Irish Journal

by Böll, Heinrich

  One thing is certain, and that is that of Mrs. D.’s nine children five or six will have to emigrate. Will little Pedar, now being patiently rocked by his oldest brother while his mother makes fried eggs for her boardinghouse guests, fills jam pots, cuts white and brown bread, pours tea, while she bakes bread in the peat fire by placing the dough in the iron form and heaping glowing peat over the form (it is faster, by the way, and cheaper than in the electric oven)—in fourteen years, in 1970, on October 1 or April 1, will this little Pedar, aged fourteen, carrying his cardboard suitcase, hung about with medallions, supplied with a package of extra-thick sandwiches, embraced by his sobbing mother, stand at the bus stop to begin the great journey to Cleveland, Ohio, to Manchester, Liverpool, London, or Sydney, to some uncle, a cousin, a brother perhaps, who has promised to look after him and do something for him?

  These farewells at Irish railway stations, at bus stops in the middle of the bog, when tears blend with raindrops and the Atlantic wind is blowing; Grandfather stands there too, he knows the canyons of Manhattan, he knows the New York waterfront, for thirty years he has been through the mill, and he quickly stuffs another pound note into the boy’s pocket, the boy with the cropped hair, the runny nose, the boy who is being wept over as Jacob wept over Joseph; the bus driver cautiously sounds his horn, very cautiously—he has driven hundreds, perhaps thousands, of boys whom he has seen grow up to the station, and he knows the train does not wait and that a farewell that is over and done with is easier to bear than one which is still to come. He waves, the journey into the lonely countryside begins, the little white house in the bog, tears mixed with mucus, past the store, past the pub where Father used to drink his pint of an evening; past the school, the church, a sign of the cross, the bus driver makes one too—the bus stops; more tears, more farewells; Michael is leaving too, and Sheila; tears, tears—Irish, Polish, Armenian tears.…

  The journey by bus and train from here to Dublin takes eight hours, and what is picked up on the way, the ones standing in the corridors of overcrowded trains with cardboard boxes, battered suitcases, or duffel bags, girls with a rosary still wound around their hands, boys with marbles still clinking in their pockets—this freight is only a small part, only a few hundred of the more than forty thousand who leave this country every year: laborers and doctors, nurses, household help, and teachers—Irish tears that will blend with Polish and Italian tears in London, Manhattan, Cleveland, Liverpool, or Sydney.

  Of the eighty children at Mass on Sundays, only forty-five will still be living here in forty years; but these forty-five will have so many children that eighty children will again be kneeling in church.

  So of Mrs. D.’s nine children, five or six will certainly have to emigrate. But now Pedar is being rocked by his older brother, while his mother throws lobsters for her guests into the big pot over the peat fire; while the onions are simmering in the pan and the steaming bread slowly cools on the tiled table; while the sea murmurs and Siobhan with eyes like Vivien Leigh’s looks through the binoculars across to the blue islands, islands on which in clear weather you can make out the little villages: houses, barns, a church whose tower has already collapsed. Not a soul is living there now, not a soul. Birds nest in parlors, seals sometimes laze on the dock of the little harbor, screeching seagulls cry like lost souls in the deserted streets. It is a birds’ paradise, say those who sometimes row an English professor across, an ornithologist.

  “Now I can see it,” says Siobhan.

  “What?” asks her mother.

  “The church; it’s all white, all covered with seagulls.” “You take Pedar now,” says her brother, “I have to go and do the milking.” Siobhan lays aside the binoculars, takes the baby, rocking him as she walks about humming. Will she go to America, become a waitress or a film star, and will Pedar sell stamps, look after the switchboard, and in twenty years look across to the deserted island with the binoculars to discover that the church has now collapsed entirely?

  As yet the future, farewell and tears, have not begun for the D. family. As yet no one has packed his cardboard suitcase and presumed on the bus driver’s patience in order to spin the farewell out a little, and as yet no one has even given it a thought, for here the present counts for more than the future; but this emphasis, resulting in improvisation instead of planning, will be balanced with tears.

