Irish Journal (5 page)

I still did not know what I found out four hours later: that you can give tips on credit, and not until we had arrived, at the outer edge of County Mayo, from where there is nothing but water all the way to New York—did credit come into its full glory. The house was painted snow white, the window frames dark blue; there was a fire burning in the grate. The welcoming feast consisted of fresh salmon. The sea was pale green, up front where it rolled onto the beach, dark blue out toward the center of the bay, and a narrow, sparkling white frill was visible where the sea broke on the island.

That evening we were given something worth as much as cash—the storekeeper’s account book. It was a fat book consisting of nearly eighty pages, solidly bound, with a very permanent quality about it. We had arrived, we were in Mayo—God help us?

5
SKELETON OF A HUMAN HABITATION

Suddenly, on reaching the top of the hill, we saw the skeleton of the abandoned village on the slope ahead of us. No one had told us anything about it, no one had given us any warning; there are so many abandoned villages in Ireland. The church, the shortest way to the beach, had been pointed out to us, and the shop where you can buy tea, bread, butter, and cigarettes, also the newsagent’s, the post office, and the little harbor where the harpooned sharks lie like capsized boats in the mud at low tide, their dark backs uppermost, unless by chance the last wave of the tide had turned up their white bellies from which the liver had been cut out—all this seemed worth mentioning, but not the abandoned village. Gray, uniform, sloping stone gables, which we saw first with no depth of perspective, like an amateurish set for a ghost film; incredulous, we tried to count them, we gave up at forty, there must have been a hundred. The next curve of the road gave us a different perspective, and now we saw them from the side: half-finished buildings that seemed to be waiting for the carpenter: gray stone walls, dark window sockets, not a stick of wood, not a shred of material, no color anywhere, like a body without hair, without
eyes, without flesh and blood—the skeleton of a village, cruelly distinct in its structure. There was the main street, at the bend, by the little square, there must have been a pub. A side street, another one. Everything not made of stone gnawed away by rain, sun, and wind—and time, which patiently trickles over everything; twenty-four great drops of time a day, the acid that eats everything away as imperceptibly as resignation.… If anyone ever tried to paint it, this skeleton of a human habitation where a hundred years ago five hundred people may have lived: all those gray triangles and squares on the green-gray slope of the hill; if he were to include the girl with the red pullover who is just passing along the main street with a load of peat on her back, a spot of red for her pullover and a dark brown one for the peat, a lighter brown one for the girl’s face, and then the white sheep huddling like lice among the ruins—he would be considered an unusually crazy painter: that’s how abstract reality is. Everything not made of stone eaten away by wind, sun, rain, and time, neatly laid out along the somber slope as if for an anatomy lesson, the skeleton of a village: over there—“look, just like a spine”—the main street, a little crooked like the spine of a laborer; every little knuckle bone is there; there are the arms and the legs: the side streets and, tipped slightly to one side, the head, the church, a somewhat larger gray triangle. Left leg: the street going up the slope to the east; right leg: the other one, leading down into the valley, this one a little shortened. The skeleton of someone with a slight limp. If his skeleton were exposed in three hundred years, this is what the man might look like who is being driven by his four thin cows past us onto the meadow, leaving him the illusion that he was driving them; his right leg has been shortened by an accident, his back is crooked from the toil of cutting peat, and even his tired head will tip a little to one side when he is laid in the earth. He has already overtaken us, already murmured his “nice day,” before we had got our breath back sufficiently to answer him or ask him about the village.

No bombed city, no artillery-raked village ever looked like this, for bombs and shells are nothing but extended tomahawks, battle-axes, maces, with which to smash, to hack to pieces, but here there is no trace of violence; in limitless patience time and the elements have eaten away everything not made of stone, and from the earth have sprouted cushions on which these bones lie like relics, cushions of moss and grass.

