by Donal Ryan
He took a woeful set against me altogether, my John-John. The others just don’t bother with me, but John-John arrives down the very odd time, roaring and shouting out of him, crying and shaking. He’s gone to be a terror for the drink, anyway. His looks are leaving him; his face is getting puffed out and pasty-looking. It breaks my heart to see his lovely strong features crumbling away. I stand in the doorway and pull my cardigan tight around me. He shoves in past me sometimes, and takes what money does be in my jar on the top shelf over the fireplace. He doesn’t know I leave that money there especially for him. I expected too much from him; I know that. My John-John, my little man. I destroyed the boy by seeing too early the man inside in him. I think he thought he had to hate me to save himself.
I DO SEE that boy of the Mahons nearly every day, passing down the road to his father’s house. I hear the spinning heart on their gate, creaking slowly around. The sound floats up along the road to me, waved along by the leaves of the trees. It puts me in mind of my own dry joints; my burning hip, my creaking knees. He’s beautiful, that boy, tall and fair-haired, like his mother. His auld father is a horrible yoke. He got all his mother’s goodness, that boy. He got no part of his father that I can see. Maybe there’s something inside in him that he got from his father, but he keeps it well hid. He always salutes me as he passes; he waves and smiles and calls me by my name. Oh, he’s solid gorgeous, so he is. I’d have married a boy like that if I hadn’t been so busy going around being wanton, so determined not ever to be bound to a man.
I remember his mother well. She used to give me the time of day, not like a lot more around here who had themselves elevated in their own minds to heights far, far above me. A few of them are starting to fall from their heights, now. I see them in the village, shaking their heads at each other in disbelief, blaming everyone else. I don’t know what she died of. I was fierce sad when I heard it. That boy was grown up at the time, but he came walking up the road looking like a small child, as pale as a ghost, with his eyes hollowed out from crying. He came into my kitchen that day and drank a sup of tea. Thanks Lily, thanks Lily, he kept saying. He’d fallen out with his mother, I knew that, but I didn’t say anything to him, only that she was gone home now and he’d see her again some day. He was weak from sadness and regret, which is the most horrible feeling of all. I kissed him on the cheek before he left. I wished blessings for him, the poor love. He married a lovely girl after.
THERE’S SOMETHING unspeakable about the attraction between a man and a woman. It can’t ever be explained. How is it that I could be so foolish for a big, fat mongrel of a man like Bernie McDermott? He did something to me whenever I saw him that made me weak in my body and mind. I wanted to please him more than I wanted to mind my children. I think if he’d asked me to throw one of them over the bridge and into the rushing weir, I’d nearly have done it. Except if it was John-John. I knew my last child was his from the first moment I felt him inside in me. He gave me hell from the start. I was up before the sun every morning, retching and crying and gasping for breath. I could hardly walk for nine months with the pains he caused me. My other children were pure solid neglected. Only for John-John they’d have melted away from the hunger and the dirt. Bernie McDermott never even noticed until I was the size of a house. Are you fuckin expecting? says he. I am, Bernie, says I. Fuck me, I thought you were just getting fat. How’ll you figure out which of your mountain men is the daddy? Says I, it’s you Bernie. Me? Ha ha ha! If you fell into a bed of nettles, how would you know which one stung you? I was with no one only you for near a year, I told him. He punched me into the stomach then, and pulled over the dresser in temper. All my crockery was smashed, and my lovely Child of Prague my mother gave me. John-John ran from the back room to protect me and Bernie McDermott slapped him right back across the floor and in through the door again. He came here no more bar the time he called to make ribbons of my face over naming him inside in the hospital.
They’re big farmers, the McDermotts. Imagine if they knew there’s a solicitor inside in the city, the son of a whore, who’s kin of theirs. It’d frighten the life out of them to think of him with his brains and badness! He got the brains from me. I gave him the money to go in every day to the university. I got him all his books and the trendy clothes young fellas need to fit in. The day of his graduation, I stood outside the big building, squinting in through the glass, trying to see could I see him. Each student was gave two tickets for the ceremony. He gave them to his girlfriend and her mother. All I wanted was one look at him in his gown, with his scroll. One photograph would have done me, of him with his arm around me. I’d have had it blown up and framed and hung it in the porch, right in front of people’s faces as they walked in. I was foolish to let pride into my heart. I still paid for him to finish off his studying above in Dublin, though. The little strap of a girlfriend and the auld mother who was never let see me was brought to that graduation too.
I LOVE all my children the same way a swallow loves the blue sky; I have no choice in the matter. Like the men that came to my door, nature overpowers me. I cry over them in the dark of night. I often wake up calling their names. I don’t know why they all ran from me. I’ll never be a burden to them. I know a concoction that will send me away into dreams from which I’ll never wake. I’ve made it up already; I’ll drink it back in one go when I can no longer keep a hold of my mind or body. There’ll be no one sad after me, imagine. John-John will come out and take from the house what he can sell. And then he’ll ollagoan below in Ciss Brien’s the way people will buy him drink in sympathy. Isn’t that a fright, after a life spent blackening my soul for him, for all of them? Yerra what about it, sure wasn’t I at least the author of my own tale? And if you can say that as you depart this world, you can say a lot.