  15

  A SMALL CONTRIBUTION TO OCCIDENTAL MYTHOLOGY

  While our boat was slowly entering the little harbor, we could make out the old man sitting on a stone bench in front of a ruin. He might have been sitting there in exactly the same way three hundred years ago; the fact that he was smoking a pipe made no difference: it required no effort to transpose the pipe, the lighter, and the Woolworth cap into the seventeenth century; the old man pulled them in his wake, as well as the movie camera which George had stowed carefully away in the bow of the boat. Hundreds of years ago ballad singers, itinerant monks, had probably landed in this harbor just as we were doing; the old man raised his cap—his hair was white, fluffy, and thick—he made our boat fast, we jumped ashore and, smiling at each other, exchanged the “lovely day”—“nice day”—“wonderful day,” the highly complicated simplicity of greeting in countries where the weather is always threatened by rain gods, and as soon as we set foot on the little island it seemed as if time closed over our heads like a vortex. The greenness of these trees and meadows defies description; they throw green shadows into the Shannon, their green light seems to reach up to the sky where the clouds have gathered round the sun like patches of moss; this could be the scene of Danae and the shower of gold. There is a vault of green over the island, and the sun falls in discs of gold over meadows and trees, lying there as round as coins and as bright as coins, and sometimes a coin hops onto the back of a rabbit and drops off onto the meadow.

  The old man is eighty-eight; a contemporary of Sun Yatsen and Busoni, he was born before Rumania became what it has for years no longer been: a kingdom; he was four years old when Dickens died—and he is a year older than dynamite; all this merely to catch him in the frail net of time. The ruin he was sitting in front of had been a barn built in the beginning of our century, but fifty feet farther on there was a ruin from the sixth century; fourteen hundred years ago St. Ciaran of Clonmacnois built a church here. Without the discerning eye of the archeologist, the walls from the twentieth century are indistinguishable from those of the sixth century; there is a sheen of green over them all, scattered with golden patches of sunlight.

  It was here that George wanted to try out a new color film, and the old man—one year older than dynamite—had been chosen to supply the “human interest”: puffing away at his pipe, he was to be filmed on the bank of the Shannon against the setting sun, a few days later he would appear on American screens, and all the Irish in America would have tears of homesickness in their eyes and begin to sing; multiplied a million times over, shrouded in veils of green light, in the rosy glow of the setting sun, and the smoke from his pipe blue, intensely blue—that was how he was to appear.

  But first tea had to be drunk, lots of tea, and the visitors had to pay tribute by telling all the news; for in spite of radio and newspapers, news from the lips of the man you shook hands with, the man you had tea with, that’s the kind that counts. We had tea in the lounge of a vacant manor house; the permanent dark-green shadow of the trees seemed to have dyed the walls green, to have drawn a green patina over the Dickensian furniture. The retired English colonel who had brought us over in his boat—with his long red hair, his pointed red beard, he looked like a mixture between Robinson Crusoe and Mephistopheles—led the conversation, and unfortunately I found it hard to understand his English, although he was kind enough to try and speak “slowly, very slowly.”

  At first I understood only three words in the conversation: Rommel, war, and fair, and I knew that Rommel’s “fairness” during the “war” was one of the colonel’s favorite topics; moreover, my attention was distracted by the old man’s chi
ldren, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, who looked into the room or brought tea, hot water, bread, and cakes (a little five-year-old girl came with half a cookie and placed it on the table as a token of her hospitality), and all of them, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, had the pointed, triangular, knowing, heart-shaped face that so often looks down on the busy world in the form of a waterspout from the towers of French cathedrals.…

  George sat holding the camera, ready to shoot and waiting for the sunset, but that evening the sun was slow in setting, particularly slow it seemed to me, and the colonel switched from his favorite topic to another: he talked about someone called Henry who had evidently been a hero in the war in Russia; from time to time the old man looked at me in wondering surprise with his round, pale-blue eyes, and I would nod; who was I to deny this Henry, whom I did not know, the heroism with which Crusoe-Mephistopheles credited him?

