by Neil Jordan
It's on the turn, said Red and whipped me round. Now look at him, make sure it's him.
The conning tower loomed above us, like a cliff wall. I could see him up there waving, a sailor's holdall in his hand. Then he jumped. He hit the water about fifteen feet away and the brothers rowed towards him, as the vessel above us began to diminish, sink beneath the waves once more, throwing the waters into a fury. He grabbed the side of the boat then and pulled himself in, his blond hair plastered to his skull. Get out of here, Irish, he said, quick, it leaves a whirlpool. The brothers rowed again, furiously, back the way we had come. The wash the vessel left bobbed the boat around like a cork, and then it was gone and there was something like calm once more. Your country, he said. Yes, I told him. Your waters, he said. Yes, I said again. And your countrymen, he said, turning to the others.
Then I heard the outboard motors. First one from the east, another from the west, two more from somewhere near the shore.
What the fuck—said Red, and I turned and grabbed the German, flung us both overboard.
You fucking quisling, Red bellowed and pulled a gun and began to fire into the water. I pulled Hans beneath, dragged him underwater towards the back of the boat.
Down there it was all peace. The white tail of the boat curved above us, the water dotted with puffs where the bullets struck. His face screamed at me silently and he struggled in my arms. I drew back and struck out at him but not hard enough for he wrenched himself free. I grabbed his legs as he swam upwards but couldn't hold him and we both gasped to the surface once more.
What is this, he screamed, spitting out water.
I could now see the military caps on the other boats in the moonlight, the barrels of the .22s held by the soldiers.
I'm delivering you, I said, into safer hands.
You have betrayed me—
Yes, I said, you could put it that way. I saw Red, towering above us with the gun, and suddenly the ocean was ablaze with light, blinding him, wrapping him in white like an angel. He dropped the gun, raised his arms tentatively. There was a klieg light on each vessel, bearing towards us, and one low fast boat came by and threw us a lifebuoy on a rope.
Why? spluttered Hans, clinging to it, the wash of the boats cresting over him.
Because, I said, there was no alternative. There's a camp in the Curragh, they'll take you there.
You broke your word, he said.
We're a neutral country, I said. I could never have helped you. I slipped from the buoy and came up again, coughing water. Your war's obscene—
I have my honour, he yelled.
Thank God one of us has, I said.
The boats were all around us, the noise of the engines deafening. Someone called in a thick country accent from a loudhailer. I looked up, saw Red with his arms raised and saw the smaller brother bring his oar down towards me. I tried to duck, but he caught me on the forehead and the world went thankfully dark.
I came to consciousness on the hard wet sand of the beach some time later. A youth in an LDF uniform was bending over me, bringing a bowl of hot soup to my lips. What happened? I asked him.
They caught them, he said, fished them out of the water like drowned rats. There's an ambulance coming for you.
I don't need it, I said, rising.
There were soldiers up and down the strand, distant shouts to the klieg-lit boats out on the ocean. I staggered through the darkness, the moon had gone, the beach was one long shadow. Father, I called, trying to find my way to where I had left him. One soldier grabbed me by the arm. We're closing off the beach, he said.
I've to find my father, I said, in a wheelchair, by the promenade end.
Yes, he said, we found a wheelchair.
Not the wheelchair, I said, the man inside it. I felt ice in my stomach suddenly. Where, I asked him, where did you find it? He led me then, by torchlight to the spot where I'd left him and I saw the chair, sitting wheel-deep in the water, quite empty. The tide had come in.
Where is he? I asked the soldier.
Where is who? he asked me back.
My father, I said, I left him sitting there.
That's all we found, sir, he said.
We searched all night—the beach, the dunes, the town above it—but found nothing. When the dawn came we turned the search to the sea itself but the tides there were such they would have drawn any object in it out to sea. By noon they told me that to continue would be pointless.
