by Neil Jordan
I took the train home, wondering did he know I had been there. I found him standing in the kitchen, a glass of whiskey in his hand. You were there, he said, I saw you near the back. It was a public gathering, I said. What happened, he asked, to the right to disagree? I don't want to argue, I said. Do, he said, tell me what they would have replied if they hadn't taken recourse to a herd ofgoats. Don't worry about it, I said. You kept your dignity intact. What does that mean? he asked. It means, I said, you expounded your Fascist drivel with all the decorum of a gentleman. Where did you learn those words? he asked, those aren't your words. I'll make them mine, I said. They're teaching you to hate me, he said. And who is they? I asked. Those latter-day Republicans, he said, those corner-boys and counter-jumpers, the ones who've made a career out of hating. I don't hate you, I said, to myself as much as to him. Then I wondered had I told a lie, or at best a half-truth. He must have wondered too, for he finished his whiskey and walked towards the kitchen door.
A key rattles in the metal lock and the barred door opens. A triangle of light comes in and they come in with it in their triangular hats. The Spaniard turns his face to the shadows but it is me they point at. I stand and approach the tilted gun-muzzle and the fear that has run through everyone shifts in me like a dulled ulcer.
I walk between them down the long corridor with its peeling parabola of white. They gesture the way with their hands, quite without suspicion or hate, as if both seem pointless now that it is all over. We pass a plaster-cast statue of Christ in the wall. Both the hands are broken and the guard nearest me turns to me and grins. He mutters in a dialect I can't fathom and I smile back to show I understand. We come to a door which they both reach to open, then one steps back to let the other do so and they usher me inside. We pass through a room without windows, with a plain wooden desk and a water bucket with a dull liquid inside it. One sits by the desk, the other stands by the bucket and gestures me towards the door beyond.
I open the door and see an oak table and a silver cigarette case, a carafe of water and diamond-cut glasses. There is a man sitting at the table, German, his uniform bearing the insignia of the Abwehr, with a sheaf of papers in his hand. His skin is fair, as unused to the sun as mine is. After a space of seconds he says, please close the door.
I obey. The room has churchlike windows with a fan revolving in the ceiling.
Gore, he says, Donal Gore.
I nod, then when he stays silent, I say, that's me.
The question is, I suppose, what is one of your nationality doing here?
Waiting, I say.
Or should I rephrase it, he says. How did one of your nationality get here?
There is another bucket near the wall, dark water inside, a rag floating in it, stained with crimson.
I volunteered, I say.
Why?
Do I have to give an account of myself?
He looks up, for the first time. Green eyes and sandy hair, a freckled sunburnt face and a mouth that seems amused at nothing in particular.
No, he says, in precise Oxford tones, but it would be simpler if you did.
Why? I ask him.
You've seen what happens in the square outside. If you cooperate, it could be to your advantage.
And if I don't?
He shrugs, then lights a cigarette and reads from the sheaf of papers.
You were born into a middle-class Irish family, your mother died when you were six, your father was a minister in the Free State government.
He inhales, looking at a paper in front of him.
Your first encounter with politics was with the Republican Congress in Dublin. He exhales, and raises two pale eyebrows.
So, he says. You tell me. What brought you here?
He was eating bacon from the breakfast Maisie had prepared for him when I said I was going and the strings of bacon stuck between his teeth and he had to pause between his sentences to pick out the bacon with a sharpened match so his words were even less frequent than normal. You are leaving, he said, because you hate me, not because of any nebulous political ideas. And though it might have been true, I said it wasn't. And you think you hate me because of her, but in fact you hate me because I am simply me, your father. Please, he said, as I moved to leave, get your hatreds in perspective otherwise you'll never—and he stopped there, as if he couldn't finish. Never what? I asked. But he said nothing else, so I went.
The cigarette is nearing its end. The German lets the ash fall from his lip to the surface of the oak table in front of him.
Representations, he says, have been made on your behalf. You would be most unwise to ignore them.
By whom? I ask.
I don't know, and frankly, I don't care. So what brought you here?
My father, I say.
Your father brought you here? He smiles.
