As she sorted and packed, she was listening to a lot of trad these days, sorrowful ballads of exile that she'd once derided as Celtic schmaltz.
Till sad misfortune came over me,
And caused me to stray from the land,
Far away from me friends and relations,
I followed the black velvet band...
But the people in the songs had been forced to go, by the Queen's soldiers or the Famine or plain old poverty. Síle was choosing to go; shouldn't that make it easier?
She drank strong homemade chai as she looked through her mother's Netturpetti, her rosewood and brass treasure chest that still smelled of sandalwood after all these decades. Shay hadn't asked for any dowry, Síle remembered, but the Pillays had insisted on giving one, in case the Irish might look down on their daughter. What were the six hundred souls of Ireland, Ontario, going to make of Sunita's daughter? How far would a bit of blarney get her?
It occurred to Síle now that it must have been her father who'd divvied up Sunita's possessions between their daughters after her death; had he done it at random, or guessed what each girl would like best? Orla had inherited the pearl, enamel, and stone bracelets, the sandalwood figurines, the traditional metal lamp and bronze hand mirror. Also all Sunita's red, gold, and white woven mundo: Orla had sometimes draped herself in them for a fancy-dress occasion and looked like a maharajah's wife. Síle had been given the Netturpetti and lots of gold jewelry including the delicate Aranjanam she kept strung around her waist, plus a model snake boat and caparisoned elephant (her favourite of all, when she was a child). And the thing that meant the most to her now: the tiny gold leaf that had been strung on the holy nuptial thread, at the Hindu ceremony in Cochin forty-three years ago, before her parents' Catholic wedding, and which still dangled from its thread today, very bright against Síle's hand.
Kneeling beside her lemon yellow filing cabinet to sort papers for storage in her father's attic, she let herself glance through some bundles of old letters from pre-e-mail days. She noticed wryly that she'd used rubber bands to hold each correspondence together, so the effusions of one lover wouldn't get mixed up with the yearnings of another. The paper was yellowing already, like ashy remnants of the hot flesh. How awkwardly she turned the pages, like a nervous researcher who knew the head librarian was watching over her glasses! She didn't recognize some of the handwriting; this felt like spying on strangers. She was trespassing on her own sealed-off past.
She'd kept printouts of some of her replies. You're the most beautiful woman in the world, someone signing herself Síle had written in a distant time and place to Carmel, a not particularly good-looking art student who'd been settled for many years now in Dorsetshire with a veterinarian named Pete; they sent the occasional funny Solstice card. Síle had sworn I'll never get tired of writing to you to a Heathrow-based gate agent called Lorn, and that flurry of correspondence had died out three letters later, before they'd ever got near to reaching consummation. (The last letter never gave any indication of being the last one, she found; you just turned over the page and there was the void.) She was particularly embarrassed by overlaps in time, such as the valentine posted to Síle by one woman on the very date Síle had started writing to another.
The letters made her both sad and elated: to think that she'd been repeatedly in love, and loved, her heart renewing itself as ruthlessly as a snake sloughed off its skin. She skimmed over the hectic paragraphs, now; she didn't want to slow down enough to be caught up in any old spell. The letters were like a riddle because they captured moments but never explained what happened between one letter and the next to make love or rage flare up or fade to nothing. I miss you all day and all night, she read in a typed note to Kathleen in month three, and she felt moved, and slightly sick.
Other phrases jumped out at Síle, and the terrible thing was, she had no recollection of what they meant.
Roll on the 23rd!
Will you ever forget the moment that door opened?
I'll be saving you a y.k.w.
Went to the beach with D, very noli me tangere.
Always your Speranza.
It was like a wartime code. It was beginning to repel her, the fevered opacity of it.
The worst was when she found, at the bottom of the cabinet under several bundles of letters, a neatly folded pair of white underpants, bearing the faintest marks of having been worn. She had no idea whose they were, though there were only five viable candidates. What did the Síle who'd preserved that little relic have in common with the Síle who loved Jude today? Was she one Síle or a million, an image built up from tissue-thin layers of time?
She suddenly thought of the other filing cabinet, the one on her hard drive, stuffed with every e-mail Jude had ever sent her and every one Síle had ever sent back. She considered some terrible future self who might scroll through them (if their technologies were compatible) and sit in judgment, as if on the dead.
December, and Dublin was the colour of charcoal, the leaves churned to mud in the gutters. She'd usually have bought her Christmas tree in Smithfield, but this year she'd be celebrating at 9 Main Street. (She'd tried, once or twice on the phone to Jude, to say Ireland meaning Ontario, but it gave her a vertiginous feeling, and anyway Jude tended to assume that Síle meant the country, not the village.) Síle forced herself to imagine her daily existence after the fifteenth of December. She supposed she'd work on her business model, and e-mail her friends a lot; maybe even learn to cook. There'd be time for everything—so much time, she'd be tripping over it. Stop brooding, Síle. She and Jude talked about it a lot, in a speculative way. It would be a new life for them both, Síle knew, but still she felt alone: Only one of them had to make this journey.
