Synge (11 page)

Synge:
And the creator? Do I get an audience with him?

Chekhov:
If you do you’ll be the first.

Synge:
He’s not here.

Chekhov:
There are ruins of old palaces rumoured to be his. Moulds of rubbled turquoise and some rock no one can identify. No one is sure who lived there. He hasn’t been here in a while. If ever.

Synge:
Then what’s the point of prolonging it if he’s not here?

Chekhov:
You don’t have to.

Synge:
I can die again.

Chekhov:
Most opt to finish it in the clay.

Synge:
They don’t go for this?

Chekhov:
This is nothing. It’s not like this. This suit of clothes I wear is not a suit of clothes. I am a different creature away from here. You’ll see. You’ll be given the choice. Don’t be afraid. I tell myself that forty times a minute. Don’t be afraid. Just look on it as one of those revenge tragedies.

Synge:
Who revenges who?

Chekhov:
It is nothing like you have ever experienced.

Synge:
So these are not champagne glasses and this is not a cigar and that backdrop is not the distant earth.

Chekhov:
And you are not John Millington Synge.

Synge:
Then who am I?

Chekhov:
Some ancient thing that suffers and desires. I’m a novice here too. They swirl through the air John. You will swirl through the air all beak and talons. The light is different here, not for the faint hearted. There will be times you will weep for the quiet of dust.

Synge:
Well I know one thing now.

Chekhov:
And what is that?

Synge:
This is what I should’ve been writing about. Eternity. I didn’t trust it enough. Wasted more paper writing about girleens in shebeens and little mammy’s boys who wouldn’t know one end of a woman from the other. You know I did twelve drafts of a play once. It got worse and worse with each draft.

Chekhov:
What was it about?

Synge:
Aah … nonsense about a playboy who wasn’t. Where I come from no one had sex. Or if they did it was by accident. That’s what I was trying to write about but big corseted mammy Ireland was having none of it. Out on the Island they were different. Savages. The women were savages. They attacked me one day on the pier. I was the only man on the Island. They were high from watching husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, loading cattle onto boats for the fair. And then suddenly the men all gone and me alone with seventy, ninety, a hundred women on the pier, all shrieking at me, ‘Why aren’t you married? Come on show us why you’re not married.’– and puling and tearing at my clothes.

Chekhov:
I love Islands.

Synge:
And the women used to stand in the sea to bath themselves. Women to drive you mad. Not their fault, they’re just washing themselves in the sea, it’s what they’ve always done, but still, from the cliffs, something to behold. And then sometimes the men would take me out with them in the currach. They were different out there on the open sea. I was different. Our mood would accord itself with wonderful fineness to the suggestions of the day and the ancient gaelic we spoke was of such divine simplicity that I would have liked to turn the prow to the west and row with them forever. But all of that is over.

Chekhov:
Yes. All gone.

Synge:
Chekhov you said your name was.

Chekhov:
That’s right.

Synge:
I read a story of yours in some French journal a couple of years back … about a little boy travelling through the Steppe with a priest and his uncle … that was yours.

Chekhov:
You read it?

Synge:
Yes. And what’s more I loved it. The boy … was that you?

Chekhov:
When I was nine or ten my mother decided to go in search of her father’s grave. So she hired horses and a cart and we all piled on. My father stayed at home to our great delight. Me, Sasha, Kolya, Masha, the babies and my mother heading off on an adventure. We rode for a month through the mountains, sleeping under the stars, cooking by campfire, washing in streams.

Synge:
And did you find your grandfather’s grave?

Chekhov:
No we never did I wonder is she still alive … and Olga … Masha … you wouldn’t know would you?

Synge:
I’m sorry.

Chekhov:
Pointless even asking.

Synge:
Who are Olga and Masha?

Chekhov:
Olga was my wife. Masha? Who was Masha? My sister I suppose, but more than that. It would be good to see those three women again. Olga was an actress with the Moscow Arts. Faithless, light headed but a lifeline to me. I hardly saw her. And Masha … poor old Masha … my work horse. It goes without saying they hated one another. And my wise old mother in the middle of them, reading her bible. I never said goodbye. Always in flight. I thought if I kept on the move I’d somehow beat this disease. I never dreamt it would happen so quickly. I’m a doctor. I’ve seen plenty of death but I could never apply it to myself. To be snuffed out like that. That was for others. And to be landed here. Irony of ironies. The sceptic in eternity. I still don’t believe in it but here I am. Here you are. And I’m rattling on about myself and I said I wouldn’t. I have no manners it seems.

Synge:
Your manners are fine.

Chekhov:
Well the champagne is finished. Will I open another bottle or do you feel up to the maelstrom?

Synge:
Couldn’t we just sit here for ever and drink and smoke cigars? If there was a violin around I’d play for you. That’s all I ever wanted to do, play the violin …

Chekhov:
We can send for a violin.

Synge:
Then do. I’ll open another bottle. Let’s have a wake.

Chekhov:
You mean mourn our own passing. I’m all for that. All right, you serenade me and I’ll sing you all the Russian hymns my father taught me.

The blue door slides open. Shakespeare stands there with his son Hamnet.

Shakespeare:
Where’s this poet fiddler? Champagne! Fantastic! Will Shakespeare. This is Hamnet, my son. It is such a pleasure to finally meet the man who wrote
Riders to the Sea
. Better than the Greeks. Now tell me all the news from the old country. Play Hamnet, play little man, I always like music as the lamps go out.