No. He's tried to arrange—Ah. Your father has made the representations? Perhaps. As I told you, I neither know nor care. My function is simply to get some answers to some simple questions.
For instance?
If I must repeat myself, what brought you here?
She had come the night before with her music case under her arm out of habit I assumed, since we had long given up all pretext of lessons. Let me be the first to congratulate you, I said, aware that he could see us from the living-room window, walking the length of the promenade. The evening sky was immaculate, the sea was serene, only disturbed by the movement of paddle-boats around the Head. You can't blame me, she said, you can't take that tone. What tone is that Rose? I asked her. I don't expect you to understand, she said, I don't want to talk about it. So what can we talk about? I asked her. You, she said. You'll kill him if you go. So, I said, maybe there is a reason to my going after all. How did you get like this? she asked. I don't know, I said. Maybe the sins of fathers are visited on their sons. He is a good man, she said, better than you've ever given him credit for. Better than you'll ever know if you go like this. So where should I stay? Rose, I asked her. In the bedroom next to yours? He asked me, she said, he asked me to consider his affection for me. He finds it difficult to say such things, I was touched, I said I would and you're going to tell me that's a crime. All I've said is my congratulations, I told her. Donal, she said and she grabbed me and pushed my shoulderblades against the promenade railings, I'm begging you, don't do this to him. So it's him it's being done to, I said. All right, she said and took a breath. Don't do it to me, then. I'm not doing it to you, I said.
She was wearing a peach-coloured dress underneath her gabardine. Her blonde hair was piled on her head in a way that was new to me. She laid her chin on my shoulder and stared out at the sea. I have a feeling, she said. A premonition. Of what, I asked. Something dreadful. Something worse than dreadful. If you go. I can't stay, Rose, I said, as softly as I could. You know that. Let me leave, then, she said. I'll get out of your lives. It'll be as if you never saw me. The thing is Rose, I said, it can never be that. It can't? she said. Then go and be damned. 'Cause you will be.
I volunteered, I tell him, I took the course of action most likely to wound my father. I became the person he was most likely to fear, despise, to loathe. I wanted to quench forever the last embers of speech between us. I joined the Republican movement he had abandoned, espoused whatever politics would fill him with terror. I walked into Liberty Hall by the Liffey in Dublin on an April morning and stood in a queue with a line of other lost souls and when my time came I wrote my name down. So what brought me here was a series of accidents, beginning with the accident of birth, a childhood spent on the promenade in Bray, a holiday town not a stone's throw from Dublin, a slender talent for music at an early age, the discovery of certain sentimental harmonies in the company of a woman who was to become my stepmother. And, while we are at it, nightlines.
Nightlines? he queries, a smile playing on his thin lips.
Nightlines, I say, a practice common in the South of Ireland. Two metal rods with a line of hooks strung between them, to be jammed in the sand
at low tide, the hooks skewered with rag or lugworms, take your pick, then left to simmer as the ocean passes over them until morning.
And in the morning? he asks. His smile has broadened.
In the morning the tide, following a logic known only to itself, makes an orderly retreat, leaving a ray, a plaice, a pollock or, if you're lucky, a salmon bass swinging from the hooks. This practice to be indulged in at arbitrary intervals with a familiar who may relish the sense of relative peace it brings, the main pleasure, I might add, being in the silence brought about by the absence of the need for speech.
Is that all? he asks.
No, I say. Lest I misrepresent the pleasures of this ritual, it should be stressed that the actual catch is ancillary to the process. The evening walk with the hooks swinging between both participants is without doubt the high point. The morning's catch is an afterthought, a by-product, often-times a let-down.
I think I understand, he says.
No, I say, you don't. Neither for that matter do I. But if representations have been made on my behalf by my father, I will regretfully have to decline them.
What precisely do you mean by that?
It means, I say, I won't accept his patronage. Or yours. Whatever sordid arrangement he came to with your superiors is nothing to do with me. Now, if you'll excuse me.
I stand. He stands too. He says certainly, then floors me with a straight right from the shoulder, western style. I feel a mouthful of knuckles, an exploding lip and find my head crashing off the bucket on the floor. It wobbles, then falls, spilling stale blood and water over my chest.
He walks round the oak table and stretches down a hand. I take it.
