Irish Journal (3 page)

I staggered wearily from the ship into the train, and a few minutes later from the train into the great dark railway station of Westland Row, from there onto the street: a young woman was just lifting an orange milk jug into the room from the window sill of a black house; she smiled at me, and I smiled back.

Now I had no idea, although I soon began to suspect, that the hours between seven and ten in the morning are the only ones during which the Irish incline toward taciturnity, for whoever I asked, and whatever I asked about, I received the brief answer: “Sorry.” Like the German apprentice in Amsterdam in the old tale who supposed that everything he asked about belonged to Mr. Kannitverstan, since that was the only word he ever heard in answer to his questions, so I would have liked to ask: Who owns the big ships in the harbor? “Sorry.” Who is that standing up there all by himself in the morning mist on a pedestal? “Sorry.” Who do these ragged, barefoot children belong to? “Sorry.” Who is this mysterious young man standing on the back platform of the bus so skillfully imitating a machine gun—tok tok tok tok? “Sorry.” And who is that riding by with his crop and his gray top hat? “Sorry.” But I decided not to try and apply my meager knowledge of the language and to rely more on my eyes than my tongue or the ears of other people, and to study the shop signs instead. And there they all came rushing to meet me as bookkeepers, innkeepers, greengrocers—Joyce and Yeats, McCarthy and Molloy, O’Neill and O’Connor, even Jackie Coogan’s footsteps seemed to lead here, and I was forced to admit that the man up there on the pedestal, still looking so forlorn in the chill of the morning, was of course not Mr. Sorry but Nelson.

I bought a paper, something called
The Irish Digest
, and, drawn by a sign promising “Bed and Breakfast Reasonable,” decided on a reasonable breakfast.

If Continental tea is like a faded yellow telegraph form, in these islands to the west of Ostend it has the dark, glimmering tones of Russian icons, before the milk gives it a color similar to the complexion of an overfed baby; on the Continent weak tea is served in fragile porcelain, here it is casually poured into thick earthenware cups from battered metal teapots, a heavenly brew to restore the traveler, dirt cheap too.

The breakfast was good, the tea worthy of renown, and thrown in for free was the smile of the young Irish girl who served it.

I glanced through the paper and the first thing I saw was a letter demanding that Nelson be brought down from his high perch and replaced by a statue of the Virgin Mary. Another letter demanding Nelson’s downfall, then another.…

It was now eight o’clock, tongues were loosened, I was engulfed in words of which I only understood one: Germany. I decided to strike back, in friendly but determined fashion, with the weapon of the country, “Sorry,” and to enjoy the free smiles of the tousled tea goddess, when a sudden roar, a sound almost like thunder, startled me. Could there be so many trains on this strange island? The thunder continued, became articulate, the powerful opening bars of the
Tantum ergo
beginning with
Sacramentum—veneremur cernui
became distinguishable, and sung clear and true to the last syllable it pealed out over Westland Row from St. Andrew’s Church opposite, and just as the first cups of tea were as good as all the others I would drink—in desolate, dirty little hamlets, in hotels and by firesides—so I was left with the impression of an overwhelming piety as it flooded Westland Row after the
Tantum ergo:
in Germany you would only see that many people coming out of church after Easter Mass or at Christmas; but I had not forgotten the confession of the unbeliever with the sharp profile.

It was still only eight in the morning, Sunday, too early to wake my host: but the tea was cold, the café smelled of mutton fat, the customers were gathering up their boxes and suitcases and heading for their buses. Listlessly I turned the pages of
The Irish Digest
, haltingly translated the beginnings of some articles and short stories till a one-line aphorism on page 23 caught my eye: I understood it long before I would have been able to translate it: untranslated, not in German and yet understood, it was even more effective than if it had been rendered into German:
The cemeteries
, it said,
are full of people the world could not do without
.

This wisdom seemed to me to be worth a trip to Dublin, and I made up my mind to lock it securely in my heart for the moments when I would be feeling my importance (later on it seemed to me a kind of key to this strange mixture of passion and equability, to that temperamental weariness, that indifference coupled with fanaticism, which I was to encounter so often).

Great cool private houses lay hidden behind rhododendrons, behind palm trees and oleander bushes, when I had decided to wake my host despite the barbarically early hour: mountains became visible in the background, long rows of trees.

