3: Aurora

Then, suddenly, he thought of Siobhan, thought he should go up and see her. Whether this was because he genuinely felt for her, or because his head was now so full of ideas that he would surely wake up the next morning, hold his hands and pray for rain, is something I’ll leave you to decide. In any event, he embraced Tom, an act that was more important to himself than to his embracee, who had be gratified enough by the rare chance to wax lyrical as he had just done, and told him he was going up to see the daughter of a truly amazing man. Tom blushed a little as he was often wont to do, then turned around to stoke the fire to keep it going for another few minutes. Before Schillerz went up to see Siobhan, There was one thing still prickling his curiousity that he needed resolved. What are those big brown things that you burn?” “This is called turf. It’s like coal, but in an earlier stage of decomposition.” “And you mine it here?” “Oh no, it’s not buried deep enough to need to be mined. We just dig it straight out of the ground, then let all the water soak out of it, which takes a few months, then when it’s dry enough we burn it.” At this point the story of the boy who cried wolf came into both of their heads. But when Tom continued: “It’s this god-awful war that forces us back into the ground, as it were. Like yourselves and your increasing dependence on potatoes and other root crops”, Schillerz suspected that he might be serious after all. He left the room, feeling even dizzier, said “‘night”, Tom turned his head around, uttered a casual, affable, “and you”, unaware that his face was illuminated with an iridescent glow from the embers he breathed new life into. Schillerz rushed up the stairs, whether out of eagerness to see Siobhan, from giddy cerebral inspiration, or from some atavistic desire for his corporeality to reeasert itself against his newly inspired intellect. He pushed open the door of Siobhan’s bedroom without thinking to knock, but found it empty. Then, having recovered a measure of patience, he went slowly into his own room, where he found Siobhan lying down on the bed, plainly not as eager ro see him as he was to see her. Sensing something amiss, he asked, “Is there something the matter?” “No”, she said, in a voice stifled by a lugubrious apathy, “Why should there be?” “Well, there’s no reason I ask, it’s just that you don’t seem as vivacious as...” “As you are now?” she finished off the sentence he was unable to complete with a hint of sarcasm that stung Schillerz severly, then went on, “Well I’m sorry I can’t be the other half of your platonic wholeness, Hermes. I’m an indepenent entity with agency off my own.” Seeing that he was a little taken aback by this remark, She added “You see, I’ve read a few books as well. I may not be the great intellect that my father is, and I may never be good enough for him, but Lord Jesus, it’s not like I haven’t tried.” “I’m sorry”, responded Schillerz, sounding chastened in the way only a man can be by a woman. “It’s just that your father is such a brilliant man, he’s amde me think about so many different things in a whole new way.” “Well Hermes”, she responded, unable to supress a slight smile at the mention of his new sobriquet this time, “I think I know what sort of man my father is at least as well as you do. And frankly, I’ve had it up to here”, pointing to her forehead” with hearing what a brilliant man he is.” “Really?” asked Schillerz, puzzled, as he had been under the impression that Tom had lived in splendid rural isolation, “Who have you heard this from?” “Oh, every month or so he has a little soiree where he brings down writers, poets, journalists from The Irish Times and Dublin Opinion and they talk about aesthetics, politics, the same sort of stuff he’s been wowing you with, more than likely. The younger ones always look the most impressed, but the older ones will sit there with there looks of world-weary experience and pretend they’ve heard it all before. But every time, every fucking time one of them will take me to one side and say `You are so lucky to have such an amazing man for a father’ It’s just a matter of time before I say, well you come and live here, cook and clean for him, do all his shopping if you think he’s so fucking great. You put up with all his condesencion, his impossibly high standards and see how you fucking like it. It’ll probably never happen, of course. I’m too inhibited.” Just for a second, she wished she smoked as this would have been an optimum moment to take a long, fellatial drag of a cigarette. After this tirade Schillerz felt the way a gifted farmer’s son does on his first weekend back from the university. He felt compelled to defend his new paedagoue with all the passion and intellectual resources at his disposal, however. “How can you talk of him with such contempt? He has done so much for you, given you a beautiful home in a wonderful setting, with all these books and music, all this wonderful food? Have you any idea how lucky you are?” “Well”, she said contemplatively, “Try looking at it through the other side of the telescope. I live here in the middle of the country, very few locals come near us because they think we are dangerous eccentrics, so I get very little contact with the outside world. So I just sit around doing domestic chores for me da all day, reading the odd book or listening to music if he isn’t using the record player, and having to listen to his endless stories about his travels. It’s not the greatest life for a twenty-three year old girl to be leading, now is it?” Now so chastened it might appear that he had found his virginity again, he said, in the most contrite tone he could affect, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been so selfish.” Then he paused a while and said, “So you must be glad that I arrived here a few days ago, then?” At this remark her eyes lit up and she stretched her arms out to embace him. He lay down gently next to her and looked silently into her eyes for a short while. Then she punctured the silence with: “I’ve been wondering what force it was brought you here. There’s so much evidence to suggest the world is completely aleatory, but when something like this happens you have to wonder if there isn’t someone out there looking after you. D’you know, for a couple of minutes after I found out who you were, I was really distressed, but now I don’t even care. I know what sort of person you are deep down.” He couldn’t think of any words to express how he felt about her right now that had the same clarity as a warm, tight embrace and a wet, sloppy kiss, so that was the option he went for. So began another epic night of ebullient concupiscence that I won’t bore you by recounting the details of. When it was over, he lay back for a while to enjoy the moment of post-coital ecstasy and then went back into an embrace with her. They fell asleep that way, not saying anything, finding comfort in the world outside the intellect. He dreamt a dream of home, one with little symbolic resonance to our story, but then woke up, almost entirely naked, with Siobhan’s arms locked around him. Suddenly he felt the pinch of an Irish summer night in a big old house in the era before central heating was invented. He tried to get out from her rhadamanthine embrace without opening her eyelids to reveal her lethargic eyes. After struggling for a few seconds, he suddenly realised this was the first time he had ever tried to do this. Would it be the first of many, or would love fade into mere familiarity and these embraces become fewer and further between? He didn’t ponder on this too long, as his priority was to get out from this embrace and find some clothes. He eventually got out of it, not by separating her arms, but by slithering out oleaginously, taking particular care not to cause any disturbance when his head passed the area between Siobhan’s legs. He then fumbled around for his underwear, his standard-issue wehrmact vest and underpants, then felt them to see which was the front and back, then put them on and snuck surreptitiously back under the covers. This time, peace did not come dropping slow, the blind arbiter between high and low did not settle gently on our hero, for there were things going on in his head that his subconscious had obviously decided it couldn’t come to grips with. Yet it was not Tom’s lenghty discourse that troubled him the most, but one brief, almost throwaway remark by Siobhan. You have to wonder if there isn’t someone out there looking after you. What made her say this? Was it a rebellion against the secularity with which she had been brought up, as he, in his own mind had been reacting against the conservatism of his parents by embracing Nazism? Or was there something more fundamental going on, a desire for there to be something beyond what there was now, something that would still be there when youth and beauty had faded? Yet how could he reconcile this longing with the desire to be a free agent intellectually? Not having read a great deal of philosophy, he thought about these things as if he was the first person to whom these thoughts had occured. Frustratingly, he often lacked the verbal apparatus to think coherently about these things, although this led him to the revelation, for himself at least, that these thoughts might be a by-product of the ability to verbalise. When did we first start to realise what a mixed blessing our consciousness was? Was it with Freud, with the Romantics, with Descartes, Shakepeare, with Sophocles, or when we first started to paint bulls on the side of our caves? I use the term `we’ with some reluctance as I’d struggle to paint a bull on the side of a cave with some blood myself. Yet if they knew what they were getting themselves into, those pilose troglodytes of Altimara and Ribadesella, would they have decided that maybe the mininalist interior would hipper this epoch? It was too late for Schillerz, or perhaps too early, as the drugs that took the sharp, jagged edges from the raging inferno between our ears without causing any short-term side effects had to wait another generation to be patented. So he tossed and turned, stopping only occasionally to admire the elegant, voluptous form of the woman lying next to him, run his fingers through her thick curls, listen to the soft respitory noises she made, wondering what pleasant dreams she might have if he succumbed to the temptation to kiss her neck. It was during one such reverie that he noticed her respirations become more intense, her arms start to flail, her heavy eyelids open, her head shake, and her recognition that she had woken up occur. Schillerz reflected on how he had never seen a woman wake up before, and how, in it’s own way, this was more intimate than losing his virginity. When she got herself together, she turned to him and asked, “Have you been up long?” “Actually, I only slept for a few hours. I’ve got a lot on my mind.” “Oh, thinking about the things me da was tellin’ yeh last night, were yeh?” “Well, yes, in part. About some of the things you were saying as well.” “Really?” she asked, sounding a little flattered. “What sort of things?” “Oh, you know the stuff about someone looking out for you?” She gave a nod of recognition, but seemed unwilling to expostulate on the subject, and paused for a minute before asking, “I’ve got to go and milk the cow. Is there anything you want?” He thought of asking for a cup of tea, but hadn’t given up on the thought of getting some shut-eye, so he just shook his head. Then the look that comes on people’s faces when they sudenly remember somthing usurped Siobhan’s visage, and she said, listen, today’s Friday, the day I usually go into town to get some groceries. You need some new clothes, and maybe we can go to see a fil-um as well.” A look of apprehension on Schillerz’ face was recognised by Siobhan. She responded with a puzzled look, the sort that subtly, tacitly solicits explanation. “Well, you see, the police in town know that a German spy is in the area, and they would instantly suspect me.” She just smiled and held his hand, laughed a little, and said, “Hermes, if the guards knew that, they’d have been here days ago, ransacking the place. They hate me da ‘cause they know what a free spirit he is, and they suspect he does drugs as well. They just need the slightest excuse to come and bully him.” Feeling only slightly reassured, he told her: “But when I was in that IRA cell there was a raid.” Then he reflected ironically, “That’s how I ended up here, actually.” Siobhan laughed uproariously at this. “Wait ‘till you tell me da that. He’ll get a great laugh out of hearing that ‘twas the guards that brought you here.” Then she became more serious and reassured him, “The guards have to be seen to be tough on paramilitaries, as the goverment wants to stay on the right side of the American and British legations. But really, they couldn’t give a damn. Anyway, none of them are great intellects, so they probably won’t even recognise your face. And even if they do know there’s a suspected nazi spy around, they won’t have informed the community at large because of the censorship policy. So you have nothing to worry about.” He reflected that maybe he could use a few new clothes, but wondered what a fil-um was. She laughed and said, in ever so patronising a tone, “You Know a fil-um that y’do be seeing in a picture-house. Don’t you have those in Germany?” An ironic question, I grant you, but bear in mind they didn’t have media studies in school back then. Schillerz’ response was to say “Ah ja, ein kinospielfilm”, to which Siobhan responded with the predictable disdain of the monoglot. Schillerz told her that he had indeed seen many movies, and they were delighted to find out that they had seen many in common, so much so that if they weren’t yet living in a global village, at least it was a global townland. They talked for a while before she suddenly realised that she had meant to get up and feed the cows. She jumped out of bed, slithered into her dress and slipped into her shoes, her round, curvaceous hips thrusting themslves at Schillerz as she did so. On her way out the door, she asked if there was anything he wanted. Less certain that he would get back to sleep, he asked her for a cup of tea. She blew him a kiss as if to acknowledge compliance with his wishes. The next thing he knew he was lying in bed with a cup of cold, coagulating tea on the bedside table. He dipped his finger in it, felt a beverage so lapidously cold that it must have been there for a few hours. When he took his finger out again, he saw that it was coated in a slimy film of unpasteurised milk residue. He wiped it disdainfully on the bed, confident that Siobhan, though a princess in her own way, would never notice if there was a pea under her matrass. So, he’d slept for another few hours. Perhaps the raging beast within him was less of a wild tiger and more of an angry puppy that just needed a little affection. He decided to get up, struggled into his clothes, went downstairs, into the kitchen, from where the muffled sound of the wireless was the only evidence of life. When he got there, Siobhan was spreading some home-made blackberry jam on some some thickly buttered soda-bread. “So, Sleeping Beauty has decided to join the land of the living”, she averred, without irony. Tom looked from behind his Irish Times and added, “Rip van Hermes.” Schillerz smiled indulgently then sat down, while Siobhan, as if by a combination of telepathy and Pavlovianism, started to get his breakfast lately. Tom closed his paper and wrapped it up in the peremptory way you do when you want to start a conversation. “So, Siobhan tells me you’re scared to go to Ballanasaoirse, Hermes. A little ironic, in view of what the name means.” “I didn’t know it meant anything”, Schillerz admitted, contritely. “It means `town of freedom’. Or Freiheidstadt, if you will.” “Sprechen see Deutsch?”, asked Schillerz, enthusistically. “Eine Kleine”, was Tom’s modest response, uttered while shaking his hand around it’s index finger axis. Meanwhile, Siobhan, her head turned away, breathed in deeply. “I’ve got something you may like to look at upstairs”, said schillerz, in a tone that started off with enthusiasm and slid rapidly into apprehension. Tom suspected what it might be, but thought he would let himself be surprised. He gave Schillerz a nod of assent, unfolded his newspaper, while Siobhan turned around as if to bid him Godspeed. He returned a few minutes later with the manual the abwehr had issued him with before he landed in Ireland. “I don’t know how much of this you could understand, if there’s anything you don’t understand just ask me”, he said, handing the manual to Tom, sounding slightly gratified that there may be some things he understood that Tom didn’t. However, as he sat down to eat breakfast, he noticed first chortles, then loud laughter coming from Tom’s chest. It appeared he could speak German fluently. “So, we’re loud, pugnacious, argumentative, dirty peasants. I have to give your superiors credit for giving it to us up front, instead of developing a whole culture of simian caricatures like some nations we could mention.” Schillerz had enough of a grasp of Irish history by now not to need to ask which nations. Tom, who had been fairly engrossed in reading the manual, took a look at the paper on his knee, and said to Schillerz, “Oh, I’m sorry, did you want a look at this?” Schillerz nodded and accepted the paper. He asked how the paper was acquired, since he had never noticed anyone walk into town.” “Sure don’t the leprechauns bring it”, said Tom, in an exaggeratedly Irish accent. “Leprechauns?”, asked schillerz, looking a bit perplexed. Tom made a show of flicking through the manual in his hand, and said, “Oh, I see they’re not mentioned here. Well, they’re little small men who dress all in green, wear little hats, and give good luck to people who’ve led virtuous lives, such as ourselves. Only in Ireland, though.” There was a silent interim while Tom and Siobhan wathched Schillerz’ face contort into bewilderment, then, almost simultaneously, they both burst into laughter. Though, even in the pre-politically correct era, neither of them would have said so, it was sometimes fun to have a German round the house. “A paper boy from a newsagent in town delivers it. We have to pay him a bit more, but he deserves it. Sure yeh never no what dangers might befall him coming to a place of ill-repute like this.” This time Schillerz recognised the sarcasm, and laughed politely. Then he started to read read the paper. After reading a few articles, he sought some contextualisation. And was there a better man to give it than the man sitting across from him? “So”, he asked, looking inquisitive like a particularly enthusiastic fresher, “I think I know who this De Valera is, but who is this Dillon?” “He’s one of the leaders of the opposition”, said Tom, somewhat langourously, half-anticipating what the next question might be. “And he leads a party with a completely different ideology, right?” Tom smirked inwawrdly, coming as close to being smug as it was possible for a man of his intellect to come, at the accuracy of his prognostications. “I wish, that’s the way democracy is supposed to work, with a vibrant civil society and a free press challenging every issue.” He gave a look of resignation that ensured Schillerz that this was not the case in this country at this time, then added, “Unfortunately, ideology has always taken a back seat to race and religion in this