You must excuse me also, he says. It is after all the least that is expected of me.
He pulls me upwards. He smiles, pats my cheek, then turns me towards the door.
Let's talk again tomorrow, he says.
There is a cry I recognise as they walk me back down the peeling corridor. I hold my sleeve to my lips to stem whatever blood is coming from them. They turn the key in the barred door then and push me back inside the room. Every figure there is hunched by the windows, dark against the streaming light. I hear the cry again like the strangled gull my father had inadvertently imitated when he ran from the fishing lines. I walk across the straw-covered floor and peer above their shoulders. I see Antonio standing by the wall, head tilted backwards at a strange angle, staring at the sky. Three Moroccans raise their rifles nonchalantly and fire at random while his figure jerks, an odd dance to the rhythm of their bullets. He spins several times, face to the wall, then face to us and falls.
There's silence in the room. The Welshman coughs then, a spasm, born out of years on some coalface. The boy from Turin mutters a prayer. The Germans withdraw from the window and sit back in the straw, drawing their long knees towards their chins. I take the scrap of paper he gave me from my pocket. I am several seconds and maybe an eternity too late since his blood has spread a pool as large again around his body, but I read it anyway. Because I could not stop for death—He kindly stopped for me.
They rough you up, Pat?
The Welshman talks between wheezes. I remember my split lip and for a moment am glad of it.
A little, I say.
And what did they want?
Wanted to know what brought me here, I tell him.
You find out anything?
Like what?
What's going to happen to us.
I shake my head to intimate infinite possibilities, then turn back to the window.
When did they come for him? I ask.
Just before you came in.
He coughs again, then stares at me.
You know something, don't you, Pat.
What could I know? I ask him.
You tell me.
In the night his shadow edges over to my bed, invisible hands are laid upon my shoulder and his voice whispers, you cannot sleep, Irlandes, like me, neither. His ghostly syntax is as misplaced as ever. I turn, about to brush him off but see nothing there. Soft moonlight coming through each window and the figures huddled in the straw around the walls. It comes to me suddenly, with an odd, perfect clarity, that all of us could die here. Our release would be too troublesome, and once released we would have tales to tell. The Welshman snoring, his broken nose pointing towards the ceiling, the two Germans, their hair indistinguishable from the straw, the Jewish boy from Turin, all beyond the help of ordinary discourse. I think of us joining that realm below the waves and fall asleep dreaming of the Abwehr officer plucking us from a row of hooks from which we swing, gently, in the morning light.
And I am called to him next morning. The same two guards, through the triangle of the early morning light, walking me with the same brutal insouciance through the vaulted tomb. The German sits and smokes, questions as before. Nothing will do for him but some answers, so I reply, inventing a past that might satisfy him. Yesterday's outburst was just that, an outburst, I tell him. But what you want is the truth. The word seems to satisfy him and he nods. How does the son of an Irish reactionary find himself in Republican Spain?
My father's world, I tell him, was an unfinished one. I joined the Republican movement to bring it to some conclusion. His revolt had been stillborn, dissipating its energies in the nonsense of a Civil War. The State resulting from it was one of paralysis, echoed in himself. I became his nemesis, his alter ego, took up the gun he'd dropped and made it my own. The divisions in Europe echoed ours, or was it the other way round, I forget now, but it seemed important at the time to make them my own. So here I am.
And what now? he asks.
What about now? I reply.
Where do your sympathies lie?
Where they always did, I say. With the Republic.
Irish or Spanish?
Both, I say.
But the one you said is stillborn and the other you know is finished.
I am Irish, I say. I live in realms of pure possibility.
Representations have been made, he says, and I can only act on them under certain conditions.
Who made these representations? I ask.
To repeat myself, that is irrelevant. I can only act on them under certain conditions.
What conditions are they? I ask.
We have contacts with some members of your movement. We need to expand them.
You want me to collaborate?
Phrase it as you want. To quote your movement, England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity.
And what precisely is England's difficulty?
That remains to be seen.
My father, I tell him, would be most unhappy with this turn of events.
Why?
Look at it through his eyes, I say. He arranges for diplomatic pressure to be exerted to free his wayward son. His son will only be freed on conditions that make him more wayward.
