Passport to Peril

by Lawrence Block

  After a moment he said, “You’re leaving tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll miss you, Ellen.”

  She didn’t trust herself to speak.

  “You’ll love the west. You may miss Dublin, but I know you’ll like the rest of the country. Don’t be afraid to talk to people. The only strangers in Ireland are people you haven’t met. Once you meet them they stop being strangers. You should have a grand time in Tralee and Dingle. I’ve never been there, but I’ve been to other parts of County Kerry. It’s beautiful country.” He paused for a moment. “I know you’ll do well in Berlin. And that you’ll have a good trip home.” Another pause. “You know, I really will miss you, Ellen.”

  His arms held her, and his lips found hers. She knew she was going to cry but hoped she could hold her tears until she was alone in her own room. Just a vacation romance, she told herself. He would forget her in a week, and they would never see each other again.

  He walked her to her door and kissed her good night. She hurried inside without a word and rushed up the stairs and into her room. She was all prepared to cry, but now the tears refused to come.

  Hardly a grand passion, she told herself. Just a very pleasant way to pass the time in Dublin.

  And so I knew that she would do

  With all of the tricks I knew she knew

  To pass away the time in Venezuela

  Would she ever see him again? Probably not, she thought. And if she did, they would probably have blessed little to say to each other. This week had been a delicious accident, a moment when each was ready for the other.

  I never shall marry

  And the rest of the trip would be good, she told herself fiercely. It would be exciting, and she would forget him.

  I’ll be no man’s wife

  She slipped out of her clothes and snuggled under the bedcovers. It was cold in her room. She pulled the quilts up to her chin and settled her head on her pillow.

  I’m bound to stay single

  Damn that song! Why did it have to run through her head this way? Why?

  All the days of my life

  Six

  She left The White House almost immediately after breakfast. She settled her bill and carried her suitcase and guitar and tape recorder to a waiting taxi. The bus station was only a few blocks away, but it was too far for her to carry everything on foot. She had half-hoped and half-feared that David might call that morning to say a last goodbye to her, and she was both glad and sorry that he did not appear. Goodbyes had always been difficult for her, and although she would have liked to see him a final time, she was relieved that she would be spared the awkwardness of another leavetaking. He had said he would miss her, and she knew full well that she would miss him.

  Her bus left at the appointed hour, though David had cautioned her to approach all Irish schedules with a certain amount of skepticism. “An Irish mile is about a fourth again as long as an English mile,” he said. “I suspect the national character has something to do with it, because an Irish hour often turns out to be half a day. Just be confident that the bus will leave sooner or later and reach its destination sooner or later. Don’t pay too much attention to the time. That’s one of the charms of the country. You can get along very well without ever looking at a clock. Sometimes I leave my watch in my room for weeks at a time and never miss it.”

  But this particular bus had left on time, and she sat a few seats behind the ruddy-faced bus driver and looked out the window as the old bus left Dublin and headed south. David had helped her plan her route, although he had impressed upon her the need to keep her plans flexible. “Just remember that you want to arrive in Tralee in time for the Festival of Kerry, and let things follow their own course between now and then. The best part of a trip is slipping off your schedule and getting caught up in some fascinating surprise. I feel so sorry for the poor fools who take those carefully arranged tours. Breakfast in Paris, sightseeing for the morning, lunch in Florence, shopping in the afternoon, dinner in Rome, a tour of the nightclubs, a morning flight to Vienna—I don’t know how they stand it. They might as well stay at home and watch a Technicolor travelogue at the movies. A trip should be more personal than that. It should move at its own pace. That way it can keep on surprising you—and travel’s no fun without surprises.”

  Still, she had sat with him while they mapped out a rough itinerary. She was heading south now, through the Wicklow Mountains toward County Wexford. She would spend the night in Wexford City and then head west along the southern edge of the country. There were parts of Waterford and Tipperary that she wanted to see, along with Cork City and parts of western Cork and Kerry. The itinerary was purposefully vague, the timetable almost nonexistent. She was not sightseeing so much as she was seeking out new songs and native singers, and so she would go where the material could be found.

  The first couple of days on the road, while delightful, were musically unproductive. Despite David’s advice, she found it impossible to overcome her natural shyness and approach total strangers. She spent the night and part of a day in Wexford City, touring churches and a small museum, spending quietly satisfying hours in a local café and breathing the fresh salt air of the seaside town. But she left her guitar in her room, and she did not hear people singing where she went.

  Several times the local tradesmen spoke to her. They were excited to hear that she was an American, since tourists were more of a rarity in Wexford than in Dublin. Almost everyone she spoke to had relatives in the States and was anxious to talk about America. Often the pubs and stores sported color portraits of Kennedy, and people seemed anxious to talk about the Irish lad who had become America’s president.

  But no one sang. When she told of the motive for her trip, of her desire to collect new material, everyone was interested and sympathetic and quite useless. “You’ll want to go to the west,” she heard more than once, “where they’re a regular race of singers. We’ve nothing so unusual here, sad to say.”