Eight hours later a German compatriot was declaring categorically to me: “Everything here is dirty, everything is expensive, and nowhere can you get a proper châteaubriand,” and already I was defending Ireland, although I had only been in the country ten hours, ten hours out of which I had slept for five, bathed for one, spent one in church, argued for one with my compatriot, who could pit six months against my ten hours. I defended Ireland passionately, fought with tea,
Tantum ergo
, Joyce and Yeats against the châteaubriand, which was particularly dangerous for me since I didn’t know what it was (it was not till long after I got home that I had to look it up to identify it: a kind of steak, it said), I just sensed dimly, as
I fought it, that it must be a meat dish—but my struggle was in vain; the man going abroad would like to forego the disadvantages of his native land—all that rushing about at home!—but take his châteaubriand with him; probably one cannot drink tea in Rome with impunity, any more than one can drink coffee in Ireland with impunity, except perhaps in the home of an Italian. I gave up the struggle, drove back in the bus, and marveled at the endless line-ups in front of the movies, of which there seemed to be plenty: in the morning, I thought, they crowd into and around the churches, and in the evening apparently into and around the movies; at a green newsstand I fell victim again to the smile of an Irish girl, bought newspapers, cigarettes, chocolate, then my eye fell on a book lying unnoticed among pamphlets: its white cover, bordered in red, was already soiled; secondhand, I could have it for a shilling, and I bought it. It was Goncharov’s
Oblomov
, translated into English. Although I knew Oblomov’s home to be some two or three thousand miles farther east, I suspected that he was not out of place in this country, where everyone hates to get up early in the morning.

3
PRAY FOR THE SOUL OF MICHAEL O’NEILL

At Swift’s tomb my heart had caught a chill, so clean was St. Patrick’s Cathedral, so empty of people and so full of patriotic marble figures, so deep under the cold stone did the desperate Dean seem to lie, Stella beside him: two square brass plates, burnished as if by the hand of a German housewife: the larger one for Swift, the smaller for Stella; I wished I had some thistles, hard, big, long-stemmed, a few clover leaves, and some thornless, gentle blossoms, jasmine perhaps or honeysuckle; that would have been the right thing to offer these two, but my hands were as empty as the church, just as cold and just as clean. Regimental banners hung side by side, half-lowered: did they really smell of gunpowder? They looked as if they did, but the only smell was of mold, as in every church where for centuries no incense has been burned; I felt as though I were being bombarded with needles of ice; I fled, and it was only in the entrance that I saw there was someone in the church after all: the cleaningwoman; she was washing down the porch with lye, cleaning what was already clean enough.

In front of the cathedral stood an Irish beggar, the first I had met: beggars like this one are only to be found otherwise in southern countries, but in the south the sun shines: here, north of the 53
^rd
parallel, rags and tatters are something different from south of the 30
^th
parallel; rain falls on poverty, and here even an incorrigible esthete could no longer regard dirt as picturesque; in the slums around St. Patrick’s, squalor still huddles in many a corner, many a house, exactly as Swift must have seen it in 1743.

Both the beggar’s coatsleeves hung empty at his sides; these coverings for limbs he no longer possessed were dirty; epileptic twitching ran like lightning across his face, and yet his thin, dark face had a beauty that will be noted in a book other than mine. I had to light his cigarette for him and place it between his lips; I had to put money for him in his coat pocket: I almost felt as if I were furnishing a corpse with money. Darkness hung over Dublin: every shade of gray between black and white had found its own little cloud, the sky was covered with a plumage of innumerable grays: not a streak, not a scrap of Irish green; slowly, twitching, the beggar from St. Patrick’s Park crossed over under this sky into the slums.

In the slums dirt sometimes lies in black flakes on the windowpanes, as if thrown there on purpose, fished up from fireplaces, from canals; but things don’t happen here so easily on purpose, and not much happens by itself: drink happens here, love, prayer, and cursing. God is passionately loved and no doubt equally passionately hated.

In the dark back yards, the ones Swift’s eyes saw, this dirt has been piled up in decades and centuries: the depressing sediment of time. In the windows of the secondhand shops lay a confused variety of junk, and at last I found one of the objects of my journey: the private drinking booth with the leather curtain; here the drinker locks himself in like a horse; to be alone with whisky and pain, with belief and unbelief, he lowers himself deep below the surface of time, into the caisson of
passivity, as long as his money lasts; till he is compelled to float up again to the surface of time, to take part somehow in the weary paddling: meaningless, helpless movements, since every vessel is destined to drift toward the dark waters of the Styx. No wonder there is no room in these pubs for women, the busy ones of this earth: here the man is alone with his whisky, far removed from all the activities in which he has been forced to participate, activities known as family, occupation, honor, society; the whisky is bitter, comforting, and somewhere to the west, across three thousand miles of water, and somewhere to the east, two seas to cross to get there—are those who believe in activity and progress. Yes, they exist, such people; how bitter the whisky is, how comforting; the beefy innkeeper passes the next glass into the booth. His eyes are sober, blue: he believes in what those who make him rich do not believe in. In the woodwork of the pub, the paneled walls of the private drinking booth, lurk jokes and curses, hopes and prayers of other people; how many, I wonder?