I drove back then to Lisdoonvarna and found Rose pacing the square, filled now with camouflaged lorries and boys in ill-fitting military uniforms. Her face had the grey pallor that told me she already knew.
Is it true? she asked me, and I told her it was.
He must have walked, I said, through the water, out to sea.
You know he couldn't, she said.
I told her then about the voice that seemed to come from nowhere, could only have come from him. Maybe the boy did what he was paid for.
It makes no sense, she said. If he could walk, why walk into the sea?
Because he knew, I thought. So I said yes, it makes no sense, he couldn't have walked.
We stayed three more weeks. Thinking a corpse might be washed up at the foot of the Cliffs of Moher, any point on the coastline from Gal way to the Shannon. We took boats out daily, more for the comfort of doing something than in the hope that we would find him. A silence settled between us that we knew was permanent. At night I dreamt of him, traversing the waves of the Clare coastline like a merman, in an element that perhaps would have suited him more than most. Rose slept beside me, frozen in her loss, her body stiff and unattainable. Now that he was gone he was all she could desire, and I was the cause of the absence that gnawed at her, as she was of the absence that gnawed at me.
We ate silent breakfasts, surrounded by small farmers and their intended sweethearts, who came there for honeymoons, matches and cures for arthritis. We went as far as Aran one afternoon, and there, on a grey slab of island in the Atlantic, we admitted it was finished. The search for him, and for each other. The Clare coastline was a dull blur, a mist sheeted down from the West, she said little but that's it then. And it was, I agreed.
She took a train up to Sligo, to the mythical household she had filled me with years before. I had the urge to ask her could I see it, just once, but on the dull grey platform, waiting for the train, I knew it was useless. Goodbye Donal, she said, and she kissed me. I'll be in touch about the house. And the train bore her off, through the scented hedgerows of the single-gauge line of the West Clare railway.
I drove home with only the wheelchair for company. I watched it in the rearview mirror, the country roads unwinding behind it. It was silent, and perfect, in a way, a memento of him, with the same quiet dignity I had found in him since I had come back. When I reached Bray, I found the boy had maintained the boats in perfect order.
We spent the rest of the Emergency fishing, which seemed as good a way as any of passing the conflagration. I sent Rose money when I could, played the piano at nights and tried to think of as little as possible. Some days, under the sheets of rain, dragging herring out by the Kish I would look at the catch, see the dark shape of a porbeagle or dolphin among the slapping silver and imagine for a moment that I had caught him, his body having made the long journey home, the way salmon do. Some nights I would wake, look at the wheelchair gleaming in the moonlight by its spot at the window and think for a moment he had returned, was sitting there, silent, patient, inscrutable.
The news from Europe passed us by, seemed monstrous, but somehow less intimate than the monstrosities we had accomplished. Rose came down from Sligo on the day of the fall of Stalingrad and we walked the promenade for an hour, before she collected her things. She had felt ill for weeks on her return, she told me, had feared she was pregnant, then discovered she wasn't and instantly regretted it. She was a widow now, she said, and in the country that had a certain status. We were both regretful, but empty of tears as she emptied her room. The dress
I had bought her was packed neatly with the others, the ring was still on her finger. You could live here, I told her, if it took your fancy, but she shook her head and I understood why. So we said goodbye once more, by the Bray station this time, and I saw her borne off by the double-gauge of the Great Southern Railway.
IV
THEN, ON THE day after De Valera presented his condolences to the German embassy on the death of Hitler, I resurrected my father.
He had died in that other sea, to the west, and this smaller one outside my window, that I fished when the light was good seemed to hold his spirit in a more companionable form. Rose was by now a memory, a bittersweet one, that scent of dried flowers matching the printed flowers on her dress, her upright back by the upright piano, her long blonde hair shifting as she played. I drank too much most nights, whiskey in the empty study and, when the night was clear and the humour took me, Guinness in the waterfront bars down near the Head. I would wake with the first light, walk out behind the house to where the Dargle river spilt into the harbour.
