An Ark of Light

by Dermot Bolger

  The child finished eating and sat on the step to examine the book of children’s bible stories that Eva had brought her from London, lingering over an illustration of Noah leading a line of animals into his ark. When Eva read this story aloud last night, it was the first time she had felt the child tentatively respond to her. Juma crossed the veranda, carrying several pairs of Eva’s shoes dosed in paraffin to kill any jiggers who might crawl in and lie in wait to bite a tiny hole in her toe and lay their eggs under her skin. Jiggers were one reason why Alex was not allowed to walk around barefoot. She had been bitten once, though Hazel said the child was intensely brave when they had needed to peel back the skin to cautiously remove the bag of eggs without it bursting open and infecting her entire toe. Juma began filling her plastic bathing pool and Alex ran inside to get changed, delighted with the prospect of splashing about.

  ‘It will get her nice and cool,’ Hazel remarked. ‘It will be hot in the hills later. I’ve packed some gin to compensate for you missing your new friends at the club tonight.’ This was said with a dry laugh. ‘You don’t much fancy the club, do you?’

  ‘Some members are nice.’

  ‘What you really mean, Mummy, is that some others are dreadful snobs, so pretentious that they’d make a stuffed bird laugh. But beggars can’t be choosers, we’re not spoiled for choice. I’d go insane if I stayed at home every night. You need to be able to talk and hear other people’s voices, even if they bang on like church bells and only talk tommyrot. One problem over here is that it can be hard to know who is talking rubbish and who isn’t.’ Hazel reached for the imported English marmalade. ‘Like the drunken Londoner who washed up at the club one evening last summer, with a desperate craving for Pimm’s Iced Tea with liberal quantities of gin, and an even more desperate craving for white company.’

  ‘Who was he?’ Eva asked.

  Hazel shrugged dismissively as she sipped her tea. ‘I can’t rightly say, except that he appeared to live in squalid digs in a backstreet hotel in Homa Bay on Lake Victoria. Like everything else about him, his name sounded fishy. He called himself Smythe, though if that was his real name then I’d say he definitely started life as a Smith in some East End terrace. The man sweated far too much to be trustworthy. I can’t rightly remember how he wormed his way into our company, although out here you tolerate any newcomer for a while, just to hear a different voice. But once he bagged a seat at our table, he clung to us all evening like a drowning rat. Claimed to be a former Foreign Office official, all hush-hush, dispatched here by MI5 to keep an eye on the communist agitators who were secretly behind Jomo Kenyatta’s election victory. Everyone present could see that Smythe or Smith had simply been pensioned off as an unreliable drunk – and, God knows, you need to be a seriously unreliable drunk to be let go by the British Foreign Office. I told him there are no communists behind Kenyatta, despite his dalliance with Moscow before he got the sniff of power. Kenyatta knows that Washington has a fatter cheque book, even if he doesn’t bell it aloud in his inflammatory speeches. Besides, I assured him that Kenyatta didn’t sound like a communist and I should know as my uncle was Ireland’s most notorious communist before he disappeared to Moscow two years ago.’

  ‘Let’s hope that’s where Art actually still is,’ Eva said. ‘He fell out with so many people that he left no forwarding address and cut his ties with all of us.’

  ‘That’s what I told the other drinkers,’ Hazel said. ‘I said that everyone else who flees abroad is running away from having to cope with debt, but Art is the only person who ever fled because he was terrified of dealing with wealth. This got a laugh but Smythe or Smith was all ears, demanding to know my uncle’s surname. Then he said the most extraordinary thing.’ Hazel looked around, ensuring that Juma or Alex’s nanny were not within earshot, then leaned forward towards Eva. ‘He claimed to recognise the Goold-Verschoyle surname. He maintained that in the 1930s your brother acted as a secret courier for the Soviets and was controlled in London by a Dutch communist named Peick. Peick used him as a mule to smuggle dispatches into Moscow from a Foreign Office cipher clerk named King who worked for the Soviets. Apparently King confessed to spying when the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky fingered him.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ Eva put down her cup and laughed. ‘Art always stood out too much; he was unable to stop himself delivering a speech in praise of Stalin if he found three people gathered at a bus stop. They wouldn’t have trusted him to courier anything in secret, because he was the most obvious candidate to be searched boarding any ship. Besides Art lived in Moscow throughout the 1930s.’

