Book of Kells

by R. A. MacAvoy

  With a complacent smile, contrasting oddly with the look of dreamy sensitivity the Amanitas had given his eyes, the abbot went out the door.

  MacCullen leaned over the table to Derval and grinned broadly.

  Derval had no intentions of falling into the role of minding John’s belongings just because she took responsibility for the animal that had borne them. She presented him with the packet of his belongings and suggested he wash his socks.

  The packet consisted (besides those socks of battleship gray which the softness of the old Nikes made unnecessary) of his clasp knife, house keys, and an odd pound in change. All these had been in his pocket when he had made the great step backward in time. With them was the shirt that had been drenched in MacCullen’s blood.

  He glanced at this unappealing item for a moment and dropped it back in the bag in which Derval had kept it. Strange to remember how very sick Labres had been. (John called him Labres simply because he called John by his first name, and a Canadian is impatient with dignities.) Obviously there had been change in the species in this last thousand years, and not for the better, either, for John knew that the wound the poet had suffered would have put him low for a long time, if not six feet under.

  The bell of noon was ringing from the church. It awoke a host of echoes from the rocky walls of the valley and beyond: echoes so delayed they developed off-tones and rhythms among each other and were hard to recognize as having originated in the simple dingdong from the monastery. He had been told that the noon bell was rung a half hour early, because some of the herb gatherers of the community wandered a long way into the upper rocks. John looked over the drowsy landscape of the enclosure, where red cows competed with pilgrim penitents for grassy places in which to pray. Among the gray and white gravestones with their crosses and their “ora pro…” inscriptions. One old gentleman who had green thistles stuck at odd places into his léinne knelt by the wall of the church with his arms outspread. John was thinking once more of the superior sort of holiness of the gardener—he did not agree in any sense with Ailesh’s comments on his own condition—when the sun sparked off a church window set with glass.

  John scuttled toward the church. Only an hour ago Father Blathmac had shooed him out of the scriptorium, saying his elation was disturbing the concentration of the scribes. But he had (mark of great favor from the Roman-trained priest) been allowed to carry the great book out with him. Only in the compound, Father Blathmac had warned him. John had not needed a warning. He carried the Book of Kells wrapped in his brat, very close to his beating heart.

  His luck was in, for there was no mass being offered within the church, and the sun of midday lit it as effectively as John’s illuminated worktable at home. John tiptoed warily past certain religious who stood with arms in the position of crucifixion at odd places in the building’s nave. Why they felt they had to do this, rather than a simple folding of the hands and bowing of the head, was more than he could say. But it might have been a factor in the production of some of the blacksmith-sized shoulders he’d seen among the monks.

  He missed the presence of regular pews, with high seats and backs, as he settled down onto a bench, his bones crackling. The white-painted churches of his childhood (with the list of drowned and missing fishermen carved in stone in the vestibule) had their attractions. Yet when was the last time he had visited a church, except to take rubbings?

  He knew better than to put the book in direct sun, temptation though it was to see the pigments glow. Calfskin, like any leather, degenerates and cracks to nothing under such treatment. So he placed himself in a position where the sunlight, filtered through small round panes of glass, merely tickled his thigh.

  An active sort of contentment spread through John Thornburn as he leafed from page to page. The soft light put a glow to the coat of Saint Mark’s lion, and the eyes of the saint himself seemed radiant. He flipped from face to face, feeling the work of the forgotten artist in the tendons of his own forearm. After a while he came upon the page illustrating the Virgin, and stopped at it.

  Why was there no other female figure in all this wealth? And why did this one lack the rotund complexity of all the other saints portrayed? John doubted it was by Ferches.

  John felt something like pique at the monks who would design such a beautiful thing and leave out something as important as females. It was not a political response on his part, brought on by contact with Derval’s feminism, but rather an aesthetic one. John himself preferred to draw women and thought there was more in a female worth drawing. Especially for any artist who preferred a curve to the straight line. He imagined himself engaged in minatory dialogue with the good Father of Iona.

  The sun had been crawling toward him as he sat in reverie, and now, like a daring puppy, it came up and licked his eyelids. John shut his eyes against the brilliance and then gasped, for behind his eyelids came the image of Bridget as he had seen her, in rags and glory.

  Though he had not exactly been asleep, John woke up. He heard the self-directed babble of the child in the corner, and the groans of one poor pleader whose position was at the feet of the altar cross. He looked at the altar, at a painted wooden Christ with large blue eyes and arms as stiff as the crosspiece of a telephone pole, and he looked into those blue eyes. He felt his breath go harsh and felt, also, oddly, the stirrings of his penis within his jeans.

  “What?” he said aloud, staring through the Christ. “What is this all about, please?” He stood up.

  “Why did you bring me here?” It was a question John had never asked before. Never thought to ask. The book slid in his hand, and as he caught it, he saw the sunlight shining through the parchment as if through amber wax, and he could make out the backward Latin on the other side.

