by John Boyne
The bar was frequented primarily by gay men but was not so much a pick-up joint as a casual hangout. Occasionally, a couple of rent boys would come in and attract the attention of the older men sitting alone at their tables reading De Telegraaf but unless they conducted their business quickly, the proprietor, Jack Smoot, would throw them out, directing them back toward Paardenstraat and Rembrandtplein with fiercely uttered warnings not to return.
“A little trade from time to time is fine,” he told me one evening after ejecting a tall, dark-haired boy in a pair of tight denim shorts that did him no favors. “But I won’t allow MacIntyre’s to get a reputation for hustlers.”
“None of them are Dutch, are they?” I asked, watching the boy as he stood outside staring into the canal, his shoulders slumped in defeat. “He looked Greek or Turkish to me.”
“Most of them are Eastern European boys,” said Smoot, barely glancing outside. “They come over here to make their fortunes but they don’t have the same success as the girls. No one’s interested in seeing boys posing in their underwear in a window in De Wallen. They have about five good years, if they’re lucky, then they start to show their age and no one cares anymore. If you want him—”
“Jesus,” I said, retreating in my seat, offended. “Of course I don’t want him. He’s just a child. But isn’t there some other way he could make a living? He looked as if he’s starving.”
“He probably is.”
“So why throw him out? At least he would have made enough to eat tonight.”
“Because if I let one do it, then I have to let them all do it,” said Smoot. “And I didn’t set this place up to be a haven for rent boys. He wouldn’t have approved of that.”
“Who wouldn’t?” I asked, but he ignored my question and returned behind the bar, washing his hands in the sink and ignoring me for the rest of the night.
I’d grown friendly with Jack Smoot ever since I’d started frequenting MacIntyre’s. He was about twenty years older than me and an intimidating presence with his shaven head, eyepatch and a walking stick that supported a lame left leg. Once, when I stayed late on a Friday night with a girl I was friendly with from work, he invited me to spend the night with him in his flat upstairs, but I declined and he seemed more upset by my rejection than I had expected him to be, for I assumed that he hit on his regulars frequently, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. I made sure to return the next night, hoping that things would not be awkward between us, and to my relief he behaved as if nothing untoward had happened. Now, he usually left me alone to enjoy my dinner but would sometimes join me for a drink before I left for home and it was on one such occasion that he surprised me by revealing himself to be Irish.
“Well, half Irish,” he said, correcting himself. “I was born there. But I got out of the place when I was twenty.”
“You’ve no trace of an accent,” I told him.
“I worked hard to get rid of it,” he said, tapping on the table nervously with badly chewed nails.
“Where are you from?”
“Out near Ballincollig,” he said, looking away, his tongue bulging in his cheek. I could feel his entire body tensing beside me.
“Where’s that? Kerry?”
“Cork.”
“Oh right,” I said. “I’ve never been there.”
“Well, you haven’t missed much.”
“And do you go back often?”
He laughed, as if I’d asked a ridiculous question, and shook his head. “I do not,” he said. “I haven’t set foot in Ireland in thirty-five years and it would take an army of mercenaries to drag me back there now. Awful country. Horrible people. Terrible memories.”
“And yet,” I said, a little unsettled by his bitterness, “you run an Irish bar.”
“I run an Irish bar because it makes money,” he told me. “This place is a little goldmine. I may hate the country, Cyril, but I don’t mind her people coming over here and putting money in my till. And once in a while someone comes in and there’s something in his voice or his expression that…” He trailed off and shook his head before closing his eyes, and I could tell that whatever scars lingered from his past, there was little chance of them ever healing.
“What?” I asked when he showed no signs of continuing. “Something that what?”
“Something that reminds me of a boy I used to know,” he said, looking up with a half-smile, and I decided to ask no more questions. Whatever his memories were, they were private ones and no business of mine.
“Anyway, I admire people like you, Cyril,” he said finally. “People who got away. It’s the ones who’ve stayed that I despise. The tourists who come over here on Friday mornings on the first Aer Lingus flight with no plans other than to drink themselves stupid, then make their way to the Rosse Buurt to get laid, although by then they’re usually too drunk to get it up anyway. Then they leave again on Sunday afternoon, back to their civil-service jobs with Monday-morning hangovers, convinced that the whores enjoyed the five minutes they spent with them just because they smiled through it all and gave them a kiss when they were leaving. I bet you never see a group of Irish tourists in the Anne Frank House.”
“Not often,” I admitted.
“That’s because they’re all in here. Or places like this.”
“You know, I worked for the civil service when I was younger,” I told him.
“I’m only half-surprised to hear you say it,” he said. “But you left, so you mustn’t have enjoyed it.”
“It was all right. The truth is I might be still there today if…well, there was an incident and there was no staying on after that. I didn’t care much, to be honest. I got a job in RTÉ and that was more interesting.”
Smoot took a sip from his drink and glanced out the window, watching as the bicycles went past, an occasional bell ringing in the air to warn a careless pedestrian. “Funnily enough,” he said, “I know someone who works in the Dáil.”