  ‘I’m not referring to Art,’ Hazel said. ‘Smythe or Smith had never heard of Art. The Goold-Verschoyle whom the Foreign Office kept files on was Brendan. Smythe claimed that Brendan’s Foreign Office file described him as a naïve enthusiast on a guilt trip. Communism was quite a fashionable craze for young men in the 1930s, a bit like the Charleston was for flappers in the 1920s. His Foreign Office file showed that Brendan was recruited by the Soviets as a sub-agent, travelling to Moscow by circuitous routes in the guise of paying innocuous visits to see his older brother there, but in reality he was transporting undeveloped rolls of film containing photographed top-secret government documents. They think he underwent wireless training on each trip to Moscow, not for use in Spain but in case his services were needed as a wireless operator in London. When not being used to courier documents, the Soviets ordered Brendan to have no contact with communist sympathisers in London. They wanted him anonymously holed up in some Battersea flat: a sleeper whose services they could activate when needed. But like you once said about Brendan’s character, it wasn’t in him to be duplicitous and hide away, leading a double life. He so much fell in love with whatever version of Moscow his handlers let him see on his visits to Art that he disobeyed orders and turned up in Moscow uninvited, demanding the chance to be given something practical to do to fight fascism. That’s why the Soviets sent him to Spain, to keep him under their thumb and wait for him to betray the first sight of thinking for himself, after which they snuffed him out like he never existed. It explains why the British Foreign Office didn’t lift a finger to assist your mother after he was abducted in Spain. Even if only a naïve enthusiast, if you live by the sword you generally die by it. I’m sorry to say that Smythe claimed there is no chance of Brendan still being alive.’

  The only name familiar to Eva was Walter Krivitsky. Her mother had sent numerous unanswered letters to this former Soviet intelligence officer who defected to the West in 1937 after learning of Stalin’s intention to purge him.

  ‘So did Smythe think Brendan really was killed by a Nazi warplane attacking the prison train he was on?’

  Hazel shook her head. ‘He laughed and claimed that this is the classic Soviet response to inquiries about foreigners who vanished during the war – to deftly blame their deaths on the Nazis. Smythe says the Soviets rarely bother wasting a bullet on foreigners: they simply work them in camps till they die from starvation, malaria, typhus, frostbite or exhaustion. The only merciful thing is that the conditions are so brutal that most poor souls rarely suffer for long. He said that not only was Brendan most certainly dead, but that everyone who volunteered to travel from Moscow to Spain – even the most loyal of party members – were executed within months of returning home as heroes to receive medals. You see, anyone who volunteered for Spain was contaminated by having fraternised with foreigners, and Stalin was too paranoid to allow the possibility of any cross-contamination being caused by ordinary Muscovites encountering anyone with direct knowledge about the outside world and life in the West.’

  ‘Maybe Smythe was telling lies.’ Eva felt chilled despite the warm African sun. In her heart she knew Brendan was almost certainly dead, but didn’t want to let go of the last trace of hope. ‘You say he was a drunk and a fantasist.’

  Hazel gave a shudder of distaste. ‘He was pathetic, slimy and lonely: unable to stop talking now that he’d finally latched onto white voic
es willing to listen. He puffed up his self-importance as he switched from gin to whiskey. His voice got so slurred it was hard to know or care what he was saying. They keep a bedroom at the club for whites like that; let them sleep it off, then sober them up and make them aware that they’ve overstayed their welcome. Ordinarily I wouldn’t believe a lost stray like him, but if he hadn’t seen a file on Brendan how else could he possibly have heard of Brendan’s surname?’

  Eva closed her eyes. She tried to summon up Brendan’s face – idealistic, good-natured and sincere in believing that he was helping to build a New Jerusalem. But it was Art’s features that came to her, his furtive gaze whenever she probed too deeply into what he knew about his brother’s fate. Could Art have inadvertently lured Brendan into danger simply by encouraging – or being encouraged to encourage – Brendan to apply for a visa to visit him in Moscow?

  ‘Maybe I’ll never know the truth about any of my family,’ Eva said. ‘Perhaps that’s true of all families, but our white lies are bigger than most. I nursed your father to his death, yet I still never knew for sure what was going on in his mind. No more than I really know what’s happening in your life.’

