An Ark of Light

by Dermot Bolger

‘Will I do before I enter the parade ring?’ she asked.

  ‘You’d make any man proud,’ Eva assured her. ‘You make me proud. You always did.’

  Eva didn’t know if someone gave a signal or everyone instinctively knew to withdraw, because suddenly there was just Eva and Hazel in the room: the murmur of the well-wishers waiting at the foot of the stairs growing ever more vocal as if they sensed that the moment had arrived.

  ‘I’ll be back and forth every few years,’ Hazel said. ‘Kenya isn’t as far away as it was once.’

  ‘All I’ll need to do is put Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata on the gramophone and you’ll be close,’ Eva said. ‘Every night you’d ask me to play it in Mayo during the war.’

  ‘They were happy days.’

  Eva softly touched her gloved hand. ‘Your truly happy days are still to come,’ she promised. ‘It’s funny, this moment reminds me of my own wedding. Just before I walked down the stairs I ended up alone in my bedroom with my mother and she made me promise something.’

  Francis was tapping at the door, indicating that the wedding car was here, the crowd impatient, the moment unable to be put off any longer.

  ‘What did she make you promise, Mummy?’

  ‘No matter what hand life deals you, promise me that you will strive tooth and nail for the right to be happy.’

  Chapter Five

  Gather Ye Rosebuds

  Spain, 1957

  From the moment Eva left her posada for the short walk through the winding streets to the shop that doubled as a post office, an inner voice taunted her: there will be no letters today: no replies ever. Eva ignored this voice, because even if her dreams of being a teacher were gone, she had fresh dreams to realise in this remote Pyrenean village. Over recent months the locals had grown accustomed to Eva and were less curious about having a foreigner in their midst, but no less courteous. The afternoon heat was abating. Old men halted their conversations at the outdoor café in the square to lift their hats as Eva passed. The uneven pavement was speckled with stray petals strewn in a religious procession yesterday, led by a guitarist walking through these shabby laneways. That atmosphere had felt exhilarating, unlike religious feast days in Ireland where the streets remained forlornly deserted if the pubs stayed closed. But behind yesterday’s gaiety Eva had sensed the same sadness she often witnessed in Mayo: parents – and sometimes grandparents – raising children who would have no option but to leave, because only the old and the very young still populated this tiny village.

  She reached the post office. Every afternoon when she came to inquire about letters, Maria’s father, an elderly man with a limp, looked pained at sensing her disappointment, as if feeling personally at blame for the non-arrival of post. But this evening he spread out his arms wide and smiled when she opened the door. Maria was upstairs, attending to her three children. He pointed at the wooden rack behind the counter, his gesture reminding Eva of a magician having just pulled off a conjuring trick. Three envelopes lay there, each with British postmarks. The man seemed perplexed by Eva’s initial hesitation to take them. She smiled to disguise her nervousness, thanked him in broken Spanish and placed the letters in her canvas bag. Saying that she would return to visit Maria when the children were asleep, Eva left before the man could notice how she had started shaking. She wanted to return to her posada and open her letters in the privacy of her room, but needed time to compose herself for what news they might contain. The voice in her head was silenced, but it would soon begin. Anticipation and terror consumed her. News of her long-anticipated post had probably reached the old men sitting outside the café, so it was important to appear calm. Therefore Eva kept walking, leaving the village to commence her daily trek up the dirt track into the hills, refusing to contemplate the contents of these envelopes until she reached the isolation of the small lake there.

  These washed-out, pale Pyrenean skies would have provided her with a source of inspiration if her childhood dream of becoming a painter had come true. But Eva was not here to paint. Her old neighbours on Frankfort Avenue – most of whom never set foot on the continent unless on diocesan pilgrimages to Lourdes – would be perplexed as to why she gave up her old life to be here. Hazel called it ‘making up for lost time’. Others might call it wanderlust, seeking a change of direction while going through the change of life. But Eva’s journey to this village felt more like a realigning of her life to allow the resumption of a lifelong quest. Even when she had been a child in Killaghtee Church, she had sensed how some ministers who preached sermons there were more concerned with elocution than with any love of Christ. She had only truly felt close to God when out amid the fields around Dunkineely. Her quest for a spiritual home had continued during her art student days. While Ireland was preoccupied with seeking independence, Eva had been preoccupied with seeking a creed to belong to, sampling and savouring every religious service on offer while an intuitive inner voice always warned her to move on and not mistake each stepping stone for a summit. By the end of her student days, Eva had come to feel that she was simply a sepal to be blown about at her creator’s will, although she once needed to hide such unorthodox beliefs when on display beside Freddie in the designated Fitzgerald family pew in the Protestant church in Turlough during her marriage. Now that Francis and Hazel were leading independent lives, Eva had feared succumbing to feeling old and sorry for herself. But since her arrival in Spain, Eva realised that she still remained a tiny sepal in her core, content to be blown about in her quest to discover what purpose God intended for her on earth. Today’s letters might finally reveal the answer.

