No Country for Young Men

by Julia O'Faolain

  Afterwards, she felt tender towards him and grateful. The recorder was playing and his formal voice came on the tape, politely coaxing the old-timers.

  ‘Tell me, sir,’ said the stiff, Yankee voice, ‘what it was like at the time. Was there great bitterness?’

  She glanced at the tongue which had just now been sliding in her vulva, like a neat, tail-flirting fish.

  ‘Tell me, sir,’ she mimicked. ‘I hope it wasn’t bitter down there?’

  ‘Bland,’ he told her, ‘a bit like home-made bread.’

  ‘Bitter enough,’ rasped the voice on the tape. ‘When de scrap was over – we called it de scrap, don’t ye know, de scrap with de English …’ The old man’s throat groaned like tired plumbing. ‘We hoped,’ he gurgled rustily, ‘for better times but twas worse times we had to face. Tin time worse …’ This man, Grainne judged, was from Ireland’s Deep South, County Cork, where the bulk of the fighting had gone on in what would have been his heyday. ‘Dere were no jobs and any dere were went to de boys who’d accepted de Traty. De rest of us could whistle for dem. De country was destroyed: roads up, bridges down and de blame all put on us …’

  ‘Turn it off,’ she’d groaned. ‘Ulagoaning. Moaning. Misery. How can you listen?’

  ‘History is full of things like that.’

  ‘I don’t think of it as history. It’s fate: something that will go on and on.’

  ‘You’re not living on the breadline.’

  ‘No. But give me credit for imagination. Others are. Besides the thing ricochets up. In other countries people sometimes come to grips with something new. Here the old bogy returns. You start to laugh and then, Jesus, the damn thing turns out to be real.’

  ‘Was there no help for veterans?’ James’s voice asked on the tape.

  ‘For de Staters dere was. And tin years later our day came. Yis. When our lads went into de Dáil, dey helped dere friends. But a lot of preferment had been given out by den. Many had emigrated. Gone. I had a butty was given work smuggling sweepstake tickets into America. He was on de pig’s back but many’s de lad was left widout a tosser.’

  ‘Pitch and toss,’ said Grainne. ‘You needed coins.’

  ‘I’ll need you to translate this stuff. I should give you a salary.’

  ‘You don’t think I’d collaborate on your hawkish film.’

  ‘Do you disapprove of it?’

  ‘You said yourself it’s propaganda to get Americans to pay over money for guns.’

  ‘No, I don’t think our producer is committed to guns. I mean I’ve no reason to think so except paranoia, which I’ve been breathing in here with every breath. From what I learn from the old vets I’ve been talking to, I should be cautious too about listening to lassies like yourself who belong, they tell me, to a well-heeled, sycophantic class who now run this country and have sold out to an international conspiracy of the Right which includes my own country, Japan, the IMF and multi-national enterprises generally.’

  ‘You’ve been talking to hallucinating Trotskyites?’

  ‘I’ve been talking to whoever would talk. I have the tower of Babel on that tape-recorder. None of them agree except on one point which they put pithily: Brits out.’

  ‘What does your international conspiracy want?’

  ‘To keep wages low and plunder your natural resources. We want you as an economic colony.’

  ‘And American self-distrust makes you wonder if it’s true?’

  ‘Well, I’m plundering one natural resource, right?’

  ‘I’d better get dressed. I’ve got to fly. My neglected son will wonder where I am. He’s suspicious of you. He’s keeping an eye on his unreliable Mum.’

  ‘The other thing my interviewees agree on is that the younger generation will make up for the corruption of their elders.’

  ‘Typical Ireland! They get the youth cult ten years late.’

  ‘Can I phone you at home?’

  ‘God no. The place is full of extensions and Cormac is nosy.’

  ‘I can ask about your aunt? We could have a code.’

  ‘He disapproves of your interest in her. So does Michael since Owen Roe has been leaning on him. No. I’ll phone you.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘This evening.’

  ‘What about the extensions?’

  ‘I’ll go out to a phone-box.’