  Hazel laughed, unsettled by the remark. ‘Look around you. What is there to know?’

  ‘Where’s Geoffrey, for example? And are you truly happy?’

  ‘Geoffrey is away on business. And why wouldn’t I be happy? For the first time in my life I have everything I want. It may be remote here but it’s close to paradise. Besides, I would categorically refuse to allow myself to be unhappy.’ She paused to take a final sip of tea. ‘I wanted to write to you about this Smythe man, but it’s so unverifiable, like everything in the Soviet Union, that I thought it best to wait until we had a chance to talk. I hope it didn’t upset you.’

  Eva shook her head. ‘The unsettling thing has been not knowing how to make sense of his fate.’

  Hazel patted her hand. ‘Nothing about your brothers ever made sense. Still, wouldn’t it be funny if Art was an unimportant sideshow all along, despite a life spent making grandiose gestures. I mean he gave away every penny he inherited and lived like a monk on a vow of poverty, being jailed for preaching revolution to bemused turf cutters or organising tenant rent strikes in Dublin, all to prove his devotion to Stalin. Yet maybe the Soviets never cared a fig about him. Maybe they just let Art stay in Moscow in the 1930s to lure his kid brother into their net as the big catch: an unobtrusive, presentable young man able to courier documents, never drawing attention to himself.’

  ‘Art must have meant something to them,’ Eva said. ‘Otherwise they wouldn’t have finally granted his request to be allowed return to Moscow.’

  Hazel shrugged non-committedly. ‘Maybe they felt sorry for him, in the same way as you’d let an unfortunate farm dog whose day is gone back into the kitchen on a rainy night to lie near the fire. Or maybe he was doing more harm than good in London, getting in the way of a new generation of British communists who got sick of hearing Art praise Stalin at a time when Khrushchev wants everyone to forget the past.’

  ‘I don’t even have an address to reach him,’ Eva said. ‘It feels like I’ve lost two brothers in my shrinking family.’

  ‘Your family isn’t shrinking, it’s growing.’ Hazel watched her daughter run out from the nursery in her bathing suit to clamber into the plastic pool. ‘Alex is really excited that you’re here, but just too shy to show it.’ Hazel rose, dabbing her mouth with a napkin. ‘I wouldn’t treat anything Smythe said as gospel. The trouble with Kenya is that it attracts misfits who reinvent their lives as they go along. He may have been a drunk ready to seize on any name that got him attention and another shot of whiskey. Trying to fathom Brendan’s fate is like walking through a hall of trick mirrors and seeing a different reflection in each one. A time comes when you must put the past behind you and get on with the opportunities presented in the here and now.’

  Eva nodded. ‘Spit out a bit of life a little further on.’

  Hazel looked at her, amused. ‘You say the most peculiar things, Mummy.’

  ‘When your father died, I fell into a deep malaise,’ Eva confessed. ‘I wasn’t just mourning his passing but the life we might have had. For weeks I cried every night in my London flat, then one morning as I woke I was convinced I heard a voice say those words in my head: spit out a bit of life a little further on.’

  Hazel smiled. Eva knew that she was humouring her. ‘Whose voice?’

  ‘I don’t know. You’re the practical one in the family. You tell me.’

  Hazel laughed as Juma came to clear away the breakfast dishes. ‘It was probably caused by indigestion, but there are worse mottos to live by. Let’s get packed, Mummy, we have a bit of life to spit out a good bit further on today.’

  Eva returned to her room but for a long time all she could do was sit silently on her bed, going over every word this Smythe stranger had said. But it was too enormous to take in: she would have to let it filter through her subconscious to the bedrock of her being before one day, months from now, its implications would be clear. By the time she re-emerged with her small suitcase, Juma and the cook had left to travel ahead in the jeep. Alex sat on the veranda examining the pictures in Eva’s huge Birdwatchers Guide to Africa. Eva sat quietly beside her, deliberately not getting too close, knowing it was important to wait for the child to initiate a conversation. Finally her granddaughter looked up, after skimming the pages.

