Sunrise with Sea Monster

by Neil Jordan

  The hands let go. I swayed on my numb feet. He kindly stopped for me, I remembered the verse.

  We drive through the outskirts, factories reduced to rubble, bomb craters filled with water, lines of people walking in both directions as if the destination doesn't matter. His white scarf blows in the wind and the kid gloves play nonchalantly at the wheel, one hand continuously on the horn. He talks of how they'll make the world a rubbish-tip, cut through cities like a cleansing wind, how he would care if his uniform allowed him. He was a physicist, he tells me, worked in Leipzig with Heisenberg on the uncertainty principle. He relates to me the bones of quantum physics, says how Einstein claimed God does not play dice with the universe then tells me how he discovered God does nothing else. His father was Prussian, an officer, rooted in the civilised brutalities of the Wehrmacht. Perturbed by the more pervasive brutalities of the Reich, he was foolish enough to express his feelings and now worked as a sub-postmaster in Silesia. Both of his brothers joined the Waffen SS, and he had chosen to hide himself in the bureau cratic niceties of the Abwehr. I ask him the connection between that and the uncertainty principle and he tells me to look around me.

  Lorries full of returning loyalists are passing us from the north and the legs of a child jut out behind a mound of rubble.

  I was an indifferent mathematician, he tells me, more interested in metaphors than equations. And quantum theory was as apt a metaphor as any for what I saw around me. I have no taste for brutalities but a certain aptitude for interrogation. I listen, I ask the pertinent question after the teeth have been extracted by others, I find civility works wonders. My brief, if you must know, was to question those members of your brigade whose sympathies may be uncertain. You fell into that category by reason of your movement's approaches to the Reich. You knew about this?

  I shake my head.

  You have some argument with Britain?

  I shake my head again.

  Then certain of your compatriots do. Whether you do or don't, frankly, I couldn't give a damn. That's how you say it?

  As good a way as any, I tell him.

  You will be contacted in Dublin by persons possibly unknown to you. Whether or not you act upon these contacts is no concern of mine.

  He drives in silence for a while.

  Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

  He smiles. It's from a film they made while you were inside. Clark Gable, walking down the staircase. Vivien Leigh, walking up. Gone With the Wind. See it, when you get the chance.

  We are bumping across a makeshift bridge over the Ebro, the ruins of the aqueduct to our left. Beyond it, miles of broken farmland, as far as the eye could see.

  In fact, he continues, you would have been released either way. Representations have been made on your behalf.

  He is repeating himself, I tell him.

  OK. But be so kind as to repeat to me the burden of what I've told you.

  You studied at the University of Leipzig with Heidegger.

  Heisenberg. Heidegger holds the chair of philosophy at Freiburg. But that was not my question. About your movement.

  They have had certain contacts with the Reich.

  Yes. And on your return, you are to resume your contacts with your former comrades. In time you will be approached by persons unknown.

  Should I get out and walk? I ask him.

  Yes, if you wish to be a martyr and an idiot.

  Then stop the car.

  He screeches to a halt. The landscape is lost in a cloud of dust and my head crashes off the windscreen.

  Be my guest.

  A trickle of blood runs down my nose. I feel for the door handle, push it down and stagger outside. He looks at me with amused contempt. I wipe my nose and smile and thank him and walk forwards. As the dust clears I see the ruins of a farmhouse in the distance, the thin line of refugees starting again. To the left of my feet is what must have once been an irrigation ditch, now filled with bloated cattle. I walk forwards. I attempt to calculate the walk to Barcelona and guess it at fourteen days. After a time I hear the Hispano-Suiza purring behind me.

  Irish, he calls.

  Hans, I answer. The car draws alongside.

  Am I to take it you won't act upon my brief?

  Yes, I tell him.

  Then please accept my hospitality.

  I stop, wipe the blood again and look at him, his face still wreathed in the same smile.

  This is no time for heroics, my friend.

  I turn again and walk on, knowing the car will follow. And after a time it does.

  You heard what I said?

  Which part?

  All of them.

  I heard the lot, I tell him. And while not wishing to offend you, I think I might enjoy the walk.

  The smile diminishes somewhat.

  You do offend me.

  Then please accept my apologies.

  I bend my head, to signal my regret, then walk on. I hear silence behind me for a time, then the engine roars and he passes me in a cloud of dust.

  The cattle by the ditch are long-horned, their ribs showing through their cases of skin. Their stench is overpowering. I walk on, my hand over my face and slowly, ever so slowly, the line of figures comes closer. A dozen men in front, like a bedraggled bunch of navvies and behind them women and children. We pass, without exchanging a glance. The ruins come closer and I see instead of a farmhouse, the remains of a hamlet, smoke rising out of a bare chimney unsupported by walls. The sun in time congeals the blood on my face, then the sweat from my forehead makes it flow again. I can see a table now beneath the chimney, an open fire with scattered motorcycles round it. Glinting in the sunlight, a phalanx of three-cornered hats. They turn as I approach, to watch the sole figure walking in their direction. The smell of charcoal drifts towards me, mixed with a hint of pork. I can see a suckling pig roasting on a spike, a young boy turning it. A figure in torn khaki tied to a broken column, the head bent down at an unnatural angle. Two of the three-cornered hats rise. They walk towards me, casting tiny shadows, thumbs stuck in their ammunition belts. I follow the only course open to me and walk on.