  ‘Maybe I should interview Cormac. Would he like that?’

  ‘No. He’s mad about privacy. That’s what he has against you. You’re the media.’

  ‘Maybe I can brainwash him? Would he take me to visit his Youth Club?’

  ‘I wouldn’t count on it.’

  He caught her arm, reaching over her shoulder with his other hand to close the door. ‘Hey! Kiss me.’

  They kissed. She closed her eyes, opened them. ‘Listen,’ she pleaded. ‘Don’t play with me. You’d undo me.’

  ‘I thought you were a tough lady.’

  ‘I am. I’m like a snail with a tough shell. But you could lure me out and then I’d be vulnerable.’

  ‘Do you want to be lured out?’

  ‘Only if it’s safe.’

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ he promised. ‘I’ll let you know when.’

  *

  Therese,

  No letter from you and that’s a relief. I couldn’t bear to read the kind of letter you might have written before getting mine – and I dread your reaction to that. Besides, why should you write? I have left things dangling. I suppose this seems selfish? It is an attempt to say no more than is honest.

  I feel that as I have begun by telling you what is happening, I must go on doing so, and what is happening is that I am possessed. I can see that this is how my condition might strike an observer. Reading this must be painful to you. I am not sure that it is only from honesty that I am telling it. Perhaps there is a cry for help in this impulse to confide? Perhaps I am trying to steady my nerves. After all, I have no friends here, though already acquainted with half the city in a boozy way. The hotel, like all big hotels, is anonymous.

  Facts: the woman is married. She is my age. I don’t know how much she cares for me. Yes, as you are surely thinking, it may be ‘just sex’. I am certainly hot for that all the time. When I am not with her I think of her and of you and the two of you fuse in my consciousness. In my dreams you are one person and all is resolved. I wake up to agony. No need to write a gloss on that. Yes: she is quite beautiful and, I think, intelligent though not an intellectual. Not like you.

  I feel shame at my animal greed and at the same time panic that here may be a chance of happiness which may never come again if I don’t seize it ruthlessly – like in fairy tales where alternative values are suddenly invoked and the victor is the one who can learn and play by new, surprising rules. People here are saturated by folk memory freighted with messages which probably tempt and frighten them. This may explain their puritanism. The temptation to break loose is surely insidious – unless I project?

  I should add that the part of myself which I prefer and esteem is the part loyal to you. But she, I think, is more vulnerable.

  Forgive me,

  James

  *

  Sparky Driscoll dropped by one day while Judith was alone and accepted a cup of tea.

  ‘Are you enjoying your stay?’ she asked politely.

  ‘Well, I’m not here for pleasure,’ he said, ‘but yes, I am. Though I’m not sure everyone approves of me.’ He laughed to take the barb out of this.

  There had been arguments. Some were afraid that certain people might be preparing to sell the country short. The British were negotiating but who’d trust them? Divide and conquer was their old strategy and there were always bad eggs on our own side: funks and windy lads who might be all too ready to hand in the gun. If a division did come it was important that American help go to the right people – and important that Driscoll send home a true account of the way things were in Ireland.

  ‘I have to form my own opinion,’ he told Judith. ‘I
know a lot of you think I may be taken in. Listen to the wrong people?’

  ‘Well, there have always been traitors.’ Judith thought of the dance where Kathleen had been waltzing in her pink satin when the Tans broke in. Tipped off by whom? ‘It must be strange for you here,’ she supposed.

  ‘I like it,’ he told her. ‘I’d always heard about it – heard those songs your sister sings.’

  ‘You like her, don’t you?’ It was part of his openness, the fact that he showed it. Last time he’d been over, Kathleen had told the story about how she and some other Cumann na mBan girls had spirited their dead brother Eamonn’s body from where the police had left it, so that his comrades could give it a soldier’s funeral. They’d done it at night and held the ceremony in a place where the volley fired could not alert authorities. Kathleen had told the story in a whisper, looking over her shoulder lest their father hear and be reminded of his grief. Judith had seen Driscoll savour secrecy and watch Kathleen with dog’s eyes.