country. This Dillon, he’s a member of Fine Gael, the tribe of gaels, though they’re no more Gaels than the National Socialists are Marxists. Their fondest wish is for this country to be as much like Great Britain as possible. That’s why Dillon wants us to get invoved in this war, though it would mean most of our cities being bombed to the ground.” He reflected a little and said, much as I loathe and despise De Valera, I’m sometimes able to take cold comfort in the idea that the other crowd are worse. That’s what passes for democracy here, I suppose.” “What makes you say that...” he hesitated trying to pronounce the name of Ireland’s loyal opposition, and finally settled for “Dillon’s party are worse?” “Well, they were in power for ten years, after the Anglo-Irish war, they had an opportunity to do so much, make so many changes, bring in so many innovations. Instead they supported the interests of big landowners and did everything in their power to stay on the right side of the British.” Schillerz one again looked bemused. “I don’t understand this. You have a revolution to get rid of the English and for the first ten years after you have a government that tries to imitate them? How can this be?” “I think I already said something about this, when I still thought you were from Dublin.” “Ah yes, I remember now, I claimed that I came from a family that lost all it’s money in the revolution.” “Ah, yes, it’s coming back to me as well. Isn’t it funny how you often forget the very first conversation you have with people, the one where you try to establish who they are, where they come from. I’ve never really figured that one out, though I don’t read as much psychology as I should.” He gave a melancholy look, immanent with the recognition that there were things about the human psyche that may never be known in his lifetime. Then he shook himself out of it and said, “as I recall, I tried to draw one of my little analogies between the Night of the Long Knives and the betrayal of the people that fought for Irish freedom. Of course it’s a lot more complicated than that, as there’s a lot of people here who’d rather be misgoverned from Dublin than from London. But I still think the form of government we have here now is a betrayal of what people fought for. And they’re offered no real alternative, as the labour movement never took off here, for various reasons.” Schillerz gave a look that seemed to solicit more information. Sensing this, tom went on: “Well, there’s very little of an urban working class here, as there’s only one big city, and then the Labour Party here shot itself in the foot by not standing in the 1918 election, thinking t’would be better to get the independence issue settled. Of course, there’s many who believe your country’s leadership got entangled in the last war to stop the march of the SPD. I don’t suppose you know the story about Lenin, reading that the SPD had voted for war credits, and is supposed to have said, “Ah, sure don’t worry, ‘tis just a forgery. And then there was Jean Jaures, who thougth the socialist had no country, bless him. So maybe this country isn’t that different from the rest of Europe after all.” He grimaced at what a horrible thought this was. Schillerz, meanwhile became distraught at Tom’s putative nihilism. “You don’t think democracy works, you don’t think fascism works, what do you believe in?” “As someone who’s studied Buddhism and Taoism a lot, I’m a believer in the middle way. I think people want a certain level of social equity and security, but also the freedom to be whatever they want to be, and the rewards for achievement.” He paused, stroked his beard, and said ironically, “How you achieve this utopia is another matter. I think the first step is getting rid of the consumption of animal products. As long as we have this atavistic link to our primordial ancestors, we’re going to be rapacious beasts.” Schillerz asked if this was why they only ate vegetarian food. Tom nodded peremptorily, eager not to lose his train of thought. “Yes. I’m not alone in blaming all the ills of the modern world on meat. I think Tolstoy said something like man will be at war with himself as long as he eats the flesh of other animals. It’s a difficult argument for an intellectual to remain unpersuaded by. Y’know, Henry Ford based his system of mass production on Chicago slughterhouses. At much the same time, the US started herding Native Americans into reservations, the British started slaughtering Boers in concentration camps. I hear rumours that similar things happen with Jews in Germany today.” “And with unmarried mothers in Ireland”, interrupted Schillerz, whether out of some residual patriotism or a desire to balance the argument he knew not. In any case, Tom, the person who first informed him of the Magdalen Laundries and industrial schools was not going to contradict him. He merely nodded and went on with his spiel. “I’ve been to a vegetarian society, in India. It’s no utopia, and it won’t be after they get independence either. But there’s so little violence, the people are so gentle, they live in such harmony with the natural world. We could learn so much from them, if we could put our imperialistic superiority complex aside. “Of course religion is also a problem there, though you’d never imagine it from reading the Gita or the Upanishads. The caste system...” he had no words fit to describe this, merely shuddered at the thought. Assuming Schillerz was at least vaguely acquainted with this concept, he went on: “Organised religion served a function early on in the history of civilisation, when it promoted the social order needed to build towns and cities. But now it’s an albatross around our necks. For example, the first book of Genesis tells us that God gave us dominion over the universe. This was a useful when we were developing agriculture, but it could eventually lead us to exploit the world’s resources until we perish. Actually, the ancient Romans would have done that if the “barbarians” hadn’t overcome them. La Mancha and parts of North Africa were once fertile pasture before they were chronically overfarmed. So, if this war doesn’t end civilisation as we know it, either we have to change the way we feed ourselves fundamentally, or some external factor will have to destabilise us.” Schillerz, though he had realised how bogus the notion of Aryan supremacy was, was unable to see where this threat could come from, and Tom, realising this, started to fill him in. “Well, some hisorians think that the reason Europeans conquered the rest of the world was that they were all competing against each other. Unfortunately this meant they were often vulnerable to attacks from Turks, although they never got past Vienna. I think this may continue after this war is over, with the new superpowers, America and Russia supporting different sides in conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and elsewhere, in what really may be the final war of the teutons against the slavs. It may turn out to be both of their downfall.” Who else but Tom, or maybe Leopold Bloom, could get from James Dillon to this totalising theory of history, as if he had a whole world wide web inside his head. While this discourse was going on, Siobhan, rather than quietly, stoically listening, or politely excusing herself, elected to watch the look on Schillerz’ face as he listened to Tom. It was a curious combination of high-browed intellectual and eager schoolchild that she could not resist, though she was in the stage of the relationship where her partner could do no wrong. Tom, for his part, decided it was time to wind up this particular argument, the way people soak up the last bit of sauce on the plate with French bread. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much, though. It’ll take centuries for western civilisation to crumble, and if the experience of the Roman Empire is repeated, these will be the most decadent, lustful years in it’s history. Read Decline and Fall if you don’t believe me. Though...” he adopted a contrite look, Schillerz looked at him inquisitively, Siobhan smiled ambiguously, he admitted, “I’ve never actually read Gibbon from start to finish myself.” Relieved to see this chink in Tom’s intellectual armour, he thought this might be a good time to go and finish Candide, which found itself cast in the rare role of light relief. Tom also wanted to go and read, while Siobhan, for her part, had some work to do round the house. She told Tom however, that they would be going into town later, to which request he gave his silent, tacit assent, his paternal net extending to embrace the young man he seemed to be moulding in his image. Strangely, though Schillerz was conscious of this, it didn’t seem to bother him, at this particular time he was not giving much consideration to the long-term future. He didn’t realise how obsessed with him Siobhan was becoming, indeed he had little idea how obsessive they could be in general, how much of a need they have for fidelity. He was still finding his way around the strange, foreign land called gender relations, and was without any guidebook, or just had a really old one that was written by someone who’d only been there for a week or two. So when he left the room to go and read, failing, perhaps because of some vestigial misogyny to ask Siobhan if she needed any help, he failed to recognise the glance she gave him for what it was. Yet even if he doesn’t reciprocate her feelings for him, it may not matter, as she is the only woman he can trust, and he is in limbo as to what his future plans are. So she is his for the meantime at least. Is she cynical enough to realise this, or does she rationalise, or is she in denial altogether? I have to make a confession of my own, hot on the heels of Tom’s Gibbon admission: I don’t really know. I also find women perplexing, enigmatic creatures, which is why I’ve been able to tell you so little about what’s going on in her head. D’you know, there are times when I’d give up all my hip, post-modern distance for the confidence of a Balzac or a Jane Austen to screw her head open and take a look inside. Yet like a guy hovering round a pretty girl and never quite plucking up the courage to ask her to dance, I just float around her in a haze of epistemological miasma. Anyway, Schillerz and Tom both leave the kitchen. Schillerz asks Tom if he’s going to read outside, as it seems like a nice day out. He says no, he thinks being outdoors exacerbates his pains. Schillerz gives this little thought at the time, infers from the look on Tom’s face that he won’t mind if Schillerz reads outside. He goes out into the garden, gets a deep lungful of the fresh country air, then sits down to read in the same place he was yesterday. There’s something deeply comforting about this. He’s gotten to the part where Candide gets to El Dorado, and finds gold all over the ground, and wonders why the natives aren’t all really rich. Schillerz thinks of the stories he’s heard about people of the Weimar era having to bring a wheelbarrow load of cash to the shop just to buy a loaf of bread and papered their walls with money because it was cheaper than wallpaper. He reflects on how arbitrary money is, and how values vary from place to place. Then he hears the door opening and he turns round to see Siobhan bring him some green tea. “I know you don’t like this stuff but you should drink it anyway. It’s good for you, full of antioxidants.” Without replying he blows on it, takes a tentative sip. “I’ve got to go and take care of the animals, and then weed the vegetable beds. Then we can go into town, if that’s okay with you.” Having already been convinced that it was safe, he nodded assent. Siobhan went to go and do her chores, but Schillerz, whose train of thought had been interrupted, started thinking about the way tom was treating him. Why was he being so generous to him? Surely he was not grooming him as a son-in-law. The idea that he had freed himself, intellectually from one form of tyranny to become enmeshed in another was a bit disconcerting. But then was it really tyranny, to have to spend a whole lifetime with such a goddess. Perhaps he was a male like any other, frightened of commitment, or maybe there was something deeper going on. Had Tom’s exegesis of the Irish state been what struck terror into his heart? After thinking about this for a while, he reflected on the irony that a few days ago he was hoping to help bring about a thousand-year Reich but now he was scared of having to make a descision affecting the remaining fifty or so years of his own life. Then he thought of how insulated he had become in the short few days he had been in this rural demi-paradise, far from the banners and the yellow stars, the jackboots and the armbands. Was there one soldier on the eastern front who would not take the prospect of a lifetime with this woman if it was offered to them? How quickly the most arbitrary events can change our whole Weltanschaaung. After pondering these things for a while, he started to read the page of Candide that he had been staring blankly at for the last while. I like “while”. Nice and ambiguous, polymorphous even, malleable, nebulous. Gives me, and you, some room to move around in, unlike in a telemarketing job or a Balzac novel, or a movie for that matter. I guess that’s why I’m a writer and not an Time-and-Motion consultant. Actually there’s a whole set of reasons why i’m not a time-and-motion consultant, but you probably don’t want to know what they are. Just the sort of reasons you’d imagine. Anyway, Schillerz gets back to reading the book, but the perspicacity that he was bringing to bear on his interpretation had dissipated into a cloud of angst, hypercognition brought about by the green tea, and perhaps a touch of hangover from last night’s fraught introduction to the dubious plesures of narcosis. Yet though he was not really assimilated the book, he would rather be reading it than just sitting there. Vestigial work ehtic from a man whose nation had recently smelted the words Arbeit macht frei into the consciousness of the world, no doubt. It would take more than one hoke of a joint to turn him into a dolce far niente Latin. But then he wasn’t long coming round to the anti-nazi point of view, was he? Perhaps when he gets round to reading the Tao another major tergiversation will come about. So, after an hour or so of that uneasy combination of hazy, lethargic reading and furious neurosis, he heard the door opening again, this time Siobhan was wearing a long jacket and had a handbag draped over her shoulder, and a silk scarf caressing her neck. Most noticeably, she had a blue headscarf tied around her head, and Schillerz might have been mistaken about this, but she might have been wearing just a hint of lipstick. Perhaps that was the effect she was going for, doing enough to irritate her moral betters in town without appearing to draw attention to herself. “So, are we ready to hit the road?” I’m unaware of whether there’s an exact German equivilant in German for this phrase so I can’t tell you what his reaction was on a semantic level. He was certainly eager to go into to town, though his fears of apprehension had not completely dissapeared. “I see you’ve gotten all dressed up. You didn’t really need to. I like you just the way you are.” She blushed a little, said, “well, sometimes it’s nice to dress up. Anyway, to get into the best seats in the cinema, we need to look our best.” Schillerz, who had been way too preoccupied to give that any thought, started to scratch his stubble, and ask, “Should I tidy up a little bit as well?” She looked peremptorily at her watch, then at him, and said, well, maybe you should. but we’d better make it snappy.” She beckoned Schillerz inside with a nudge of her head. Schillerz followed her inside, watched her peek her head in the door and ask Tom was it alright for Schillerz to borrow any of his clothes. He didn’t hear the response, but he sensed that it was one of assent. Siobhan, revealing yet another facet of her complex persona, clicked her fingers, and said, “right, up to the bathroom, get your shirt off. I’ll be up a minute.” A little taken aback by this tone, he nonetheless obeyed. She arrived with the sort of punctuality of which Schillerz’ compatriots would be proud, bearing a razor, a shaving brush, a cup of hot water and a towel. “Wait a minute, are you planning to shave me?”, he asked nervously. “Relax, I do it to me da all the time, ‘specially when he gets those pains of his. Now, put your face up against the mirror.” Reluctantly, he agreed. He watched the reflection of the towel being placed around his neck, the shaving cream being applied to his face, but he was to nervous, and she too hurried, to appreciate the eroticism of this act. She placed the razor at the base of his neck, and she glided it gently towards his jaw. His eyes were closed when this was going on, but he opened them when this first stroke was over, and, to his relief, saw Siobhan wiping shaving cream, but no blood, from the razor. Then, as she repeated the same movement on the other side of his face, she said, “Da was tellin’ me that, in India, barbers will add all sorts of moisturisers and scents and stuff, and still only charge a couple of farthings. He always meant to ask them where he could get them, but never got round to it.” Whether she said this to allay Schillerz nerves or her own, it was hard to tell. In any case, Schillerz, though growing more confident of her abilty to shave him without killing him, chose to acknowledge this statement with a mere raising of his eyebrows, a gesture that gently amused siobhan. She finished off shaving him, noticing his discomfort receding gradually, the way a crumpled piece of paper will gradually unfurl, but never return to it’s original shape. She wiped the remaining cream off his face, dried it off, , examined his neck for any cuts or bruises that she might have caused, and then gave herself an inward look of satisfaction, the sort of one the Lord would have given himself on one of the first six days of creation when there were no other conscious beings to appreciate his genius. She then grabbed a bottle of after shave from the mantle piece below the mirror and allowed some to drip onto her open palm. Schillerz, who was now comfortable enough to start making frivolous conversation again, said, “I thought it would be hard to get this stuff right now.” As she started to splash it on his neck, he could see her puzzled look in the mirror, so he added, “There is a war on, so I thought people would get alcohol from any source they could.” There was a look of recognition on her face, what would be called an anagnorisis if this was a Greek tragedy and the end was looming. “Ah well, people here are always able to make alcohol for themselves. Sure there’s a fella in town who still makes poteen, like his father and his father before him. “C’mon”, she said then saw him getting ready to put his shirt back on, and said, “No, no, sure didn’t yeh hear me askin’ me da if we could use his clothes”, then beckoned him in hte direction of her father’s room. He looked as contrite as politeness demanded, then followed her. Tom’s room was as amiably ramshackle as Schillerz might have expected. It seemed he was one of those people who relish clutter, but he could sense, in his brief sojourn there, an underlying order, a sort of solipsistic feng shui that reflected the cross-currents of Tom’s mercurial mind. Statues and tapestries from diverse cultures placed in positios