  The air here was drier than in Ireland, the unpaved roads coated in dust. Eva stared ahead as she walked. Her soul was coming to love this landscape and so did her arthritic bones. The villagers kept expecting her to tire of the extreme remoteness, but Eva had no intention of going anywhere – at least not until her meagre savings ran out. Besides, where was there to go when she no longer possessed a home? In her recent letters from Kenya Hazel had scolded her for selling Frankfurt Avenue for such a low price. But Eva could not imagine any house in Dublin ever being worth much money: the night boat so constantly crammed with departing emigrants that it was easy to envisage a time when there would nobody left in Ireland except the young and very old. Hazel claimed that Eva never planned ahead, but she had prudently safeguarded her future by using the proceeds from the sale of Frankfurt Avenue to purchase an annuity with Standard Life. From now until her death Eva would receive a twice yearly dividend of one hundred and thirty pounds. She would never be rich, but with five pounds a week to exist on, she could not envisage starving either. If today’s letters brought the news she was desperately waiting for, it would justify her decision to sell her home and stake everything on this dream of a new life.

  This village seemed the perfect place to nurture that dream, allowing her to live cheaply in seclusion. Five months ago Eva had feared that Spain would prove a disaster when a white-gloved border guard at the crossing from France examined her meagre luggage, while armed soldiers scrutinised her standing beside a wall dominated by a picture of Franco. The frontier guard minutely studied the details on her passport. Height: five-foot, two inches. Colour of eyes: grey/green. Face: oval. Colour of hair: light brown. Maiden name: Goold-Verschoyle. Sensing the official reach her maiden name, Eva half-expected him to bark orders to the soldiers: her luggage thrown back at her feet amid taunts of ‘Comunista!’ as she was refused entry into Spain. But the Goold-Verschoyle name meant as little to Brendan’s old enemies who had triumphed here as it meant to those who fought against Franco in the International Brigade. Brendan’s fate didn’t conveniently fit into either side’s narrative of the Spanish Civil War, leaving both sides equally indifferent and content to erase him from history.

  Therefore the frontier guard had snapped shut her passport with a final glance of wary suspicion – caused, she suspected, by the stated occupation listed on the passport – and waved her through into a country dominated b
y uniforms. She found Franco’s staring eyes everywhere: on café walls and hotel foyers and the front page of newspapers sold by barefoot urchins along the Ramblas when she reached Barcelona. The newspapers showed the Generalísimo making one of his curt high-pitched speeches; the Generalísimo receiving flowers from grateful children, playing at being the ascetic, austere father of an impoverished nation; a sage-like saint who favoured the humble food of the ordinary labourer and never flagged in his vocation to formulate bold steps to enrich his seemingly grateful flock. What Eva noticed about every photograph was how Franco’s eyes never smiled even when his lips pretended to.

  She could not even visit old churches with being reminded of Franco’s victory by seeing young Falangists devoutly praying at shrines to José Antonio Primo de Rivera at side aisles decorated with flags and flowers. When booking into a cheap hotel on her first night in Barcelona – on a pilgrimage to retrace Brendan’s final known steps – a squadron of the Falange marched with ramrod precision across the lobby, led by a stern-faced young chaplain. Watching them stomp out the door, Eva realised that she was witnessing an incarnation of the sort of Ireland which the Blueshirt movement had fantasised about creating in the 1930s.

