The Pakistani couple move out because of the noise but the young Pakistani man still has a key and visits the house once a week, opening the accumulation of letters in the hall – casualties, traumas, mental-hospital cases, junkies, psychopaths – reading them and leaving a litter of unopened letters on the hallstand.
One of the Chinese youths tries to sublet his smelly, claustrophobic room. Advertises for a room-mate.
A black youth in a beanie comes, his bumster jeans show boxers with a pattern of leprechauns. China youth rejects him, and the black youth screams outside that he’s been rejected because he’s black.
The Chinese youth does have a Polish youth, whose black hair is so shaven his head looks like ash, staying with him for a while, and who’s hit on the head at three in the morning on the North Circular Road, with a baseball bat.
There is an almost daily noonday concert of someone kicking the hall door and beating it with a chain. We take this in our stride. With Dimitris at work on a building site, Zyna wanders around in a pongee though Hannibal and Lecter are twittering louder than usual. It never occurs to us we should inquire into it. One January evening Dimitris had turned away a shaven-headed man with a prison tattoo on his neck, ‘Down for Life’, who had come looking for me.
A junkie who looks like a mackerel head still attached to a bone body, a body of bones – an alleycat’s delight – who’s fleeing a drug gang in Coolock, and his girlfriend whose hair is a despairing flamingo, arrive, and he immediately starts stealing bicycles, advertising them in Buy and Sell, amputating some of them, bits of bicycles all over the place.
Dimitris and Zyna play host to a youth just out of Mountjoy who showed up in Bermudas patterned with cheetahs and rajs’ palaces and rajs’ leopard-spot umbrellas, his legs golf-ball white, his entire belongings in a green Carroll’s Irish Gifts paper bag, and their flat sounds like a fanatical rookery. They leave their door open at night and noise penetrates your room. They suddenly decide to play Panonski top volume, so you wake in fright as if being strafed by a helicopter attack. Feels as if a Balkan war is going on.
A woman is attacked on the street and her terriers – ankle-biters – hanged.
I leave this savage Golgotha of microwaves that sparkle like a rocket about to take off when turned on, or toasters that kamikaze after two slices of rye bread, of Dickensian hot plates – one of the pair having given up the ghost – for another part of the city.
*
Shortly after I leave an old man who looks as if he’s going to disintegrate or blow away like Traveller’s Joy in autumn, comes to live in the house.
‘I have come here to die.’
A black youth, drug trafficker, moves briefly into my room. He was born and bred in Galway but his parents are from the West Indies. Guards come looking for him and he disappears. The junkie comes down and robs money and a PlayStation from the next occupant of my room, a youth who looks like a frazzled snowdrop.
The postman had placed a book of Jean-León Gérôme reproductions for me in the junkie’s arms one morning, and I was lucky to have got it, that he didn’t advertise it in Buy and Sell. I was lucky to be able to put the colour copy I’d made from it in my new room, Christ entering Jerusalem on a donkey followed by its milk-white foal, greeted by Mary Magdalene dressed as a dancing girl – an almeh – as a woman of Cairo.
The junkie frequently comes down and asks Dimitris if he has his bucket.
The junkies multiply like garbage rodents. The new junkie couple immediately sell the house hoover. He wears a hat all the time. The junkie who was already there hammers a hole in his door so he can shout abuse at the new junkie opposite who does the same thing with his door.
‘I’ll fucking break your jaw. I’ll fucking break your throat.’
‘Fucking handicaps. Fucking spastics.’
The junkie girl who was already there, nine months pregnant, has a knife fight with the new junkie’s girlfriend, who in leggings has a plucked-chicken look, cheeks inflamed – like a rare steak, and the old man downstairs drops dead.
Hannibal bites Lecter on the neck and Lecter drops dead. Then Hannibal dies.
Dimitris decides to put on his silver suit, white shirt, turn himself in at the Croatian Embassy with Zyna in her turquoise dress with matreshka dolls and Russian spring flowers on it, and ask for papers to return to Croatia.
Mosher and Peggy’s Leg give them a good-luck card which shows three children going up in a balloon basket.