that seemed arbitrary to him, clothes scattered on the floor, books lying half open, bed unmade. None of these things diverted siobhan from her primary purpose, which was to transform Schillerz, Pygmalion-like, into a presentable cinema companion. She bent down into his cupboard, giving Schillerz the kind of view of her taut buttocks that men never get tired of seeing, promping a potentially embarrasing tumescence on the part of Schillerz, who was dresssed only in his underwear. Fortunately for him, she handed him a shirt without turning her face around to witness Schillerz’ member strecthing the cotton on his standard-issue underwear, and said, “Try this on”, adding, “It’s pretty old, from when me da got more exercise and knew less recipes.” Schillerz took it, checked to see that she was still facing away, and smelled it gently to see just how old it was. As he picked it up, he noticed how much heavier it was than the shirts he had back home. The smell was certainly noticeable, but it was a smell of ossification rather than decompostion, like a Chinese philosopher’s beard rather than the four-day stubble he had just seen washed down the drain. He tried it on, and it was perfect for his purposes at this precise moment, just the right size at the neck and shoulders but long enough at the waist to conceal whatever potentially embarrasing appendages might have recently emerged. She took a look round, took a deep breath, and said, “Ah, that’s grand. Will you try these on now”, and handed him a pair of black trousers. He bent down, unelfconsciously to put them on. Did Siobhan also take a brief, fleeting glance at Schillerz hips tightening? Does it really matter, in the bigger scheme of things? Anyway, the pants were a bit loose, so he went into his room to find his braces. he chose not to inform her, as it might complicate things, and allowed her to continue burrowing through her father’s things. However, preoccupied as she was, she still managed to ask “where yeh goin?” He told her, then came back, a minute or so later, with her father’s trousers hanging comfortably from his shoulders, his shirt tucked neatly in, and his erection lost in the loose fabric. She gave him a look, compounded of satisfaction and relief, and handed him a shirt and tie. She watched him try them on, after making a desultory effort to tidy the clothes of her father, who in any case, wouldn’t care all that much. She watched him put on the tie, acutely aware of the eroticism implicit in the carressing of his neck by this glabrous, silky, material. She enjoyed this, as if it was some reward for her hunt in the trecherous realms of her father’s cupboard. When he was finished, she gave him a kiss on the cheek, then took him by the hand and led him hurriedly down the stairs, not giving him time to think about the symbolism of fitting so comfortably into Tom’s clothes. They went down the stairs, which was often a struggle for Schillerz to keep his balance while Siobhan kept his hand in her firm grip and walked rapidly downwards. Her itenirary included, it seemed, the living room, where she presented her creation to her father, as if seeking his approbation. They walked in, failing to gain his atttention for a second or two, until she interjected, rather impatiently, “Da!”, causing him to turn round, look up from the book he was reading, slide his spectacles down his nose a little, and say, “Ah, Hermes, you’re lookin’ like a right mickey-dazzler.”, in an exageratedly Irish accent. Siobhan looked pleased with herself, while Schillerz’ evident confusion induced him to add, “Du biest ein Schonne jonge mann, nicht warr”, an act that made him seem, to Siobhan at least, less of a solicitous interpreter than an omniscient creator, for was he not adressing the fruit of his loins and a young man dressed in his own clothes. Schillerz, less captious by nature responded with a mixture of flatteredness and admiration for his linguistic ability. He bowed, and said “Danke Schonn, MeinHerr”, which only threw high-cholestoral palm oil on the smouldering flames of Siobhan’s pique. She bade her father adieu, saying, “Well, we’d better be off, if we want to get into town before the shops close.” Schillerz waved and added, “Auf Wiedersehen”, prompting Siobhan to clench his hand firmly enough to induce mild pain. They stepped out into the sunshine, at that time of the day when the sun decides it’s time to start calling it a day and making the long, slow, journey to the horizon. Virgilian? The great man’s probably brushed off much worthier pretenders than me from his Olmpian perch. Anyway, Schillerz had other things on his mind. “So, why were you so rude to your father just then?” Giving him a slightly contemptuous glance, she said, “I wasn’t rude, I’m just in a hurry.” As he had always assumed she was perfectly honest with him in the past, this was a bit disconcetring for Schillerz. “Well... I’m not saying you’re lying but... I just got the sense that you became a little tense when your father spoke German to me just there.” She took an extremely deep breath, the sort that made her breasts heave, a process that Schillerz could not resist a surreptitous glance at. “I just wish he wouldn’t show off so much. He knows I don’t speak any other languages, even though they teach us Irish in school from the time we’re four.” This last piece of information surprised him, but that was a tangent he didn’t want to go off on right now. Instead he said, in one of his rapidly mushrooming moments of insight: “Well, your father has little to show off but his intellect. You have your youth, your beauty, you have... ”, he blushed a little, “me. At least I think that’s why you’re bringing me into town.” This cozened her enough to stop complaining about her father, but she opted to put her anger about him into a small compartment in the back of her mind rather than take it out an examine it to see what an otiose encumbrance it was. This led to an uneasy silence, not as uneasy as it would have been if there were other human beings watching them, but pretty uneasy all the same. He was left to reflect on the incongruity of their dressand the surrounding hedges on each side of the dirt path that brought tem to the main road, flanked on each side by fecund hedgegrows where innumerate species of grass and weed seemed to dwell. It was as if he was a 17th century French courtier dressed in baroque clothes with baubles hanging from every stitch in his clothes sent from Versailles to find a reclusive bucolic six-string viol player. His musings were interrupted by the sight of Plato, who had been burrowing in one of the hedgerows, turning around, almost the way a builder on scaffolding would to have a butchers at a passing voluptress. He ran over to Siobhan and raised his head to receive a tickle at the base of his neck, before going back to what he was doing. Schillerz used this opportunity to break the silence. “It’s a bit surprising that he didn’t follow us”, he offered. “Not to me. I know that he can sense that we’re going into town, from the way we’re dressed.” “Hmm. That’s something I’ve been meaning to ask. Why is it necessary to dress up so much, when most people aren’t able to afford such clothes?” A slightly presumptuous question, as he hadn’t been in the country that long, but a valid one nonetheless. “Appearance is very important here, hermes. If we don’t look our best, we might not get let into the best shops, or the nicest seats in the cinema.” Schillerz thought, as the more percipient of you will have guessed, of five-pointed yellow stars, causing a melancholy look to descend over his face. Siobhan went on unperturbed, grateful to be the pedagogue for once, saying, “Me da was tellin’ me that in Barcelona and Madrid, people would also be judged by the way they dressed, and would have to wear tight black clothes and always with the ties. Then for a brief while the two cities were run by anarcho-syndicalist collectives and people were allowed wear whatever the hell they wanted, but it only lasted a few years. It’s one of those periods in history that you wish you were a part of, when people’s inhibitions are cast aside, even for, what’s that word? An ephemeral moment.” Briefly, Schillerz reflected on the irony that his compatriots were fighting in the biggest conflagration in human history while he was heading to the pictures in a small town in Ireland. But this too passed, like the butterflies that emerged from hedges to fade into the hazy evening sunshine. Eventually they came towards the end of the path, gradually hearing the sound of the odd passing car, and as they came closer, a sporadic horse and cart as well. When they came to the point where the dirt track that led to the farmhouse merged with the main road, Schillerz felt a pang of recognition, and a strange nostalgia for the time he had last passed here, though it was only a few days back, but profound, eventful days, days that shook his world, turned it upside-down, leaving him in a dizzy haze that he was just about recovering from. And yet he sensed that the adventure was not over yet. If the Reich had formed itself in a few whirlwind years, with the aim of lasting for a thousand years, then surely the man he had become would live for another forty or fifty. Yet he felt difficulty communicating these ideas to Siobhan, found it hard to express the queasy melancholy that consumed him as he trod this road again. As he recalled, it was about quarter of an hour’s walk from this point to the town. he wondered how different it would seem from his initial first impression, contingent as that was on his preconceptions about Ireland. Now he was going to be looking at the same place through a whole different prism, like a college student coming home from his first semeseter and realising how narrow and unexciting his family and erstwhile friends are, man. His meditations were interrupted by the sound of a horse and cart, which would have been a pleasant, bucolic sound if it wasn’t for the experience he had had a few days back. He leaned over to Siobhan, whispered in her ear a request to describe the person driving it. She gave him a perplexed look, to which he replied: “Don’t be like that. Just tell me what he looks like. I’ll explain later.” She took a brief glance back, trying not to stare, and made out the face of a person who might not be that much older than themselves, but who a life of hard labour, a lack of education and a fondness for alcohol had wizened, as well as perhaps a desire to reach manhood in a time and place where the pleasures of childhood were somewhat dubious. He wore a ferret cap, tilted slightly, and a wild woodbine hung languidly from his thin, chapped lips. Siobhan described him to Schillerz as best as she could, and he was relieved to detect no resmemblence to the person who had picked him up a few days ago. How many days was it? Three, Four, he couldn’t be sure, for, though teutonic blood still ran in his veins, the last few days and nights had melted into a nebulous haze. Anyway, the town came into view in time, and it did seem different, partly because of the incongruous sunshine that small Irish towns never seem prepared for, with their whitewashed walls and their narrow streets and their grey slate roofs. Also, it was Friday afternoon, and they were not the only two people coming in from the country to do a bit of shopping. Some of the younger kids had also been let out from school, adding to a general brio that seemed absent a few days hence. Yet when they got closer to the centre of the town, a square dominated inevitably by a domineeringly phallic church steeple, he started to feel a bit uncomfortable. He could feel people’s eye’s straying in his direction, then whispers being thrust surreptitously into the ears of old women by their haggard, emaciated peers. He sought reassurance from Siobhan that they were not suspicious that he was a foreign spy. “Will yeh relax, boy. They’re old women. They do this every time a stranger walks into town.” So, it wasn’t a fearful German or Eastern European village where anyone could be a traitor, but a wild west frontier town where outsiders got the most guarded of welcomes. Then he noticed Siobhan take an urgent look at her watch and felt himself being dragged to a store which bore the gloomy moniker: O DONNELL & SONS: GROCERIES AND PROVISIONS. Outside the store he noticed a middle-aged woman, corpulent and ruddy of complexion, staring at Siobhan, tapping her watch peremptorily. When Siobhan noticed her, she walked a bit quicker in her direction. She gave her an uneasy smile, and said, “Sorry I’m late. Let me explain I...” “You don’t have to explain”, interrupted the woman in a snarling, contemptuous voice, revealing a mouth that didn’t have a full complement of teeth,“I can see ye’ve got a new fancy man. Well, let’s be doin’ business all the same. I don’t have any more time to wastin’, not like some people I could mention.” She opened her hand, which had been clenched with a limpet-like tightness up till now, and released a couple of slips of paper, gave them to Siobhan. In contrast, Siobhan opened her handbag with the grace and elegance of an 18th Century Parisian aristocrat or a self-conscious nouveaux riches American Plutocrat, and handed the old woman some similar slips of paper, to which she responded with the most cursory, grudging gesture of gratitude, after which she darkened the doorway of the shop, which wasn’t all that bright to begin with, if the truth be told. Schillerz remarked to himself that it was surprising that those two females belonged to the same species, let alone the same race. When they were a few steps away, and he was categorically sure that this monstrous creature was out of earshot, he asked: “What was that all about?” Grudgingly, as if this was one of those things in her life she didn’t want to discuss with anyone, like menstruation and defaction, she said: “I have an arrangement with that old bag. She and her husband don’t eat sugar, because they want to hang on to the few teeth they hace left, me and me da don’t eat meat ‘cause of our convivtions, and don’t smoke tobacco cause... well you know. So every week we meet here and swap our ration cards. It’s not something i’m particularly proud of, it’s just something that has to be done. At least it’s only going to happen for as long as this stupid fucking war goes on.” He reflected on the irony that the war’s tentacles were a bit more sesquipidelian than he had imagined, and he was not the only one whom they had thrown into strange alliances, albeit the difference in Siobhan’s case was aesthetic rather than political. He asked her when she was going to go and get her own rations, to which she replied: “Oh, that old bag’s goin’ to be gossiping for at least half an hour, largely about us, I’d imagine. The whole town’ll be talkin’ boutcha for days.” This struck fear into Schillerz’ heart, prompting his Adam’s apple to expand as if an incubating alien was about to give birth to it’s offspring in his neck. Siobhan could not fail to notice this aberation of nature, and rushed to offer reassurance. “Calm down, Hermes. These people haven’t got enough imagination to think that you might be a German spy. They probably just think you’re a young journalist down from Dublin to visit me da.” She Paused and added, “Let them have their little bit of gossip. They don’t have much else to do, living in a place like this.” She followed this with another pregnant, Pinter-Play pause, where Schillerz adopted a contrite look and told himself he shouldn’t be so paranoid. When she spoke again, it was in a tone designed to take some of the tension out of the situation. “C’mon, lets go and get some new clothes for yeh, like we said we would. I’ve got a friend who works in a shop over here.” She nudged her head in the direction of a clothes shop that, from the outside, seemed as dreary and nondescipt as the grocery store. When they got inside however, it seemed much brighter. Behind the counter were a wide, polychromatic array of skirts, blouses, dresses, with a small, more modest section of men’s clothes hidden away like a difficult child or a dissolute cousin. These seemed to warrant Siobhan’s attention less than the girl behind the counter, whose face seemed to light up at the sight of her. “Siobhan! How’s it going?”, she asked, as Siobhan leaned over the counter to embrace her friend, who gave Schillerz a coy look, sizing him up briefly with the bright blue eyes which rested uncomfortably in an acned, plicated face where the chin seemed to desire convergenge with the forehead. She introduced Schillerz to him by his original adopted moniker, didn’t give any details about where he came from. Then they started a gossipathon of their own where they talked about their friends from school who were marrying carpenters or becoming mathmeticians in the civil service. He suddenly felt superfluous, like a fifth wheel or a hairbrush at at Hitlerjugend rally. His attention to their conversation dissapated rapidly and he found his eyes wandering rapidly around the shop, wondering to himself what social rituals could there be in which these elaborate fabrics were showcased. He thought of church, but coming from a protestant background, imagined that something more austere would be worn. Then, as if by some ESP or telepathy or divine providence or Victorian Novel predictability, Siobhan’s friend’s voice suddenly raised it’s tone and said, “Oh, Siobhan, D’you know there’s a dance on at the crossroads tonight?” Siobhan’s face lit up, for though she recognised how archaic this ritual was, she relished the chance to show Schillerz this slice of authentic rural Irish culture. Also, she rationalised that, like with the sugar rations, in a time and place like this you had to make the most of what you got. Schillerz, however, perhaps the Ur-German backpacker, looked a little confused. Sensing that her friend had spotted this, she moved swiftly, like a benign Machiavelli or a solicitous spin-doctor to cover for him. “He’s from Dublin, just down for a few days. He’s more used to dancing to jazz music in places like the Gresham and the Shelbourne, arentcha, Patrick?” She grasped his hand, nervously trying to ascertain whether this act was perceptible to the third person in the room. Schillerz nodded with meek alacrity, like a kid told to keep his hands under the table, or in Schillerz’ case, over the table. “Yes, yes. The Gresham. Fine place”, he said, sounding curiously uncomfortable with a persona he thought he had merely passed through, but now was finding himself, contrary to Heraclitus’ advice, going back into the same river again. Siobhan’s loquacious friend helped him out by waxing lyrical thus: “Ah, sure, now’s your chance to get a taste of real ireland. We’ll have to find the right clothes for yeh, though. Let me see, your a 38, right?” Schillerz was used to a whole different set of measurements but was willing to put his immediate sartorial future into the hands of this young woman all the same. She reached over to find a thick, green linen shirt which, for some reason she thought would suit Schillerz. She pointed him to the changing room which lay in the oposite corner of the shop, behind a heavy beige curtain. He went behind it dutifully, and tried it on, and though it was indeed his size, he found it a bit garish. While he tried it on he heard whispering going on outside and assumed they were taliking about him but his attempts to eavesdrop were in vain. He came out to receive unqualified approbation