That river was a small insignificant one, almost an afterthought to the layers of sand and silt that clogged its banks, but in the early morning when it reflected the sky it had a certain muddy poetry to it. I had clear memories of a kingfisher, scudding across the brown surface with its flash of royal blue, of the mullet that would hang beneath the bridge where the sewer pipe came out. I would sit beneath the huge metal girders of the railway bridge, watch these mullet and think of how the fish we had always caught together were of the unprepossessing kind: mullet, plaice, sole, an eel or two, the lazy kind, addicted to the grosser forms of waste, fun for catching, maybe, but not for eating. I would watch the somnolent arcs these mullet made, then hear the six-thirty from Cork to Dublin whacking by, shaking the earth I sat on, the huge metal girders, adding a ghostly ripple to the swatches of water, sending the mullet off in whiplike flashes to the darker corners that fish go to whenever they go.
My memories of him were dimming. The alcohol of each night didn't help, but I would substitute them with fancies. See him beneath the water, the fish we caught when we were younger draped round his neck in a tangle of eel, catgut, gill and reddened mouth for all the world like a wreath. Or smaller ones around his forehead like a halo, woven together like sprigs of myrtle, his head ascending through them to a bowl of light which halates it in turn. Cleaving through the water upwards, in a dive reversed, the white cloud and the blue sky reflected in the metal surface of the Dargle water and the angels, if they deigned to grace my fancy, rising with him, whipping this way and that in the stiff morning breezes. Then at times I would think of the banks of silt around the river conserving his flesh, that dull sand we all return to and the rust-coloured water holding whatever water inhabited him, spreading, the colour of old blood, out to those cold white horses that played on the sea beyond the river's mouth. His soul playing over it like that unseen wind that only showed itself on the water when it rippled, then shuddered as the train went by, that wind becoming a secondary gust the train sucked into itself then dispersed among those frothy horses along the shore further down the line.
These were fancies, easy to imagine with the warped clarity that too much whiskey brings. What proved impossible to imagine was what common sense told me—that he simply was no more. And the fact that the old prosaic reality proved impossible to picture while any alternative to it was blissfully simple proved something else to me in turn: that these layers of silt, those ovals of pig-iron above it, the six-thirty roaring to Dublin, Dublin itself and the sea beyond it served simply as an adjunct to his story. He died in the sea to the west and the sea itself depended on him for its continued existence, since why else would I have sat beside it, or beside this river, its drab, half-forgotten tributary? And to return to fish—for somehow fish are central to his tale—only seriously there when caught, dead, gutted and eaten, otherwise as elusive as memory itself, backwards flips on the surface of the water, shadows running to shadows. Fish were important in more ways than one. As the garland to our cruellest moments, and to our kindest ones and as a conduit to a whole river, even a sea of memories. The memory of those piscine armfuls led to other recollections which would ripple on the surface of my quotidian dreaming and drag me down with them. There was another sea there, but I was underneath it, the brown waters were as cold as dreaming is, and a cod or a ling or at times a codling would weave towards me and beyond with a memory pinned to it like a Bord iascaigh Mhaire tag. The sea was all about death, and death drew into itself all the moments of its attendant lives and my attempt to understand this sea had taken years now and one memory would draw me towards it, always the same, lapping like a rising tide when you had forgotten there was such a thing as water, for you had thought the tide had retreated, your bare feet had grown used to the hard scalloped sand and yet there it was, creeping round your ankles saying, in so many words, remember me. And the memory was this. The two of us, laying nightlines for the umpteenth time at low tide.
I had travelled to the Curragh to visit Hans in the low collection of Nissen huts that constituted his prison. A plain of flat green as far as the eye could see dotted with clumps of grazing sheep, a copse of trees barely hiding the military barracks. He emerged from a group of half-starved Republicans, the grey pallor of his face now echoing the grey of his tattered uniform. You have betrayed me, Irish, he said.