Sorry you’re leaving.
You’ll be missed.
It was nice knowing you.
I hope you return someday.
Have a nice flight.
*
One of the main access points to the Royal Canal as it journeys from the Shannon to the Irish Sea is in my mother’s village in County Westmeath.
She wrote to me once about how she returned and visited the Church of the Nativity and knelt and prayed that if she had done anything wrong, that if she had made mistakes she should be forgiven.
*
The only people who offer you a meal in Dublin are a Croatian couple. This is before they leave Ireland. They wanted to make scampi buzara but there were only mussels available so it is mussels buzara.
Collecting date shells from the sea is forbidden in Croatia – they’re not as old as the sixteen-hundred-year-old olive tree on Veli Brijun in the Brijuni Islands – but some are hundreds of years old, and as soon as he gets home he hopes to get a tweezers, a hammer and sub-aqua outfit and dive for them.
When they go the city is lesser, lonelier without them, their stories of concentration camps and massacres and sudden, epic flights.
*
When they leave a golden thread is lost in the city – they’ve taken an Aladdin’s lamp with them – something that on being massaged gives back images, stories, legends.
You follow the story as the raven flies into the teeth of the wind. Croatia Bus and Dublin City buses have the same jazzy pattern, navy and tango orange. They get their upholstery from the same company.
There are deer, goats, ducks in the fox-coloured hills, and there’s an exodus of foxes from the mountains to the lowlands – sign of a bad winter to come.
*
‘We miss rashers, Leo Burdock’s quarter-pounder, fireplaces,’ Zyna announces outside Isadora Duncan’s villa, an annexe of a lambswool-yellow Austrian Empire hotel with marine-blue lettering, a tall palm tree Isadora Duncan loved beside the villa.
‘We come from the Beverly Hills of Croatia,’ Dimitris had told me in Dublin. ‘Untouched during the war.’
‘Isadora Duncan was killed here,’ Dimitris proudly claims, who was handcuffed immediately on his arrival in Croatia and put in Rijeka jail for three months, later in the year getting a further two weeks for having magic mushrooms sent to him from Amsterdam.
‘If you know everyone in prison it’s not so bad.’
‘Isadora Duncan wasn’t killed here,’ I contradict him. ‘She was killed in Nice.’
No use contradicting a Croatian fact. Isadora’s scarf became entangled in the wheels of an automobile here, in this town with its lungomare; its belle-époque hotels all shades of yellow – Easter primrose, buttercup yellow, old gold, rose-yellow, lemon-yellow, Naples yellow; its Mediterranean-Gothic villas of Frankenstein hue; its youths like mahogany lizards, one of whom said to me: ‘There was a were, and refugees came here during the were’; its outbreaks of urban wood – chestnut, laurel, gingko trees, sequoias, holm oak, Japanese camellia, bougainvillea, baby banana trees, Japanese banana trees in which the soundtrack of Elvira Madigan is piped – Vivaldi’s Violin Concerto, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21; its German and Austrian tourists in Tyrolese hats, Alpine hot pants, white loin-stockings, with quarterstaffs; its historical list of visitors – Isadora, Chekhov, Puccini, Mahler, Coco Chanel (who was interrogated by the Free French Purge Committee for her Nazi connections but who, unlike Arletty, who was forbidden to act, was acquitted for lack of evidence).
‘Before the war,
’ says Zyna who’s carrying a shoulder bag with a lion, a rhinoceros and an elephant on it, ‘there were orchestras everywhere. Evergreen music. A river of people at four in the morning. Dancing all over town to orchestras. After the war the streets are empty at eleven.
‘Before the war I was in the Young Communist Pioneers. Love your country. Tito was a Croatian but he hated Croatians.’
‘All the celebrities came to his funeral in Llubjana,’ Dimitris breaks in. He’s wearing a striped T-shirt – blue, white, orange, white, green, white, aquamarine, white.
‘He loved being photographed with celebrities,’ Zyna adds, ‘Elizabeth Taylor, Gina Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren, Queen Elizabeth.’
‘The partisans stole my grandfather’s bicycle during the war,’ Dimitris complains.