from the two girls. “Well, isn’t it a handsome fella yeh’ve got for yerself there, Siobhan.” “To be sure, Kate, she replied, taking the purse out of her handbag and making it clear to Schillerz that the choice of whether to buy this shirt or not was not his. He acquised, realising that perpetuating her friendship with Kate was important enough to neccesitate disregarding his feelings. “So what time is the dance on?” Siobhan asked, in that way that you do when you’re starting to wrap up a conversation. “Nine O’ Clock, I think, at the usual place.” “Grand. We’ve got a bit of shopping to do, then we want to see a fil-um.” “Oh, I went to see a grand fil-um the other day. The Man I Married, ‘tis called. Well worth seeing, I think. Still in, I’d say.” Thinking this movie the sort of love story that she was a sucker for, she thanked her and took her leave. They went to a few other, dark, dusty shops, Siobhan getting the things they need while Schillerz looked with fascination at the scoracious posters advertising wares that were often not available, bearing cartoonish figures that bore only a notional resmeblance to the real Irish people he had encountered. They got to the cinema on time, which Schillerz would not have recognised as such, used to the modernist designs of his compatriot architects as he was. This building had clearly been used for something else before the world woke up to the vision of edison and the Lumieres. A church for one of those Calvinist sects that went around proselitising 19th century Irish villages with their dreary, funless dogma, perhaps. An old man, with a couple of forlorn wisps of hair dragged across his head, sat on a crochety wooden chair, with an equally superannuated table in front of him, on which rested an old tin, which was used as a money box. Siobhan bade him good-day, and he returned the greeting in a voice that was tremulous and apparently less judgmental than some he had encountered in this town. Siobhan gave him a half-crown, and he fumbled around the tin with hands on whom the constant contact with the cupro-nickel seemed to have left a patina the way a snail leaves a shiny, slimy trail. He eventually found the right change and wished them to enjoy the show with as much conviction as a fourteen-year-old responds when asked if he’s learned anything interesting in school today. They went in to take their seats, which, again, were not the soft, contiguous seats he was used to, but hard wooden chairs in which trying to get comfortable would be a waste of time and energy. In case you don’t know, The Man I Married is a 1940 movie, directed by Irving Pichel, starring Joan Bennett and Francis Ledger. It concerns an American woman who marries a nice German guy in the mid ‘30s and goes home to live in Germany with him, only to find that he’s really a Nazi, who leaves her for a stereotypically teutonic type. How it ended up in a cinema in a small town in Ireland so quickly is a bit of a mystery, but it’s worth remembering that this was the pre-Jaws era when block-booking had yet to be introduced, and sleeper hits that might never be seen again were often shifted to remote circuits. Anyway, that’s not really the point. What you really want to know is how our heroine and hero react to this tale of ethnic and philosophical mismatch, right? Well, at first, Schillerz finds the portrayal of the German character moderately amusing, the way an English person would to the portrayal of Cockney gangsters in GW Pabst’s Threepenny Opera or the London Times theatre critic in Istvan Szabo’s movie Mephisto. Or, for that matter, any of the propaganda films of the ‘30s that depicted the English as effete and not totally averse to the pleasures of same-sex intercourse. Then, when it gets to the point when they return to Germany and he starts to see where they’re going with all this, he gets uneasy. It’s not the Germany he knows, for one thing, but a Hollywood vision of a dark, hyperindutrialised dystopia, Michigan with swastikas, or New Jersey with bratwurst. Yet he sees something of himself in the main character, idealistic, swept away by a current of patriotism while his better judgment is dismissed like some anemic Cassandra tremulously trying to indicate to him how crazy all this is. He’s surprised at how well the makers of this movie from the new world understand what motivates those living in their ancestoral lands, as if a young child had figured out the motives for his parent’s alcoholism. He also feels for the female lead, who realises that her husband was not all he seemed. more importantly, though, how does Siobhan react to this character? While Schillerz watchs with relative intellectual detachment, scratching his chin occasionally, she starts to shuffle with increasing tension, contorting constantly into ever more uncomfortable positions in the process. She looks over at Schillerz occasionally to discern his reaction, yet his face is as enigmatic as the poker player in a Western who you know is going to walk away with all the money at the end. This isn’t a deliberate choice on the part of Schillerz, who is burdened, or gifted, depending on your perspective with that teutonic intellectual and emotional distantciation. They even have one of those big compound words for it, it might be Verfremsdung but don’t quote me on that one. Whatever it’s called, it comes across as deliberate inscrutability, something she’ll have to take up with him when the movie is over. It does dissapate a little, though, at a scene where they try to replicate a Nazi rally and it ends up looking a bit more like a 70’s disco with all the rapid heils, which amuses Schillerz enough to draw a mild laugh from his lips. At the end of the movie, though, she watchs his reaction with even more intense scrutiny, so much so that she trusts her ears to pick up the plot for her. For, as the heroine gets back to the US at the end, she thinks she notices a glistening in his eyes, a suggestion that pity for this character might, just possibly have moistened his tear ducts enough to produce one, solitary tear, the sort of tear that surface tension one the eye never allows to drip down the cheek, but still indicates so much. She watches his eyes like a hawk, as the moonchrome images flicker, and maybe, just perhaps, the reflections of these images are refracted through a tear, a tear that would mean so much. When the movie ends and the lights go up, she stares, without saying anything, directly into his eyes. He wonders why, but as she places her finger on his eyelid and feels the moist tear coagulate into a round drop on her fingertip, which after cursorily looking round, she places on her tongue, drinking it’s salty viscous liquid as if it was some divine ambrosial nectar. This would be the moment where they kissed passionately, but bear in mind this is an Irish cinema in the ‘40s, so Siobhan has to repel his advances in this regard with a neurotic shake of head, which leaves him being the confused one. On the way out, between glances hither and tither to see if there’s anyone that she recognises, she asks him why the film had such an impact on him. “I don’t know”, he replied, blinking slightly as they emerged into the mellow declining light of an Irish summer evening, “I think I just felt for the woman in the film. It must be so scary to find out someone is so different from who you think they are?” Sounding slighly ill at ease, she asked, “I’m not going to find that out about you, am I?” He didn’t answer straight away, thought about saying that it depended on how long they stayed together or something similarly evasive, but then decided that such candour deserved to be reciprocated. “I don’t even no what I’m going to find out about myself in the future. I know what I’m not anymore, but I don’t know what I’m going to become.” That piece of confused, innocent, deer-caught-in-the-headlights honesty drew the sort of amourous, idolotrous glance that leads to major smooching in Hollywood movies and lengthy dance sequences in Bollywood movies. Here, however, Siobhan could only give him an embrace which was immanent with the promise of greater intimacy later on. Unable to express those emotions that aren’t really communicable in words, she shifted the topic of conversation to the more immediate future. “So, are yeh looking forward to going to the dance, then?” “Yes, but aren’t we going to go home first?” She took a look at her watch, said, “I don’t think we’ll have time. It’ll take us an hour to get there on foot, so we’re better off going straight there.” “But... aren’t you worried about your father?” “Jesus Christ, Hermes, I make a big enough sacrifice by staying here when I could be in Dublin, or on the sort of adventures he keeps telling me about.” Feeling chastened, he apologised, said he didn’t think about what he was saying. After an awkward silence, she asked, “Will you be Patrick from Dublin while we’re at this dance?” “Okay, but you think they’ll believe that?” “Well, I did, I think even my da did for a while.” “Well... what if I get asked questions about Irish politics and things like that?” “Just improvise. Or say something non-specific. But don’t worry. They’ll probably just ask you how you find life in the country, as opposed to the city that’s what...” She paused, scanned his face to see if he could prognosticate what was coming next, but saw only a blank look. She took a deep breath and began: “Remember when I was telling you about those parties that me da has?” He nodded. “Well, some of the younger journalists he brings along have taken a fancy to me. They stay here for a few days, tell me how much they like me, but it always turns out they have a sweetheart back in Dublin, and I get the sense, that, even if they didn’t, that I’m a bit too uncouth for them anyway.” She paused, trying to cover her self-pity with a gloss of stoicism. “Anyway, I’ve brought one or two of them to dances, but nobody ever wants to talk politics to them, just want to hear about how decadent the big smoke is. You can improvise on that, right?” He supposed that he could, and wanted to reassure her that he would be loyal to her, but decided that this was not the right moment. So they kept on walking, out of the town and down a long, straight country road flanked on each side by walls composed of thick stones that hardy, hairy country men broke their backs moving. They talked for a bit more about the movie, but as they came closer to the dance and heard the music and the sounds of people converging from other directions the way you only can on a soft summer’s night, he asked what sort of music this was. She told him it was traditional Irish music, of the sort that would not ruffle too many feathers in Church or government circles. She explained that a lot of the songs in this genre were lugubrious, self-pitying tales of imperial dominion, but that at it’s best the music could be uplifting and life-affirming in the most visceral way. When they finally got there, it was a sight unlike any he had ever seen. Though he had seen an outdoor production of Tannhauser and been to a rally or two, he had never seen such frenetic dancing outdoors before. To Schillerz, they seemed less the chaste, comely maidens that Eamon de Valera would fetishise a few years later, than worshippers at an ancient Pagan festival, which is probably what their ancestors were, before they adopted a religion that considered dance a prelude to sacreligous acts. In fact, this was the closest Schillerz had come to seeing the Ireland of My life for Ireland, except that this was real and he could focus on whatever he wanted, whether the corpulent, pock-marked musicians stopping between drinks to take the odd sip of guinness, or the rosy-cheeked girls dancing in their embroidered green linen dresses, which they lifted occasionally to reveal their fat round farmers-daughter calves, or the boys they danced with, short-haired, often bearing the wispiest moustaches, wearing big, thick polished leather shoes that they would save for occasions like this. Actually, he didn’t get much time to survey the scene before Siobhan decided she didn’t want to be a mere spectator at this ritual. She grabbed Schillerz by the hand, brushed off his protestations that he didn’t know how to dance this way with reassurances that he should just copy her. This wasn’t an easy thing to do for, in a melee of sprightly rustic nymphs dancing in an orgy of kinesis in front of a setting summer sun, none was more energetic or dextrous than her. He made an effort to copy everything she did, yet the apparent elasticity of her ankles and the motor that must have propelled her hips were features that weren’t included in the body nature gave him. At first he felt merely inadequate, but as everybody else formed a circle around Siobhan to admire her terpsichorian skills, he felt increasingly self-conscious. He tried harder to replicate her moves, yet found his ankles getting increasingly entangled with each other. It seemed the harder he tried, the more he showed up his own awkwardness. Then one moment he got so tangled up in himself that he fell to to the ground, breaking what would otherwise have been a bad fall with his elbows. He looked up, expecting to see looks of disdain all around, but instead, to his amazement, heard loud applause, the applause of a people whom years, generations, centuries of disaster had inured to failure. As Siobhan helped him up to his feet and he brushed the dust from his clothes, he looked around to see the smiling, often toothless face brighten up and reflected how differently they saw things in this country. Siobhan decided that they had done enough to deserver a break, and took Schillerz to sit down on one of the wooden chairs that were placed around the crossroads. He just puffed and panted, maybe did a bit panting than puffing, actually, while she waved over at Kate and some of her friends. They came over, kate greeted her with: “Well, your new friend might be able to do with a few dancin’ lessons.” Siobhan held his hand, as if to assure him that no aspersion was intended. Then they started gossiping again. At first, he listened in, eager to see Siobahn reveal more about this aspect of her character. Then his attention drifted back to watch the dance. He wondered where they got all this energy from, these boys and girls who toiled in the fields all day and then danced till the sun kissed the horizon. It must be somthing in their diet, he concluded, wishing for a while that he knew more about that sort of stuff. Also he noticed that the sun’s osculation with the horizon wasn’t reflected in some of the humans in his immediate presence. It was something he would seek clarification on later on. To his relief, no-one really tried to engage him in any protracted discourse, just the formailities he could answer without taxing his imagination too much. Still, he enjoyed the experience the way a tourist does, or even someone watching a documentary on TV, without ever engaging in it after his initial embarressment. As it grew darker and people started to drift away, he grew a little weary and became conscious that he wasn’t a tourist who could go and see the next sight or a TV viewer that could change the channel, but someone who was really there. He looked, suggestively at his watch a few times until Siobhan said to one of her friends, “God, it’s getting late, maybe we should hit the road.” Her friend agreed, bade Schillerz a polite goodbye, and then drifted off in various directions. Eventually Siobhan too left, waving politely to a few casual acquaintances. When they got far enough from the music, Schillerz said, “You know, back home, if boys and girls were dancing together, at the end of the night, slow music would be played and they would start to kiss.” She shook her head despondently, reminded him where he was. “This is Ireland, Hermes. That sort of thing just doesn’t go on in public.” Though he wasn’t aware of the long and venerable tradition of Irish love poetry, it still seemed incongruous to him that a race so rich in terpsichorean skill would be so inhibited when it came to other kinetic activities. “So in only goes on in people’s homes, then?” he asked. She blushed, but not enough to be perceivable in this dim light. Then, conscious of the long journey home, she said, “Some people aren’t able to go home, as their parents wouldn’t approve, so they go and do it anywhere they can, in dark alleys, or in country places like this, in fields and behind ditches.” It’s hard to describe the combination of shock and titillation that this remark produced. It horrified him that people had to go to such lengths to do something that was so natural, but the idea of having to do things in secrecy appealed to the adventurous side of his nature. Then he stopped, took a look at her face to ascertain whether she had told him that for the reason he imagined. He saw a look that was, in its own way, as unmistakable a sign of a wish for some form of physical communion as a brightening of pubic tissue that our ancestors and some of our simian relatives produce when they desire coitus. She, in turn, sensed that he recognised this, and pulled his hand in the direction of the wall. She released it again to lift her skirt to climb over the wall, which she did with a dexterity that Schillerz could only envy, as if her shoes were only a thin patina on clawed, atavistic feet. She looked down from the top of the wall, a princess with the rough, granite rocks her immutable throne and he her devoted servant to whom she offered her hand n a gesture of royal benediction. He grasped it, then uneasily placed one of his feet in a gap between two rocks. With a strength that surprised him, as of an Amazon warrior or a Xena, she pulled him up the rest of the way, then, with even more astonishing physical adroitness, she seemed to dive off the wall the way a Mexican rock diver would, landed taking all her weight on her wrists, then swung round, lay on the ground with her legs spread just a little, beckoning him to match her agility. He thought about trying for a second or two, but sadly this young man from the land of Kraft durch freude fitness camps was tragically unable to do anything of the sort, whether for fear of hurting her or hurting himself remains a moot point. Anyway, as he crawled down from the wall nervously, she looked less disappointed or angry than stoical, the way a parent who hoped their child would grow up to be a doctor would look when they find out he only has good enough grades to become a lawyer. He, however, was pricked with a sense of shame, a sudden rush of inadequacy, a feeling that he wasn’t good enough for her. Instead of entering into her warm embrace, he merely lay down on the lush grass beside her and, unwilling to confront his shortcomings head-on, came up with, like, a textbook Freudian defence mechanism: “Are you sure your dad won’t get any of those pains of his?” “No”, she replied, looking disillusioned, “He only gets them during the day.” “Well… won’t he be worried about you?” “Worried about me? Jesus, Hermes, I’m a big girl. I know how to take care of myself. My da is probably gone to sleep, or else he’s relaxing, listening to some music. Anyway, why didn’tcha ask me this before we jumped over the wall?” He pondered this last inquiry for a few seconds in that typically teutonic way of his, the way that she would find amusingly charming as long as they were in the throes of romantic obsession, and found it’s logic emphatically compelling, in the way a six-year old