By January, or February at the latest, the purple crocuses would be pushing up under her father's apple tree, and on Deirdre's windowsill. But by then Síle would be locked into the Ontario winter, which wouldn't relent till the heat of April or May. Spring was her favourite season, and she was moving to a part of the world where it lasted about two days.
"We should wake you," commented her father. "I mean, give you a wake."
"I'm not dying," said Síle, too sharply, though she knew that someone with a terminal diagnosis might look at everything the way she did these days, with a hungry, lingering gaze.
"Surely you've heard of an American wake?" asked her father. "In the old days in Roscommon, they'd have it the night before the youngsters were going off on the ship. They'd get the emigrants so fluthered they'd hardly feel the parting."
"Did they call it a wake because they didn't expect to ever see them again?"
"That's right."
"But I'll be back all the time," said Síle, tasting the lie on her tongue.
The Give Away pile was beginning to look like a rubbish bin. How had Síle acquired so much stuff over the years? Tubefuls of posters she didn't even remember buying; moulting feather boas; six pairs of scissors! She drove the shabby stuff down to the Vincent de Paul shop. "For the rest, I'm considering throwing a potlatch," she told Jael as they dashed through Stephen's Green, laden with Christmas shopping, toward Yseult's drama studio.
"Oh no," groaned Jael. "Somehow that always means five troughs of potato salad and no dessert."
"That's a potluck," Síle corrected her. "A potlatch is a Pacific Coast feast where somebody gives away all their possessions."
"Oh well in that case, bags your Alan Ardiff gold pendant."
"My which?"
"You know the one, with all the tinkly dangly bits."
"That's copper, not gold."
"I still maintain you're going to regret this grand gesture," muttered Jael, picking up speed and switching her bags to her other hand. "You must admit, changing job and country and all, for a lover ... let's just say it's not a soundly diversified portfolio."
"Could you sound more middle-aged?" Síle taunted her. "Come on, moving in with someone is always a risk, even if you stay in the same city. You're putting your hea
rt in their hands. But who are you to tell me it can't work out? I remember you panicking at your hen night, taking me off to the loos and bleating Síle, how can I possibly be content with one person for the rest of my life?"
Jael grinned oddly. "Anton was the only Irishman I'd met who was taller than me."
"You play the old cynic," Síle panted, "but actually you're an inspiration to me."
Jael stopped, straightened, put her hand in the small of her back.
"What is it?" Síle walked back to her. "Have you a stitch?"
Jael shook her head. Her shopping bags were on the ground; her hand was over her mouth.
"Come on, we'll be late for Yseult's star turn as Dorothy!"
"You're such a fucking innocent."
Síle's forehead contracted.
Jael spoke despairingly. "That's what I like about you, Síle, you have this sort of transparency, this shine, and it reflects off the rest of us..."
"What are you on about?"
"When you saw me and Caitríona in the café," said Jael, "what did you think we were talking about? Budgets?" she suggested after a second. "Press releases?"
Síle viewed the scene again in her memory, the heads bent together, red and fair. She felt so mortified, she had to turn her face away. "You mean—"
"One person isn't enough." Jael spoke the words as if giving dictation. "Not for a lifetime."
"Oh, Christ."
"Or maybe it's just me." A violent shrug.
"Are you—are you and this Caitríona—does she want you to leave Anton?" Síle asked awkwardly.
Jael half laughed. "She's married too, she's got twins going into secondary school. Nobody's leaving anybody."
Síle should have been glad about this, but her chest hurt.
"It seems I need a little bit extra. Something of my own," said Jael hoarsely. "Without it, I swear I couldn't hold it all together: the house, the husband, the job, the child. Maybe I need a secret."
Síle nodded.
"So, sorry to wreck your illusions, but I couldn't bear you holding me up as some kind of bloody role model." Jael glanced at her watch and snatched up her shopping bags. "Come on, we'd better leg it, they'll be halfway down the Yellow Brick Road."
And the two of them broke into a run.
"Mm, it's true, I'm moving to Canada," she told colleagues and acquaintances, "I'm emigrating." Why was it, Síle wondered, that emigration sounded noble and tragic, immigration grubby and grasping?
Immigrants had everything to prove, with documents or witnesses or even with their bodies: Shay told her an awful story about Indian women, coming to join their fiancés in Britain in the seventies, having to submit to virginity tests at Heathrow. Crossing borders, for so many people in the world, was a perilous business: guns behind, hunger ahead, possessions and relatives scattered. Only the other day she'd been reading about a Palestinian woman in labour, delayed by Israeli guards, who'd given birth in the bushes, and the baby had died. There seemed no limit to what people would endure in order to enter the country of their (perhaps arbitrary) choice: extortion, bureaucratic humiliations, being spat at in the street. One of Orla's Nigerian clients at Ireland of the Welcomes had just had a backstreet abortion because she was terrified to go to England for a legal one while her application for asylum in Ireland was pending. Síle tried not to think of the worst stories, like that tomato truck full of suffocated stowaways.