‘They threw the gold Virgin which was by the sea, into the sea. She was put there by an aristocratic woman whose son was lost in a ship at sea. The partisans replaced her with a maiden holding a gull. Bikers threw bottles at the gull during the war. The Virgin was found and was put beside the church.’
There are button chrysanthemums under the Virgin now, and a passing woman in a scarlet cardigan with a swallow at each shoulder flutters her fingers at the Virgin.
‘The last witch in Europe was burned here,’ Dimitris proudly announces, pointing to the beginning of a copse.
Never contradict a Croatian fact.
I knew there were executions of women accused of being witches in Switzerland and Prussia at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth.
Darkey Kelly, who ran the Maiden Tower brothel in Copper Alley, Dublin, which had a clientele of Hellfire Club young bloods, was partially hanged and publicly burned alive in Baggot Street, Dublin, January 1761. Believed to have been a witch for two and a half centuries, recently revealed as a serial killer who hid men’s bodies in the vaults of her brothel, possibly the real reason for her terrible end.
‘Never trust a cop or a hooker,’ Dimitris would say.
Witch hunt . . .
The template of prosecutions builds up, clerics who taught the classics. But I suspect, I know there’s a lie. A misinterpretation of history.
‘Tender grapes have a good smell . . . ’
A priest who taught the classics investigated the lonely Aughrim, the battlefield of a thirteen-year-old boy’s body.
*
Flavio – gaunt eaten face like Saint Oliver Plunkett’s, Russian camp pale-rye haircut, ascetic glasses sitting on his face – plays his guitar on the lungomare in front of Isadora’s villa. He was lost in the war for eight years. They declared him dead. His parents died. They took his house, cancelled his social-security number. He doesn’t exist. They looked at records going back to the 1930s. He can’t get a new number.
What is a person who doesn’t exist supposed to do? He knew ten numbers on the accordion, including ‘Lili Marleen’ – ‘The German version,’ Dimitris is quick to say, ‘Lale Andersen’s version was played in Croatia all during the war.’
Then Flavio got a guitar, and he sits in front of Isadora’s villa and plays all day, looking towards the shimmering round-the-year azure beloved of Habsburg empresses and Russian tsars, sipping alcoholic beverages made from crushed walnuts or from honey and herbs.
Isadora Duncan had many homes. There is a statue of her behind Flavio. She dances nude among the shrubs grown from seeds brought back by sailors from their journeys. She dances to Flavio’s tunes, but she knows that the last four tenants were recently evicted from another of her homes, the Carnegie Hall Artist Studios, including a woman poet in remission with cancer and a ninety-eight-year-old woman photographer, she knows that this is the world we live in.
Sky and sea are a torrid thrush’s egg blue at evening, a penumbra of orange on the sea and the mountains. You might expect the historical visitors to this place, Chekhov, Puccini, Mahler, Isadora Duncan, and even Coco Chanel, if she wore the black she looked best in, to come down from the mountains, a much-needed confederation.
*
When I first went to live in County Limerick after returning from England, in a dream, I came out of a pothole in the Warsaw Ghetto after the rising. There were no survivors in my life. But there was a great menorah in the sky.
Zagreb is a hall of mirrors for me; it mirrors exactly past friends.
I walk through Zagreb from early morning to late evening, with its Popeye the Sailor blue trams, by the nineteenth-century paternalistic building, the Balkan stucco, the Stalin functional, the Stalin Gothic, the Stalin Titan, high rises with the words The Exploited written at the bottom of them.
City of curd cheese and circuses. Tea towels with patterns of tiny owls or tiny houses with cloudlets above them and trees beside them cover shopping baskets. A man in a Stetson performs Gospel karaoke. I frequently hear Freddie Mercury ‘I Want to Break Free’.
Federiko Benković, like Dimitris, exiled himself from Croatia but returned, and his Sacrifice of Isaac is tenebrist like the roasting chestnuts which are sold throughout the city – Isaac’s head bent towards his adolescent genitals which are covered by a trail of gauze but we are reassured by edges in the painting that his pubes are growing. While his father points a dagger to kill him, Isaac is curious about his sexuality. His left nipple is bright as a girl’s.
