Annalise smiled faintly. She knew from whom my ideas had come.
The bombs were coming quite close again, perhaps aimed at the gigantic flak tower in the Tiergarten. It was alleged to be impenetrable. Some nights there were more than thirty thousand people in it, not counting the men who operated the 88mm cannon on its top.
If several large bombs hit it at the same time, there would be horrific casualties. Another great triumph for the Royal Air Force. Finally, the cacophony of plane engines, 88mm fire, exploding bombs, sirens, declined—stowly at first and then definitively. The tension lifted from our cozy shelter. People woke up, stretched, and stood up. There was another day ahead, another day of walking or riding by smoking ruins, checking on one’s family, and friends, struggling on. And hoping that they survive the next night or the night after or the night after that on and on till the war ended, if it ever did.
Didn’t the RAF wallahs remember how the stubborn people of London had stood up to the Luftwaffe blitz and actually became more stubborn in the process? Did they think that Germans were any different? Or did they believe if they killed more people than the Luftwaffe did, German morale would collapse? There were worse crimes in this war, but was not the indiscriminate killing of civilians also a war crime? Since the Allies are now certain to win the war, the leadership of the RAF will not be subject to trials. But can we call this justice? Will history think that it is justice?
That would go into my dispatch to Dublin before the day was out.
So there, Winston.
Franz drove us back to Charlottenburg. Animals from the destroyed zoo were wandering in the Tiergarten, the Prince William Church was in ruins. The Kepinski had vanished. Long blocks of the Kudamm had been devastated. All military targets?
“I am very grateful to you, Herr Ridgewood, for your invitation. It was a most interesting evening. I met very many nice people. I ate good food and drank good wine. I know the Irish are lucky people, so I felt safe with you when the raids began.”
“And you did dance a little.”
“Fortunately for me, with a very skilled dancer.”
Dawn was turning into sunrise. Charlottenburg had been damaged seriously too. However, her tower still stood.
“Good! I still have a home. I must bathe and dress properly and return to the Luft Ministry.”
I walked with her to the door of her building. She turned and kissed me, a sign that I was not to go up to the door of her room.
“A very lovely young woman, Herr Ambassador,” Franz observed, “and a very nice one too.”
“I had noticed that, Franz.”
The BBC informed me that the RAF had made the largest raid yet, fourteen hundred planes had leveled large industrial areas of Berlin.
I wrote a passionate dispatch to the Ministry for External Affairs.
“The industry of Berlin, located mostly in the suburb as is the industry of Paris continues to hum, relatively undamaged by the RAF raid last night. Most of the bombs fell on a central swath across the city, where tens of thousands of people live, many thousands died, and many more are homeless. Also many of the animals at the Berlin zoo are dead or wandering around the park near the zoo where they will be dead tomorrow. It seems obvious that the Royal Air Force’s goals in these raids is not to destroy industry but to kill people. It is successful in that goal. It killed many last night. How many more do they have to kill before they realize that such murder has no effect on Hitler or the Stormtroopers?”
I then filled in the rest of my thoughts on the subject, including the charge of war crimes, translated it into Irish, and fired it off.
I didn’t imagine Winston would like it very much. I wasn’t sure that my minister would like it either. However, he sent back a two-word minute.
“Brilliant altogether.”
I had not written so passionately in any of my earlier dispatches. Why now?
Because I was in love with a woman who, for all her hesitation, was in love with me. I did not want to lose her to an errant Royal Air Force bomb.
I said a couple of Rosaries that night.
19
“SHE’S NOT going to die,” Nuala insisted.
“Even if she survived,” I said, “she’d be dead by now anyway.”
“Dermot Michael Coyne, you have no romantic sense at all.”
“Life is not a film on the Lifetime Channel,” I said.
“Besides, she’s not necessarily dead.”
I calculated the numbers.
“She’d be almost ninety.”
“A lot of people live that long.”
“Is all of this fey knowledge like about Des?”
“No, it’s just common sense—with maybe a touch of fey hunch in it.”
“Where’s the common sense?” I demanded.
“Give over, Dermot Michael! Your man is obviously in love with the woman. He’s not writing about a fading memory but about a living woman. If she were dead or if he had lost her long ago, he wouldn’t have been capable of the book, would he now? We miss the dead, we miss them terribly, but we can’t be humorously affectionate about them … And don’t say that I’ve cheated and read ahead. I have a lot of faults, but would I be doing something like that?”
“Not all that many faults.”
“Hmf!”
We were driving up to the distant regions of the Northwest Side, in Nuala’s Lincoln Navigator with myself at the wheel. Me wife seemed to believe that the region around Crawford and Lawrence was some sort of outpost of civilization where we would need a tank to escape safely. I told her that it was the real Chicago and that River Forest and Lincoln Park West, our little enclaves, were not at all typical. The real Chicago, she insisted with no evidence, was “down below,” her term for the Loop and the Mag Mile.
My poor wife was in a snit about Nelliecoyne. It had been a mistake, she insisted, to buy a digital camera and a printer for our eight-year-old. One genius is enough in a house. I requested clarity on who the other genius was. The problem was our daughter had the natural eye of a gifted photographer. She was now running wild taking pictures, some of them, as Nuala herself admitted, “brilliant altogether.”