would his parent’s hurried, illogical responses to his endless `why’s. He didn’t have any real verbal response, and even if he had, it might have been better to save his wisdom for more civilised, less feral surroundings. Just as nature seemed to claw back the walls that humans used to demarcate it, gradually, almost impercetibly encroaching on their walls and turning them into hybrid heaths, it seemed the thick grass and the sound of the crickets in the background drew our hero and heroine into it’s lusty embrace like the gallant knights that tried to rescue the sleeping beauty. Years later, when Schillerz’ hormones loosened their grip on him and he had read far more books than he had now, he thought of how abstract the idea of ferity, of freedom from the constraints of civilisation was, that we needed constraints before we could really appreciate freedom. Perhaps it was this idea that our ancestors had in mind when they came up with the idea of making us spend our adolesences corralled in rooms listening to things we couldn’t care about. Right now, he was that feral creature that he would look back on and analyse like half-time commentators would a particularly ambiguous offside decision. Why do we analyse our actions so much, provide such specious rationalisations? Why were some of Schillerz’ contemporaries seizing the war as a chance to prove their manhood? Does a dog see a cat passing and think of it as an oppurtunity to prove it’s doghood? Right now, none of this mattered to Schilerz, seized as he was by a febrile, carpe diem opportunism, except that, when he got to the stage where his face was embraced by her warm cushions of mammarial tissue and his fingers were making their way to the moist, pilose orifice between her legs, he suddenly felt compelled, as if by some Sophoclean Daemon to ask: “Remember when you told me about your `cycle’ before?” She sighed, unaware of what might be causing these uncharacteristic inhibitions, and said, “yes”, but at the same time grabbed hold of his hand and drew it closer to her vulva, in anticipation of the next question. “So, I guess you’re not at the point of the cycle where you can get pregnant yet?” “Hermes, we can only get pregnant four days out of every month, but those are the days when we enjoy making love the most. It’s like a cruel joke nature has played on us, making us, or at least me enjoy it so much but then take it away from us when we want it most. Of course, after we reach a certain age we can’t become pregnant anymore but then nobody wants us.” Maybe her real misfortune was to be alive in one of those times when the baby had been taken out of the bath but the bathwater not yet replaced, videlicit, when it was becoming unnecessary and undesireable to have a big family but before the invention of the pill. This was the same time that mass industrialisation was atomising workers but TVs had not yet become affordable. Is it any wonder people thought going off to war would be such a good idea? Here, however, in the neutral island at the heart of man, there was one organ in Schillerz body that was decidedly not neutral, declaring it’s intentions with all the subtlety of an early draft of Mein Kampf, pushing up against the Maginot line of his underwear, seeming to drag all his physical and even mental energy with it, the way armies suck the life out of states in their thrust for conquest. He was willing to accept her assurance without any corroboration. So, once more, he stimulated all of her erogenous zones, by now less like a stout Cortez exploring the jungle than a driver of a school bus picking up all the regular clients on his route. Then she decided it was her turn to take the initiative, and turned over and climbed on top of him, opened his trousers and allowed his swelling, throbbing member to spring out, then pulled up her dress, took off her underwear, and pressed herself around him, pressed her knees into the grass causing two marks that would surely be the subject of debate among the cows in the morning and waited for him to respond, as if too a particularly contentious argument. His response was measured, like a politician who’d paid just enough attention to his spin-doctors to say what people wanted to hear, altering the pace and thrust enough to generate increasing moans and howls, till eventually, against a backdrop of a red sunset, her head leaned back as far as it could go as she screamed in ecstacy, like a fiery dionysian maenad drunk on the richest ambrosial nectar. She then climbed back off him with an incongruous fuctionality, then lay down on the grass with Schillerz in the hope of communicating with him in the brief window before he started wanting to have sex again. Tragically, or at least pathetically, he just wanted to lie there until he had recovered enough energy to walk home and sleep somewhere comfortable. She accepted this stoically, and allowed him to bask in post-coital ecstacy for a while, while she took a few satisfied deep breaths of her own. After about five minutes, she thought they should start making tracks, and went about the uneasy task of getting him up. “Can’t we sleep here?”, he muttered, his face still squeezing his upper arm against the grass. “Well, you can if you like, rubbing bits of grass from her kneecaps and trying, forlornly, to removing the marks the grass had made in her skin, “But I’m heading home.” He nodded in the most perfunctory way, then, without speaking, held out his hand for her to lift. She gave him a look of slight disdain, then grabbed his hand and jerked him up to his feet with an alacrity that shook the post-coital complacency out of him. Then, without saying a word, she climbed up on top of the wall, looked over her shoulder to beckon him to follow, then lifted up her dress and jumped down the other side, leaning over to beckon Schillerz once more. Then she started walking towards home, followed a few minutes later by Schillerz, moving with the lumbering gait of a first-time marathon runner. She looked down, saw the rips in his pants, evidence of his struggle to climb the wall, then up towards his his eyes, battling against that blissful fatigue that only comes from doing what they were just doing, or maybe from dancing ‘til three o’ clock. He reached out to hold her hand, whether out of affection or a mere desire to stay upright she could not tell. She gave him hers anyway, and they walked home this way, though sadly he still didn’t have all that much to say, other than a few cursory questions about the dance, about the music they were playing, about her friends, which at first she answered with some enthusiasm but gradually realised that he was just asking those questions to keep her talking and abrogate his own conversational responsibilities. She just accepted this, though, considering it a prestigination undeserving of any anger. When they got home they found Tom asleep in his favourite armchair, a record still spinning around the turntable. Siobhan asked Schillerz to take it off, asked if if he wanted hot chocolate or anything, which he refused, knowing he would fall asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. He lifted the needle from the record, took a look at it to see what Tom had been listening to. The record bore the words, in gothic script, Der Tod und Das Madchen. He wondered what melancholy terrors could be drawn from this round piece of vinyl that could deserve such a title, made a mental note to listen to it himself some time. Then Siobhan came in, bearing a cup of Ovaltine for herself, and Schillerz asked her if they should wake Tom up. “No”, she replied, “he’ll probably wake up after one of nightmares, and even if he doesn’t, it doesn’t get that cold in this house in summer anyway.” “He has nightmares as well?”, asked Schillerz, feeling, perhaps, a new bond with the slumbering mass on the armchair. Siobhan, for her part, was merely moved to ask “As well as who?” Schillerz, about midway between being surprised and stunned, answered, “Me.” She nodded nonchalantly, to which he responded, “Couldn’t you tell? Surely I must toss and turn a lot in my sleep?” “Perhaps you do, I can’t really tell, I’m quite a heavy sleeper.” He wondered how many more such revelations they would each have to make before they could really claim to know each other. But not for very long, as when he got to the bedroom, he just took off his shirt and pants, went under the covers, and fell into a deep, comatose slumber. The next day, and the days in the weeks that succeeded it, followeed a similar pattern. Schillerz stayed in the house most of the time, enjoyed the cornucopia of aesthetic pleasures that Tom’s living room had to offer. He listened to all sorts of music, from that chilling Schubert quartet to the jauntiest Billie Holliday tunes and the wildest, most atavistic Irish folk music. From Tom he heard all the old Irish legends, about how Finn McCool had accidentally eaten the salmon of knowledge and how Setanta had scored a last-minute goal against the hound of Ulster. He heard tales of Tom’s travels, of fascinating cultural encounters and wild adventures. And he read, voraciously, with the passion of a recent convert to a new religion. He finished off Candide quickly, then he read Goethe, Heine, and his near-namesake Schiller, figures that had been bound and caged in classrooms but now liberated to roam around his mind like freed songbirds on flights of lyricism. He read the Tao, poetry by Blake, Byron and Shelley, Yeats and TS Eliot, Portrait of an Artist and Dubliners, Gulliver’s Travels, the Iliad, the Oddessy and the Aeniad. He discussed them all with Tom, always fascinated by his insights and his revelations. Often, too, Siobhan would surprise him with flashes of brilliance, so much so that he often wished her talents were better put to use, like in a university. Other times, she seemed at home here, teaching him how to milk the cow, how to plant spuds, or just going for walks and teaching him the names of all the flora and fauna. They went to more dances, though, if the truth be told, they weren’t the thing Schillerz looked forward to the most, as Siobhan would never let him reveal too much about himself. For her, it gave him an aura of mystique, but for him it only seemed to emphasise his isolation. He accepted this fate though, not least because, when Siobhan wasn’t either menstruating or putatively ovulating, they fucked like bunnies. It wasn’t a situation that could last forever, unless this was a fairy tale, or a feel-good Hollywood movie. One day soemthing would have to come along and burst their bubble. Deep down, Schillerz knew this, yet a hedonistic, epicurean spirit kept this knowledge deeply supressed like a bourgeois child with Tourette’s syndrome. One day, however, he had just finished off reading the Bhagavad-Gita, and was discussing it with Tom, a ritual they had both grown equally enamoured of. This time, however, seemed a little different, as the wide-eyed wonder that seemed to light up Schillerz face as Tom granted him his pearls of wisdom seemed to have dissapated to be replaced by a troubled, yearning angst. Tom tried to exorcise this by explaining what a complex, multi-layered work it was, passed on some of the insights given to him by emaciated Sadhus on Himalayan peaks. This time, though, Schillerz had formed his own interpretation, and didn’t want to know of anyone else’s opinion. “Krishna’s message is an obvious one, Tom. You have to go along with the Zeitgeist, no matter how fucking horrible it seems. You have to find a role, do what you do best, your dharma. You told me that yourself.” “Yes”, he replied, scratching his beard the way he did when he was making a statement he considered profound, “But there are many ways to interpret this. Remember, the Gita is part of the Maharabata, which is a martial epic...” “And we’re in the middle of a martial epic called the second world war. I had almost found my dharma by being a spy, except I was spying for the wrong side. I’m Going to have to go back into the war, Tom.” “Hermes, let me be frank with you. I don’t think that you were that good at your job. I can’t imagine how the abwehr let you do this job, except of course that Ireland is hardly the most important field for espionage.” Schillerz, whose respect for Tom’s judgment was immutable, merely frowned slightly. Tom continued, “The Nazis are going to lose the war whether you take part in it or not. If you go to England and try to become a spy for MI6 you could be arrested and spend the rest of the war in a POW camp. If you stay here, you can spend the war educating yourself, you can do something useful at the end, become a lecturer in English or in General humanities, something you really enjoy, something worthwhile.” At this point Schillerz realised what a Galatea he was to Tom’s Pygmalion, or a Daedalus to his Icarus, a Matthew Garth to his Tom Dunson, or a Dolly the Sheep to his bald Scottish scientist guy. “You’re trying to mould me in your own image, aren’t you?”, he said, a little rashly, only afterwards becoming aware of how hysterical and melodramatic this might have sounded. Tom’s response was measured, grateful that he didn’t add “Your just as bad as the Nazis”, or anything of that ilk, as he would have done if this was a movie. “I must admit I’ve come to think of you as a son. I couldn’t have one, though, for reasons I think Siobhan explained to you. Though I’m by no means misogynistic, I have to recognise that our society still very much is.” He gave Schillerz a look that suggested that he had to make his own accomadations with the Zeitgeist. “I’ve often tried to mould Siobhan in my own image, to use your phrase, but I realise that Ireland isn’t a matriarchy as it once was, so it seems so futile. So I’d hate anything bad to happen to you, as spending the next five years with a bunch of Nazis in POW camp in the Scottish highlands would surely be.” He reflected on what an awful image that was, then qualified by saying: “Of course you’re not my son, so I can hardly oppose whatever descision you make. I can only beg you to give it careful contemplation, and reassure you that there is a place for you here until the war finishes.” This was such a reasonable position that Schillerz found himself unable to vent any more of the spleen that he wanted, which in some ways was not a bad thing as it was directed at himself as much as at Tom, who would be the one to suffer. He took his leave politely, saying he needed some time for private contemplation, to which request Tom assented. He decided to walk down to that old well where siobhan and he had had many a romantic interlude. He passed her on the way out, putting some washing on the line. “Are yeh going for a walk?” she asked, to which he nodded. “If you wait ten minutes I can come along”, she offered. He detected a tension in her expression, the sort that can only be relieved by making a major revelation. Nevertheless, he told her that he needed to be by himself for a while. Plato, who was lying down next to Siobhan, sensed he needed to be by himself, and stayed where he was. On his way to the well, he found it hard to focus with the cacophony that was going on inside his head, especially as the bright summer sun seemed to cause a mild sinus. When he got to the shady copse that grew around the well, he found only an external peace, a disapointing incongruity. With a little more poetic sensibility, he might have noticed some of the wild onion stalks twitch endlessly as if fighting some endless struggle with ground, or realised that under the calm surface there were more organisms than he, or perhaps anyone else, could name, endlessly, tirelessly fighting to preserve this rustic idyll. He lacked this, so instead he thought of his plans for rejoining the war and Tom’s alternative. Yet the conflict was like one of those boring soccer matches where most of the time the ball stays around the centre of the field, as if both arguments were deploying the offside trap with relentless efficiency. he eventually decided he had better make a substitution, and decided to bring Siobhan into play. The contribution to the game was one he could not have expected. He got home to find Siobhan lying on her bed, twisting her hair, not in that coquettish way he was used to, but tensely, irritibly. Disturbingly, he noticed some hairs of hers on the bed, and feared the worst. He noticed a darkening of her eyes and an uncharacteristic sallowness in her cheeks. Though it pained him to do so, he told her: “I had some things I wanted to discuss with you, but I get the impression you also have some things on your mind.” “What sort of things?”, she asked, unexpectedly. “Well... I don’t know if I can stay here much longer when...” “I’m not sure if I can stay here much longer either”, she said in a voice doom-laden like a character in an Edgar Allen Poe tale. “Why not?”, he asked, feeling surprised and not a little irritated. “Because I’m late”, she replied, perhaps on some level aware that Schillerz would not know what this statement portended. “Late for what?”, he asked, tentatively, like a Polynesian peasant aware on some deep, visceral level that a volcano was about to erupt. “Late for my fucking period, you stupid fucking eejit.” Unfortunately for Schillerz, he still didn’t know what this meant, and Siobhan could tell. “My time of the month? My monthlies? My women’s problems?” Recognising that he still wasn’t quite sure what was going on, she grabbed her crotch and said, “I haven’t bled down here for five weeks. You know what that means?” Tragically, he didn’t, and this was made evident by his hesitant expression. “It means I’m fucking pregnant, that’s what it fucking means. I’m going to have a fucking baby in the next eight fucking months. So either you marry me, I go to England, or one of those Magdelen hell-holes. So why do you want to leave, then, pretty-boy?” When he got enough composure together, he said: “I don’t think that’s so important right now. How do you think this happened?” Though she knew what he meant, in her anger she could not resist the temptation to indulge in some salient sarcasm. After getting an impromptu lecture in human reproduction, which he patiently listened to, he asked: “What about your cycle? I thought you knew what days you could get pregnant and not?” “Well, apparently the rhythm method isn’t infallible after all, Hermes.” “So what do you think you should do?” At this question her anger turned to fear. She burst into tears, said “I don’t know what to do. And I don’t think you know either.” In a desperate, doomed attempt to comfort her, he made the following offer: “Well, I could marry you if it would help.” “Oh, Great idea”, she replied, sarcastically. “I’m sure you’ve got your birth cert and maybe your abwehr papers in there somewhere. You know, the local priest is sooo eager to marry off pregnant girls to protestant nazi spies.” It didn’t escape Schillerz’ attention that she said `protestant’ before `nazi’, but he deemed it unworthy of comment. “Well... it wouldn’t be that hard to falsify documents, would it?”, he asked, as tentatively as he was able. “This isn’t the thirty nine fucking steps, Hermes. This is reality. Things just don’t work out that simply.” “Well... maybe not, but I’ve heard of people do things like that and get away with it.” In a slightly calmer tone, apparently impressed by his genuine attempts to comfort her, she explained: “I don’t think you understand what people are like here, Hermes. They’re so inquisitive, and officuous, and gossipy... No