‘You know who’s sleeping in the stable, don’t you?’ Francis said. ‘Why are you just standing here, Mummy?’
‘Because I’m scared to move.’
‘What do you mean?’ The boy was near tears, finding her behaviour unsettling, but she could not reply because she herself didn’t know what she meant. As long as she stood here in silence, Eva had felt that she could keep alive the dream but the children’s presence allowed reality to intrude. A candle went out behind her. She turned to blow out the others so that there was just the distant candlelight from the drawing room window and the lantern Maureen was carrying. Eva became aware of how cold she was. Maureen saw her shiver.
‘We’d best be having some supper downstairs, Mrs Fitzgerald.’
Eva allowed herself to be led away and Maureen beckoned for Francis to close the door. When they reached the stairs to the cellar Maureen told him to hurry on, but the boy remained in the spot where Eva had stood.
‘There is somebody out there,’ he said quietly. ‘By the chestnut tree at the start of the avenue.’
Eva started forward and Francis stepped back, looking like he wished to bolt the door and keep whoever was out there at bay. But he let his mother run down the steps onto the gravel that was choked with weeds. A lank figure stood beneath the tree, a hand raised to his eyes as if the distant candles were blinding him. He began to approach, like a ghost arisen from a battlefield. He was Brendan’s height, with Brendan’s gait. Only his gaunt face seemed older, his hair prematurely grey. Eva ran towards him in the moonlight, afraid that if she averted her eyes the apparition would disappear. He seemed surprised by her eagerness, unsure of how to respond. He stopped to let her approach. Her baby brother, the laughing boy she had pushed in his pram, carried on her shoulders, lain beside in hayricks at night to teach him the names of stars.
For several seconds she surrendered to a feeling of bliss, as if willpower and longing could transform his features into those she yearned for. Then she stopped running and her hands gripped her stomach to block out the surge of grief. Silently she cursed her naivety and cursed this stranger. Because wherever Brendan was, he was not standing before her.
‘I thought you were someone else,’ she said feebly.
‘I’m sorry.’ The voice was hoarse, the words hard to make out.
‘Somebody who went to Spain.’
‘That’s where I’ve come from.’
The tiniest flicker of hope stirred.
‘Which side?’
Scornfully he looked down to emphasise the state of his clothing. ‘I was among the Irish who actually fought. I wasn’t led by a cowardly buffoon who ran away at the first shot. When I was released from the hellhole of Franco’s jail, where warders would half-hang men for amusement, my father shut the door in my face. You tell me which side.’
‘What brought you here?’
‘You are Eva Fitzgerald?’
‘Yes.’
‘My name is Peadar Bourke. I’ve something for you. From a comrade.’
Eva stepped forward, desperate hope fanning up again inside her. ‘When did you see him last? Please God, tell me he’s all right.’
The stranger shook his head. ‘I wish I could. We tried to stop the fascists capturing the Madrid road at Jarama. But our only training was firing a few shots at rocks to get the feel of our guns. Frank Ryan was wounded there and poor Kit Conway killed. There was no shelter except a few scraggly olive trees in the valley. The firing stopped for a second and I saw him pick some fallen fruit from the dirt. He said, “Even the olives are bleeding.” Then the fascists advanced and Charlie tried to cover our retreat. He copped three bullets, one in the head. Poor bastard, it took us ten days to retrieve his body.’
‘Charlie who?’ Eva said, caught between conflicting emotions.
‘Charlie Donnelly,’ Bourke replied angrily. ‘Who do you think we’re discussing?’
Eva recalled the young poet whom Art had brought here once. Impassioned, dogmatic, barely out of his teens. A cattle dealer’s son whose voice mellowed when he recited his terse verses. His young face scarred by a bullet hole, baked for ten days under a merciless Spanish sun. Eva should have felt grief for him, but instead was overcome with guilt-ridden relief because it was not Brendan mown down by machine-gun fire. Her hope could live on.
‘I found this in his kit bag.’ The gaunt stranger reached into his coat pocket. ‘Several times Charlie mentioned his promise to give it back to a woman. I thought it must be important, but you don’t even remember him.’
