The City in Darkness

by Michael Russell

  On this Christmas Eve, Kilranelagh echoed to the cawing of rooks, flying in to the stands of beech and oak that bordered it. But there was another noise, an intermittent snuffling close to the two great lichened pillars they called the Gates of Heaven. For 3,000 years these had been a gateway to the world of the dead, but lumbering back and forth through them now, nosing for roots, were two large saddleback pigs. Sadie and her daughter Molly had escaped through an open gate at the Gillespies’ farm below Kilranelagh, and, wandering idly wherever the ditches and the boreens took them, they had finally found something worth eating.

  The pigs were not alone. Two small figures moved through the crooked headstones towards them. Tom Gillespie, dark and eight, with a bucket of calf nuts, took up the rear; Rebecca Wall, fair and nine, his neighbour from Woodfield Glen, led the way. She had spotted them first.

  They had been two hours finding the pigs, and as they had left the gate open there was an element of redemption in all this. Rebecca took some nuts from Tom’s bucket and they walked slowly towards the Gates of Heaven. Tom called, quietly, ‘Sadie, come on, come on’, his words blurring into the ‘gub, gub, gub, gub’ all livestock know. Rebecca threw the nuts down in front of her. Sadie sniffed and moved closer. Whatever smelled good underground the calf nuts offered instant gratification. As she mowed along the line of nuts her daughter picked up the new scent and trotted forward eagerly. Sadie snarled; Molly stopped abruptly. Rebecca laughed.

  ‘She’s such a mean mother!’

  Tom threw more nuts. Molly inched forward, eyeing her mother cautiously, and began to crunch them, only feet away. Rebecca held more food out. Sadie waddled past her daughter, pushing the outstretched hand. The children moved across the graveyard, sometimes backward, dribbling out a trail of calf nuts, calling, cajoling, encouraging, laughing.

  They didn’t know that they were being watched.

  Heading to the cemetery gate it was slow progress through the headstones but the children were moving faster now. Once they were in the lane it would be easier. But it was dark now. Navigating their backward-walking way had already led to tumbles; the pigs were more sure-footed.

  Then Rebecca fell heavily, tripping over a half-buried headstone. She rolled down a slope, with a cry of shock more than anything, but her laughter told Tom she was fine. Suddenly a figure rose up in the darkness, almost where Rebecca had landed. A man. There was nothing to see except a shape, blacker than the darkness. He pushed past Tom, knocking him over, and in seconds he was gone. As Tom got up he heard the man crashing through the undergrowth. Rebecca was up too. They stared into the night. Sadie and Molly were unfazed, feeding on the calf nuts that had spilled on to the ground. The two children looked at each other and ran.

  The cemetery gate was close now and as the two children ran headlong towards it the path was clearer. At the gate they could see a light moving, coming towards them. And there was a voice Tom knew well.

  ‘Tom! Are you here? Tom!’

  They reached Stefan at the gate. Tom threw his arms round him.

  ‘There’s someone there, Daddy!’

  ‘No pigs?’ laughed Stefan.

  ‘We found Sadie and Molly, but there was a man!’

  ‘There was, Mr Gillespie, he was hiding!’

  Stefan saw that something really had frightened them. Then across the graveyard came the sound of an engine. It was a motorcycle, in the line of trees that marked the track heading towards Cloghnagaune. He saw the sweep of a headlight. Someone had been there. Not odd in itself; there was always something of Christmas that was owed to the dead. Stefan would be there himself in the morning to put a little of it on to Maeve Gillespie’s grave.

  ‘Well, it’s quite a welcome home anyway!’

  There was a grunt and a snort and the sound of slow, heavy feet. The two pigs, still munching on the last nuts, lumbered irritably towards them.

  ‘Well, whoever it was, if you two didn’t frighten the life out of him, I’m sure Sadie and Molly did. I’d have run myself if I’d seen you all coming through the Gates of Heaven across the graveyard! The Children of Lir and the Black Pig of Muckdubh, or is it two Black Pigs of Muckdubh?’