On the phone, she and Jude had got in the habit of shutting their eyes, pretending they were in bed together, and telling stories. Tonight, Jude had an Inuit one about a girl named Sedna who lived with her father way up north. "She was so handsome that young hunters from far and wide came to ask her to marry them, but she thought she was too good for them. Then one spring when the ice was breaking up, a fulmar flew into the bay and started singing to Sedna."
"What's a fulmar?" asked Síle.
"A seabird. It sang—" Jude put on an eerie voice—" 'Come with me, beautiful Sedna, to the land of birds, where there's no hunger or want. My tent is made of soft skins, and you'll be dressed in feathers; your lamp will always be filled with oil, your pot with meat!'"
"Uh-oh," said Síle. "Shades of Tir-na-nOg. Does she stay three weeks but it turns out to be three hundred years?"
"These aren't the Celts," Jude warned her. "So Sedna climbed on the fulmar's back and it carried her over the sea. When they finally got there she realized she'd been tricked: Her tent was made of tattered fish skin, and all she got to eat was old fish scraps. So she sang, 'Oh father, come in your little boat and take me home.' After a year her father turned up."
"At last. Hurray!"
"He killed her fulmar lover, and he and Sedna set off in his little boat. But the other birds discovered their dead friend and they started weeping and wailing, and they do to this very day."
"Ah," said Síle, "that's a sad one."
"Wait," said Jude. "They chased after the boat, and stirred up a terrible storm with their wings. So Sedna's father threw her overboard."
"He what?"
"But she clung on to the edge, so he took out his knife and cut off her fingers, and she went down. Once the fulmars thought she was drowned, they flew home and the storm died down. Her father pulled Sedna back into the boat—"
"Minus fingers!"
"—but she hated him now," said Jude. "As soon as they landed at their own bay, he lay down to sleep. Sedna called to her dogs, and told them to gnaw off his hands and feet. The father woke up with no hands or feet and started cursing; he cursed himself and his daughter and the dogs and the fulmars, too. And the earth split open and swallowed them all up."
"Jaysus," said Síle, into the Silence. "Celtic myths are cuddly by comparison. All the Wee Folk do is swap their skinny children for ours, or sour the milk." Then she added, "It's about emigration, isn't it?"
Jude laughed.
"The moral is, never fall for a foreigner and let them carry you off to their godforsaken country."
"You think everything's about emigration."
"Everything is! Last week on telly I saw a random selection of old movies—Casablanca, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Wings of Desire, Castaway—and every bloody one of them was about swapping one world for another."
Crossing from Trinity College to Dame Street in a hurry, arms full of rolls of wrapping paper, Síle paused on the traffic island and remembered a similar cold day, twenty-seven years earlier, when she and Niamh Ryan had stood and talked on that spot. Her eyes shut and she was back then, watching white specks land and melt in the orange waves of the girl's hair. Feet gone numb, like Lucy after she walked through the wardrobe into Narnian snow. She and Niamh hadn't been particularly close friends after that day, and Síle had no idea what had become of her since school. Síle had been to the reunions ten years after, then twenty, but Niamh Ryan had never been there. Just as well, really; her hair wouldn't have been the colour Síle remembered. Probably rusty brown now, speckled with gray.
These days she felt as if she were living in a film. Every song she heard on the radio, every random choice her headphones threw at her, formed part of the soundtrack of Síle's Last Weeks in Dublin. As the shuttle took her home from the airport, she examined every grubby shopfront or littered gutter as if it were precious. She was often on the verge of tears, for no reason; she caught herself laughing wildly at some crass joke about three blondes a taxi driver told her. We've all got a past, she'd told Jude scornfully in July, but to cling to the spot where it happened is a bit pathetic. Well, now Síle was clinging like a baby. She walked along old Northside streets, in one memory and out of another, and every corner was a touchstone. Would Dublin miss her at all, she caught herself wondering? To think she'd once claimed to be a citizen of the world, with no particular allegiance to this place! My arbitrary domicile, my grain of sand.
"I never bought that citizen-of-the-world stuff," Jude told her on the phone. "Of course you love Dublin. That's why I can barely believe you'll go through with this."
r /> "It does help that you get it," Síle told her.
"Of course I do. Respect des fonds, remember? Context is all, and you're ripping yourself out of yours. I'll just have to spend the rest of my life trying to make it up to you."
Warmth like a flush all over Síle's body.
Provenance
Emigration may, indeed, generally be
regarded as an act of severe duty,
performed at the expense of personal
enjoyment, and accompanied by the
sacrifice of those local attachments
which stamp the scenes amid which
our childhood grew, in imperishable
characters upon the heart.
—SUSANNA MOODIE
Roughing It in the Bush
December seventh was Síle's last flight, Heathrow to Dublin. The sunrise was particularly lovely. Yellow light slanted in the portholes as in a religious painting, touching heads, shoulders, cheeks. Síle watched the sleepers, the report-readers, the gazers, the chatters. So many strangers she'd shepherded through the skies. They weren't all rude and irascible, she thought now; she'd been forgetting how many of them sat peacefully reading or chatting to their children.
That sense of slow dropping to earth; the ungraceful scrape and rumble as the wheels caught the tarmac, and the engines screamed. Then a lull, a gliding along the runway. A scattering of applause went up. Safe landing.