Eva stared at the book, Lyrics from the Ancient Chinese, with her name and address inside it. She accepted it back, wondering at what journeys this slender volume had undergone in the three years since the poet slipped away from here at dawn.
‘I do remember him,’ she said. ‘It’s just that somebody else I love is missing in Spain.’ She paused, afraid to mention Brendan’s name in case all hope was extinguished. ‘Have you eaten?’
‘I bought bread in the village. You’d swear I was a black man from the way the women in the shop looked at me.’
‘Not many people pass through here,’ she said apologetically.
‘That’s all I’m doing, mam. Passing through from Westport. Charlie made this sound like a place where a man might seek shelter. This past week I’ve slept in your outhouse. I hope you don’t mind.’
‘We can offer you a blanket on the floor.’
‘I’d sooner be on my way. I just wanted to return your book so I could feel I’d done something on my visit home.’
‘Did your father really turn you away?’
‘I think he would have taken me back in only he claimed that the peelers have their eyes skinned for me. De Valera is locking up anyone he dislikes while Hitler and Chamberlain fight it out.’
‘I know. My brother, Art Goold, has been interned in the Curragh camp.’
‘That lunatic? I’m sorry…no offence. Charlie never mentioned the connection. I knew Art in Dublin, on the fringe of everything. You couldn’t hold a conversation without Art deciding it was a public meeting and shouting “Long Live Comrade Stalin.” They put him in the Curragh, you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s where they’ll put me unless I get a boat to Liverpool.’ He paused. ‘If your Art’s sister that makes you…’
‘What?’
He went silent.
‘Did you know my younger brother in Spain?’
‘Sweet Christ, that’s who you thought I was.’
‘Is he alive? Please tell me. Does Franco have him?’
‘You know that Franco doesn’t have him.’
‘We know nothing.’
‘Surely Art told you? I heard he was crazy with worry. He almost doubted his God.’
‘Art doesn’t have a God,’ she said.
‘He has. A cobbler’s son with a peasant moustache and a smile that would turn your blood to ice.’ He looked past her towards Hazel and Francis in the doorway with Maureen watching over them. ‘Are they your children?’
‘Yes.’
‘In Dublin they say that Art has no chance of ever seeing his wife and son again.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘In Spain there was an invisible line between the Russians and the rest of us. In theory we were each fighting Franco but really it was two separate wars. Stalin didn’t give a toss for the Spanish people. If Franco is Hitler’s puppet, then Stalin wanted to install his own. Pretty soon we all knew where we stood but your brother’s problem was trying to have a foot in both camps.’
‘What happened?’ Eva asked in dread.
‘It shouldn’t be me telling you this. I don’t know what’s true or false. Brendan wasn’t really one of us. I was only in his company once, on a long afternoon in Barcelona. He accompanied me on a journey I might never have taken alone. I can’t be sure what happened. With the Russians you never know.’
‘What do people say?’
‘That he was tricked on board a S
oviet ship. He told a friend of mine that the Russians were letting him go home, he just had to fix a radio as a favour. He seemed to genuinely trust them. Typical Protestant – not knowing when it was wiser to make a sly run for it. Once he stepped on board, the gangplank was raised and the Russians in the radio station shrugged their shoulders at any mention of him like he had never existed.’
‘But he was on their side?’
‘That makes it worse. It means he’s no prisoner of war, he’s a traitor. Some said that Goold wasn’t taken prisoner at all but had been spying on us for the Russians who stagemanaged his mock disappearance. Others said they saw him later in the war under a different name. But mostly people said nothing, afraid of suffering a similar fate. It was hard enough being target practice for Hitler’s pilots, without having to worry about being shot in the back. After a while I was only interested in saving my own skin.’
Eva shivered, with coldness pervading every vein in her body. Images rushed through her mind so forcefully that she had to struggle to remain standing. Brendan as a boy in a comical hat. Brendan smiling in that last photo from London. Shaven-headed boys gathered around the piano on the cover of Sovietland and how it was obvious that none had ever held a violin before. ‘On the basis of new principles of education, thousands of former criminals are rehabilitated in the Bolsheov Corrective Labour Commune for Juvenile Delinquents, in conditions of absolute freedom, to a new life of labour as fully-fledged members of the socialist society.’ Lies and more lies. If Brendan’s body had not been thrown overboard with ropes binding his wrists, he was probably caged in some Soviet camp, as desperate to return to Ireland as Art – in an Irish camp – was desperate to reach Russia.