  Tom and Rebecca laughed, reassured enough to feel a little foolish.

  ‘Come on ladies, we’d better get you home.’

  ‘I dropped all the food, Daddy.’

  Stefan held up a bucket of grain, and grinned.

  ‘Do you think I never left a gate open when I was your age?’

  The stranger in the graveyard was soon forgotten. Neither Tom nor Rebecca had any real fear of the place, even at night, and there was more than enough going on to drive away a momentary fright. Even as the two sows settled in their sty, Christmas had taken over, sweeping everything before it. And when Stefan and his son came back up to the farm after walking Rebecca home, it was Christmas that was the only thing on Tom’s mind.

  It was the memory of what Stefan’s grandparents had brought to Ireland from Germany, years ago, that meant the Gillespies kept Christmas on Christmas Eve. The presents round the tree, which Tom and Stefan’s father had cut down the day before, were for opening after the Christmas Eve meal. For now, the kitchen range was full of cooking, and Stefan’s mother was flustered, not because cooking flustered her, but because Kate O’Donnell did. There was an impression to make, even if it only truly mattered to Helena Gillespie.

  Kate had been pulled into the rarely used sitting room where a fire blazed and candles burnt. Tom was finishing decorating the tree, which was by long tradition just too big to fit in the corner by the fire. There was a new decoration each year that Tom chose in Clerys but this year there was a second, a glass reindeer brought by Kate. He wanted it with his own new one, a bright wooden soldier with a drum. When he was satisfied with the tree they returned to the kitchen and the smell of cinnamon and cloves from the Glühwein on the range. Kate sat at the table realizing any offer to help Mrs Gillespie would only make Helena more self-conscious. Tom smiled. It wasn’t often his grandmother was like that, but he knew why of course.

  In the barn the four shorthorns ate hay in their stalls, side by side. Stefan and his father sat on stools milking the last two in the light from oil lamps. The only sound was the rhythmic spurting of milk into pails. Stefan had not forgotten the stranger at Kilranelagh as easily as Tom. It was a puzzle that echoed another puzzle about his wife’s grave; the flowers that were left sometimes, the white lilies. The last had been that autumn on his return from America. It had left him with the feeling that someone was watching his life. It had happened before, of course; each time he forgot about it till the next time, but he remembered now that once before he had found a lily on the grave at Christmas.

  ‘You’re very quiet,’ said David.

  ‘I’m sorry, Pa. You know how it is.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘I’m clearing the smell of Special Branch out of my head.’

  He did need Christmas to clear Dublin out of his head, and above all he needed it to be what Tom wanted. He needed Kate to feel easy at Kilranelagh too. She had only been to the farm three times since she first came there to find him, after they met in America at the end of the summer.

  ‘So Gregory’s giving you a hard time?’ There was a hint of amusement in David Gillespie’s voice. ‘I did warn you. It’s what the Special Branch is about, to be a pain in the arse. And it takes a royal pain in the arse to run it.’

  ‘You know I don’t like what I’m doing, Pa.’

  ‘I’d be more worried if you did. What about this arms’ raid?’

  ‘The IRA didn’t get far beyond a show. We’re picking it all up.’

  ‘Jesus, it was some show though!’ said David.

  Stefan said nothing. He wanted that conversation shut off too. David could tell. He had been a policeman himself. He still knew that when it came to the job silence was usually a request for silence in return. He poured the milk into the churn behind him. He turned to clean the cow’s udder. Stefan poured his mi
lk in and clamped the round top on to the churn.

  ‘I’m glad Kate’s here for Christmas,’ said David.

  Stefan bent down again to clean off the last shorthorn.

  ‘Ma’s told me that half a dozen times. I have got the message.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Father and son took the churn by the handles and carried it through into the dairy. David put it under the tap and left cold water to run over it and cool it. The two men washed the smell of the milk from their hands.

  ‘You’ll need to be quick on your feet to stop her asking what’s next.’

  ‘For God’s sake, I’ve only known Kate a few months.’

  ‘She’d say that’s long enough at your age.’