  Buenos dias, I mutter, with what I hope is a hint of dialect, and they step aside to let me walk between them. I keep an even pace, down the centre of the track, then hear their footsteps close and congeal behind me. I think it unwise to turn, but hesitate for a moment, then feel my feet kicked from beneath me.

  I smile as I hit the dirt, try to raise my hands in a supplicant manner when they grab them, flip me over and drag me face down towards the table. I can see the figure in khaki still motionless, tied to the broken column. They dump me by the burning embers, beneath the suckling pig on its spike, and the fat leaps from its browning skin to the skin of my face. One of them plants a boot in my shoulders. I attempt to comprehend their talk as the weight crushes my chest into the pebbles. The breath squeezes out of me slowly and one of them rises, takes a knife from his belt and cuts off the roasted flesh in strips. He turns the spike slowly, shifting the carcass on its axis and chews as he mumbles instructions. The pressure on my back eases and the hands above me drag me over to the column. The kid in khaki with his neck bent strangely can't be more than fifteen. His lips are blue and the rope that jams his neck to the sandstone column has plenty to spare. They wrap it around mine so my cheek touches his then tighten it with a perfunctory jerk. I breathe in long strangled gasps, and each struggle to breathe better causes the rope to tighten more. I can see spots in front of my eyes, the figures in the three-cornered hats, like blurred puppets in the sun, sitting by the table, bringing pigmeat to their mouths. They mutter as they eat and it seems to be about everyday things. Then I close my eyes, feel the blood sink to my bowels and hear a familiar sound: the even purring of the Hispano-Suiza. It comes closer, I open my eyes and see a haze of white. I hear the engine sputter into silence, the door open and his voice, in screaming Castilian, thick now with a German accent. He calls them sons of the leavings of whores and one of them walks towards
me, cuts the rope with a knife that smells of pork gristle. My head flops downwards, almost on to the blade, and a pair of hands lifts me till my face is even with the patent-leather hat. Then the hands on my neck are replaced by ones covered in soft pigskin and he carries me over to the open door of the car.

  You are an idiot, Irish, he says almost wistfully as he eases me inside. His gloves run along my neck where the rope burned it. He closes the door, takes the driver's seat and starts the engine, reverses suddenly so the high boot strikes the table, sending it cartwheeling in the dust, upending the bearers of the three-cornered hats. He guns it forwards then, and lurches off in the direction he came.

  So, he says, you will accept my hospitality whether you like it or not.

  We drove for three days and nights. Through towns covered with the dust of chalk, through a moonlit landscape of small broken farms. After a time, the swelling on my neck subsided and it was comfortable to talk. Until then, I listened. There is a price to pay for everything, he told me, rarely apparent at the time of the transaction, making its claim at the most unexpected moments. He himself had no doubt that his bill would come, but no longer understood the terms. Until then he was content to observe the demolition going on around him. He had become convinced from an early age that the greatest triumph of the human being was the most useless: the attempt to create meaning from a meaningless world; to create a moral system out of the random chaos of human affairs. The Reich's greatest triumph, he told me, was its recognition of chaos, of the arbitrary maelstrom that raged beneath the veneer of what we term civilisation. That recognition gave it power, a power it could use to create yet another absurdity: an amoral system based now upon an amoral premiss. So of the fact that he would one day pay, he had no doubt. His sole amusement lay in conjecture, of what form that payment would take.

  I listened to him talk, watched his scarf blow in the wind, the pale glow of his hands on the wheel. There was a river behind him, following the road, then the ruins of a wall, an old broken millwheel, a courtyard with tables, the light of a pens ion burning inside.

  Can I call you by your name, Irish? he asked me softly.

  Yes, I told him. You know it. Donal.

  Donald, he said.

  Donal, I told him. From the Gaelic.

  We sat by a table and drank wine from earthen mugs.

  So you are alive, Irish, he said. We must be thankful for small mercies.

  You are my small mercy, I told him. And now I presume I must pay.

  That seems to be the norm.

  And I can only conjecture on what form this payment will take.

  He ordered from a stout woman with a butcher's knife who seemed to be proprietress, cook and waitress all at once.

  You want to know the truth?

  Is there one?

  There is, and it is quite mundane. The truth is, I didn't have to take you. But now that you are with me, there are procedures. I must file a report, conjecture upon any possible use you may have, itemise your specific talents—

  I am a moderate pianist, I told him.

  And your contacts.

  I have a friend, I told him, called Mouse.