  These fascists were the antithesis of everything her youngest brother believed in; the embodiment of a tyranny Brendan railed against. Yet for all their grandiose uniforms and reprisal killings, Franco’s thugs were never even afforded the chance to harm Brendan during his months fighting against them here in 1937. His fate was so abrupt and secretive that Eva suspected that his name probably never even had time to make it onto the lists of enemies of the state still kept by Franco’s secret police. From their divergent perspectives, both Art and Freddie had often complained that Eva didn’t understand politics or history. Undoubtedly from their black-and-white perspectives they were right, but even if her grasp was hazy, she understood that history and politics were never black and white. There had not been one civil war here but a dozen wars simultaneously combusting inside each other like a set of burning Matryoshka dolls, with Brendan ending up trapped inside the smouldering, inner rings of carved wood. What little she knew about Stalin horrified her, but she suspected that he never had any real interest in helping Spain’s government, beyond looting its national gold reserves, in their war against the fascist coup to overthrow them. Brendan had been a naïve enthusiast, as much in thrall to his big brother as to Stalin. By dispatching Brendan to Spain in a tightly monitored unit, Stalin could use Brendan as a proxy in his war against what he perceived to be his real enemies there – not Franco’s forces but any independent-minded socialist members in the International Brigades who expressed reluctance to swear unwavering loyalty to Moscow.

  Eva would never know how quickly Brendan realised that he was not sent here to fight fascism. But she knew enough of Brendan’s character to know how vivaciously he must have objected after realising he was being given no chance to fight for the Spanish people and allowed no contact with ordinary volunteers in the International Brigade unless he was willing to spy on their conversations. During the three days Eva spent in Barcelona, she had walked for hours along the dockside wharfs, halting at each mooring bollard, unsure if she was standing on the stretch of cobbles which Brendan had taken his final steps across as a free man. Sensing that she was becoming an object of curiosity to dock workers unloading cargos, Eva kept pressing her palms against each bollard hoping that Brendan might have paused here to touch one of these stones. But her silent vigil on the Barcelona docks brought no comfort, leaving her only plagued by uncertainty about whether, when he ascended a gangplank here, mistakenly believing he was being asked to repair a ship’s radio, he had any inkling that he would be taken prisoner and transported back for interrogation in Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison before being sentenced in a sham trial that probably lasted less than a minute.

  Ever since Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s cult of personality to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party last spring, Eva kept hoping for more reliable news of Brendan’s fate. While staying with Francis in London before she left for Spain, Eva even tried to deliver a hand-written appeal to Khrushchev when the Soviet leader held talks with Sir Anthony Eden. Eva had also hoped to persuade Art – who had moved to London after quarrelling with the small clique of fellow Irish communists – to renew his inquiries. But she found that Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalin’s murderous paranoia merely enraged Art. It took Khrushchev’s suppression of the Hungarian Uprising to restore his credibility in Art’s eyes: Art regarding the mass resignations from the British Communist Party in protest at Soviet brutality in Budapest as proof that Trotskyites were increasingly infiltrating every left-wing movement.

  Eva’s last meeting with Art was heart-rending because of the insurmountable distance between them as she sat on the solitary chair in his London flat and he hunched on the thin horsehair mattress on his small bed, inches from her and yet beyond reach. She had pleaded for him to inquire if – despite the official report of his death – Brendan might still be being held in some camp, like the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg was rumoured to be. Wallenberg had helped thousands of Jews in wartime Berlin before falling into Soviet hands. There were worldwide campaigns for Wallenberg’s fate to be revealed, but Eva could not even persuade her brother to discuss Brendan. Instead Art obsessed about his latest self-published pamphlet, cheaply reproduced by Gestetner under his own imprint, The Proletariat Press. In this he argued that the Soviet tanks invading Budapest had actually liberated Hungary from a reactionary coup. Contacts in the Soviet Embassy in London had told him that his pamphlet could prove a decisive factor in him finally being rewarded with a visa to return to Moscow, ending what Art regarded as a twenty-one year exile from his real home.

  He had now cut his final ties to Ireland by legally acknowledging ownership of his inherited acres in Donegal, after it was intimated to him by comrades in the Irish Workers League that it would greatly help the spread of communism in Ireland if he sold this property and donated all the proceeds to them so they could buy a party headquarters in Dublin. This still left Eva’s childhood home, The Manor House in Dunkineely, which Art could not legally sell but only hold in trust for his eldest son. His solution to this was simply to give away the house keys to the daughter of their former gardener, telling her that she was free to do whatever she wished with the house. These acts by Art had severed Eva’s last links to her childhood village, increasing her growing feeling of being homeless in every sense.