Two nights ago, the child had brought us two dozen of her photos, “the only ones worth looking at,” she claimed.
“Are they any good, Da?” she asked me, which was a violation of the family protocol. You always asked the Ma first
I worked my way carefully through the prints.
“This one of your baby brother and Johnnie Pete is marvelous, and the one with two doggies looking at the baby is wonderful.”
“They adore him, Da, and he loves them.”
Being a responsible husband and father, I quickly passed the prints into my wife’s eagerly waiting hand. She gasped a couple of times as she inspected them.
“You have the eye, kid,” I said. “It’s a natural gift that many professional photographers would die for. Keep it up.”
Nuala burst into tears and scooped up the eight-year-old in her arms. Nelliecoyne responded as a girl child does to a mother when they both share the same wavelength—she sobbed too.
“They’re marvelous, Hon. Isn’t your poor da right like he always is! You have a lot of talent. I’m so proud of you.”
Poor Da is always right, huh?
“The only one I don’t like.” the woman of the house continued, “is the one of meself nursing the little pest.”
Nelliecoyne dismissed that complaint with a wave of her hand.
“You’re only saying that, Ma, because you don’t think you’re that beautiful. You have to learn to accept that you’re drop-dead gorgeous.”
So saying, our daughter ran off, delighted with herself.
The words “learn to accept” were a direct quote from the little book of Nuala Anne, the unwritten rules in our house for child rearing. My wife was getting her own back.
“Where did she pick up ‘drop-dead gorgeous,’”I said. “Mind you ’tis true.”
“I
t’s a Madonna and Child picture.” My wife sighed. “She’s seen too many of them over in that school. I’m not the Mother of God and the little punk certainly is not God and there’s no mystical glow in me eyes. Besides there’s too much boob in it.”
“You know better than that, Nuala Anne McGrail. A nursing mother is a metaphor of God’s maternal love for us. Haven’t you been reading my poems?”
“Still too much boob.”
I glanced at the offending print.
“I’d say it needs a little bit more boob.”
“Wouldn’t you be saying that?” She tapped my arm lightly in mock disapproval, an improvement over the solid punch with which she used to show affection.
I didn’t realize that we had a full-blown family crisis on our hands until that night as we cuddled in bed, after I had amused myself by playing with her aforementioned boobs at some considerable length, accompanied by her squeals of delight, as a prelude to more advanced amusements.
“What are we going to do about our little girl, still?”
“I thought she has calmed down lately.” I said half-asleep.
“I mean Nelliecoyne and herself a friggin’ genius.”
“We encourage her but don’t push her. It’s likely to be a phase, but if it isn’t, so much the better. She can support us in our old age.”
“I’m serious, Dermot Michael.”
POST-COITAL SERIOUS DISCUSSIONS ARE NOT NATURAL.
Too right.
“’Tis a terrible thing altogether to be a parent.”
“I agree.”
“We can’t tell her that her pitchers are no good because that would be a lie, wouldn’t it?”
In Irish English the words for a photograph and for a receptacle from which one pours a liquid sound exactly the same.
“And it is what happens in some Irish families to prevent a talented child from getting a big head.”
“Too true, Dermot love. But won’t she neglect her schoolwork and make all her little friends envious and won’t she drive people out of their minds and herself pestering them with her friggin’ camera.”
“As for the little friends, many of them well on their way to nastiness, she has already proved that she can deal with them like a precinct captain. She’ll snap pitchers of them that are flattering. Our daughter can take care of herself.”
“I donno, Dermot Michael, she’ll be a teen in four more years.”
“And will be as bossy as her ma.”
“I’m SERIOUS, Dermot.”
“I understand. A little kid might freak out with her new skill. We’ll have to watch closely to see if that starts happening. But, to be fair, our Nelliecoyne is not the sort of child who freaks out.”
“’Tis true.” She sighed. “It’s a problem still … You can go to sleep now, Dermot love.”
“I already have.”
Nonetheless, my wife continued to fret for the next several days and hence had to finish catching up to the Stauffenberg story as I drove the tank to the Northwest Side.
“Why didn’t you tell me that this was such a nice little community, Dermot and all these nice shops and these friendly people on the streets?”
“And with every skin color under heaven … This is your typical Chicago neighborhood.”
Tariq was a man about forty with graying hair and a paunch which suggested a sedentary life rather than too much beer. His face, not as dark as our friends Joseph and Mary, was lined with sadness. He was courteous to us but he did not smile.
“First of all,” my wife began the conversation, “our daughter has become a camera enthusiast. She didn’t ask for it, but I think we ought to get her one of them printers which will do eight-by-ten prints, something simple that you don’t have to be a genius to operate.”
“A man in my business is always happy,” he said in a melancholy voice, “to hear about a new camera lover.”
They picked out an appropriate printer and the paper to use with it.
“Will she need software to use with the printer?”
My wife had not the faintest idea what the question meant. She glanced at the family’s computer expert. I nodded.
“Certainly. What would you recommend?”