matter what part of Ireland you say you’re from, they’ll know someone who lives there, you’ll get caught out after a while, end up in a POW camp, while I end up being brutalised and...” She looked down towards her stomach, feared the fate worse than abortion that faced the new life inside her, and placed her head on Schillerz’ chest and started to cry. Realising there was nothing he could say or do to comfort her, he just let her cry the pain out for as long as it took, which was quite a while. Inevitably, one thorny question would have to raise it’s ugly head. “Have you told your father about this yet?” “Actually, that’s the least of my worries in a way but... I have this fantasy that he might have a solution and I’m afraid that when I confront him he won’t know any better than you or me what to do.” “I see... well, he had problems bringing you into the world, and you turned out alright.” She gave him a look that recognised his good intentions but allowed him to realise what a patronisingly glib statement they had inspired, though an apology seemed uncalled for. “Well, he’s going to find out sooner or later, the longer he’s aware of this the more time he has to formulate a solution.” It was a small crumb of comfort, though, strangely, she was more cheered by Schillerz’ faith in her father than inspired to share it. “I suppose it’s better that I tell him myself than that he finds out second hand. Oh Lord, I hope he can think of something.” “I’m sure he can but...” “But what?” “But we’ll never be able to live the life we’re living now again.” She nodded stoically, her face blackened with tears, her hair frazzled, like a rose which had been plucked and was starting to lose it’s petals, and could never be retuned to the soil from which it sprung. Yet she saw a look in his eyes that informed her that, whatever else happened, she was not going to be deserted. It was a strange comfort to know that if she was going to get impregnated by a Protestant Nazi spy, then Schillerz would have been the one to choose. Schillerz comforted her physically for a while, taking care not to do anything that might lead to greater intimacy and the comcomitant impression of taking advantage of her plight. Then they discussed when would be the best time to tell her father. Schillerz didn’t think there was any time to waste, while Siobhan thought it might be better to wait ‘till he had had dinner. Her opinion was allowed to prevail, after which there followed a long, Becketian silence, in which they lay like broken halves of a Platonic sphere. After a while, she said in a voice transformed by the consciousness of pregnancy, rather than the pregnancy itself, into that of a jaded, world-weary middle-aged woman, “I suppose I’d better go down and make the dinner.” Schillerz, eager to help in any way he could, interjected with: “I can cook if you want.” As jaded and enervated as she was, she was not sure she could trust Schillerz with this task, and didn’t want to confront her father with her bad news after he’d been improperly fed. “I’m not sure you’re a good enough cook. Me da is pretty fussy, y’know. So am I actually,” she added, as if this was a cause for guilt. “Well, I’ve been watching you cook some days, and I’m learning a lot. I think I might be able to do a biryani. They seem pretty straightforward.” The decision to give him her acquiesence seemed not to have been made in her brain, but in her weary, aching limbs. She nodded gently, rationalising that the biggest botch Schillerz made of the dinner could not be worse than the torture of having to drag herself out of bed and face the array of ingredients needed to make the perfect biryani. She checked that Schillerz was aware of what all those ingredients were, then gave him her final approval, raising her hand like an Umbrian farmer saying, “One day son, all of this will be yours.” He went down to the kitchen with an elan that his fear of becoming a father could mollify but not eliminate. He walked past the living room without saluting Tom, wanting the dinner to be a surprise. He looked round the kitchen which had briefly become his domain, not stopping to think what an irony this was, as more than one man has got a woman pregnant in order to have someone else to do this sort of stuff. He took out the olive oil out of the drawer, smelt it’s magical odour, allowed it to waft through his nose like the most meretricous oenophile. He drained the basmati rice lovingly, almost, he almost thought, like washing a baby. He chopped the onions like he had been doing it all his life, then, with a dexterity that surprised even himself, picked all the spices from the spice rack, and added them, grinding the ones that needed to be ground like some pagan deity breathing life onto the earth. Then he added the vegetables, and then the rice, by which time the odours had found their mellifluous way to the living room. A minute or so later, Tom had followed them into the kitchen, where he greeted Schillerz with the words: “Well, my love, it seems your treating your father to one of his favourite dishes”, and reached over to embrace him but, with a shudder, realised who he was. “Hermes! Have you decided that your dharma is not war but cookery?” “Not exactly. It’s just that... Siobhan isn’t feeling so well and I thought I would save her the bother.” “Not feeling well?” Schillerz suddenly realised he had dug a hole for himself, as Tom continued: “What’s the matter with her?” “Oh..well... she’s sort of... under the weather.” “Women’s problems?” Tom asked hopefully? Schillerz gulped, perceptibly, said, “You could say that.” “Well, she’ll be able to come down and have dinner alright?” “Oh, yes, that won’t be a problem. You might call her right now, as I’m nearly ready.” It didn’t take him very long to establish dominion over this realm, it seems. Tom went out to call his daughter, when she didn’t reply at first he thought of going up to see what was wrong, but then he heard the creaking door signify that she was at least well enough to come downstairs. When he saw her dishevelled face, her tear-browned face and her lugubrious gait, he guessed that the weather she was under was either a monsoon or a parching heat-wave. “My love, what’s become of you? I haven’t seen you look so bad since you got the mumps as a child.” Schillerz looked over at her, beckoning her to ease the tension by admitting what had happened. She seemed determined to stick to her original plan, however. “I’m Okay. Just a touch of flu, I think.” Tom, who had seen more flu’s than she’d had hot dinners, was suspicious, but did not want to trouble her in her current state. “Well, it seems Hermes has cooked a meal with plenty of Vitamin C in it, right Hermes?” Schillerz nodded, though he didn’t really know what Vitamin C was or where it might be found. He served the dinner, watching the reactions of Tom, who was watching Siobhan’s face for any signs of brightening, but which seemed to wear an immutable, pachydermous tragic mask for the course of the meal. Schillerz was mildly frustrated that Tom showed no signs of appreciating his cookery, but allowed his sympathy for Siobhan to take precedence. When the meal ended, she turned to him and said, listed, da, there’s something we need to tell you.” Then she looked over at Schillerz and asked him, in a slighlty peremptory tone to make them some camomile tea. He did so, but with slighty less effort than he had put into the dinner. He brought them in a to the living room a few minutes later, found Siobhan deeply embedded in one of the armchairs, twisting her hair neurotically, while he leaned forward eagerly, desperate to know what the matter was. Schillerz handed them both the tea, then sat in a nervous position on the edge of one of the other seats. Tom looked round at them both and asked how much longer they would be kept in suspense. While Tom and Schillerz looked on eagerly, Siobhan twisted her hair, pressed her fingers against her forehead, bit her fingernails, rubbed her head against her shoulder, and finally, hastily, said, “I’m pregnant.” Tom took her hand and grasped it gently, said, “Oh, my love. Oh dear.” He looked over at Schillerz, asked if it was his, recieved a grimacing nod. Tom paused a while, asked how it happened, Siobhan responded with the sort of gesticulations that seem to try and draw answers from the air. Finally she offered, “I don’t know. I must have been ovulating early.” She added that it was her own fault, that Schillerz hadn’t made any unreasonable demands of her, which was judicuous but a comfort to no-one. Tom scratched his beard, admitted that he didn’t really know what to do, that he would have to give it some thought. He reassured them that they would have his support no matter which course of action they pursued, for which genororisy he was rewarded with a warm embrace from his daughter. Then he sipped some camomile tea, reflected on the bitter irony that the man he had chosen to become his son manquee was now poised to become the father of his grandchild. Then he asked to be left alone to think about this for a while. As the young ones reluctantly left the room, he asked if one of them could get his records of Brahms 2nd and 3rd, the music that helped him think in these situations. Dutifully, Siobhan bent down to pick them out from the cupboard beneath the bookshelves. Schillerz looked guiltily away, trying to repress the lust that had gotten him and the woman he loved into such trouble. This gratified Tom’s sense of irony rather than amused him. Siobhan went over to the turntable, checked the needle was Okay and dropped on on the record, walked over to her father to kiss him goodnight as the lush opening chords filled the room. Schillerz looked on, feeling like a superfluous encumberment, which is what he would be if he belonged to a lot of species. Going up the stairs, he was unsure if Siobhan wanted to make any physical contact or not, he felt generally awkward around her, the way a teenage boy does around a girl he has an unrequited crush on. Siobhan sensed this, and asked: “Hermes, why don’t you hold my hand?” “Well... I wasn’t sure that’s what you’d want.” “Of course it is. I need someone to support me right now. I need to feel that you won’t desert me.” “Of course I won’t. You know you don't need to worry.” With those words he took hold of her hand and entered the bedroom. This, sadly for Schillerz, was another realm of gauche awkwardness. “So what do you want to do now”, he asked. “I just want to be by myself for a while.” “Okay, I’ll just go into the other bedroom, then.” “No, I mean... I want to be by myself but... I need you here... I just need privacy... I need to think by myself, not to talk... Stay here... please... can you?” “You want me to stay here?” “Yes but... not to talk, or to do anything else. I just need you here.” It seemed like a strange request, but not one he felt he could refuse. He watched her light a candle, creating a dim hue which seemed to cast her furrowed features into a more gentle light. Then she lay down on the bed, beckoned him to join her. It was a slightly frustrating position for him, trying to figure out what was going on behind that newly grim facade, while trying to clarify his own feelings simultaneously. It made him conscious of how little he understood about her, and about himself, how futile the idea of intellectual union was. After about an hour of this fraught, silent neurosis, when he variously imagined the horrors of POW camps and Magdelen laundries, fantasised himself taking his son (he never imagined it would be a girl) for treks in the Bavarian alps, and concocted all sorts of hare-brained schemes to get themselves out of this mess, they heard a knock on the door. It was, as it could only be, Tom. Schillerz got up to answer. “Hey, Hermes, come on downstairs, bring Siobhan too. I’ve thought of a way to solve this wretched problem.” Schillerz’ eyes lit up, while Siobhan, still on the bed, adopted a look of mere sceptical optimism, and dragged herself up. They followed him downstairs as if being led by an Amerindian shaman in a tribal rain dance. When they got to the living room, Tom beckoned them hurriedly to sit down, then started his spiel. “Okay, here’s what you should do. It’s just my advice, of course. If you can think of something better then... well by all means. I’m going to get a phone line installed in this house. It shouldn’t take more than a month, no-one will know Siobhan’s pregnant by then. So if I get any of my pains, I can call a nurse, and someone to cook my dinner. In the meantime, you two go up to Dublin, you can stay there for a few days, then get the ferry over to Holyhead, and make your way down to London from there. Schillerz, with your knowledge of German you should be able to get a job in espionage, which is what you wanted to do anyway.” Those last words prompted Siobhan to look at Schillerz askew, but she tried to focus on the bigger picture. “That way you can support Siobhan, when the war is over you can either go back to Germany or come back here, though you’ll either have to get married, or adopt British citizenship. Hopefully I’ll still be alive to see my little grandson when the war is over.” With those last words he had to swallow a gulp. Schillerz shook his head, trying to take all of this in. “I suppose we could do all of that but... what if the British intelligence think I’m a Nazi spy?” “That’s a risk you have to take. But when they look through your stuff, and find banned books like Ulysses, that risk will be minimised.” Schillerz admired the thoroughness of his plan, then looked over at Siobhan, to see what her opinion was. “Well, if we do this, how do I know that I’ll ever see you again, da?” “You don’t. You just have to live in hope. But if you go to one of those laundries, your hope is gone. Anyway, you’ve probably spent enough of your life with me already, and you’ll have another month to discuss any unresolved issues we might have between us.” She admired his magnanimity, but there was one issue on which she wanted immediate closure. “So, if you’re confident a nurse could take care of you, why have you kept me around the house so long?” He adopted a look of melancholy stoicism, a look that suggested that he had expected this question for a long time. “Well, you’re my only child. Your mother is dead, and once you go away, I have no-one to bond with. I knew this day would come, sooner or later, but... I left enough money in my will for you to do whatever you wanted with your life... If I was still alive by the time you got to thirty...” he raised his arm the way someone would releasing a dove from captivity, then nervously awaited Siobhan’s response ro this latest revelation. It could have been an angry one, but her reaction to the news that he had planned to keep her around the house for another seven years was measured and respectful. “Well, I suppose.. the best laid plans of mice and men... But surely you knew you were going to last at least another seven years?” “I’m not so sure... these pains I’ve been having, I’m sure they could be the prelude to something worse, although no doctor I’ve seen will predict that, none of them are willing to rule it out... anyway, the point is that I knew this day would come eventually... it’s not about me anymore, it’s about getting you and Hermes to safety. So do you think this plan could work?” “Well, I just reprimanded Hermes for a plan that was too spy novel.” She looked over at Schillerz, who was blushing slightly. “But I think this one may work. And, like you say, I don’t have much of a choice.” She looked over at Schillerz, as if passing an invisible baton to him. “Well, I can’t let her go to England by herself, I can’t stay here, I can’t go back to Germany, I guess I’ve got no real choice.” Tom responded with a wry smile, Siobhan with the gentlest of embraces. “I suppose that means you’ll have to go to Dublin to make arrangements to have a phone installed. You’ve never been to Dublin, have you, Hermes?” Schillerz responded to Tom’s question with an ironic shake of his head. “I’m interested to know what you make of it. There’s a few friends of mine there I’d like you to check up on. It might be a good idea to book your ferry tickets while you’re there as well.” Schillerz reflected on how little time or debate it took to resolve this issue, the finality and totality contrasting so saliently with the aleatory, arbitrary circumstances that brought him to this position. It was a decision he would think about for the rest of his life, but then they would still be talking about the current war when everyone in this room had crossed the Styx. “Dublin. What’s it like, Tom?”, he replied, implicitly accepting Tom’s strategy by doing so. “Well, you read Dubliners and Portrait of an artist, didn’t you?” Schillerz nodded. “They give you a good impression of what the city is like. Overwhelmingly gloomy in some ways, but with a humour and a spirit that generally keeps the people going. I’m not sure what you’d make of it, having been to places like Munich and Hamburg. When I went there first, as a teenager, it seemed like this huge, grey metropolis, since then I’ve travelled the world and now it seems like a faded, jaded, former imperial outpost that hasn’t quite decided what it wants to become in the future.” In the days before Schillerz got a chance to make up his own mind, he felt he had been cast in some strange limbo, but he always reaasured himself that his own uncertainty paled before that of his compatriots on the eastern front. They got a train to Dublin a few days later, Siobhan’s handbag bulging with adresses and shopping requests. The train contained an eclectic mixture of people, from farmers going to the city to petition their local TDs to members of the old Anglo-Irish gentry going up town for the weekend to see some plays in the Gaiety. Younger, Irish people as well, hardy sons of the soil trying, forlornly, to look respectable as they headed for the ferry at Dun Laoghaire to face more toil in the building sites of London. Or perhaps face Schillerz’ compatriots in North Africa, in a bitter struggle to the death. He looked at their sullen faces, their hastily combed fringes and their spasmodic, Kalaharian stubble, wondered how any of them would react if they knew he was, the rallies he’d been to, the propaganda he’d listened to, or even if they could hear what he was thinking, in the language of his ancestors. Then he noticed another young Irish person. Well, not so young, maybe someone in his late twenties who didn’t drink, smoke or eat red meat. A frustrated intellectual, perhaps, with a penetrating stare and and endless range of histrionic gesticulations, running his fingers through his unusually long, curly hair, biting his nails, constantly avoiding eye contact with other passengers, as if his penetrative gaze might turn them, medusa-like, to stone. Schillerz wondered why this person was taking such an interest in him, or perhaps the uberfraulien sitting next to him. Perhaps he was a shy, nervous type who wondered how a beauty like Siobahn would end up with a person like himself. Or maybe there was something more, something in his glance that suggested that there was a deep bond between him and Schillerz. For almost the whole duration of the journey, most of which Siobhan spent asleep, he alternated between looking out at the mountains and the bogs, the fields and the hedgerows, and at this strange charcacter. When the train finally passed through all the lush fields and dismal suburbs, he watched