  On impulse John put the book back in his brat and yanked at the string of his bag. He drew out his rusty-brown shirt and unrolled it. In the front pocket was the many-folded sheet of tissue he had left there, and despite the dried blood it came open as cleanly as waxed paper. He stared once more at the obliterated pencil work. He went to the glass window with it.

  Without thinking of the horror of what he did, he put the four corners of the sheet into his mouth, one by one, and got them wet. Then he pressed them against the flatter area of the glass and they stuck. The sun’s light, through the stained paper, was the color of dead leaves.

  But the lines were there—every little clear-etched spiral. John growled to himself in satisfaction. He rummaged for his knife. The end of the corkscrew attachment he fitted against the groove made by repeated tracings. He began to whistle.

  Worshipers looked up. Dobarchu, wife of Brother Aidhne, the cook, glanced over, frowning. The White Lady knew there were different rites in the church and different churches among the faithful, and what with the odd prayers of the Welsh and Hebrideans, not to mention the acerbic Romans themselves… But to make such noise at one’s devotions, in the church itself. Dobarchu had no fear of taking responsibility on her shoulders, and so after waiting a decent time, she lifted her skirts and proceeded toward the source of the disturbance.

  It was with her own eyes she saw the shining cross of blood upon the window, eclipsing the sunlight in its brilliance. And there was no mistake that the little poorly dressed stranger jumped for joy to see it, and cried out for sheer happiness as he cast himself into it and was gone.

  Dobarchu spread herself flat out on the carved stone floor and praised God in a voice more loud than the stranger’s whistling.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “It would be a mad world completely, the people would be putting their bicycles upside-down on the road and pedalling them to make enough mechanical movement to frighten the birds out of the whole parish.” He passed a hand in consternation across his brow. “It would be a very unnatural pancake.”

  Flann O’Brien,

  The Third Policeman

  After the rosy beauty of the gate dissipated, John found himself in total darkness. For a moment he thought he had come to some t
errifying half-world, and that he would never escape. But there was a ground, and he could move along it. As he bumped into the drafting table and fell face forward onto the floor, he realized that he had made it back into his house. He wondered why night and day, for the first time in his temporal zigzagging, were off sequence.

  John stumbled to the light switch and turned it on. The inside of the room was as it had always been, albeit even more dusty. But the sixteen-paned French windows in front of the drawing board had been covered crudely with plywood. All the windows had been so treated, and that was what had put the room in darkness. John shut the switch off again and waited for his eyes to adjust. Pinpoints of light shone through the cracks.

  So the house had been boarded up—by the police, certainly, since Mrs. Hanlon would have no interest in disfiguring her property in this manner. He tried the door handle. The latch moved, but the door, nailed shut to the frame, wouldn’t budge.

  Confused for the moment, he walked over to the refrigerator and opened it. He wrinkled up his nose and slammed it shut again.

  “Pists,” he whispered. (He had always cursed easily in Irish.)

  A click sounded in the living room, and John went to investigate. It was the stereo turntable, which he now remembered he had left without turning off. He walked over and was quite surprised to find that apparently nothing had been damaged. He lifted the arm back into its cradle, and shut it off.

  Why would the police have left this going, when they had taken the trouble to board up the house? It didn’t make sense, but John dismissed it from his mind. He had more important things to think about, so he sat on the couch and thought about them.

  He had certainly solved the problem for Derval and himself. All he had to do was to usher her through the church window and into his bathroom. And it was no bad time to do it, now that Ailesh was safely in the monastery of Domnach Sechnaill.

  But this vision, roseate as the gate of Bridget, faded as he considered it, and as he considered the import of the boarded windows and nailed doors. Arriving in his own home century was going to be a bit of a problem. Explanations. John had no gift for explanations.

  Derval did, of course. But Derval, if John was any judge, was not going to be too eager to leave the tenth century, now that things had at last quieted down and she could rummage about to heart’s content. Showing off to the locals. And come to that, neither was John Thornburn himself too eager to leave. After all, when all this Ailesh business was done, they did plan to bury the gate for good. There’d be no going back.

  When all this Ailesh business was done… John gave a large sigh and dangled his hands between his knees. He had a desire to do something for the girl, if he was going to say good-bye for good. While he was at it, he’d do something for Derval too. Help her display herself to best advantage in front of the olive.

  Hurriedly he changed his clothes, washed himself, and shaved. Then he noticed something he’d been missing for days. In the corner of the hallway lay his fisherman’s cap; the battered, lumpy blue hat that was almost part of his head. As he got himself together he popped it on and felt immediately better. Then he headed back into the bathroom.

  The bathroom window might be easier to get open. It would certainly have required fewer boards to cover it. Standing on the toilet he gripped the heavy shower-curtain rod. (He knew it could hold him, because he’d played with it before.) Swinging himself out, he kicked the window. The glass shattered and the flimsy plywood waved from one nail and then dropped noiselessly into the weeds below.

  Daylight streamed into the bathroom. John checked his pockets for his wallet, passport, and bankbook, then gently lowered the leather satchel with its precious contents to the ground. He jumped.