  After their conversation petered out, Eva had walked down the unlit stairs in that London tenement, with gangs of children stomping past her, knowing that – even if Art did not get his cherished visa to be reunited with his wife and child in Moscow – she had lost the heart to visit him again. Yet, unable to simply walk away, she had waited across the road until Art emerged into the twilight. Following at a distance, while he walked the streets in his ragged clothes and tried to entice hostile passers-by to buy his pamphlet, Eva had sensed that Art was in purgatory, haunted – like her – by the fate of the youngest brother who once hero-worshipped him.

  But Eva hadn’t come to Spain to uncover Brendan’s fate. She picked Spain because it was cheap, although in Barcelona she realised how quickly her money would run out in big cities. Therefore after returning to the docks one last time to leave a bouquet of red roses on a mooring bollard, she left Barcelona and began to travel, unsure of where she was seeking, but trusting her instincts to recognise it when revealed to her. Plain-clothes police were everywhere, demanding her passport in railway carriages. Priests stared haughtily from café windows reading copies of Fuerza Nueva. But, once she ignored this strutting of triumphalist power, Eva felt comfortable among the ordinary rail travellers who offered her food and drink when they saw that she was a woman alone. Such passengers tried to teach her simple Spanish words, roaring with good-humoured laughter at her inability to pronounce them. She joined in the laughter, more intoxicated by their open-hearted compa
nionship than by their proffered wine. Finding a cheap pensión in Zaragoza, she only realised that it was above a slaughterhouse when she woke to the terrified bellows of animals and saw the cobblestones beneath her window transformed into deltas of blood. She moved pensión and spent days exploring Zaragoza. But an instinct urged her on to seek a remote place where she could afford to live and work and think.

  Eva had stumbled across this village by accident, after accepting a lift from a farmer who did not understand her simple Spanish words. He drove for so long and so high into these mountains – with Eva jolted about on the open back of his truck – that she had fears of being kidnapped. It was evening before he reached this village and stopped to help her down in the small square, lifting his hat respectfully before he vanished into the café. There were signs of recent festivity, elderly couples in their Sunday clothes, who seemed to be the remnants of a wedding party, lingering over a meal and raising their glasses in good natured toasts. Noticing how a faded sign above the café read Posada – she had inquired from the posadero about the possibility of renting a room. As the elderly couples clustered around – perplexed but not displeased by her arrival – Eva grasped from the posadero’s broken English that one upstairs bedroom existed, but tonight it was mucho full, although from the following morning it would be mucho spacious if she wished to stay.

  Initially she thought the posadero was turning her away, but his inherent sense of hospitality would not allow this. His explanations, accompanied by confusing hand gestures, made little sense until he brought her upstairs and Eva realised that the large front room overlooking the square was divided in two by heavy wooden partition doors that were closed. After the man left she listened at the partition but heard no sound from the other side. Indeed Eva might never have known that this other half of the room was occupied if she had not accidentally brushed against the partition when getting ready for bed. The doors opened at her touch to reveal two naked young newlyweds silently trying to make love on the moonlit small bed. The embarrassed boy tried to cover himself. But the girl – immersed in her pleasure – simply gazed at Eva, woman to woman, and laughed unashamedly in the exhilaration of being alive and in love. Her laugh made Eva nod in silent affirmation before she swiftly closed the partition. But the glimpse of their intertwined bodies was as startling as the shock of bathing beneath a waterfall: the girl’s unabashed laugh resonating with such joy that Eva felt revitalised. She knew that this was what she was seeking in Spain: unadorned life lived with gusto. Eva had crept downstairs to sit in the moonlit deserted square for hours, anxious not to disturb the lovers’ privacy from that partitioned room. On the next morning she took a walk around the village and returned to find the partition doors folded back. The small bed where the young couple had slept was dismantled: a large writing desk occupying that space. Standing beside it, the posadero had anxiously inquired: ‘Para tus necesidades? It pleases? For your needs?’