‘Tender grapes have a good smell . . . ’
‘Zagreb was a bunker then,’ Dimitris had told me. The Croatian Army bombed Zagreb themselves. There were 10,000 skinheads in Zagreb during the war. Books by the white supremacist Matthew Broderick were popular.’
He was talking about another place when he told me, ‘There was a man. He was the best neighbour. When the war came he lined thirty of his neighbours up in the corridor and shot them.’
As winter dark intensifies I am outside a barber shop with bay rum in the window in glass containers shaped like cannon guns or culverins – phallic – or in glass containers shaped like Prussian helmets.
On the wall inside a photograph of a 1930s barber in white coat standing beside a line of customers like people waiting to be executed.
In the shop window is a photograph of a modern counterpart, a youth in tank top, with Teddy-boy roach, lip gloss, who doesn’t look unlike Slavko’s fifteen-year-old Albanian friend.
Zapamtite. Remember.
‘I was in war. It’s not a game of chess.’
They fought with hunting guns, bows and arrows, homemade grenades, potato mines, pineapple mines. They have grenades at home as souvenirs of the war.
Dimitris and I have been through the wars, and once you’ve been through the wars you’re marked; Toblerone and Turkish Delight may palliate, but you’ll never forget.
Paper and Ashes
William Wall
I got the death certs for the crows. I call them the crows. When someone dies they all come pecking. I got five. I came out of the office, and it was still daylight like when you come out of the pictures. I’m there blinking and looking around me and everyone is wearing T-shirts. I’m thinking there was a reason why people used to wear black, like you’re obviously a widow and people show respect. I probably look like just a thirty-five-year-old woman with a handbag full of death certs. Except they don’t know about the death certs, that’s the whole point.
So I went down to the river. The sun was shining. My late husband liked water.
So then I thought about his ashes, standing there. I thought, Wouldn’t it be nice?
Would anybody notice? There was just this old tramp asleep on a bench with a bottle in a brown paper bag. Even if he saw. I looked down over the wall, and the tide was out, and I could just see a shopping trolley in the mud. That gave me a laugh. Then I started to think wouldn’t it be even better if I left the urn in a supermarket trolley. Someone would find it and report it. Would the person who lost the human ashes please come to the information desk. Better again if I put him on a shelf. In the pickles section. Or in the fridge with the soups. If I could get one of those stickers. ??
?Reduced to Clear’. I remember my late mother saying once, That man of yours knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Everybody says that about accountants.
So that’s what I was thinking when someone hit me right between the shoulder blades. I don’t remember falling out onto the road, but I remember the sound of a car passing right near me. I remember thinking, That one missed me. Then someone was helping me up. It was the tramp.
My death certs, I said.
No fear of that missus, the tramp said.
No, I said, they were in my handbag.
The tramp pointed up the street, and I saw the boy who hit me. He was running and throwing things. The things were from my handbag. Bits of paper. Keys. My mobile went over the wall into the river. Some of the death certs were going up on the wind. I could see one drifting over the wall. I started to run but my back and shoulders hurt. I had to stop. All of a sudden I had a bad headache. The tramp started to run too, and he got about three feet ahead of me. Now he was leaning on his knees wheezing.
We walked. We did not say anything to each other. I was thinking, Why is this tramp walking with me? We’re like an old couple. When we reached the place where my bits started I found my car keys.
I saw the certs going upriver. The tide was coming in. They were just floating. Now how am I going to prove he’s dead?
The tramp looked at me.
It’s just paper isn’t it? he said.
My late husband, I said.
I liked saying late.
I’m sorry for your trouble missus, the tramp said. I found myself shaking his hand. I never touched a tramp before. I let go as soon as he let me.
My credit cards, I said.
My late husband would have thought about the cards first, then the phone. He wouldn’t have bothered about the certs. All I had to do was go back into the registry and queue again and they’d give me out a hundred if I wanted them. It was stupid.
Suddenly I thought, I have only this old man. Even at the funeral they were all laughing behind my back. Those that aren’t owed money.