‘Are you all right?’ Bourke put out a hand to steady her.
‘I’m not all right. I want my brother.’
‘Don’t give up hope. The Russians have nothing to gain by holding him. No volunteer I’ve met since my return wants to talk about him. They’re building their own legends and have no room for messy loose ends. If he’s alive he needs someone to speak out. But just don’t expect help. With one Goold under lock and key, de Valera won’t exert himself to get his hands on another.’
‘You’re cold,’ Eva said. ‘Come inside. Have some supper. We can give you a bed.’
‘No.’
‘Please.’ Eva was desperate to do the things for this man that she could not do for Brendan, as if he could somehow be a proxy. He was the last person she knew who had seen him, the only link. She looked at the book. ‘You have nothing belonging to Brendan?’
‘I barely knew him. But Charlie Donnelly was my pal. He wanted you to have your book back. I have to go now.’
‘Where?’
‘I’ve thought things through in the woods here. I never imagined that England’s fight could be my own. The IRA think that if we help defeat the British, Hitler will benignly hand over the Six Counties. But I saw his planes above Spain and knew that I was looking at evil.’
‘My husband has enlisted.’
‘He’s a Protestant so people will expect no less, but when I don a British uniform it won’t be just my father’s door that will close on my face. Still, maybe between the pair of us your husband and I will keep Mayo out of this war. Go back to your kids, mam, they’re worried for you.’
He turned to walk down the avenue without looking back. Eva wanted to return to the house, but her limbs were so cold that she couldn’t move. It was the children who came to wrap their arms around her, besieging her with questions.
‘Who was he, Mummy? What did he give you?’
She allowed them to escort her back to the kitchen. Maureen asked no questions as she sat Eva down by the range and placed another log inside it. But Eva felt that she would never be warm again. Maureen began organising the children, arranging makeshift beds on the flagstones until the mattresses were aired. Francis and Hazel kissed their mother before climbing into bed but Eva barely registered their presence. Maureen went upstairs and soon the exhausted children fell asleep, leaving Eva alone. More alone than she had ever felt. The copy of Sovietland lay on a chair. She picked it up, opened the range and watched the flames consume the picture of the shaven-headed boys. She closed over the range. Her untouched supper was on the table but Eva could not bear to eat it when Brendan – if alive – was probably starving at this moment.
Maureen came back downstairs to quietly get undressed, knowing that Eva would confide in her in time. The girl began to wash at the sink and Eva walked out along the haunted corridor and up the stairs to enter every room and blow out the candles. She paused in the drawing room and thought of poor Freddie alone on Winchester’s blacked-out streets. The skies were dark across Europe, waiting for the drone of planes. War seemed so remote from this Mayo wood, yet she knew there was no guarantee of sanctuary here. She would try to make for her children an ark in this old house but some force of evil, which she could not name, held the world balanced on his palm. It was raised to his lips so that all he had to do was blow and their lives and hopes and dreams would scatter like cigarette ash.
She had so much to pray for. Her frail parents in Oxford, her brothers, her husband too crippled to fight, Peadar Bourke trudging through the Mayo night, her two precious children downstairs. What prayer could be powerful enough to protect them all, what incantation or spell? Eva stared out into the darkness and offered God the only gift she could proffer, her silence like an empty vessel aching to be filled.
TWENTY-SEVEN
In the Hold
Off Magadan, Soviet Union, October 1940
Tomorrow they would reach the port of Magadan. The dead would be unloaded from the ship first and stacked in batches with their ice-cold carcasses carefully counted. Then the sick would be laid out on canvas stretchers on the cold sand and finally the remaining zeks, squinting against whatever grey half-light existed. Only then would the full count be taken, with the zeks being shouted at by the sailors and NKVD officers anxious to off-load their cargo and return to Vladivostok. Tomorrow this nine-day sea nightmare would end, even if a new nightmare beckoned in a march to the Kolyma gold fields across the frozen landscape which Brendan could glimpse now as he ascended from the ship’s hold.