  You are right, he said, there is an absurdity at the heart of it. Even that I must itemise. You came here by way of the Republican movement.

  By way of a faction of it, I told him.

  Who are engaged in certain disturbances in Britain.

  England's difficulty, I told him, is Ireland's opportunity.

  That is your belief?

  No, I quote.

  Yes, I remember the phrase.

  Would you believe me, I asked him, if I said I will be of no use to you?

  I would, he said. But you must allow me the courtesy of procedures. Otherwise, I must leave you by the roadside.

  You already did.

  He nodded. You are right. I already did. But look what came of that.

  The food came. Thin strips of pork, fried with rice. I ate slowly and swallowed with difficulty.

  You said representations had been made, I asked him. By whom?

  He shrugged. You know someone in government circles?

  My father.

  Ah. Your father. He must love you.

  He must.

  You don't believe he does?

  I don't think about it, I lied.

  He slipped into conjecture then. The moon was sinking low over the river, throwing silver on the dried husk of the millwheel. He asked me to entertain the fiction that I could be of use and asked me to imagine what use that could be. I drew a picture of my homeland for him as a mandarin world where each statement had two meanings, its apparent meaning and its actual one. Foreigners, I told him, must approach us with circumspection, guile and an adamant refusal to believe things are as they seem. A naive acceptance of the surface of things would lead one to believe the island lay fifty miles off the coast of Britain, whereas its actual position could only be found with reference to medieval cartography, wherein the earth was flat and the boundaries to the known world lay somewhere to our west. My main use to him would be, I surmised, as interpreter, or to be more precise, diviner of the hidden facts, the hidden meanings, the hidden landscapes which lay behind the apparent ones.

  Admirable, he said. I am not alone in my affection for metaphors.

  Not at all, I assured him. The wine was going to my head. But there is one caveat.

  What is that? he asked, his face flushed, and I hoped the wine was going to his head too.

  My role as interpreter/diviner would itself be an apparent one.

  Ah! he exclaimed, and I saw the wine was getting there, but you would still have provided the interpretive codes.

  Perhaps, I said, but can that which is apparent be trusted to distinguish what is not?

  We stagger from the tables towards the pension. He supports me by the elbow, whispering that perhaps those distinctions will be made by people other than ourselves. I am by now tired of the whole conceit but can divine some hidden meaning in the clasp of his hand on my elbow. There is a wooden staircase leading to a small stone-walled room, two beds against opposite walls. He stands too close to me in the darkness, swaying slightly.

  Scarlett, he says.

  I ask him what he means.

  An apparent name, for your apparent function.

  Scarlett, I repeat.

  Yes, he says. He walks slowly towards the bed to his left. You must see the motion picture.

  What motion picture? I ask him.

  Gone With the Wind, he says. And I shall be Rhett.

  He sits there, staring at his boots, then looks from them to me.

  Could you do me the honour, Irish.

  I pull off one boot, then the other and place them by the wall. He lies slowly back, staring at the ceiling.

  The scene on the staircase, Vivien Leigh walking upwards, Clark Gable walking down. Watch it, when you get home. Think of me.

  There is a hint of self-pity in his voice which touches me. I lie on the other bed and feel sleep coming on in a rush. Then he speaks again, as if unwilling to let me depart.

  You will think of me, Irish?

  I tell him I will, then let the sleep take over.

  The drive to Barcelona takes two more days. The city seems crushed, like a drugged patient afraid to let his eyes wander. The streets are empty of people, but for the posters of the General, which stare from every wall and lamppost, the Virgin, who stares from every church, and everywhere the three-cornered patent-leather hats. He drives through it to the port, where a statue of Columbus looks out on the Mediterranean. He has arranged my passage on a coal-tip, heading for Dublin. An Irish consular official is waiting by a black Ford, a sheaf of papers rustling in his hand, surrounded by a sea of triangular heads. My Abwehr deliverer walks through them with a contempt that is matched only by the distaste with which the consular official looks at me.

  Gore, he says, Donal Gore.

  I nod.

  I knew your father, he mutters, ruffling
through the papers. He looks at my ragged clothing.

  How is he? I ask, but he doesn't reply.

  Could you not have made yourself presentable?

  I apologise. His accent is thick Cork.

  Let's get it over with. He hands me a pen and papers to sign.

  We walk in a phalanx towards the dock, the consular official from Cork ahead, behind him me and the German, behind us again the phalanx of triangular heads. Some odd ceremony of nations is taking place, the Cork official muttering to himself about scuts and layabouts and thooleramawns who should be left to rot in their own ordure, striding like an undersized zealot through yards of wooden warehouses, the German easily keeping pace with him, all of the Spaniards straining to keep up, their shoes shining even brighter than their patent-leather hats. We come to a mound of coal, the giant claw of a crane stretched over the brown water and beneath it a vessel that looks like an enlarged coal-scuttle. Three men in blackened vests are stretching a walkway to the pier.