  ‘Should I be glad we’re not here long, Pa?’ laughed Stefan.

  ‘You’ve got her parents Stephen’s Day. They’ll think the same.’

  They walked out into the yard. The sheepdog Tess followed, then thought better as her nose hit the crisp air; she went back to bed in the barn.

  ‘Well, if Ma wants my intentions to be honourable, Mr and Mrs O’Donnell might be hoping they’re not. It has to be better than their daughter marrying a policeman, a Protestant policeman into the bargain!’

  ‘Is it that way then?’ said David more quietly.

  ‘It’s no way, except we don’t need to get too serious about it all.’ Stefan smiled. ‘There is the question of what Kate wants to do as well, Pa!’

  ‘Jesus! If you don’t know, you’re a bigger fool than you look!’

  Stefan and his father came into the kitchen, both laughing. Kate and Tom brought them a glass of the mulled wine. Helena called out across the room.

  ‘We’ll be eating in about an hour. One present each first!’

  Tom grabbed Kate’s hand and dragged her back to the sitting room.

  Helena walked over from the stove and picked up her own glass.

  ‘Do you think she’s all right, Stefan?’

  ‘Of course she’s all right, Ma!’

  ‘I’m glad she’s here, though,’ she said in a meaningful whisper.

  ‘You never are, Ma! I wouldn’t have guessed!’

  David Gillespie snorted into his glass.

  ‘Don’t be drinking too much, you two. She won’t think much of that!’

  Stefan and his father adopted their most serious expressions; Helena began to laugh. The door burst open and Tom and Kate returned, each bringing two small packages from under the tree. Helena took an unusually large gulp of her Glühwein, and crossed her fingers. Tom distributed the presents to be opened now. On the radio a choir sang ‘The Wexford Carol’.

  Good people all, this Christmas time,

  Consider well and bear in mind

  What our good God for us has done,

  In sending his beloved son.

  8

  La Prisión Central

  María Fernández Duarte walked from the station at Burgos across the bridge over the River Arlanzón. It should have been a three-hour journey from Salamanca but she had waited four hours at Valladolid for a connecting train. Although the Civil War was over, trains, like everything else in Spain, were only just beginning to work again. She was lucky on Christmas Eve to find one at all. But she had been dry and almost warm. Now it was wet, no more than drizzle, but on the prison road the wind would rise and the rain would be heavy. She had money for a taxi but she knew no one would take her. The drivers would see, just by looking, why she was there. It didn’t pay to associate with visitors to the Central Prison. A driver who made a habit of ferrying them would be talked about; being talked about was only the beginning. One driver got out of his cab. María smiled and shook her head. She walked on. Over the bridge she turned away from the city into the darkness beyond. Already the rain was harder.

  The Republic was gone. In much of Spain it had gone long before the Nationalists’ victory. In some places it had barely existed. The holy city of Burgos was such a place. The Gothic cathedral at the centre of the old town was more than a monument and a place of pilgrimage; it was the heart of Castile and a Spain that looked back three hundred years for its place in the world, to a past that made the present inconsequential and shabby, as squalid as the slums that pushed up against the walls of Burgos and crept into its narrow streets, hidden behind the city’s medieval splendours and its gleaming modern banks and hotels. It was a place where the pulse of Spanish Catholicism, unbending and overweening, beat so strongly you could hear it in the streets, just as you could smell the incense.

  When the King left Spain in 1931 the people of Burgos felt they could tolerate a president in his place if nothing else changed. The President’s visit to Burgos was encouraging; he switched on the electric lights that now illuminated the cathedral at night and made it more than ever the definition of what the city was. If the President concerned himself with celebrating what had been created between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries there was little to worry about. The city’s governor was a Republican by then, of course, but as a respectable businessman he could be forgiven his eccentricities. It was better, even under the Republic’s godless yoke, if power remained in the hands of people of the right sort.