him get off, turn his head back towards Schillerz and Siobhan, with a pessimistic, Cassandra-like expression that seemed to warn Schillerz of catastrophes ahead, then dissapear into the throng of hurried, disparate passengers. Siobhan noticed the glance as well, asked Schillerz who this person was. He answered honestly that he didn’t know, and acted as if he would never think about it again. He started to take in the sights, the stalls selling heavily censored newspapers, the cafes selling tea at vastly inflated wartime prices, the ruddy-faced beggars lying against the walls with caps forlornly soliticing farthings, the nuns with their pious expressions from whom Siobhan flinched nervously, fee;ing like Mick Collins walking past RIC members twenty years before the ragged posters advertising things Schillerz could not imagine many of the people around him affording. They made their way out of the station, hailed a taxi. A cab driven by a middle-aged, greying, dolichocephalic man opened it’s doors to them. “So where would youse fine young people be headin’, then?”, they were asked, in an accent Schillerz had never heard before, full of the lugubrious weltschermz that one would imagine a grey city like this inspiring. “Dublin Castle, please”, requested Schillerz, meekly. “Oh, so youse are gettin married, or maybe youse are buyin’ a house for yourselves.” Siobhan tittered, and Schillerz said, “Not quite. We’re just trying to have a telephone installed in her father’s house.” “Ah well, I don’t blame youse folks for puttin’ off the big day. Times is uncertain, what with this Hitler marchin’ into every county in Europe. They say there’s every possibilty that England could fall in the next few months, and then we’ll all be speakin’ German and doing the goose step. You wouldn’t think of heading over there to help out with the war effort, would ya?” “Actually, I’m going to go over there within the next month.” “Good for you, boy. But tell you what, you’d want to marry this young one before you head over there, else you never know what’ll happen.” Siobhan smiled embarresedly, but Schillerz, who had still not got the hang of the whole piss-taking, ball-hopping thing, held her close. The driver realised he had touched a raw nerve and opted to keep his eyes on the road and his hands upon the wheel. Schillerz marvelled at the wild incongruities of the city, the augustan architecture and the dull grey skies behind it, the green, putrescent river and the elegnant little bridges across which a constant stream of hurried people crossed, making Schillerz think of TS Eliot’s allusions to Dante. So, this was the Styx, they were up from the sticks, the smell sticks in their throat, makes them sick. Finally, they arrived at the castle. To Schillerz, it seemed less of a castle in the way he understood the term, one of Ludwig II’s flamboyant, Wagnerian collections of spires and butresses, than the stately, sombre headquarters of a North Sea trading guild in in Hamburg or Rostock. He watched the beurocrats strut round like ruddy-faced peacocks, wondered how many of them got where they were by fighting the perfidious Sasanach in muddy bogs, though if he thought about it long enough, he’d realise that nobody ever gets into a position of power without either they or their ancestors causing some horrible pain to someone weak and vulnerable. He didn’t as he had other things on his mind, like getting that telephone installed. They finally found the relevant office, what Dickens might have called an eternity room, or Munch in his youth painted as a gloomy limbo, except he would have used a broader range of colours. Schillerz wondered by what osmotic process the colour drained from the clothes and buildings and streets and the sky over Dublin and into their faces and the river that ran lugubriously through their grey city. But then he hadn’t been inside a Catholic church, just one of those dark grey places where a small number of poorly trained civil servants ran the lives of everyone else in the country. They asked what desk they were to make their inquiry at, and pointed towards a room where other respectable, middle class types like themselves were waiting for service, holding briefcases and handbags and other signifiers of their alpha status in the community, most of whom would be aghast to learn that the new status symbol which they were trying to acquire would one day be thrown to the hoi-polloi along with their cars and their foreign holidays, with any Tom, Dick or Harry able to walk into a shop in any town in the country and come out with a phone they could walk around with and take onto busses and annoy all the other passengers. For now though, they remained safe in their bourgois cocoons where poverty would only ever come up to them on the street and ask for a few bob and be brushed aside just as easily. He watched some money changing hands over the counter, and thought this would be a good moment to ask about the money here, which, like some travelling mendicant monk, he had managed to get by without. Casting her eyes around the room to make sure this action would invite no suspicion, she took out some change and some notes, explained the labyrinthine monetary system that her compatriots had inherited and still shared with their former imperial overlords. It took him quite a while, in particular, to get used to the idea that their were units of currency that were worth one nine-hundred-and-sixtieth of a basic unit. He held one of the coins in his hand, a part of that stable currency that held it’s value while the Rentenmark imploded and the Bundesmark fluctuated like a weathercock in a stormy north sea port. He held a half-crown in his hand, imbuing it’s slighty rusting cupro-nickel verecundity with the stability it represented, and that of the nation that produced it, that remained intact through two reichs and a republic came and went in his homeland, the country that had always been the desired ally of his former fuehrer and his Kaiser before him, that sucked the life out of Bengal, Southern Africa, and the island that now kept his feet from getting wet while it’s aristocrats argued about what time to have there afternoon tea, which left it’s undelible mark on the city he now sat in like the stump of a willow tree in the middle of a field of potatoes. And this is the country to which he was now going to have to flee, like many from this unfortunate island in the past, present, and the future. Another one of his reveries, inspired, no doubt by a conversation with Tom. It was brought to an end by Siobhan, who was bored enough to wander into such reveries, but being the loquacious young thing she was, wanted to have one aloud. “You seem really fascinated by that half-crown.” “Oh, well, not in the coin itself, more what it represents for me.” She nodded, preffering to enunciate one of her own currency-related themes, though this one also came from the mercurial mind of her father, who seemed to linger behind all their discourse like a Hobbesian Leviathan or a Hitchcokian camera eye. She took the coin in her hand, and said: “Me da says one day we’ll all have the same currency all over Europe, or at least Western Europe.” Schillerz gave the same look of respectful inquistiveness that he would have afforded her father, as if he was some roman augerer picking over the entrails of a cadver to divine messages from the omniscient gods. “Oh, yeah, he was saying that as early as a hundred years ago, people in your country realised that the major powers in this century would be the US and Russia, and that the only way Europe could maintain it’s position would some form of monetary union. Unfortunately, people from your country have only ever tried to impose it by force, while people from other countries, like Aristide Briand, have suggested something more consensual. He thinks it’ll happen in the decades after the war, though only after endless bickering and horse-trading.” “And what does he think this new currency will be called?” “I don’t know. The Euro, maybe. Or something more imaginitive.” She put the half crown back in her pocket, it’s brief, radient career as a muse for reflections on political and economic history being brought to an abrubt stop, dooming it to return to a life of being exchanged for packets of wild woodbine and sacks of kerr pinks before being melted down to be made into a shiny new ten pence piece, or, if it was really lucky, find it’s way into the collection of a sullen, bespectacled numismatist. They made their way to the top of the queue, each succesive seat given up to them like a piece of feudal fealty by their predessors. After another wait which they endured in silence like mourners at athe funeral of a wealthy but unloved relative, they were beckoned to a desk behind which a balding, bespectacled, beaurocrat sat. “How may I be of assistance”, he asked, in that peculiar, affected tone of voice in which Dublin civil servants spoke. “We wish to get a phone installed as soon as possible.” Without giving any verbal reply, he took some documents from one of the piles next to him and started to ask him questions, writing down his answers in a steady, laboured handwriting. When he had gotten Tom’s name and address, he asked if Schillerz was “said person” Schillerz replied that he wasn’t but that Siobhan was his daughter. “And what relation would you be to her?”, he asked, in an officously inquistive tone which contorted his by no means handsome face into a ferret-like, Uriah Heep expression. “He’s my fiancee”, blurted Siobhan, at which Schillerz remained impassive and the beaurocrat’s suspicion mellowed into mere disdain, more the disdain of the old and decaying for the young and beautiful than that of the urbanite for his bucolic cousins, Schillerz reckoned. He made a request for the cost of telephone installation, and Schillerz handed it over, his unfamiliarity with the Irish coinage not escaping the civil servants attention. He counted the money with a Scrooge-like avarice, though to Schillerz, not a great reader thus far of Dickens, it seemed more like a Semitic character from a film back home. Finally, he asked if there were any additional details which would make it easier to find the house. Siobhan gave him a detailed description of it’s whereabouts which he transcribed as if performing a labour of Hercules. Parenthetically, have you noticed how recent avatars of the Hercules myth have emphasised his physical strength at the expense of the obvious guile which is what allows him to complete all those tasks in the original myths? The emphasis on physicality is a bit disturbing to me, as it probably is to many other scrawny intellectual vegans who can only think of those battery hens every time they see a Sinous Scwharzneger or a Strapping Stallone on the silver screen. I’m also of the belief that our current fixation with the physical dates back to the nazis. But then, while you probably have no idea what Schillerz looks like without his clothes on, I spent pages describing Siobhan’s body. Does this make me a sexist? It’s the sort of question that keeps me up at night. Anyway, when the sullen civil servants sissyphean subserviences were succesfully sealed, he assured them without making any pretence at enthusiasm that their phone would be installed within three weeks. The smiles that this announcement provoked didn’t inspire any concomitant satifaction in their interlocuter, at least none they could percieve behind his furrowed, receding brow. They left the building, waving him goodbye, to which he responded with a dismissive nod that belied less the knowledge that his low-level beaurocratic job could affect the lives of hundreds of people than the awareness that anybody else from the same social class with two brain cells to rub together could do the same job. “So, in three weeks, we’ll be able to get out of here. No-one will know I’m pregnant by then”, Siobhan told Schillerz, in a hushed tone, but with a palpable, almost immanent relief, as they walked into the courtyard. “I suppose we can go to buy those ferry tickets now.” “Yes, I supose so, though maybe it would be better to wait for a month.” “So, you’ve realised that we’re not that punctual here, huh?” He gave an ironic nod, then asked where they would have to go to collect the tickets. She told him they would probably have to get the bus to Dun Laoghaire and buy the tickets there. They made their way down to the river, through the grey streets where they passed Dubliners of all ages, social classes and genders, yet who all seemed to be dressed uniformly in black. Schillerz heard snatches of conversation here and there, though he found the accent thick and impenetrable like the stew he had tried to eat on his first day on this island. Ocassionally they got a second glance from the odd passer-by, though Schillerz assured himself that they were provoked by Siobhan’s beauty rather than his unheimliceid. Yet when they got to the bus stop and waited a few minutes for their conduit to a safer, less fearful life to come along, he felt his otherness more sharply. On the bus, he picked up more of the conversations, and heard about Dublin GAA, the inferior quality of guiness in England, the level of rationing for various household goods, and realised that in his rustic ivory tower he had learned nothing of any of these things, a bit like some of the tourists and students in the years to come. They got past, with the tortuously slow pace that one would have done on a CIE bus at that time all the bustling city streets, then the smoky factory chimneys and the containers by the river, through some stately suburbs and salacious slums to the port. When the bus expurgated them , he could not fail to notice the containers that seemed bound for the same place as them. Why were they still exporting food, as they were in the famine, when people at home had to get by on mere rations? As both sides in the current world conflict embraced market capitalism with the same zeal, the question was as academic as asking how many angels could dance on a pinhead, or what lenght of skirt they were wearing. They found the ticket office with surprising ease, as if the only thing the government of this country was willing to facilitate was emigration. Inside, they got suspicous glances from working class Irish men, who were heading over to the factories of Liverpool and Manchester to find employment that proved so elusive here. They suspected, perhaps, that these were a middle-class Irish couple who would step on the train to London for a weekend of culture and sightseeing about which they would boast about for weeks to their bourgeois friends. If only they knew what horrible fears were driving them here. After another encounter with someone who would rather be doing a different job, they got their tickets, looked at their watches and realised they would have some time to spare before they got the train home. On the bus back to the centre of Dublin they decided what to do with their free time. Schillerz wanted to see some of the pubs that were mentioned in Portrait of an Artist, though Siobhan warned him that, in this age when Joyce was still reviled by his compatriots, they would not be easy to find. Siobhan wanted to go to the National Gallery, and maybe squeeze in a bit of shopping while they were in the city. With a combination of Teutonic efficiency and magnanimous generosity, Schillerz worked out a rota that would satisfy both of them. Siobhan smiled, realising that cohabitant life with him would be less of an ordeal than the clerically sanctified marraiges of many. She put her head on his shoulder as he looked, fascinated out the window of the bus. They got to do most of the things they wanted to do, rushing around the way daytrippers usually do, Schillerz indulging Siobhan while she tried on dresses and stuff, even examining some of the fabrics himself to see how they compared with the things girls wore at home, getting a few suspicious glances for his pains. In a concession to Schillerz’ desire to do a bit of erstwhile Joyce tourism, they wandered round the august buildings at Trinity where the great man’s weltanschauung was formulated. They made it to the National Gallery as well, where the plump, delicate female charcaters in the Vermeers reminded Schillerz of a certain someone and the Steens made him deliberate on how a maritime imperial outpost could become a place of almost vulgar opulence in the space of half a century. 17th Century Amsterdam, that is. And finally, they got to drink in one of the pubs mentioned in Portrait of an Artist, probably Ulysses, which Schillerz hadn’t gotten round to reading yet. It didn’t make much of it right now, though in the future there would be drawings and photos of the afformentioned belletrist hanging from the walls with other Irish heroes like Jack Charlton and a website with a link to doublelin.com and a group package for Bloomsday. It dissapointed Schillerz, who half-expected to be confronted by a gracile, bespectacled student and engaged in an erudite discourse about Aristotolean dialectics. Instead, there were just a few corpulent old men talking about the same things Schillerz had heard about on the bus. He kept his ears pricked up, as it were, for any mention of the war and what ordinary people here thought of what was going on in Germany as they sipped the frothy heads from their pints of Guiness. Yet he heard so little of insight that he was lest to believe that their brows had furrowed and their hairs greyed in vain. On the train home, while Siobhan thought about how good her new clothes would look at the next dance, this thought brought him endless disspointment, though later on he would realise that for every Joyce, or, for that matter, every Goethe or Schiller, thousands would live a life of unrewarding toil, brightened only by alcohol, football and maybe the odd shag. Perhaps, he too, needed the kairos that this Odyssean or Dantean venture into the underworld offered, for the next month he would labour only in his mind. The rest of the train journey home was a lethargic affair, with Schillerz sitting on the right hand side of the train, watching the sun go down behind an erubescent sky, the same sun that would go down on his compatriots a few hours later, in many of their cases for the last time. When they got off the train, they felt that familiar feeling of isolation that rural people get when they step off a bus or a train or an auto-rickshaw from the city, a deafening silence punctuated by the odd forlorn caracole of a horse and cart or the tintinabulation of crickets reminding them that the place was as densly inhabited as any, just by members of different species. It was a long, lonely, slog back to the house, with our protagonists each too lethargic to strike up much of a conversation, their shopping bags making grooves in their hands, the sort that you can percieve fading away like steam from a kettle or the dimminuendo at the end of a Wagnerian overture or passionate youthful convictions. When they finally got to the front door of the house, the sound of Siobhan’s shopping bags hitting the floor, or maybe her keys making their awkward passage from her handbag to the keyhole, alerted Tom to return of the native and the etranger to his humble abode. He rushed to the door with an eagerness that was a bit disconcerting considering how little time his daughter had been away. It would have been disconcerting to Schillerz to think how this sagacious, crypto-shamen was unreconciled to the idea of losing