The sailors refused to ever risk descending into this pit of vomit and shit and terror. But every evening they would briefly allow small bands of prisoners up on deck to use the latrine which smelt no worse than the hold they had left. These few minutes were precious because you could suck freezing air into your lungs and you were safe from the urkas who controlled life below deck. Brendan’s bladder had been aching all day, but he’d learnt to nurture that pain because of the blissful sense of relief he could savour now in finally being able to piss. An old Pole squatted to his left, frantically trying to move his bowels in the short time available. He was so emaciated that Brendan knew he would not survive tomorrow’s march to the gold fields. But Brendan could not afford to feel sympathy at present. He was focused on the warm flow of piss, which momentarily allowed him to forget everything else. Rising steam froze immediately in the air.
Sailors screamed at them to hurry on, but these zeks had waited all day for their moment above deck and nobody wanted to be the first to turn because once one man left the latrine they would all have to follow. A guard shouted again and this time they emerged from the latrine in unison, their instincts honed to recognise the exact second when you risked receiving a blow or a bullet. Brendan helped the Pole beside him to rise, but the old man stared ahead, too ensnared in the failure to move his bowels to acknowledge the gesture. The next group of prisoners cursed Brendan’s slowness in walking back, breaking into a trot as they struggled to control their bladders while being beckoned forward.
Time was running out for the desperate men at the back, mainly because the urkas, who were always allowed up first, had taken so long to stroll back to the hold where their rule was the only law. Some nights the sailors grew tired of standing in the cold and closed over the hatches befor
e all the zeks had a chance to relieve themselves. Brendan’s companions had already climbed back into the hold but he risked standing on deck for an extra second to stare at the barbed wire surrounding the steps. An irrational desire possessed him to touch those knotted strands as if a human hand might transform them by magic into hedgerow flowers. A sailor shoved him forward with his rifle butt and Brendan passed down through the queuing men. The hold seemed utterly dark after the weak light on deck, but he managed to seek out Yasili and squat next to him.
Yasili was a former portrait painter who received an eight-year sentence on suspicion of espionage for an unknown foreign power after it was discovered that he had once been taken prisoner of war in Austria in 1915 and had therefore once consorted with foreigners. He always loitered near the base of the steps, even at the risk of receiving blows from the urkas, because you needed every chance mouthful of clean air to survive this voyage which carried the risk of typhoid. Yasili was unique among the zeks in having been sent to the gold fields once before. However he had been transferred to a camp at Siblag when the commandant there wanted portraits done of his children. His talent had saved his life because outdoor work was compulsory in Kolyma unless the temperature fell below minus fifty degrees. Yasili expected that few of the men with whom he first made the trip would still be alive.
Brendan closed his eyes, hoping – after his glimpse of the sea – to conjure up the blueness of Donegal Bay in his mind. But these days he rarely dreamt of Donegal and could barely visualise Dunkineely. Three years in gulags had stripped away most memories. Now when he dreamed of water it involved his first glimpse of the Black Sea at twilight after being brought up on deck to glimpse the port of Sevastopol in 1937.
Brendan had shared that journey from Barcelona through the straits past Gallipoli and Constantinople with two young Russians from the Communist Youth League who were accused of spying after having been seen fraternising with British volunteers. The boys had been too scared to talk to him, in sufficient trouble already without associating with another foreigner. Brendan would have welcomed any interrogation on his voyage from Spain, when he was still furious about being tricked on board. He had craved the chance to defend himself or at least know the charges against him but his only dealings had been with brutish sailors who were not intentionally cruel but regarded the three prisoners with the same indifference as if transporting cattle. Occasionally the two Russian youths were dragged from the small room where they were kept chained beside Brendan. From their screams Brendan knew that they were being tortured, but the NKVD officers on board did not seem interested in extracting confessions. They were merely going through the motions of their handiwork to remind the sailors of their power.
The Family on Paradise Pier Page 36