  ‘She’s pretty,’ he acknowledged now, ‘but you’re more beautiful. Will be.’

  She didn’t believe she’d heard him right. Her?

  ‘Didn’t you know?’

  She blushed and hated him.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘What for?’ She had to ask.

  ‘Dragging you out of childhood.’

  ‘You have no small opinion of yourself!’ There was a supply of such remarks.

  ‘You see, it’s happened,’ he teased, ‘you’re flirting.’

  The impudence! But she wouldn’t believe him. Redheads were rarely beautiful. ‘How old are you?’ she challenged his authority.

  ‘Twenty-seven,’ he said, which was ten years older than herself. It made him more reliable for public but less for private matters. Fellows her age might feel differently about freckles and her hair.

  ‘The fellows who’ll be running the country now,’ she said, ‘are no older than that. Kathleen’s fellow, Owen, will be in the Dáil for sure. It’ll be a country run by young men.’

  ‘What about the women? They’ll have a say now too, won’t they?’

  She shrugged. ‘The men in this country would never let women have a say.’

  She imagined the women he’d know. Americans. Did he have sisters?

  ‘Have you a girl in America?’

  ‘Several.’ He laughed. ‘Which means no serious one.

  ‘So you could marry a girl from here so?’ This was banter and not to be taken seriously. If he didn’t see this she’d give up on him entirely.

  He said he wasn’t ready yet to settle down. ‘I want,’ he told her, ‘to travel.’

  ‘Have you seen Ireland?’ she challenged.

  He had been to Dublin. Someone had taken him to the Abbey Theatre. Then he’d been to Cork to talk to the IRA on the spot. His friends in Boston and Philadelphia were interested in knowing how the spirits of the ordinary fighting-men were. They were leery of politicians.

  ‘It’s an old story now,’ he said, ‘that they come to us looking for money and tell us what they think we want to hear: blarney. Then after promising us they’ll do so and so, they go back and do the opposite.’

  He began to question her about Owen, saying what a shame it was he was in gaol. What had Owen thought about the people he met when he was in America? Had Judith heard of the bad blood between Irish leaders over there and some of the delegates from here? Money was at the bottom of the row, Sparky admitted.

  ‘Am I boring you?’ he asked suddenly.

  She was offended. ‘Too much for my pretty little head?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  What kind of a man was Owen? he asked again, and Judith began to wonder whether it was this fellow’s interest in Kathleen that made him so curious. Owen, she assured him, was manly, upright and straight. She admired him, she said, and the family was proud that he should be marrying Kathleen.

  ‘Does that answer your question?’

  Sparky backed off a bit then and talked more generally about the tensions between the Yanks and the Irish. His business, he said, was to promote a better understanding. Some of the men back home were a bit old, maybe out of touch with today’s Ireland. This was why they’d sent a man as young as Sparky to represent them. ‘Things change,’ he admitted, ‘and my countrymen are more ready to see this than most. However, we don’t like being taken for a ride. We like to know the score. Shareholders in a business have a right to know what’s being done with their money.’

  It struck her that she was talking to someone who was himself to have a say in the way things would go. Could such a man be moved by a person as ignorant and unimportant as herself? Robert Bruce had been influenced by the sight of a spider making and remaking its web. But the spider, to be sure, had not known its own importance. It had given its lesson in persistence by just being a spider. She wished passionately that there were some persuasive thing she could do or say, and, mind filled with the wish, became incapable of saying anything at all. What an idiot she was. Owen might have persuaded Sparky if he’d been here, but he wasn’t.

  History, she thought, looking at the ordinary young man with surprise. It came, like the Blessed Virgin’s apparitions, to touch the most unexpected people. At least in republics it did and maybe that was the best argument in their favour. Realizing that she had been staring at her guest with intent excitement – it was a way she had, which the nuns had described to her as ‘pop-eyed’ and also ‘owlish’ – she tried to remember what they’d been talking of before he got on to politics. Her looks? No, not that. Oh, seeing Ireland. Yes.