  ‘Were all these birds in Noah’s Ark?’ the child asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Eva replied. She tried to show Alex how to stare through her binoculars, but once Hazel appeared the intimacy was broken and the girl ran possessively to her mother. As Alex climbed into the car, Eva deliberately placed the book beside the child on the back seat. The governess waved them off and the gardener raised a hand among the vegetable rows. They bumped down a dirt track through trees, then out onto the open road and past a cluster of round huts where Eva could hear children chant their lessons through the open schoolhouse door. The heat haze had settled in. After twenty minutes they drove along the town’s main street: an ugly row of flat-roofed shops. The flagpole above the main store was bereft of any standard: the white owner prudent enough not to fly the Union Jack but too stubborn to replace it with the incoming national flag. A black workman set down a wheelbarrow to greet a cyclist whose carrier was so overladen that the cardboard boxes tied up with rope rose up behind him higher than his head. Their loud voices contrasted with the silent white women who remained seated in dust-streaked vehicles outside the shops while their houseboys packed groceries into their car boots.

  The town petered out into countryside. Hazel stared ahead, her foot on the accelerator as they picked up speed. Even in Ireland Hazel always drove too fast. Here the roads were straight, the distances greater and there was nobody to stop her. They sped past a child herding two long-horned cows, his bare feet reminding Eva of boys herding sheep in Donegal half a century ago. The miles quickly passed as they climbed towards the soaring bulk of Mount Elgon, its brown stone face rising out of the green uplands. The road narrowed to become a red murram track of loosely packed dirt. It was hot in the car but unwise to open any windows, due to swirling dust being thrown up. A roadblock marked the entrance to the National Park. The black man at the barrier shouted through the open doorway of a wooden hut and a white man emerged in shorts and an official hat. Hazel lowered her window.

  ‘Mrs Llewellyn: a thing of beauty and a joy forever.’ The man smiled, leaning forward so much into the car that his head and shoulders were almost pressed against Hazel.

  ‘Major, behave.’ Hazel’s tone was amused, like a school mistress mildly reproaching an impish child.

  ‘Your boy came through earlier. You have a visitor, I see?’

  ‘My mother, Mrs Fitzgerald. An artist from Ireland.’

  ‘Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mrs Fitzgerald.’ The man reached across to shake Eva’s hand, gaining an even closer proximity to Hazel’s breasts while
she eyed him with wry disdain. ‘You do know the rules about guns in the National Park?’

  As animals were protected, dogs and firearms were completely banned. Eva knew that Hazel kept a pistol for protection in the glove compartment.

  ‘Of course.’ Hazel smiled at him. ‘I trust you don’t intend on frisking me.’

  The man chuckled. ‘I wouldn’t dare try.’ His index finger tapped lightly on the glove compartment. ‘We understand each other perfectly.’ He glanced at Eva. ‘Enjoy our game reserve, Mrs Fitzgerald. Her beauty will seduce you but like all beautiful females, there are hidden dangers if approached too close. Our native beasts, once roused, can kill with one swipe of a claw.’

  Hazel released the handbrake so that the car jolted forward a few inches, causing the major to bang his head as he hastily withdrew. Hazel began winding up her window. ‘You’re incorrigible, Major.’

  Alex spoke from the back seat as they sped away. ‘I do like the Major.’

  ‘We all do,’ Hazel replied. ‘Loneliness lures him down to the Colonial Club once a month. He gets sozzled drunk for three days, rather like those Irish priests who spend their holidays locked away in the residents’ bar of the North Star Hotel opposite Amiens Street Station. The Major flirts unsuccessfully with every woman and is put to bed in the guest room when he passes out. Then when the shakes get so bad that he can barely hold a glass without spilling it in the mornings, the bar attendants sober him up with black coffee and drive him back to this hut. He was born in Bradford, I believe, very redbrick. I doubt if he was more than a sergeant in the army, but we indulge his white lie. Kenya attracts men who were disappointed by life or want to reinvent themselves in a new life.’

  ‘What about you? Are you happy here?’

  ‘What exactly is so wonderful about whatever you call happiness?’ Hazel seemed more perplexed than annoyed by the question. ‘It’s the second time you’ve asked me today. I have everything I need. Do you think I could ever have been happy as a barrister’s wife in “Dun Leary” or whatever they now call Kingstown, with the highlight of my year being the January sales in Pim’s Department Store? You’re always caught up in a battle to be happy, like it’s the be-all and end-all of life. Have you ever thought that there are more important things in life than being happy?’