  Suddenly he felt the presence of the twentieth century. Inside the boarded-up house he had been protected from the noise, but as he walked to the bus, a deafening bombardment of sounds assaulted him. Somehow, the week that he had spent in that other place had made him vulnerable.

  What a shame. He had thought this was a quiet street. It looked pleasant enough: the old trees, the wide, uneven paving, fancy iron- and brickwork fences in front of old semidetached houses, small front gardens graced with beds of roses and annuals. Greystones wasn’t O’Connell Street, after all; he had felt as at ease here as anywhere in Ireland. But now he was followed by an electric broom, an aircraft, two radios, a television tuned to the BBC, a domestic argument, a group of small children fighting, and of course, dozens of automobiles. They whizzed past with an alarming din at frightening speed. He covered one ear, but that brought no relief. He stuck his finger into the ear.

  At first it was individual sounds that bothered him. Then he heard the underlying roar of Dublin itself, stretching across the miles. It was a noise made up of hundreds of sounds. It was a hum that set his teeth on edge. It unnerved him so much that he hardly realized that the bus was passing him on the way to the stop. He ran to get there, only to find a waiting line long enough to delay the driver for all the time that he needed. He mounted the steps and climbed up to the second tier.

  Up here he was nearly alone. He felt his shoulders sag slowly down from his ears. A tightness in his throat dissolved. He watched the green grass and gray pavement go by.

  As the bus wound its way toward the city the ticket attendant finally got around to coming upstairs. He walked down the aisle and asked John for his destination. For just a moment John panicked. The sound of the English shocked him so much that he struggled to remember what to say. Finally “Dame Street, Trinity Gate” came out. The conductor asked for thirty p.

  John counted out the coins, and watched the fellow clip them into his change belt. “Thanks,” said the conductor.

  “Right you are,” John answered casually, having rehearsed the answer all during this transaction. Then he was alone again.

  It was impossible that he could be thinking in Irish, after only seven days’ exposure. He had had four years of French in school and never succeeded in making that leap. And everyone in…in that other place told him how bad his Irish was. But still, he found his native tongue sounding very odd.

  His mind was working differently; he could say that without fear he was being blinded by conceit. He had never before felt safer on the roof of a bus than in the middle. It had never before seemed reasonable to invest his money in needles.

  There was a stop. A large crowd got on: workers from a small factory or office. They filled half the seats on the upper tier. So much for his privacy. Their speech provided another stimulus and shock. Of course, he still knew English, knew intellectually what the words meant, but he had to follow the sentences carefully and put them into Irish in his head for comprehension to take place.

  John’s palms were sweaty. He wiped his hands off on the clean corduroy pants. How would he live this way again, he wondered. How long would it take before he could ignore the noise? What if he never readjusted? Holding tightly to the leather book satchel for reassurance, he took his eyes from the rows of brick houses and the whizzing cars. He took his nose away from the automobile exhaust that made his gorge rise, and brought the intricately tooled leather up to his face. There was a comforting scent, mixed of peat smoke, tallow, oak bark, and cows. He followed the soothing patterns with his eyes. Variety and order were both there.

  Nothing else around him seemed as real as that book sack.

  It was getting late in the day by the time he got off in front of the Bank of Ireland. The bell on College Green was ringing four o’clock. People were already knocking off from their jobs. It was the beginning of rush hour. Long queues were forming at the commuter stops for the buses out to the neighborhoods. The names on the signs told John of the names of the ancient monastic houses: Tallagh, Drumcondra, Santry, Glasnevin. They had ringed the village of the Ford of the Hurdles, once. In my time, John thought, I have heard their bells ring. And the bell at Trinity. How many others could say that? He felt like Methuselah, he thought. But no—he had outdone Methuselah. That old
man lived for nine hundred sixty-nine years, and John’s memory stood over a thousand.

  He wondered if this sort of thing happened to other people, and if so, why no one seemed to know about it.

  In between the whizzing streams of traffic stood the statue of the man who had written “A nation, once again.” John looked at it, for a moment, trying to decide whether to go straight to the bank, or to head over to the Trinity Library. It was Friday—a long bank day, so there might be time…

  The noise was still deafening, but he was gradually getting used to it again. For a moment he hesitated, and then started walking toward the college.

  The library had won. Or rather, John’s curiosity had. It seemed great crack to compare the two books (or the one book in its two ages), and he was hoping that Kieran Hakett was on duty today. With Kieran and a bit of luck, he might actually be able to touch the manuscript.

  Kieran and John were old friends, or rather, old for his stay in Ireland. They were drinking buddies and had both worked in a graphics shop together when John had first come over—he as paste-up man, while Kieran was printer’s devil—and the position hadn’t worked out for either one of them. John quit, and Kieran was sacked for referring to his employer in highly original language while the man was in earshot.

  One thing John worried about was the possibility that someone who had read about a “mysterious disappearance” might run into him here, so he took a circuitous route through the halls, avoiding the green entirely.

  The library was closing up for the day, but he asked the fellow at the door to see Kieran, and he slipped in just as the attendant locked the front door.