through the centuries, back to the Middle Ages – earlier, because some of the episodes in this particular story were documented in Greek literature, six hundred years BC. Books link you to the past too, of course. But the line of oral transmission is more moving, because it’s so fragile. A book can survive unread for centuries in a library, and then be rediscovered. A story that is not written down depends entirely on being told again and again for its survival. If people stop telling it, it vanishes off the face of the earth. The chain of oral transmission is indescribably delicate. Unl
ike booklore, oral lore is intangible. And in 1978 it was very rare to find anywhere in Europe a storyteller who knew tales he or she had learnt from earlier narrators. The Märchen are sometimes called wonder tales, or tales of magic, in English. The stories are indeed wondrous because of their fantastic content; in them the human imagination is in full and glorious flight. But even more wondrous is the experience of listening to a tale told by a good storyteller, a tale that has survived by being told again and again by many individual anonymous people over hundreds of years, and is brought to life once again in a prefabricated hut in Donegal.

  I couldn’t articulate my feelings with any precision, as I listened to Joe, as I recorded his voice and his stories and songs. Gratitude, astonishment? Pleasure, joy? There was no word for this: for the sense of being awestruck, of hearing the voices, many voices, of the past, transmitted over centuries. It was like listening to the dead, although the story was as alive as the dogs barking in the winter farmyards, or the waves crashing against Bloody Foreland. It was like meeting the poets of the thirteenth century, and every century since then. It was like touching an invisible glinting chain that goes back through the ages, and getting an electric shock from it: small, thrilling, like the shock from some sea creature in the depths of the ocean.

  It was an experience like no other, an experience I felt very lucky to have, because who has it? Just a handful of the chosen, the self-selected, the ones who are drawn to this sort of thing, for reasons that they don’t usually analyse themselves. Why had I chosen to study folklore? I could come up with reasons – I was not far removed from the traditional communities of Ireland, and as soon as I found myself in the Folklore Department I felt a powerful draw to the material; I also loved the scientific methodology, the empirical investigation of documents and recordings, the precision of the way folklore was studied. But in the end I don’t know why some of us are attracted by this kind of exploration, while others are not. Just as I don’t know why some people become writers and others don’t (and both instincts, the instinct to study folk literature and the instinct to be a writer, are linked; I’m sure of that). One can speculate, and come up with more than one reason. But in the end there’s a mystery about it.

  What is certain is that the voice of this old man in the hut perched on a bog in Donegal carried me away, to the most distant places, to the crepuscular landscapes, the fire-lit caves, where the work and the play of the human imagination first began.

  It was a cold wet Friday night when I got back home to Ranelagh. Oliver called around almost immediately. He didn’t come into the dining room, where my parents were sitting by the fire watching TV, or to the kitchen, where I had been reading. He stood in the hall, the door open behind him.

  He wanted to break it off.

  He insisted on explaining why.

  And, oh, there were several reasons, ranging from my unsuitability to be a wife (I was feminist and independent; I went off to Donegal on my own without discussing it with him first) to his lack of attraction for me. He wanted to tell me all the reasons, all about it.

  I knew I should feel sad, traumatised, overwhelmed by grief.

  All I wanted was to get some sleep. Go, go away and let me sleep, I thought. But he stood with one foot in the door, talking, going on and on and on like a salesman persuading me to buy something. To buy the break-up, the reasons for it, the logic of it all.

  Go away. Please, just go away.

  After a traumatic relationship break-up – as after a death – you feel nothing for a while, except a desire to get away from the scene of the crime. I felt like that in the hour after Bo died. All I wanted was to get away from the hospital, to run from the deathbed. At these dreadful moments you shut down. Your mind and body are in a state of shock, and you’re temporarily numb to deep emotion. Those most affected by a tragedy don’t scream or cry, like people in movies. They are paralysed. It is exactly the same as a scald or a burn to the flesh. Have you noticed what happens? For minutes after the boiling water scalds your skin you feel absolutely nothing. Later the pain comes. The self-help books, the psychiatrist’s studies of grief, say that this is the body’s way of protecting you from unendurable pain. By the time it hits you, your body has grown that bit stronger.

  Next morning, when I woke up, I knew something was wrong. But for a minute I couldn’t remember what.

  Oh yes.

  I was no longer engaged to Oliver. That was it.

  Unbelievable. Yesterday, he was my fiancé. Today, he was not. I wouldn’t be seeing him for lunch, or after work, or tomorrow either, or the next day.

  He was out of my story now, he who had been the main actor for three years. Only eight or nine hours ago he had been on the doorstep and now he wouldn’t be on the doorstep again. Ever? How could that be true?