No one would try to pull down a wall here or take wood (very valuable here) from an abandoned house (we call that cleaning out; no one cleans out here); and not even the children who drive the cattle home in the evening from the meadow above the deserted village, not even the children try to pull down walls or doorways; our children, when we suddenly found ourselves in the village, tried it immediately, to raze to the ground. Here no one razed anything to the ground, and the softer parts of abandoned dwellings are left to feed the wind, the rain, the sun, and time, and after sixty, seventy, or a hundred years all that is left is half-finished buildings from which no carpenter will ever again hang his wreath to celebrate the completion of a house: this, then, is what a human habitation looks like when it has been left in peace after death.

Still with a sense of awe we crossed the main street between the bare gables, entered side streets, and slowly the sense of awe lifted: grass was growing in the streets, moss had covered walls and potato plots, was creeping up the houses; and the stones of the gables, washed free of mortar, were neither quarried stone nor tiles, but small boulders, just as the mountain had rolled them down its streams into the valley, door and window lintels were slabs of rock, and broad as shoulder blades were the two stone slabs sticking out of the wall where the fireplace had been: once the chain for the iron cooking pot had hung from them, pale potatoes cooking in brownish water.

We went from house to house like peddlers, and every time the short shadow on the threshold had fallen away from
us the blue square of the sky covered us again; in houses where the better-off ones had once lived it was larger, where the poor had lived it was smaller: all that distinguished them now was the size of the blue square of sky. In some rooms moss was already growing, some thresholds were already covered with brownish water; here and there in the front walls you could still see the pegs for the cattle: thighbones of oxen to which the chain had been attached.

“Here’s where the stove was”—“the bed over there”—“here over the fireplace hung the crucifix”—“over there a cupboard”: two upright stone slabs with two vertical slabs wedged into them; here in this cupboard one of the children discovered the iron wedge, and when we drew it out it crumbled away in our hands like tinder: a hard inner piece remained about as thick as a nail which—on the children’s instructions—I put in my coat pocket as a souvenir.

We spent five hours in this village, and the time passed quickly because nothing happened; we scared a few birds into flight, a sheep jumped through an empty window socket and fled up the slope at our approach; in ossified fuchsia hedges hung blood-red blossoms, in withered gorse bushes hung a yellow like dirty coins, shining quartz stuck up out of the moss like bones; no dirt in the streets, no rubbish in the streams, and not a sound to be heard. Perhaps we were waiting for the girl with the red pullover and her load of brown peat, but the girl did not come back.

On the way home when I put my hand in my pocket for the iron wedge, all my fingers found was brown dust mixed with red: the same color as the bog to the right and left of our path, and I threw it in the bog.

No one could tell us exactly when and why the village had been abandoned; there are so many deserted houses in Ireland, you can count them on any two-hour walk: that one was abandoned ten years ago, this one twenty, that one fifty or eighty years ago, and there are houses in which the nails fastening
the boards to windows and doors have not yet rusted through, rain and wind cannot yet penetrate.

The old woman living in the house next to us had no idea when the village had been abandoned; when she was a little girl, around 1880, it was already deserted. Of her six children, only two have remained in Ireland: two live and work in Manchester, two in the United States, one daughter is married and living here in the village (this daughter has six children, of whom in turn two will probably go to England, two to the United States), and the oldest son has stayed home: from far off, when he comes in from the meadow with the cattle, he looks like a youth of sixteen; when he turns the corner and enters the village street you feel he must be in his mid-thirties; and when he finally passes the house and grins shyly in at the window, you see that he is fifty.

“He doesn’t want to get married,” said his mother, “isn’t it a shame?”

Yes, it is a shame. He is so hard-working and clean; he has painted the gate red, the stone knobs on the wall red too, and the window frames under the green mossy roof bright blue; humor dwells in his eyes, and he pats his donkey affectionately.

In the evening, when we go to get the milk, we ask him about the abandoned village. But he can tell us nothing about it, nothing; he has never been there: they have no meadows over there, and their peat cuttings lie in a different direction, to the south, not far from the monument to the Irish patriot who was executed in 1799. “Have you seen it yet?” Yes, we’ve seen it—and Tony goes off again, a man of fifty, is transformed at the corner into a man of thirty, up there on the slope where he strokes the donkey in passing he turns into a youth of sixteen, and as he stops for a moment by the fuchsia hedge, for that moment before he disappears behind the hedge, he looks like the boy he once was.