  ‘Have you been to New Grange?’ she asked.

  ‘No. What’s there?’

  ‘A pagan site where the Druids may have spilled human blood to renew the energies of the soil.’

  ‘Like now,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that Pearse’s notion?’

  ‘Oh we’re bloody enough. Is that what you want to promote with your money?’

  ‘I’m not here to take sides,’ he said. ‘Only to see what’s happening. Thanks for the tea.’ He stood up. He’d be back another time, he said, to chat with her father.

  Afterwards, she began to wonder why he’d been so curious about Owen. Too curious? Had he come to pry? And had she said anything indiscreet? She went over their conversation in her mind, worrying and trying to imagine the uses to which any information she had given out could possibly be put. She decided in the end that, though the bold Sparky had definitely been fishing, she had given nothing away.

  *

  ‘Was the Yank in?’ Seamus asked Judith.

  She said he’d been around.

  ‘You know what he’s after? Why he’s over here?’

  ‘Observing us, isn’t he? Reporting back to New York on our spirits and whether we’ll fight to the death or cave in to Lloyd George.’

  ‘There’s that,’ Seamus agreed. ‘He’s looking for some lost funds too. The Yanks are touchy buckos when it comes to money and Clan na Gael in New York is making ructions over sums they say were fecked in New York.’

  ‘And why would he look for it here?’

  ‘They think it was spirited over. There’s great distrust between some of the leaders here and the ones over there. Wigs on the green, I believe. You see our crowd found that the Clan had raised big sums among the American Irish for the cause of Irish freedom, only, when it came time to cough up, didn’t they use it for their own local politics. Well, a lot of our lads felt that that was theft. You can see why they might feel justified in taking any they could lay their hands on. It would be easy enough to get it back here, as our delegates were always smuggled in and out of America anyway. They could spirit it back as easy as pie.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know who. One of the fellows from here who was over.’

  ‘But they wouldn’t keep it for personal gain, surely?’ Judith was shocked. ‘Wouldn’t it be turned over to the ministers of the Dáil?’

  ‘Well, there’s a rumour that there
might be a split in the IRA any day and one half of the lads may well be knocking the lard out of the other. If that happened, a secret hoard would be useful to the side that didn’t agree with the Dáil leaders. Also it would put the ministers in a tricky position to be handed fecked dollars. Whoever has it is likely to sit tight for a while.’

  ‘Are you making this up?’

  ‘No.’

  Again Judith wondered about the money in the yard. Seamus couldn’t have put it there. He hadn’t been to America. Owen had. Did Seamus know and was he sounding her out or tipping her off about keeping a closed mouth? Or just gossiping? If he knew he wouldn’t dare gossip, so that meant only she did. But what about Kathleen who was sweet on Sparky? She was unreliable. On the other hand, Kathleen would never go lifting the flagstones on the back path and neither would Sparky. If everyone kept their mouths shut no trouble was likely. It turned her against the Yank, though, to know he was a spy.

  *

  Therese,

  I don’t know whether or not to write. You will want to be kept informed – or, if you don’t, then you have the option of tearing this up unread. So I write. But there is little new to tell except about my own narcissistic anxiety: fear that I am using you by confiding.

  If I could make a choice, reach a resolution, I suppose I would find calm. Instead, I am like a dog barking at a door behind which he smells a bitch on heat: glaze-eyed, hot-tongued, maddened, unassuaged. I saw a gang of just such canine males yesterday which is why the image comes to me. One sees things like that here: manifestations of nature which don’t seem to occur in LA. Two days ago it was the screams of a pig being butchered which suddenly spoiled a walk through the heather on a Wicklow mountain. Yes, I was with her and awareness of blood-letting behind the farmyard wall both excited and revolted me. Nature here is unwashed and unimproved. The place is full of mongolian idiots which families keep and send out to play with other children. They look like cloth dolls with their button-nosed, puffed faces and little beady eyes. People say they are very affectionate.