  At last the sun seemed ready to set; as required by the director, it was approaching the horizon, approaching the television devotees in America, and we walked slowly back to the bank of the Shannon. The sun was dropping fast now, and the old man quickly filled his pipe, then drew on it too hastily so that it was no longer puffing by the time the lower edge of the sun was just touching the horizon. But the old man’s tobacco pouch was empty, and the sun was slipping away rapidly. How dead a smokeless pipe looks in the mouth of a peasant standing in front of the setting sun: folkloric silhouette, silver hair in the green light, rosy-hued brow. George hurriedly tore up a few cigarettes and stuffed them into the pipe bowl, pale-blue smoke came puffing out, and at this very moment the sun was half-submerged behind the gray horizon: a eucharist in dwindling glory—the pipe puffed, the camera whirred, and the silver hair shone: greetings from the beloved homeland for moist Irish eyes in America, a new type of picture postcard. “We’ll dub in a nice bagpipe tune,” said George.

  Folklore is something like innocence: when you know you have it, you no longer have it, and the old man stood there rather sadly when the sun had gone down; a blue-gray twilight absorbed the green veils. We went over to him, tore up some more cigarettes and stuffed them in his pipe; suddenly it was cool, dampness flowed in from all sides, and the island, this tiny kingdom where the old man’s family had lived for three hundred years, the island seemed to me like a great green sponge lying half in, half out of the water and soaking up dampness from below.

  The fire in the hearth had gone out, burned-out peat fell over the red lumps, and when we made our way slowly back to the little harbor the old man walked beside me and looked at me strangely; the look in his eyes embarrassed me, because—yes, because there seemed to be awe in it, and I did not find myself awe-inspiring; before I got into the boat he pressed my hand, warmly, shyly, with heartfelt emotion. “Rommel,” he said softly and slowly, and in his voice was all the gravity of a myth, and “Henry,” he said—and suddenly everything I had not understood before, everything that had been said about this Henry, became plain to me like a watermark that can only be seen in a certain light. I realized that this Henry was me. George jumped down beside me into the boat; he had quickly taken some shots of St. Ciaran’s chapel in the dusk. George grinned when he saw my face.

  I drew a breath, a long breath, in order to correct the myth; it did not seem fair toward either Rommel or Henry or history to leave things as they were—but the boat had already been cast loose, and Crusoe-Mephistopheles had started up the engine, and I called across to the island: “Rommel was not the war—and Henry wasn’t a hero, far from it,” but probably the old man had only understood three of the words: Rommel, Henry, and hero—and once again I shouted the single word: “No, no, no, no.…”

  On this little island in the Shannon, where a stranger seldom sets foot, perhaps tales will be told beside darkly glowing hearths, fifty or a hundred years from now, of Rommel, of war, and of Henry. Thus it is that what we call history penetrates into remote corners of our world: not Stalingrad, not the millions murdered and killed, not the mutilated faces of European cities—war will be known by the words Rommel, fairness, and for good measure Henry, who was there in person and called out in the blue darkness “No, no, no!” from the boat as it moved off—a word so easily misunderstood and for that reason so suitable for the making of a myth.…

  George stood beside me laughing; he too had caught a myth in his whirring camera: St. Ciaran’s chapel in the dusk and the old man, white-haired, lost in thought; we could still see his thick, snow-white hair shining far off against the wall of the little harbor—a touch of silver in the ink of twilight. The little island, the kingdom, sank into the Shannon with all its errors and all its truths, and Crusoe-Mephistopheles, who was at the tiller, was smiling peacefully to himself: “Rommel,” he murmured; it sounded like an incantation.

  16

  NOT A SWAN TO BE SEEN

  The red-haired woman in the compartment was talking quietly to the young priest, who looked up every now and then for a few seconds from his breviary, went on murmuring, looked up, then closed his breviary and devoted himself entirely to the conversation.