6
ITINERANT POLITICAL DENTIST

“Tell me quite frankly now,” said Padraic to me after the fifth glass of beer, “whether you don’t think all Irishmen are half crazy?”

“No,” I said, “I only think half all Irishmen are half crazy.”

“You ought to have been a diplomat,” said Padraic and ordered his sixth glass of beer, “but now tell me quite honestly whether you think we’re a happy people.”

“I think,” I said, “that you are happier than you know. And if you knew how happy you are you would find a reason for being unhappy. You have many reasons for being unhappy, but you also love the poetry of unhappiness—here’s to you.”

We drank, and it was only after the sixth glass of beer that Padraic found the courage to ask me what he had been wanting to ask me all along.

“Tell me,” he said in a low voice, “Hitler—war—I believe—not such a bad man really, only—in my opinion—he went a bit too far.”

My wife looked at me encouragingly.

“Go on,” she said softly in German, “don’t give up, pull out the whole tooth.”

“I’m no dentist,” I said quietly to my wife, “and I’m tired of going to pubs in the evening. I always have to pull teeth, always the same ones. I’m sick of it.”

“It’s worth it,” said my wife.

“Now listen, Padraic,” I said amiably, “we know exactly how far Hitler went, he went over the corpses of millions of Jews, children.…”

A spasm of pain crossed Padraic’s face. He had ordered his seventh glass of beer and said sadly: “What a pity you’ve let yourself be taken in by British propaganda, what a pity.”

I left the beer untouched. “Come on,” I said, “let me pull that tooth; it may hurt a bit, but it must be done. You won’t be a really nice chap until it’s done; have your teeth put right, anyway I feel like an itinerant dentist.

“Hitler was,” I said, and I said everything; I had had a lot of practice, I was a good dentist already, and if the patient is a nice chap one goes about it more carefully than when one does a routine job, merely from a sense of duty. Hitler was, Hitler did, Hitler said—Pad’s face twitched more and more painfully, but I had ordered whisky, I raised my glass, he swallowed, choked a little.

“Did it hurt much?” I asked cautiously.

“Yes,” he said, “it hurts, and it’ll go on hurting for a few days till all the pus is out.”

“Don’t forget to rinse your mouth, and if you’re in pain come and see me, you know where I live.”

“I know where you live,” said Pad, “and I’ll be sure to come, for I’ll be sure to be in pain.”

“Still,” I said, “it’s a good thing it’s out.”

Padraic was silent. “Shall we have another?” he asked sadly.

“Yes, let’s,” I said. “Hitler was.…”

“Stop,” said Padraic, “please stop, the nerve’s all exposed.”

“Good,” I said, “then it’ll soon be dead, so let’s have another.”

“Aren’t you ever sad when you have a tooth out?” asked Padraic wearily.

“For a moment, yes,” I said, “but afterwards I’m glad when it doesn’t fester any more.”

“The stupid thing is,” said Padraic, “that now I can’t imagine why I like the Germans so much.”

“You must like them,” I said gently, “not
because of
but
in spite of
Hitler. There’s nothing more embarrassing than when someone likes you for the wrong reasons. If your grandfather was a burglar, and you meet someone who likes you a lot
because
your grandfather was a burglar, that’s embarrassing; other people like you because you’re not a burglar, but you would like it if they thought you were nice even if you were a burglar.” The eighth glass of beer arrived: Henry had ordered it, an Englishman who came here every year for his vacation.

He sat down with us and shook his head resignedly. “I don’t know,” he said, “why I come back to Ireland every year; I don’t know how often I’ve told them I never liked either Pembroke or Cromwell, and that I’m not related to them, that I’m nothing but a London office worker who has a fortnight’s holiday and wants to go to the seaside. I don’t know why I come all this way from London every year to be told how nice I am but how terrible the English are; it’s so exhausting. About Hitler …” said Henry.

“Please,” said Padraic, “don’t talk about him; I can’t stand the sound of his name any more. Not now, anyway, perhaps later on.…”