  A bus took her westward from Wexford to the smaller towns within the county. Here she caught the flavor of rural Ireland, a far cry from the cosmopolitan quality of Dublin. The rude little cottages, their tall rooftop television antennas the sole visual reminder that they were actually a part of the electronic age. The scarcity of automobiles and the great quantity of bicycles, with old men and women riding them. The sweet, timeless sensation of a walk through the center of town and a stop in a village pub. These last were wholly unlike the Dublin pubs; they were more like small grocery stores with a single counter where liquor and beer were sold for on-premises consumption.

  “We’re just country folk here,” a woman told her at a boardinghouse where she found a comfortable room for just sixteen shillings, breakfast included. “Not like your Dublin jackeens, so city-wise and quick like. A young lass like yourself might find nothing to do here. There’s no picture show, and no night life.”

  “But I like it here,” she said.

  “Oh, and do ye? Most of our young people are after leaving. For Dublin, and some for London or America.”

  That night she took her guitar with her to one of the tiny pubs. She had been thinking of David, sitting in her room and remembering the time she had spent with him, and she suddenly felt a great need to be among people, to make music and hear music. There was just one other customer in the pub, an old man in cap and long coat who sat drowsily over a glass of whiskey. The woman behind the counter was reading a newspaper and smoking a cigarette. Ellen sat in a corner of the small shop and played softly on the guitar, her fingers toying with the melody of one of the songs David had taught her. She wondered if she remembered the words. It was a song of the Wexford rising, and she thought that this was the very region where the rising had taken place almost two centuries ago. She began to sing, softly, more to herself than to the others, and before she knew it the old woman had abandoned her newspaper and the man had turned from his glass of whiskey to listen to her.

  “Sure, you know t
he old songs of Wexford!”

  “Oh, one or two…”

  “And do you know this one?” And the old man, his face all lined and pinched with age, began to sing in an impossibly sweet tenor voice. By the end of the first verse she had caught hold of the melody and was able to accompany him on the guitar. When he finished the old woman remembered a song she had sung as a child, a sweet bit of nonsense about an old woman and her pig. And then Ellen sang another song, and the pub began to fill up with other men and women, and before she knew it the evening filled with song.

  It took singing to do it, she discovered. She could have gone all over Ireland, telling everyone she met that she was hunting for songs, and everyone would have nodded knowingly and sighed sadly and explained that they were no great singers in that particular part of the country but that if she would only go north or south or west or east, if she would in short only go elsewhere to some more romantic part of the nation, then she might find what she was looking for.

  Yet the moment her fingers plucked at the strings of her guitar they managed to strike a responsive chord in the men and women within hearing range. Once she had raised her own voice in song, everyone was anxious to sing, and to listen to her own singing, and then it suddenly turned out that the town was a treasure trove of words and melody.

  And was it songs she was after? Why, Wexford was the very home of songs, she was speedily assured. Songs of all sorts, songs in English and songs in Irish, too. Sure, the Clancys came from Carrick in Tipperary, but weren’t there singers as good throughout County Wexford? And didn’t they have songs right here that the rest of Ireland had never heard, much less the rest of the world? And could she stay another night? Because there would be a hooley at Paddy Molloy’s house, they’d plan it here and now, with drink enough for everyone and the best voices for five miles around sure to be there. Could she bring her tape recorder? Sure, and why not? Now if she wanted songs, why sure and they’d teach her songs!

  From that night on the whole course of her trip was completely changed. Even before the next night’s hooley she began to gather material. She spent the morning and afternoon at a table in a café around the corner from her rooming house, and men and women were forever coming to her table to ask her if she knew this song or that one, and singing to her the ones she did not know. She had her tape recorder with her and faithfully committed each new song to tape. Many of them, she knew, would prove worthless. Some were little more than different words to familiar tunes. Others were collections of clumsy lyrics, faithful as records of this battle or that but musically unexciting. But in spite of the large quantity of unusable material, she did succeed in gathering many songs that would be valuable to her.

  And later on at the party, there were more songs and several singers who were good enough to deserve a place on the album of native singers she hoped to get Folklore to issue. A small band formed itself at the party—two banjos, a tin whistle, a drum, a guitar. She kept her tape recorder running constantly, and when she played the tapes back the next morning she was delighted to discover that she had better than twenty minutes’ worth of material that could be transcribed directly, material that could stand as the core of an eminently valuable album of Irish music.

  She left the town reluctantly the next day, sad to see the last of it but at the same time anxious to get on with her work. She had found the formula now and was confident that it would serve her ideally wherever she went. Singing was contagious in Ireland. If she went among the people with her guitar and her songs, it would not be long before she had more new material than she could ever use.

  The system worked even better than she had expected. She headed steadily westward, never going very far in a single day, purposefully seeking out the smallest, quietest towns along her route. She went to towns with names that seemed themselves to be made of music, towns like Mullennakill and Ballyduff and Furraleigh and Poulnamucky and Ballylooby. She spent long, lazy afternoons walking through the green hillside down narrow winding roads bordered by fences of piled stone.

  She wondered aloud once where all the stones came from, and a farmer told her with a laugh, “We come on the stones when plowing, and the only way to be rid of them is to build fences with them. If they’re part of a fence they can’t be in the ground, and it’s hard growing praties in stone.” No mortar held the stones in place. They were piled neatly one upon another, and often she came upon breaks in the fences where sheep or goats had knocked some of the stones free.