Everything has to be paid for.
Perhaps, I tell him, but my answer will always be no.
Why? he asks.
Because, I think, he gave me life once and I won't accept the same gift twice.
Because, I tell him, what you propose is unthinkable.
For myself I don't give a damn, he says and the slang comes out oddly from his lips. My job is to file a report. But you are being more stupid than even I could have thought possible.
Why? I ask him.
Your time here has run out. They will erase this place together with all memory of it. You'll be shot.
That will have the virtue, I tell him, of keeping things simple.
You like simplicity? he asks.
Yes, I tell him. I feel my hands sweating, underneath my bluster. And it would be simpler not to change my mind.
I stand. I expect a knuckleful in the mouth again, and am almost disappointed when it doesn't come. He stands too and bends his head, a quick, odd little bow.
Thank you, he says. You have made my job easier. My report shall be brief. And simple.
He smiles as if
waiting for me to change my mind. And I would, if I could feel something, some premonition of the world having changed, but there is nothing there, merely the sweat running down my fingers and down my forehead now. And I wonder is this fear that has not yet reached me. He snaps his fingers and the guards come to the door. They walk me back the same corridor and I hear cries once more. I am pushed inside to see the Welshman being dragged, barrel-chested and screaming from a mound of flailing straw. Three guards around him, and seven more pressing the others to the wall.
I'm an Englishman, he screams, in his thick Welsh vowels. Write that down, you bastards. I move towards him and feel a rifle-butt against my split lip and hit the straw beneath me. The three get him through the door and the others then follow with a careless swagger.
The German boys stand by the wall and a dark stain spreads down the trousers of one of them. The Turin boy moans from his hide of straw. No one can bring themselves to move to the window. We hear the outer door clang and his screaming stops. We can hear the mutter of obscenities through his clenched teeth and then the sound of dragging pebbles as they move him to the wall and after a moment's silence, the dull thud of shots. As staccato as before, but more of them.
When we can engender the will to get to the window, it is over. He is being dragged by both feet to a waiting truck, his barrel chest still streaming, leaving a trail of blood behind him. The truck shudders as its engine ticks over, waiting for the lines of Spaniards being led to the spot on the wall he has vacated.
There is a certain dignity, the German with the dry trousers says, in being shot on one's own.
That night, there were no dreams. I counted fish on an imaginary line to will myself to sleep and when it eventually came, it was blank, like God's silence. I awoke with the first light and the knowledge that when they came for me it would not be to ask questions. The mound of hay on which the German youths slept now stank of disengaged bowels. But they were silent as oxen in their stalls, as if the world had ended. I lay there watching the light turn the straw to gold and when it was all ablaze I heard the feet.
They came with intent, nailed boots striking off the flagstones outside. The door opened and the room was full of them, three to keep the others in place and three to drag me. The first three were redundant since rigor mortis had already touched those in the straw and they stayed, apparently sleeping. The others pulled me in one movement and dragged me, my feet scraping off the floor. I tried to help them and walk but all life had gone from my muscles and any moisture in my mouth had retreated to the pit of my stomach. Because I could not stop for death, I thought, but could not remember what followed. They pulled me through to the arches and behind me I heard the door clanging shut. I closed my eyes: I didn't want to face the blinding sunlight, the square, the reddened wall. I had told myself that when it came I would be calm, retain whatever dignity was left to me. And now that it had come I had no alternative but calm, that awful silence I had always suspected lay behind it all, for my lips moved and no sound came out. I would have screamed had it been possible but nothing could move, shift or whisper in this pit my body had become. I was inert and howling inside it but outside all else was dumb. Then I realised we had not turned. What should have been the crunch of pebbles beneath their feet was still their boots on the flagstones; what should have been the sun bleaching the red behind my closed eyelids was still dark. I let my eyelids open slowly, saw the curved, vaulted ceiling coming to me and away. Then another door. They have taken a different route, I thought, to another end of the square; and two of them opened the door and I saw open countryside outside. The German standing there, bleached by the light, pale leather gloves on his hands, an open-topped car behind him. Come with me, Irish, he said, whether you like it or not.