  Unfortunately, in 1936, with a new government of socialists and communists that had every intention of changing things, the burghers of Burgos became part of a conflict they thought would leave them untouched. And when the opponents of the Popular Front launched a military coup that would lead to the Civil War, the sleepy plains of Castile were sleepy no longer. In Burgos the army took over. The governor, who had been the right sort for a time, was arrested with his Republican administrators and shot.

  The day the army took over, the cathedral bells rang into the night. Civil Guards and magistrates inspected the bodies of the executed officials and concluded they had been killed by persons unknown. Within days the unknown death squads were acting with the authority of a military tribunal. Over the next two years, thousands in Burgos would die or simply disappear. When bodies were there to find there were the same marks – Mauser bullet to the body, two or three more to the eyes or the temple. But on the first day the men who carried out the first executions joined those who had instructed them, with the city’s prominent citizens, the military and the Guardia Civil, at High Mass in the Catedral de Santa María de Burgos.

  As they sat in the cathedral a silent procession moved through the Arca de Santa María, across the cobbles of the Plaza Rey San Fernando. A procession that could have been seen a hundred years before, even three hundred. It was the old pulse of the city, slowed by the Republic, beating at its fullest. A quiet stream of men and women in black, wearing scapularies and sacred medallions; they carried crucifixes and the banners of the ancient sodalities and confraternities of the city; shepherding priests walked beside them; nuns and brothers from the convents and monasteries followed. Heads were bowed in prayer in that steady, black stream. It was the black of celebration and triumph. The silence was a kind of electricity.

  María Fernández saw the lights of Burgos as she crossed the river, but she was going the other way, following the river out into the country, to the one contribution the Republic had made to the life of Burgos that still lived on.

  The Prisión Central stood to the west of the city on a barren slope above the Río Arlanzón. It sat alone like the fortress it was, a squat, square structure inside a high outer wall. At the front was the great courtyard, the chapel and the quarters of the prison governor. It was the finest prison in Spain. Besides ordinary criminals it housed thousands of political prisoners. One of the first acts of the military government after the coup, once the prison governor had been shot, was to replace the old regime’s prisoners with Republicans who could be driven out to the surrounding countryside, on a daily basis, to be shot as well. It was a bleak place, buffeted day and night by wind. There was one rough track to it that had never been metalled. When it was impassable, as it often was in winter, squads of
prisoners went out to repair the damage in the storms that had caused it.

  It was three kilometres from the station to the prison. The rain slammed into María’s face; the wind bit harder as the sheltered parks of the city’s outskirts gave way to open fields. Away from the road there were the lights of farms and hamlets; sometimes she heard the sound of laughter. But mostly there was only the darkness and the rain and the noise of her feet.

  Eventually she could see the lights of the prison. Like the cathedral it was brightly floodlit; the electric lights had been installed at the same time. Where the road ended and the stony track to the Prisión Central began were two Civil Guards; she saw them ahead, in black capes and black tricorn hats. As she approached one of them walked towards her, flashing a torch.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘María Fernández Duarte.’

  ‘From?’

  ‘Salamanca.’

  ‘Staying in Burgos?’

  ‘No, I shall get the night train back.’

  ‘Papers.’

  She handed over her identity card. There was no reason to inspect her papers; it would be done at the prison. This was to tell her she was there on sufferance. She took the card back. The benemérita put his hand round hers.

  ‘You’ll have a few hours before the train.’

  She met his gaze, but she knew better than to show her contempt.

  ‘You’ll need warming up by then.’

  ‘You know I’m in your hands, señor. If you want to take the clap back home to your wife for Christmas, I’ll be at the station till about two.’

  He let go of her hand. The other policeman was laughing.

  ‘Fucking bitch, you’ll get what you deserve! Red whore!’

  She walked on to the prison at the same slow, patient pace.

  She stood in the great courtyard inside the prison. It was still raining. It was cold. It was always colder within the walls. The queues of visitors stretched across the yard. Round them stood armed prison guards. The visitors exchanged few words. Even neighbours in the city said little to one another here, and it was never wise to advertise association with visitors from elsewhere. They were watched most; they would be questioned about who they knew locally too. Networks of acquaintanceship could be costly.