  “San Francisco?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said the red-haired woman, “my husband has sent us over; I’m going to see my parents-in-law, I’ve never met them. I have to get out at Ballymote.”

  “There’s plenty of time yet,” said the priest in a low voice, “plenty of time.” “Really?” asked the young woman softly. She was very tall, fat, and pale, and sat there with her child’s face like a great doll, while her three-year-old daughter had taken the priest’s breviary and was giving an excellent imitation of his murmuring. The young woman was already lifting a hand to punish the little girl, but the priest held her arm back.

  “Don’t stop her, please,” he said quietly.

  It was raining; water was running down the window panes, farmers were rowing outside across their flooded fields to fish up their hay from the water; washing hung on hedges, at the mercy of the rain, wet dogs barked at the train, sheep scampered away, and the little girl was saying her breviary, weaving into her murmurs names which she remembered from her evening prayers: Jesus, Holy Mary, and making room for the poor souls too.

  The train stopped, a soaking wet porter passed baskets of mushrooms into the baggage car, unloaded cigarettes, the bundle of evening papers, then helped a woman standing in the rain to open her umbrella.…

  The stationmaster looked wistfully after the slowly departing train; sometimes he must ask himself whether in reality he isn’t a cemetery custodian: four trains a day: two up, two down, and sometimes a freight train ambling sadly along as if it were going to the funeral of another freight train. In Ireland the barriers at level crossings do not protect cars from trains, they protect trains from cars; they are not opened and closed toward the road, the line is blocked across the tracks; in this way the neatly painted stations look something like miniature health spas or sanatoria, the stationmasters are more like orderlies than their military-looking colleagues in other countries, who are always standing in the smoke of engines, the thundering of trains, saluting freight trains dashing by. Flowers grow around the little Irish railway stations, neat, well-tended beds, carefully pruned trees, and the stationmaster smiles into the departing train as if to say: No, no, you’re not dreaming, it’s really true, it’s really four-forty-nine, as my clock up there shows. For the traveler is sure the train must be late: the train is punctual, but the punctuality seems deceptive; four-forty-nine is too precise a time for it to be correct in these stations. It is not the clock that is wrong, but time, which uses minute hands.

  Sheep fled, cows stared, wet dogs barked, and the farmers rowed around in boats on their fields and fished up the grass in nets.

  A gentle singsong flowed rhythmically from the little girl’s lips, articulated Jesus, Holy Mary, wove in the poor souls at regular intervals. The red-haired woman grew more and more anxious.

  “No,” said the priest softly, “there are two more stations before Ballymote.”
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  “In California,” said the young woman, “it’s so warm, there’s so much sunshine. Ireland seems quite strange to me. I’ve been gone fifteen years; I always count in dollars, I can’t get used to pounds, shillings, and pence any more, and you know, Father, Ireland has got sadder.”

  “It’s the rain,” said the priest with a sigh.

  “Of course, I’ve never been this way before,” said the woman, “but in other places, years ago, before I went away; from Athlone to Galway—I’ve done that bit often, but it seems to me that fewer people are living there than before. It’s so quiet, it makes my heart stand still. I’m afraid.”

  The priest said nothing and sighed.

  “I’m afraid,” said the woman in a low voice. “From Ballymote I have to go another twenty miles, by bus, then on foot, across the bog—I’m afraid of the water. Rain and lakes, rivers and streams and more lakes—you know, Father, Ireland seems to me to be full of holes. The washing on these hedges will never dry, the hay will float away—aren’t you afraid too, Father?”

  “It’s just the rain,” said the priest, “don’t let it worry you. I know that feeling. Sometimes I’m afraid too. For two years I had a small parish, between Crossmolina and Newport, and it often used to rain for weeks, the storm would blow—nothing but the high mountains, dark green and black—do you know Nephin Beg?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “It was not far from there. Rain, water, bog—and when someone took me to Newport or Foxford, always water—past lakes or past the sea.”

  The little girl closed the breviary, jumped up on the seat, put her arms round her mother’s neck, and whispered: “Are we going to drown, really?”