Yes, I said, betrayal seems to be my destiny. And what does this say of these times where betrayal becomes the only viable response?
He didn't answer, so I proffered him the brown paper parcel I held which contained a bottle of Irish whiskey and two strings of fine black pudding. He hesitated, as if the last vestiges of his pride were reviving themselves, then stretched out his hands and pulled it towards him.
Schnapps, he said, as he ripped open the paper, couldn't you have brought me schnapps? Though he pulled the cork from the whiskey and began to drink it anyway.
At least you won't be shot here, I told him.
True, he said, you have other more refined means of torture.
What are they? I asked, and he told me how they heard Mass each morning, played hurling and handball each afternoon and studied Irish at night.
You should join the classes, I told him, you might learn something.
Linguistics, he said, was never my strong point.
Then I remembered his mathematical leanings, and told him how his mentor Heisenberg had been captured during the Rhine advance and was being held incommunicado outside London.
He will understand the true nature of uncertainty, then, he said. He passed me the bottle and I drank and after a time his eyes lost their resistance. Maybe I'll stay here, Irish, he said.
You have no alternative, I said, looking at the rolls of barbed wire across the fields behind him.
No, he said, when the whole thing is over and it will be over soon, yes?
Soon, I assured him.
I will learn your language and your violent sports and teach mathematics in a boys' school. Your president is mathematical? he asked.
He runs the country on Euclidean principles, I told him.
Maybe I could help him then, Hans said, the whiskey making him dewy-eyed. It would be good for once, to be of use. And Irish, he said, as I made to go. Just so you know. I cannot blame you. In your situation, who knows, I would have done the same.
That evening in the Railway Bar I learnt that his Fiihrer had immolated himself and that De Valera had, with all the logic of Zeno, presented himself at the diplomatic offices of the Reich to offer his condolences. The conversation in the bar ranged from the supportive to the censorious. Backing a loser there, said a local landscape gardener, sucking heavily on a cigarette. Sure what has he been backing since the whole bother began, said a coal merchant whose two sons served in the Irish Guards, his blackened hands clutching a half-empty pint. If it's not one shower, he muttered cryptically, it's the other.
I drank and listened and felt the same dull ache. Some
facts draw all other facts into themselves, create a mystical union between disparate things, and the thought of De Valera brought me back once more to him, to his study with the green baize table and his fingers pasting newspaper cut-outs of Civil War atrocities into the ledger he kept for that purpose.
I finished my drink and edged my way outside, hoping to be rid of that memory. But out there the moon was full and illuminated perfectly the green swath that led to his house, etched each small gazebo on the seafront in a childlike blue. I walked across the grass, which was wet with May dew, to the promenade. The tide was out and the moonlight touched each ridge on the empty sand and blurred the distances, so that sand was all there was to the horizon where the thinnest line of silver intimated the sea. I knew the full moon was the cause of it, made the tides full and the absences fuller and remembered my dream again, him running barefoot across the strand in advance of the crushing wave while the doctor ran to the house with his black bag and Maisie rubbed her hands on her smock on the prom with a distracted air.
I wanted to exorcise him then once and for all, put him finally to rest and went to the house, pulled open the door of the cupboard below the stairs and found the metal rods, rusting now, bent into a circle at the top with the old gut still tied to them. The lines had discoloured, turned green in places, amber in others and the old blunt hooks still hung from them. I wrapped them in one hand, took a coal shovel in the other, walked outside down the steps on to the sand and began to walk. I walked towards the line of silver that was the tide, but never found it. The closer I walked, it seemed, the more it retreated. I saw a worm cast, dug out rapid spadefuls, chasing the source and pulled out three rags. I walked on, but the tide came no closer, then dug again. I came up with some lugs this time, walked again until my effort to reach that sea seemed futile. It was the same thin line on the horizon of quiet silver, taunting me with its absence.