“There are many different kind of software programs that are popular. They range from simple to moderately complex. This program”—he held up a box—“is somewhere in the middle. If the young woman is skilled at computer use, I would recommend it.”
Again I tilted my head. It was nice to play a useful role.
Our merchant was an honest man. He didn’t try to sell us high-end equipment, though he doubtless knew he could.
Herself paid with her own credit card. I leaned on my spear. She insisted on showing the merchant the print of Patjo and the doggies.
He raised an eyebrow.
“She is very talented. She is perhaps sixteen?”
“Half that.”
The eyebrow went up again.
“We merchants need more children like that.”
Again he did not smile. Had he lost family, a wife and children perhaps, in Iraq? Gunned down by trigger-happy soldiers?
Then herself got down to business while I continued to lean on my spear.
“We want to talk to you about our young friend Desmond. We don’t want to know any secrets. We already have evidence from Turkish Air that he flew from Chicago to Ankara and then to Kars. We assume that he walked along the mountains to free Kurdistan in Iraq. We think you might have helped him.”
“That part of the world is very wild and dangerous, ma’am. The map says it is in Turkey, but it has never been really under Turkish control. The Russians occupied it during the First War. There are Kurds and Russians and Armenians and Georgians and Chechens up in those mountains and they all hate one another. If Noah’s ark really landed there, then they must have built the Tower of Babel in the same place … I beg you, madam, do not even think of going there.”
“No way.”
Tariq, clearly an intelligent man with a strong sense of irony, spoke in a low, emotionless monotone.
“Most of the people, especially in the southern end of the mountains, are Kurds. They will never accept Turkish rule. Thus far the Turks will not discuss even limited autonomy, though it may be a price they will have to pay for membership in the EU. Of all the hates in those mountains, none is stronger than that between the Kurds and the Turks, except perhaps between the Armenians and the Turks. Although I am Assyrian, I was born in those mountains. No one hates the Assyrians because we are too few to matter. That was true in Iraq until the Americans came and the religious fanatics began to hate the Assyrians because they are infidels. The mountains are very beautiful. However, I much prefer Chicago.”
“Galway Bay is beautiful too,” Nuala commented, “but I too much prefer Chicago.”
“There are groups of bandits up in those mountains that band together regardless of their religion or ethnicity for their own protection and for their own livelihood, something like the Mafia in Sicily, I suppose. They are, however, more honorable than the Mafia, they keep their word. And also more ruthless. I know some of the men in one of these groups. I grew up with them, some are my relatives. When Assyrians in this country want to bring out their relatives in Iraq or Iran, my friends bring them out. I pay my friends and the relatives pay me. With the dangers in Iraq increasing for Christians, there is more of a demand for, such ah, transfers. I make no money on it, this I swear …”
“We believe you,” my wife assured him.
“So far they have never failed me. Everyone they have contracted to bring to Kars has arrived safely. After that the relatives must arrange for the plane fare and get them safely into another country. Your Homeland Security people try to stop us, but they do not even know how to begin. I assure you, madam, sir, we Assyrians have had seven thousand years of practice in deceiving governments. No one is better than us at this activity.”
“We Irish are probably high on the list,” Nuala said. �
��Trouble is it becomes a habit and we deceive even our friends.”
True enough.
“So your young friend Desmond comes here to buy some materials for his computer that he sees in the window. He speaks fluent Arabic. The accent is African because he was in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia. He knows all the little nuances and the allusions that would mark him as a pious Muslim. He tells me, however, that he is Irish Catholic. I should have known that. He is so charming, though sometimes I do not understand what he is saying.”
“We never say what we mean or mean what we say.”
I continued to lean on my spear.
“Yes. That is it. He says a few words to me in our language, Aramaic, which is the language Jesus spoke, as I’m sure you know. He tells me that he will soon have a doctorate in Eastern languages and he wants to learn our language. He even speaks a few words. He asks about our monasteries. The Church of the East, he says, had many monasteries in Persia and Afghanistan and India and even China when your St. Patrick was bringing religion to Ireland. I am not an especially religious man. I believe in God because all we Assyrians do, but I have never had an opportunity to study religion. He tells me that we are the last remnant of the Church of the East. He wants to spend some time in one of the remaining monasteries. I tell him I don’t know of any. Well, someone has told him that there is one in Mosul. He has charmed me into admitting that I know ways to get people out of Iraq. He asks if I can get him into Mosul. I tell him that there will be a war and it is quite impossible. He persists. I should have refused, but he is so charming … Even as I talk about it, I feel guilty. It is true, I tell him, that he speaks Arabic well enough and knows Islam well enough that he could deceive people for a time. But it would be very dangerous. He begs me, he has the money. My friends are always ready to help. I agree. They say that they delivered him safely to Mosul and even that they enjoyed traveling with him. I suppose he is dead now. He was a fine young man. I am sorry.”
“He’s not dead, at all, at all,” Nuala assured him. “Thank you very much, Tariq. We will keep this conversation confidential. I myself have had trouble with the Department of Homeland Insecurity too. God bless your work.”
Irish Linen Page 26