Already the caisson—the booth—can be felt sinking deeper and deeper toward the dark bottom of time: past wrecks, past fish, but even down here there is no peace now that the deep-sea divers have invented their instruments. Float up again, then, take a deep breath, and plunge once more into activities, the kind called honor, occupation, family, society, before the caisson is pried open by the deep-sea divers. “How much?” Coins, many coins, thrown into the hard blue eyes of the inn-keeper.

The sky was still feathered with manifold grays, not a sign of the countless Irish greens, as I made my way to the other church. Not much time had passed: the beggar was standing in the church doorway, and the cigarette I had placed between his lips was just being taken out of his mouth by schoolboys, the end nipped off with care so as not to lose a single crumb of tobacco, the butt placed carefully in the beggar’s coat pocket, his cap removed—who, even when he has lost both arms, would
enter the house of God with his cap on his head?—the door was held open for him, the empty coatsleeves slapped against the doorposts: they were wet and dirty, as if he had dragged them through the gutter, but inside no one is bothered by dirt.

St. Patrick’s Cathedral had been so empty, so clean, and so beautiful; this church was full of people, full of cheap sentimental decoration, and although it wasn’t exactly dirty it was messy: the way a living room looks in a family where there are a lot of children. Some people—I heard that one was a German who thus spreads the blessings of German culture throughout Ireland—must make a fortune in Ireland with plaster figures, but anger at the maker of this junk pales at the sight of those who pray in front of his products: the more highly colored, the better; the more sentimental, the better: “as lifelike as possible” (watch out, you who are praying, for life is not “lifelike”).

A dark-haired beauty, defiant-looking as an offended angel, prays before the statue of St. Magdalene; her face has a greenish pallor: her thoughts and prayers are written down in the book which I do not know. Schoolboys with hurling sticks under their arms pray at the Stations of the Cross; tiny oil lamps burn in dark corners in front of the Sacred Heart, the Little Flower, St. Anthony, St. Francis; here religion is savored to the last drop; the beggar sits in the last row, his twitching face turned toward the space where incense clouds still hang.

New and remarkable achievements of the devotional industry are the neon halo around Mary’s head and the phosphorescent cross in the stoup, glowing rosily in the twilight of the church. Will there be separate entries in the book for those who prayed in front of this trash and those who prayed in Italy in front of Fra Angelico’s frescoes?

The black-haired beauty with the greenish pallor is still staring at Magdalene, the beggar’s face is still twitching; his whole body is convulsed, the convulsions make the coins in his pocket tinkle softly; the boys with the hurling sticks seem to know the beggar, they seem to understand the twitching of his
face, the low babble: one of them puts his hand into the beggar’s pocket, and on the boy’s grubby palm lie four coins: two pennies, a sixpence, and a threepenny bit. One penny and the threepenny bit remain on the boy’s palm, the rest tinkles into the offering box; here lie the frontiers of mathematics, psychology and political economy, the frontiers of all the more or less exact sciences crisscross each other in the twitching of the beggar’s epileptic face: a foundation too narrow for me to trust myself to it. But the cold from Swift’s tomb still clings to my heart: cleanliness, emptiness, marble figures, regimental banners, and the woman who was cleaning what was clean enough; St. Patrick’s Cathedral was beautiful, this church is ugly, but it is used, and I found on its benches something I found on many Irish church benches: little enamel plaques requesting a prayer: “Pray for the soul of Michael O’Neill, who died 17.1.1933 at the age of sixty. Pray for the soul of Mary Keegan, who died on May 9, 1945, at the age of eighteen”; what a pious, cunning blackmail; the dead come alive again, their date of death is linked in the mind of the one reading the plaque with his own experience that day, that month, that year. With twitching face Hitler was waiting to seize power when sixty-year-old Michael O’Neill died here; when Germany capitulated, eighteen-year-old Mary Keegan was dying. “Pray”—I read—“for Kevin Cassidy, who died 20.12.1930 at the age of thirteen,” and a shock went through me like an electric current, for in December 1930 I had been thirteen myself: in a great dark apartment in south Cologne—residential apartment house, is what it would have been called in 1908—I sat clutching my Christmas report; vacation had begun, and through a worn place in the cinnamon-colored drapes I looked down onto the wintry street.