Vasya
THERE IS NO flatness in this land. It is all small hills and hidden valleys. Birds sing that I cannot see; they hide in trees and fly in covered skies. The horizon is close and small. There is daily rain that makes the earth green. Even in winter it is green. A short journey in any direction ends at the sea. I went one Sunday with a man I worked with and his family to the sea. I stood looking at the waves crashing on the beach for too long. I heard his child asking what I was doing. He hushed her. The man’s wife scolded him for bringing me. She thought I couldn’t understand. She was right and wrong: I didn’t know the words, just their meaning.
In this country I speak in sentences of two words or three. I nod and smile often and I feel redness in my face when spoken to. When I worked each day on building sites, the foreman would point at things and ask with his eyebrows raised for understanding. I almost always knew then what to do. Their voices are fast. My mother’s mother spoke that way, in a dialect of a tribe of reindeer herders from far north of my family’s ground. She was full of wonder at our goats and cattle and horses. When we were children we would laugh at her strange, speeding tongue and my father would chase us from the camp. We would be banished to the fire’s outer ring where the cold and heat battled. And still we’d laugh and my father would shout warnings from inside the camp. He was very fond of my mother’s mother; he had travelled north to bring her to live with us when we received word of my grandfather’s death.
The foreman’s voice is soft and contradicts his appearance. He’s younger than me but he reminds me of my father. The big work is gone now; many things are left unfinished. Some days of the month he asks me to help him to repair work that was done too quickly.
I’m called the Russian here, as almost everyone is from other countries. I don’t mind. On the plain where I was born all of our faces looked the same to foreigners. The Latvians take offence and complain bitterly among themselves about slights best forgotten. The Russian and Polish men speak good English and try to explain the differences. No one here has heard of Khakassia. The Irish men laugh all day while they work and shout across the sites at each other in whooping voices. There was a man called Shawnee who would slap me on the shoulder and shout in
a singsong voice and make the other men laugh. I would smile and look down at my work and feel my face becoming hot. I don’t think he was being unkind.
Sometimes when I am in a good mood I act the fool. On the building sites I would ape the exclamations of the Irish. If I had difficulty with a tool or a machine I would put it down and stand up straight and shout CUNTOFAYOKE! The Irish men would look at me in mock astonishment and then look at each other and roar with laughter. GASMAN, they’d say, and shake their heads, laughing. I would feel happy, and then remember to be ashamed at myself for being a clown to please other men. I am too far from my father’s home and from my brother’s grave.
In the office where men and women go who have no work a girl asked me for a number, then for a stamp, then for the name of my employer. I could understand; I had heard all of these words before. Pokey Burke? She sighed. I looked at her in silence and shrugged. She rolled her eyes towards the ceiling. Then she smiled at me, but it was a smile that says I’m sorry. I didn’t understand the next words she said, but her voice was kind. Shawnee whispered loudly and slowly from behind me while the girl looked at her computer screen: Hey Chief, what she’s saying is you … don’t … exist! And all the men and women in the lines laughed.
MY FATHER ’S HERDS were small and spread across a plain and a sweeping valley. There was not enough to sustain all of us, so my brother and I journeyed south to a city that was spreading outwards like a dirty puddle. We lived in a hut of galvanized metal and scrap wood, near to where a great building was being erected. Its foundations were deeper than I thought even an ocean could be. I could not see their lowest part. My brother and I carried blocks to masons, along planks suspended above nothingness. We became braver each day and the other men began to respect us. You goatherds aren’t bad, the boss said once. I felt pride and then foolishness. My brother must have misheard what the man had said and taken his words for an insult. He cast aside his burden and struck the man in the face. Other men, anxious to be in good favour with the boss, turned on my brother and kicked and beat him. I fought until blood ran down my face and into my eyes and mouth and my fists were raw and scorched with pain. My brother was almost unconscious when I dragged him clear of danger; there was a swelling on his forehead. I looked back from the street and the men that had attacked us were already turned away, bent once more to their labouring. The fat man my brother had struck was rubbing his chin, pointing and shouting orders.
My brother left our hut the next day and bought dirty vodka brewed by a man in a small still across the street, beaten together from a vat and a stolen distiller. He sang scraps of folk songs that night, half-remembered from our childhood. There was no music in his voice; he shouted and screamed the words and woke people from their sleep. Shut up Afanasiev, you fool, men said from inside their own shanties. No one had courage enough to stand before him, though. He staggered away from me as I reached for him to calm him and bring him inside; he fell, and pushed me away as I tried to help. The swelling on his forehead had not reduced. The next day, a local militiaman and a regular policeman came to our muddy street and began to ask for relatives of Viktor Afanasiev. He is my brother, I said. Your brother is dead, the policeman said. The militiaman had a stubby rifle slung around his neck. He stroked it as though it were a pet and said come with us. Viktor had been found lying in a gap between two buildings at the centre of the town. He’d been beaten again and had suffocated in blood. I could never return to my home without my brother.