“A TD?”
“No, a woman.”
“There are women TDs,” I said.
“Are there?”
“Of course there are, you sexist pig. Well, a few of them anyway. Not many.”
“She isn’t a TD. She works behind the scenes. I didn’t like her very much when we first met. In fact, I hated her. I thought of her as a cuckoo in my nest. But then, as things worked out, she saved my life. I wouldn’t be sitting here today talking to you if it wasn’t for her.”
The bar, which was busy, felt quiet around us. “How?” I asked. “What happened?”
He said nothing, simply shook his head, and then breathed in very deeply, as if he was fighting off tears. When he looked up at me, all I saw was pain on his face.
“Are you still friends?” I asked. “Does she come over to see you?”
“She’s my best friend,” he said, rubbing the edge of his thumb against the corners of both eyes. “And, yes, she comes every year or two. Saves her money and flies to Amsterdam, and the pair of us sit right here at this table, crying like babies as we talk about the past. Here’s the thing you have to understand about Ireland,” he said, leaning forward now and pointing a finger at me. “Nothing will ever change in that fucking place. Ireland is a backward hole of a country run by vicious, evil-minded, sadistic priests and a government so in thrall to the collar that it’s practically led around on a leash. The Taoiseach does what the Archbishop of Dublin says and for his obeisance he’s given a treat, like a good puppy. The best thing that could happen to Ireland would be for a tsunami to rise up in the Atlantic Ocean and drown the place with all the vengeance of a biblical flood and for every man, woman and child to disappear forever.”
I sat back, startled by the vehemence in his tone. Smoot was generally a fairly benevolent presence; to hear such rage in his voice unsettled me. “Come on,” I said. “That might be going a bit far, don’t you think?”
“If anything, it’s not going far enough,” he said, betraying a little of the Cork accent in his voice now,
and perhaps he heard it too, for he shuddered, as if the fact that it remained inside him somewhere, buried deep and inexorably within his soul, was upsetting to him. “Think yourself lucky, Cyril,” he added. “You got out. And you don’t ever have to go back.”
Bastiaan
It was in MacIntyre’s pub that I met Bastiaan for the first time. I noticed him when I arrived, sitting at a corner table with a glass of Jupiler, reading a Dutch edition of one of Maude’s novels. Although I didn’t keep track of the various languages into which her work had been translated, and certainly didn’t benefit from any royalties, all of which went directly to Charles, I understood from the occasional retrospective newspaper article that they were widely available around the world and that her work was now being studied at many universities. I had seen copies of Like to the Lark at a train station in Madrid, watched a stage adaptation of The Codicil of Agnès Fontaine in an underground theater in Prague and sat near Ingmar Bergman in a café in Stockholm while he made notes in the margins of My Daughter’s Ghost, three years before his triumphant adaptation of that novel at the Kungliga Operan. It seemed that her reputation was only growing as year followed year. Maude would have been mortified.
Bastiaan was utterly engrossed in the book when I noticed him and was only a few pages from the end. The closing pages, an epilogue, reunited a man and woman in a London hotel decades after the end of the Great War in a testy encounter that provided my favorite scene from any of my adoptive mother’s books, and I sat at the bar, drinking a beer while trying not to appear too obvious in my interest. When he turned the last page, he put the book down on the table and stared at it for a few moments before taking his glasses off and rubbing the bridge of his nose. I was aware that I was ogling him but I couldn’t help myself. He wore his dark hair shorter than the general style of the time, had about two days of stubble and was ridiculously good-looking. I guessed that he was around the same age as me, perhaps a year or two younger, and I felt the familiar pang that overcame me whenever I encountered someone so attractive that there seemed to be little possibility of our ever making a connection.
A moment later, however, he glanced over and smiled. I told myself to stand up, to go to his table, to sit down with him—God knows I had an obvious conversation starter with the book that he’d been reading—but for some reason I turned away. And then, before I could gather my courage, he stood up and to my frustration waved a hand toward the barman before leaving.
“Your timidity is going to be the death of you, Cyril,” said Jack Smoot, placing a fresh drink before me.
“I’m not timid,” I said timidly.
“Of course you are. You’re nervous of being rejected. I can see it in your face. You don’t have much experience of men, do you?”
“Not much,” I admitted. Sex, yes, I stopped myself from saying, but men, no.
“This isn’t Dublin, you know,” he continued. “This is Amsterdam. If you see someone you like, you go over and say hello. You talk to them. Especially if it seems that they like you too. And Bastiaan likes you, I can tell.”
“Who’s Bastiaan?” I asked.
“The man you keep staring at.”
“I don’t think he even noticed me,” I said, wishing that he would contradict me.
“Trust me, he noticed you.”
I returned to MacIntyre’s the following evening, hoping he might be there, but to my disappointment the table in the corner was empty and I sat down and carried on with De wereld volgens Garp, which I was reading for the second time—this time in Dutch—in an attempt to improve my language skills. About twenty minutes later, however, he arrived, glanced around the room and went to the bar to order two beers before sitting down opposite me.