  The next day I applied for the scholarship to go to Denmark. I also bought an evening newspaper, and looked at the small ads for flats and bedsitters. Even if I wasn’t getting married I could move out of my parents’ house, at long last. I could have a bedsitter of my own.

  DAY 2

  ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment’

  What I wore: a salmon-coloured frock, with a small terracotta print. A lace trim on the collar. Empire line. A rust-coloured tweed jacket.

  I wore clothes like that, although I was twenty-four – ancient, as it seemed to me then. Modest loose clothes, covering the knees, even though I was slim and had good enough legs and would have looked fine in a miniskirt. Minis were over anyway, of course. It was 1978. Laura Ashley was the designer of choice. This dress had been bought somewhere else, in a sale, because soon I would not have a good salary or any salary. I’d be back to the bargain basement, on student rations.

  But I often bought a new dress.

  My hair was long, black, shining. It was tucked behind my ears and flowing down my back to the halfway mark between my shoulders and waist. I never let it get as far as my waist. I could have had a yard of hair. But something stopped me. It would have been too much. There were unspoken rules, in the air around you, that you understood although they were never articulated. Don’t go too far. Even where hair is concerned.

  I was to meet him at his apartment. Then we were going out to dinner. My bedsitter was close to town, in Rathmines, and Bo lived in Booterstown. That seemed far away, far out. Blackrock. A place you went to very occasionally, to swim in the open-air baths, which I never had liked. Too cold, too crowded. Too ugly and uncomfortable. Most people I knew lived in Ranelagh and Rathmines, either because that’s where they came from, or because they were renting a bedsitter. Ranelagh was still full of bedsitters. Some people thought it was all bedsitters but there were always plenty of families, scattered around, on the shabby roads, like the one my parents lived on, and on the posh roads, in Beechwood. It was a ‘mixed area’, back then, quite unlike the fashionable expensive urban village it has since become.

  I got a bus from town, from Merrion Square, the 7 or the 8, one of the buses that went along the coast out to Dún Laoghaire or Dalkey. A lovely summer’s evening. The bus crept out through Ballsbridge, past Merrion Gates, the Tara Towers, Booterstown Marsh. A twenty-minute journey but not one I was in the habit of taking, so it felt very long. I kept looking out, afraid I would miss my stop. But no. At the Punchbowl I got off. Traffic roared along the Rock Road. I crossed at the traffic lights where that road met Booterstown Avenue.

  There are old houses at that end of the avenue, three-storey, Victorian or Edwardian, the same as the houses in Rathmines. Rather gloomy-looking. And the avenue is dark and shadowy at that point, even on a summer’s evening. I walked up, about a hundred yards.

  Then I stopped in my tracks like a horse who senses an evil presence.

  Like a rabbit caught in the headlights.

  I couldn’t do it.

  I couldn’t go and have dinner with Bo. He was twenty years my senior. He was my professor.

  He was really old.

  I had stopp
ed outside the grey stone wall of one of those old houses. My stomach churned, and everything else. Terror is what I was feeling. Deep visceral fear.

  *

  After the meeting in Belfield, about a week ago, I had walked on air.

  I was in love, in love with Bo.

  I had been in love with him for a long time, in a way, ever since I had read in his eyes that his heart was broken.

  And there were other reasons. His good looks. His Swedishness. His enthusiasm, brilliance, learning. His fearlessness and confidence and wit.

  ‘We are all in love with him,’ someone had said to me, a year earlier, at a party.

  And now I was in love with him and he was in love with me.

  For the past week, since we met in Belfield and since his phone call, I had gone around nursing my delicious secret. My new, strange, exotic love.

  But now, as it was coming to the point, to the fateful moment, the cream turned sour. My stomach churned. My feet would not take another step. My body was screaming: Stop.

  It was that, rather than thoughts as such. The reality biting, physically. The romantic dream stopping and reality reasserting itself.

  Or was it just society imposing its norms? Asserting its taboos. Not for the first time. Thou shalt not:

  Have sex before marriage.

  Get pregnant before marriage.

  Fall in love with an older man.

  Marry an older man.

  On a May evening at the bottom of Booterstown Avenue, under a tall, gloomy Victorian house which blocked out the sun.

  Fear paralyses.

  What would people say? What would they say tonight, as Bo and I ate dinner somewhere? I was young enough to be his daughter. That’s what they would say. That’s what they would think. I’d look ridiculous, in my salmon-pink, granny-print frock, with my long black hair, on a date with Bo, that old man of forty-three. They would laugh, they’d disapprove, they’d say, how absurd! How pitiful! Can’t she get someone her own age? She’s pathetic.