  The animals seemed to wander freely, in the road as often as not. She came upon every sort of animal in the narrow roadways, sheep bleating mournfully, fat Irish cattle grazing at the roadside, plump pigs rooting in the fields, goats knocking about in pairs, their forelegs lashed together. “The sheep will usually stay where they belong,” a man had told her, “but there’s no holding the goats, they’ve always a mind to be wandering where they shouldn’t be. But there’s no beast less apt to cooperate than a goat, and so we tie two of them together, and then they’re less quick to get over a fence. Because when one wants to go wandering the other wants to stay behind, and when that one changes his mind so does the other, and they can never quite get together, and so they stay where they’re meant to stay.”

  Further west, in the inland plains of Tipperary, the soil was less rocky. There were fewer of the stone fences, and instead the roads were edged with massive banks of earth, the grass growing on the earthen dykes as well as it grew everywhere else in Ireland. Walking between those banks—they called them ditches there, a source of confusion at first because she had always thought of a ditch as a hole in the ground rather than a mound rising above ground level—walking between them, she could picture graphically the ambushes and battles of the Black-and-Tan war. She could imagine the men of the IRA flying columns crouching in the fields behind the ditches, while the Tans and Auxiliaries drove down the tortured twisted roads in their Crossley vans. Then bombs would wing down on the vans, and bold men would rest their rifle barrels on the tops of the ditches and rain fire down on the troops.

  Oh, but isn’t it grand to see

  The Auxies and the R.I.C.

  The Black-and-Tans turn tail and flee

  Away from Barry’s column

  In the County Cork an old man led her outside of the town of Macroom to the very spot where a flying column had staged one of the major battles of the Troubles. He had not been there himself, he was quick to explain, but a cousin of his had been one of Tom Barry’s men and had taken a bullet in the hip that very day. And while he pointed out just where the troops had been positioned, he sang her a song commemorating the day. The last line, as it turned out, was joyously obscene—something that did not occur to the old gentleman until he had finished singing it. He blushed furiously and apologized profusely, and it was all she could do to keep from laughing aloud. She could never record that song, she thought, and could not even sing it in mixed company, but it was one she could never forget.

  But the boys of the colyum were waiting

  With rifle and powder and shot

  And the Irish Republican Army

  Made shit of the whole fucking lot

  She ran out of tape before she reached Cork City. There she bought more and made a package of the reels she had filled, mailing them to herself in New York. In Cork the pace of her trip began to catch up with her, and she discovered that she was genuinely tired, exhausted physically by the endless walking and riding and singing, exhausted mentally and emotionally by the parade of experiences she had undertaken. She stayed longer than she planned in Cork, sleeping late in the mornings and leaving her guitar snug in its case throughout her stay. She contented herself with leisurely sightseeing and spent a night at the movies watching an American Western. She met a pair of honeymooners from Chicago and talked with them, the first Americans she had seen since she left Dublin and David Clare.

  David. She realized that night that she had scarcely thought of him at all during the past several days. She had
been too busy, rushing to experience the whole of rural Ireland, caught headlong in the legend and song of the nation. And yet he had never been far from her mind. Now she thought of him again and wondered what the trip would have been like if he had been able to accompany her.

  So often she had found herself moved by one thing or another—the view from a particular hill, the speech of a particular man or woman, the throat-catching beauty of a particular sunset. And so often she had felt the lack of someone to share those beauties with. She had never been conscious of her loneliness, but looking back she could see that she had in fact been lonely. More than once she had found herself talking aloud to herself, as if in need of rendering a verbal reaction to the phenomena that moved her. It all stemmed, if not from loneliness, at least from aloneness. She recognized this now and thought of David Clare and wished she could see him again.

  I never shall marry. . .

  Nonsense, she told herself. She looked at the four walls of her little room and shivered. She got dressed and left the hotel and went to the pub next door for a drink.

  She did not stay long at the pub. She was in no mood for drinking and in less of a mood for music or conversation, and she went only because her room was beginning to feel like a cell. She nursed one small glass of beer and smoked two cigarettes. Her American cigarettes were long gone now, and she had been experimenting with various English and Irish brands, none of which tasted particularly good to her. She had found one brand that lit themselves; you struck the tip of the cigarette against the side of the packet and the end ignited. It had seemed at first like a marvelous idea, and she couldn’t imagine why they didn’t have such cigarettes available in the States, but she found that the principle worked better in theory than in practice. Half the time the cigarette broke in the middle while she was trying to get it lit, and when lit it tasted foul anyway.

  When she left the pub she got a slight shock. On her way to her hotel she caught a glimpse of a man’s face in a darkened doorway, and it looked exactly like the face of the man she had seen in London. The tall man, his long, hawklike nose bisecting his long wedge of a face, his deep, hollow eyes, his cruel, thin lips. She saw the face for only a second or two, but she found herself suddenly walking very fast, and she was short of breath as she entered her hotel. She could barely wait to be up the stairs and inside her room with her door bolted.