And fade on the scene as Hamnet plays on the violin.

End

Illustration 5:
Synge’s Paris: The playwright’s room in the Hotel Corneille, where he lived in 1896. Reproduced by permission of the Board of Trinity College, Dublin.

The Café des Arts after a poetry reading. A slightly drunken German woman in our company tries to explain the significance of the pattern on the Aran jumper. She strokes the white synthetic stitches on my friend’s chest. He already knows all about the tradition: has read
Riders To The Sea
in French and English but is too polite to tell her. This chill night he’s probably wearing the jumper more for warmth than any nostalgia for Ireland. ‘Each family had their own particular stitch, yes? So if you were drowned and the body was washed up they’d know it was you.’ She pokes him with a determined finger. ‘I could repair this jumper for you. On the Islands they’d make you an exact copy, and it would be yours - unique - nothing much has changed, you know, since Synge was there.’

An Englishman at a party tells me he remembers seeing Beckett walking in the Jardins de Luxembourg. ‘Always impeccably dressed’, he says. ‘I was amazed; these beautiful Italian suits, really expensive, perfectly cut. I don’t know what I expected from reading him, some kind of tramp, I suppose. More Irish.’ Maybe he didn’t mean it like that.

A young Arab man, beautiful, quick-smiled, in an expensive-looking Aran jumper argues with a policeman about his motorbike – tax maybe, or parking. It’s snowing slightly, white flakes on black hair. You’d know him again if his body came washing in on the tide. The policeman gives up, shrugs, ignores the small audience, steps hard on the pedals of his own bike, and away. A lovely girl steps out of Café Ness carrying the trophy leather jacket. She kisses her hero, they laugh, heads thrown back to catch snow in their mouths. Then she gets on behind him and they zoom off, giddy, vivid, the lights of the Eiffel Tower spangling the night sky.

In a small restaurant on Rue du Pot de Fer I look around and notice five people wearing Aran knits. One chunky polo-neck; one handsome, worn, off-white jersey with what looks like another green one underneath; a waistcoat and two cardigans. All at different tables. American, Chinese and French. Maybe they’re expecting really bad floods, maybe they know something I don’t know. If the drunken woman were here she’d have a great time.

I’m thinking about a moment from years ago, a moment that reminds me of the cruel truthfulness at the heart of
Playboy
. It’s in a pub in Leitrim. A publican stares entranced at the wildlife programme on the telly over the bar. A cheetah is chasing a gazelle. ‘Look at it, look at the speed of him, the power.’ Her eyes sparkle with excitement. ‘He’ll catch her yet, he’ll bring her down - look at that.’ The cheetah downs the exhausted prey and mauls it. ‘That’s the stuff! That’s the end of hunger for him.’ She turns away reluctantly to fill a pint, glancing back to see what’s on next. She has the loveliest laugh you might ever hear – gay and light and without a care in the world. It reminds me so much of Pegeen’s line about the hanged dog and the licence and the peeler. The casual cruelty, the jubilant tilt of the head, the lilt of the language.

You’d wonder what became of Pegeen after the Playboy went east. Did she give in and marry Shaneen Keogh? Or become a committed spinster, running the business with a bitter grip when Michael James shambled to the grave? Maybe she went to America, lived to be ninety, came back to Mayo a loud Yank like Gar’s aunt in
Philadelphia Here I Come
. Saw the first man on the moon and JFK. Boasted about her youthful fame in a hothouse Rest Home on the Upper West Side. ‘You never lost it, Peggy, you musta kissed that Blarney Stone.’ Shambling on her zimmer frame. Maybe she drowned on the Titanic.

Or survived.

Sending the almost-final draft of Deirdre (
A Cry From Heaven
) to Jocelyn Clarke at the Abbey. Despite cuts it’s four pages longer. But then there’s the new long speech for Ness at the end and a longer one for Conor. I think it’s stronger – tighter, leaner; I’ve got rid of words, phrases, lines that seemed wrong or hokumy. ‘And the snow begins’ is gone – Olivier, who is to direct, will be delighted …

***

A friend here says to me:
‘It’s a really brave thing to make a new Deirdre, really gutsy.’
‘Or mad,’ I think to myself.
‘And know what?’ she says ‘one thing your Deirdre must have – she must have balls!’

Bitterly cold here: the fountain in the Place de l’Estrapade is frozen solid, shattered stalactites of water caught in mid-air. The cast-metal cherub faces gleam out from behind thin masks of ice, made more beautiful, somehow, by the transparent sheen. Someone said it was minus thirteen degrees last night; not sure I believe that – but you wonder how the homeless survive sleeping out on the street corners around here. I’m reminded of a night in autumn (I think September) 1995 when I noticed a homeless couple asleep in the arches at the side of the Odéon. The Abbey’s great production of
The Well of the
Saints
had just opened and I was leaving the theatre late. I stopped to watch the man and woman wrapped tight in their sleeping bags, rough faces in a kind of alert slumber. There was a crutch on the ground between them. I put money into each sleeping bag and watched them for another while. I was going south the next day and I thought about Martin and Mary Doul and their journey south across ‘a power of deep rivers with floods in them … ’ I was glad to be heading towards the sun instead, and I liked to imagine this pair waking to find the unexpected money, picking up sticks and shuffling off into the dawn. Probably cursing whoever had given them so little.