“I came back hoping you might be here,” he told me by way of introduction.
“I did too,” I said.
“I thought if you weren’t going to speak to me, then I should speak to you.”
I looked directly into his eyes and somehow already knew that seated across from me was the most important man I would ever know in my life. More important than Charles Avery. More important than Julian Woodbead. The only one whom I would ever love and who would ever love me in return.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m a little shy, that’s all.”
“You can’t be shy in Amsterdam,” he said, echoing Smoot’s words of the previous night. “It’s against the law. You can get locked up for less.”
“I’d spend a lot of time in prison if that was the case,” I told him.
“What’s your name?” he asked me.
“Cyril Avery.”
“Your accent. You’re Irish?” His face fell a little. “Are you just visiting?”
“No, I live here,” I told him. “I’m here to stay.”
“You work here?”
“At the Anne Frank House. I’m a curator there.”
He hesitated briefly. “OK,” he said.
“And you?” I asked. “What do you do?”
“I’m a doctor,” he told me. “A research scientist, to be more precise. Communicable diseases.”
“What, like smallpox and polio and things like that?”
He paused for a moment. “That sort of thing, yes. Although it’s not quite the area I work in.”
“What area do you work in?”
Before he could reply, Smoot appeared, pulling over a seat and grinning at us like some diligent matchmaker whose work was done.
“You found each other then?” he asked, grinning at us both. “I knew you would eventually.”
“Jack here is always telling me that Ireland is a terrible place,” said Bastiaan. “Can it be true? I’ve never been there.”
“It’s not that bad,” I said, surprised at my willingness to defend my homeland. “Jack hasn’t been home in a long time, that’s all.”
“It’s not home,” said Smoot. “And neither have you.”
“When were you last there?” asked Bastiaan.
“Seven years ago.”
“It’s not a good place for people like us,” said Smoot.
“People like us?” asked Bastiaan, turning to him. “What, bar owners, museum curators and doctors?”
“Take a look at this,” said Smoot, ignoring the question as he lifted his eyepatch to reveal a clump of scar tissue across the skin where his eye should have been. “This is what Ireland does to people like us. And this too,” he added, raising his cane and rapping it hard, three times, against the floor, making the other patrons turn their heads in our direction. “I haven’t walked easily on two legs in thirty-five years. Fucking Ireland.”
I gave a deep sigh; I wasn’t in the mood for Smoot’s bitterness that night. I glared at him, hoping he would take the hint to leave, but Bastiaan leaned over in interest and examined his wounds for a moment or two.
“Who did this to you, my friend?” he asked quietly.
“Some fat old bastard from Ballincollig,” said Smoot, his face darkening at the memory. “He took exception to the fact that his son came up to Dublin to be with me and so he followed him up one day, waited outside our flat until he could get in and then bashed the boy’s brains in against the wall before turning his fury on me. I would have bled to death if there hadn’t been someone else there that night.”
Bastiaan shook his head in disgust. “And what happened to him?” he asked. “Did he go to jail?”
“He did not,” said Smoot, sitting up straight, and I could tell that the pain was almost too much for him, even from a distance of so many years. “The jury let him off, but no great surprises there. A jury of twelve other fat old Irish bastards who said that his son was mentally disordered and so he had the right to do what he did to him. And to me. If you want to know what he stole from me, just take a look at the wall there.” He nodded toward a photograph nailed to the stonework next to us; I hadn’t even noticed it until now. “Seán MacIntyre. The boy I loved. The boy he murdered.” I stared at it, two men standing next to each other, on
e smiling at the camera, the other—a younger Smoot—glaring at it, while to their right, the figure of a woman was split down the middle by the frame. “A couple of months after that picture was taken, Seán was in his grave.”
I glanced back toward the bar, wishing he would return there. To my relief, two tourists entered the bar and Smoot looked around and sighed.
“I better get back to it,” he said, lifting his cane and hobbling back to serve them.
“Have you eaten?” I asked Bastiaan, wanting to get out of there quickly in case Smoot returned. “Would you like to grab some dinner with me?”
“Of course I would,” he said, grinning at me as if there could be no doubt about the answer. “Did you think I came back here just to look at Jack Smoot’s missing eye?”
Ignac
We discovered Ignac lying up against the doorway of our apartment in Weesperplein on a freezing cold Saturday night a few weeks before Christmas.
Bastiaan had moved in two months earlier and the simple pleasure of our cohabitation made me wonder why I had ever cared what other people might think. It had been seven years since I’d left Dublin and during that time I had neither gone back to my homeland nor communicated with anyone from my past. The truth was, I had no idea what had happened to any of them, whether they were even alive or dead. Nor, for that matter, did they have any clue what had happened to me. The notion that I might never return, however, saddened me, for as much as I loved Amsterdam, I still thought of Ireland as home and occasionally longed to be walking down Grafton Street while the carol singers were performing outside Switzer’s or taking a stroll along the pier at Dun Laoghaire on a chilly Sunday morning before enjoying lunch in a local pub.