I heard of men who were planning to travel to Western Europe. I asked them how this could be done and they gave me a piece of paper with names, addresses and numbers. That was four years ago. When I first reached Ireland I learned quickly how best to find employment. I took from others words and phrases that served me well for a while: off the books, under the table, on the queue tee. One man can learn some trades by watching another closely. I worked in two cities and then came to this village. There was work here and the air was sweet. I worked for Pokey Burke for nearly two years. Now I use the money I had saved for food and to pay my rent and I work some days for the foreman again. Bobby. He calls me the best of the ‘see too’ boys. I don’t know what this means. I smile and nod.
I have learned the roads around this village. I know the way to a quay, on the edge of a lake of placid water. There are wooden seats at this quay to sit on and look at the water. The evening sun turns it to a glistening, dazzling thing that has no place on this dull earth except in that short time before sunset. That light is a trick: if I were to swim to it or row out to put my hand upon it, it would be gone as I approached and there would be only dark, cold water in its place. Across the bay there is another place, identical to the one where I sit. When the air is moist the distant bank becomes magnified and seems closer, as do the dark hills behind it. When the air is dry it moves away, and could be another country, across a sea. When it looks to be a distance that I could easily swim, I think of myself trying and of being seized halfway by a tightening of the muscles in my arms or legs. Or by the panic of the realization that I had misjudged the distance, that I had been tricked by the landscape and the light. No one on the shore would see that I was struggling; no one would hear me cry for help.
The road from the quay is steep and winding. Houses are hidden at the end of long avenues, lined with ancient trees, where I imagine families have lived, son after father, for years and years. These people are fixed, rooted, bound to a certain place. I think of my father’s camp and the moving of the herds across thousands of miles of openness. I think of returning home, and how I would be a burden and a shame to my family. At the cattle station I would ask in which direction I must walk to reach my father’s camp and the men there would ask, with disgust upon their faces, why I had returned. My father and mother would not embrace me. I’ll stay here. I have the roads to walk and the clear air to breathe. I have the quiet lake and the light that dances on the water.
I walked once from the house where I live, before I had learned the way the roads lie and the way that this land can turn around on itself. I was tired of the men in the house; they were drinking and shouting through all the hours of the night and singing songs loudly of their different countries. A neighbour came to the door of the house and I heard him saying the baby, the baby. The other men quietened and became sullen. Without songs, they drank more deeply. I decided to walk towards the rising sun. I crossed the road, away from the rows of houses of light timber and thin blocks and entered a field ringed by trees. There was a river at the far side of the field. My eyes were deceived again and I walked into a wet hollow in the field’s centre and over a small rise and then down towards the river. Cows were standing at the muddy edge, drinking. They were fat and contented, full to bursting, waiting to be milked. The grass here is thick and long. I envied them. I found a way across the river over rounded stones and climbed the shallow far bank. I kept true east across more fields and decided to make for the foothills of a small mountain where I had heard there was an old silver mine. I thought that by the time I had reached those hills and sat for a while and walked back that the other men would be asleep and I could have a Sunday afternoon of peace. I would make my food and drink tea and look for words that I knew on a newspaper.
I walked for hours and became lost. The fields dipped and rose and all looked alike. The hills seemed to draw no nearer. I came to a public house on a roadside. The Miner’s Rest, it was called. Where is this place? I asked a man inside. Shallee, he said. I was walking, I am lost, I said in English. He seemed to understand my words. Where you from, boy? Khakassia, I said. Where the fuck is that? Siberia, I said. Jaysus friend, you sure are fuckin lost! And he roared with laughter and the others in the bar laughed as well and I don’t know why but I felt at once safe and foolish and I laughed with them as they slapped my back. A man played a fiddle. He had a serious face but his music was full of joy.
At the next week’s end, Pokey Burke gave me a lift to the house I shared. I had just finished shoring th
e foundations of a large house that would never be built. I have great time for you, he said, you’re a fabbeless worker. I don’t know what fabbeless is. I know I owe you a few bob, he said. I understood this. I’ll sort you out next week, okay? Sort you out means pay you in this land. He looked at me and smiled as he drove. I knew he was lying. I knew I would not see him again. But I said okay, Pokey, okay, and I smiled back, and my stomach lurched as he drove too fast down into a valley that I didn’t know was there.
Réaltín
THERE ARE FORTY-FOUR houses in this estate. I live in number twenty-three. There’s an old lady living in number forty. There’s no one living in any of the other houses, just the ghosts of people who never existed. I’m stranded, she’s abandoned. She never has visitors. I should go down to her, really. When Daddy and me went in to the auctioneers to ask about these houses, they let on they were nearly all sold. I wanted a corner house with a bigger garden, but the guy started fake-laughing, as if I was after asking for a solid gold toilet or something. He had at least half a jar of gel in his hair. I’ll see what I can do, he said to my chest, in a martyred voice. He shook his head and sighed and said we’d have to pay the deposit that day. He said he couldn’t promise us any of the houses would still be available the next day. I believed him, even though I should have known better. Daddy got all worried and flustered then, and drove like a madman back to the Credit Union to get me the cash. I’d love to go in to that auctioneer now and kick him in the balls.