his daughter for a long time, how far he was from achieving nirvana or ataraxia, inducing the sort of feelings a five-year-old feels when he realises his father isn’t infallible or those of a sophomore who finds out his favourite lecturer is an alcoholic, if he wasn’t so wasted from the train journey himself. Tom hugged his daughter, and the prospective father of his granchild, the way only a homosexual or a heterosexual who was completely comfortable with his heterosexuality could. He beckoned them to come and sit down in the living room, where they entrenched themselves as if on the Somme. He asked them if they wanted tea, herbal tea, or hot chocolate, and went into the kitchen to comply with their requests. He came back a few minutes later, bearing hot steaming mugs that they seemed to desire the way parched, cracking soil desires water. He waited ‘till Siobhan had tasted the revivifying beverage he supplied her with before tentatively asking her if she’d managed to find the books, magazines and records he’d been looking for. This sent her scurrying, ferret-like around her shopping bags, after which she produced, like some low-rent illusionist or amateur alchemist, copies of Dublin Opinion, The New Statesman, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, Sight and Sound, The Manchester Guardian, a copy of Murphy by Samuel Beckett, a couple of discs of FÜrtwanger conducting Beethoven, and some by Count Basie and Billie Holiday. It was the recordings by the the naiad from upper Manhattan that excited him most, almost the way that the original denizens of that island would have been by the trinkets bequested them by machoistic conquistors. He took it gently from it’s sleeve as if performing some sacred Hindu ceremony, looking upon the glazed vinyl the way the monkeys do at that smooth-surfaced thing in 2001. He got the turntable going, drew her mellow, ethereal song from the disc, asked as he was doing so what his guest made of his capital city. “Oh, well, it’s...” he struggled to squeeze his variegated impressions of the city into one succinct sentence, then, quickly realising what a forlorn task this was, just finished with: “an experience” “That it is”, replied Tom in a slightly dissapointed tone, as he returned to his seat and started flicking through the magazines that his daughter brought him, with the same wide-eyed wonder that a child opens it’s christmas presents, his enthusiasm only dampened by the odd missing article which had fallen victim to the censor’s zealous scalpel. “So, you got everything done I wanted, then?” “Yes”, replied Schillerz, surprised at the casual, throwaway nature of this remark, pleasantly surprised that he should place such implicit trust in a recent renegade. As he was clearly not cognisant of Desdamona’s father’s look to her moor if thou hast eyes to see advice, whether out of naiveté or profound psychological insight, Schillerz replied that the phone would be there within a fortnight and a half if the department of posts and telegraphs were as good as their word. Tom nodded, lifting his eyes from the marasmic pages of the Statesman in the most perfunctory way, asking him if their tickets for the ferry had also been purchased, in a way that, and maybe I’m being a bit presumtuous here, that he was ever so slightly in denial about the whole emigration thing. Schillerz took the tickets out of his pocket, sullen, nondescript, pieces of paper that would provide a conduit to a different life, perhaps a better one, and waved them in Tom’s general direction. It was an innapropriate gesture, as Tom remained stuck transfixedly in the pages of his magazine. After a few seconds of awkward silence he emerged, a bit like Martin Sheen raising his head from the lagoon in Apocalypse Now, and nodded assent, asking how much they cost, then suddenly remembering to ask if he would get a phone directory with his phone. Schillerz looked over at Siobhan, who responded with a blank, search-me expression, which prompted Schillerz to admit that they had not given that matter the consideration it deserved. At This point Tom closed the pages of his magazine, signifying his desire to become a fully-fledged particpant in this conversation. He scratched his beard, the way he always did when planning one of his neat, foolproof solutions to the vissisitudes life threw at him. “Hmm. I guess they’ll probably bring one down alright. If they don’t, there’s some adresses in Dublin I’d like you to check out, and give them my number.” An admirable solution, if not expressed in a grammatically correct way, but then Tom was a great admirer of a certain walrus-moustached nineteenth-century German philosopher whose name is quite hard to spell. “Incidentally, when will you be making your little trip?”, he asked, downgrading it’s importance in a defence-mechanistic way. “Well, they said the phone would be here in three weeks, so we booked the tickets for a month from now.” Siobhan and Tom smiled at one another, she admiring his chameleon-like ability to blend in, he thinking that his daughter’s gain might be a significant loss to the abwehr after all. The smiles made them more at ease with one another, and they chatted about Dublin, about England, about childrearing till the cows had not only come home but put the dinner on and gone in to watch Coronation Street, one of those long, semi-intimate conversations that well-adjusted sit-com families have, though our heroes were anything but your typical focus-group nuclear family. Nonetheless, it was one in which the bonds between Schillerz and Siobhan strenghtened, but in which the imminent departure of the young couple hung over them like a sword of Damocles, or a tin-opener leaning over the edge of a kitchen table where someone was preparing dinner dressed only in their socks. The athmosphere of Carpe Diem pervaded the house like the odours from an incense stick for the following month, undiluted by the wistful nihilism of Becket’s latest ouevre, which was passed along the triumverate like a baton at the olympic games, ‘sceptin dat dere was only three of ‘em, massa. There were the obvious heart-to-hearts, tete-a-tetes, moments of Proustian intimacy and Joycean epiphany. I won’t bore you or give myself repetitive stress disorder by describing them all, just present a few edited highlights that our experts will take us through after the break. One day, about two days after they got back from Dublin, they’d just had some home-made cous-cous with chick peas, seasoned with cumin and cayenne pepper. Home-made cous-cous? Oh, did I not mention that Siobhan could add cous-cous making to her CV, if she thought it would help her get a part-time job in a WWII London factory? Yes, using as recipe that Tom brought back from Beiruit or Abu-Dhabi from watching chaste beveiled arab maidens rolling wheat in the blazing sun in the dusty bazaars, almost completing the preparation with their steaming sweat. He had watched them, trying to remain impassive while they gave him suspicious glances, surveying their every action carefully as he knew, even with his passable Arabic that he could never, ever approach these women and ask them what they were doing. Yet when he returned, six months later, he was able to turn raw wheat grain into cous-cous that would satisfy the most demanding customer in the trendiest Islington eaterie today, and pass on the knowledge to his daughter, who every month went to a local organic farmer, who was organic because he hadn’t even heard of fertilisers, and turned his pure, unadulterated wheat by some sublime alchemy into the food of Morrocan peasants and London yuppies. Would Tom have made a good spy, himself, therefore? Of course, dammit, Tom would have been a success at anything he turned his hand to. That’s the whole point of Tom. DO try to keep up. Anyway, the point of this story is that cayenne pepper was, then as now, best known as a spice but can also be used to palliate low blood pressure in a similar way to some recreational drugs that are manufactured in the lower Cork harbour area you can have prescribed if you convince your GP that the snake down your trousers hasn’t been able to stand to attention with the same regularity that he used to. It won’t have escaped your attention, being the cultivated, well-informed, erudite, au courant, would-get-to-£32,000-on- Who wants to be a millionaire-without-wasting-any-of-your-lifelines type that you obviously are that Latin America, from where said spice originates, is full of teeming, copiously populated cities. You have to wonder where they all come from, know what I mean, eh, eh, huh, know what I mean? Indeed. So Schillerz has eaten from this tree of knowledge, as it were, and the aphrodisiac properties have kicked in, so to speak. As I used up all the relevant synonyms already, suffice it to say he had an erection, the type that won’t go away no how often you think of aging catholic nuns. But, whaddya know, Mr. Nabakov, he doesn’t know if Siobhan is in a position to offer him relief. Ah, Sure God love us, doesn’t he go in go in to her room and try to find out if she can or not. So he knocks on the door, she invites him, he goes in and she’s reading a book, be honest with ya I can’t remember what it was. So he lies down next to her and he says something like this: “Siobhan, I’m a little embarrassed to ask you this but...” She can’t help but notice the pretuberence in his trousers, and put’s her hand down there, grabs hold of it, and asks, “is it something to do with this?” “Yes. How did you know?” “Woman’s intuition. So what is it you wanted to know? Surely not...” “Well, I remember what you said about your cycle and...” “My cycle?” she asked, followed by a burst of laughter. “Hermes, I hate to have to tell you this, but my cycle is going to be interrupted for another eight months or so.” “And....” “And, for the next six months”, she replied, unbuttoning her blouse, “you can fuck me till the cows come home. After that you won’t want to, as I’ll be all bloated and suffering from morning sickness and stuff.” That was about as much of a cue as he required. Charming little anecdote, n’est ce pas? The sort of thing that would never happen to a spock child or anyone who’s lived in the post-Hite age of sexual freedom, except in a non-western country. The sort of story you can indulge in writing when you’re composing an historical novel, with gentle condescencion for your innocent ancestors. Yet the old apothegm eats away at the back of my mind like Homer Simpson in an all-you-can-eat restraurant: Every Time You Gain Something you Lose Something. I’m not sure if that’s entirely true, actually. From this particular experience, Schillerz gained the knowledge that he’d be able to screw Siobhan for the next six months and lost... What, exactly? So, that was on of the raisins like that that made up the current cake of their life in that month, along with the currents of the odd really fine meal and the marzipan of the odd excellent book enjoyed, and the sultana of the odd trip to a movie and dance in town. After he had gotten through Murphy and been dazzled by it’s imagination and humour (I think Beckett’s prose kicks ass, Martin) he read a verse translation of The Divine Comedy, Madame Bovary, The Republic, On Liberty, Walden and Civil Disobedience, the sort of books that make a craterous impression on the febrile mind of a twenty-one-year old. Then, one day, a couple of weeks after they got back from Dublin and the wait for the phone to be installed was turning into one of Beckett’s later drama’s, Schillerz was sitting up in bed, reading an original German version of Death in Venice that Tom had picked up in Vienna about fifteen years ago, on his way back form the Middle East. Peculiarly, Siobhan noticed, his expression seemed to become more teutonic when he read the German prose of the tortured Jewish Homosexual whose books he would have been burning a month or so ago. His spectacles seemed to drift a little bit down his nose, his brow become that little bit more furrowed. This was actually the first time he’d read German, other than his manual, since he got here. Tom had totally forgotten he’d had that book, and Schillerz had just come across it on one of his perusals of Tom’s dusty shelves, and when Schillerz showed it to him he welcomed it like a long-lost friend. As a rule they didn’t ever speak German to each other, as it alienated Siobhan, and Schillerz needed to practice his English. Anyway, it wasn’t like Tom was ever going to go to Germany again, was it? It was a strange experience for Schillerz, reading Mann’s flowing, undulating prose in his own tongue, renewing his acquaintaince with large compound words that you only saw in books the way you meet old schoolfriends in a bar. He was basking in one passage of anguished, petrarchan lust when Siobhan, who would liked to have let him finish, but had something pressing on her mind. “Hermes?” He looked up with look of moderate annoyance, a look that suggested he was irked but would get over it. “Do you remember when me da suggested that you get a job working for the British secret service, and he said something like `isn’t that what you wanted to do anyway?’ What was that all about?” Are you familiar with the scene where Iago asks Othello, “When you were courting Desdemona, did Micheal Cassio know of your love?” That’s the effect I’m going for here, except that rather than a Machiavellian Italian and a sligthly slow moor, we have an honest-as-the-day-is-long Irish girl and a conflicted German ex-spy. Nonetheless, his reaction is so similar to that of the moor’s that he could play understudy to Olivier (or Larry Fishbourne, except he’d need more realistic makeup), if only for that one brief moment. He looks up from his book briefly, not thinking the matter of any importance, says: “I was just thinking aloud with your father one day, thought it might be a good idea for me to rejoin the war.” His eyes drifted back down to the compelling text, thinking, perhaps a little naively, that the matter was now closed. He didn’t see the surprise and disdain on Siobhan’s face ‘til she grabbed the book away from him, slammed it face down on the bed and said, somewhat stunned at his apathy: “And why didn’t you discuss this with me?” “Well, I...” he started to formulate a response, but the glare that had taken over Siobhan’s face with the alacrity of a blitzkreig mad him nervous, “I discuss most of the books I read with your father. It was one of them that made me think that... maybe I was... wasting my time here... but... I don’t know, really.. genuinely, it might have passed, if we hadn’t found out about...” he put his hand on her stomach, gave her an apologetic, puppy-dog look, which succeeded, if not in cozening her, at least in taking the vitriolic edge off her rage. “So, what if you had decided to go to London before you knew I was pregnant? Would you have taken me?” “If that was what you wanted, yes. And your father, I suppose”, he added, apprehensively. “So you were planning to take me to London, and didn’t even tell me aboout it?” He took a deep breath, remembering some of the stuff Tom had told him about Zen. “I wasn’t planning anything. I was just... speculating. If I made any serious plans, you would be the first to know about them.” “So why didn’t you discuss you `speculations’ with me?” · He looked over at the wall, perhaps imagining it a more receptive interlocutor. “Your father is the person I discuss books with. And, before you ask, it’s not because I don’t think you’re intelligent, it’s just that he’s read more.” He paused, and added: “I know you’re sick of being in his shadow. When we go to London you can finally come out from under it, get a job, make new friends among the Irish community there, bring up our child the way you want... That’s what you want, right?” He looked at her nervously, but the look of complaisance on her face suggest he had successfully walked the tightrope over the crocodile pit of female wrath to the safety of feminine beneficence. It’s a tightrope all of those burdened with external genitalia have to walk sometime, or else be condemned to the fate of Onan. Unless we live in an Islamic country or... Well, I’ll get to that in a whil The final episode in our tryptich of vignettes from Schillerz and Siobhan’s last month in Ireland before the war ends takes place in Tom’s living room. Siobhan is upstairs, having had a particularly hard day’s chores making sure everything is ready for their departure, which is in a few days time, though that fucking phone hasn’t been installed yet. Tom and Schillerz are in the Living room reading, the younger man a novel by Walter Greenwood, to prepare for the harsh realities of life in Wartime England, his cenobite a work by Schopenhaur which he read before when he was a little older than Schillerz is now, but, ignoring Heraclitus’ advice, is taking another dip in. On the turntable is some Klavier music by Bach adopted for piano, one of the fugues from The Well Tempered Klavier, played by Arrau, it sounds like. While Schillerz is engrossed in a world of Anglo-Saxon proletarian woe, Tom is uncharacteristically unfocused on his book, or maybe it’s that something he’s read has set him off on one of those Eumeus-chapter-of-Ulysses, net-surfing tangents that he is rather prone to. It causes him to look up from his book, listen to the dolorific harmonies with increased attention. Schillerz does not see him look up, but, through a sixth or seventh or eight sense, he becomes aware of it. He looks up, Tom sees him, his face remains motionless, as if he was a character in one of the late Beckett plays that their life has become. “I had some more attacks of those pains today, when you and Siobhan took Plato for a walk.” “Oh... I’m sorry.” “Don’t be. Not your fault. It’s a bit of a truism, but all great thinkers suffer pains like these. It’s just...” Schillerz didn’t ask him to continue, just looked at him patiently, inquisitively. “It’s just, the more I think of it, the more I realise how it’s not just the artists...” he gave a nod in the direction of the turntable, “who have to suffer to produce great art.” He looked over at Schillerz, saw that he had his complete attention. “I think your compatriot, Walter Benjamin may have a point when he says there’s no monument to civilisation that isn’t a monument to barbarism as well. When I think what the future will be like, with the victors in the war, I mean the US more than Britain or France, enjoying prosperity unknown since the days of the Roman empire, people will be free to make art like they never have before, so many new types of music, film and literature will emerge, what the Spenglers of the future might call an Age D’or or a Gouden Eouw. Yet... Yet ‘twill all stem from their subjugation of other peoples in Africa and Asia, just as this music is only made possible by Polish peasants toiling in the fields of East Prussia... Jesus, What a fucking burden it is to be human being sometimes.” With these words he retreated into a sort of solipsistic cocoon where he made little eye contact, realising he couldn’t convey the pain he was feeling with enough clarity. Schillerz realised the truth of what he was saying, but wondered why it had become so pertinent to him at this particular time. Was his brain throwing up a smokescreen to protect him from the pain of losing his daughter? If so, it was a startlingly ineffective one. The phone came a day or two later, in the nick of time, it seemed, as they were due to leave in a couple of days time. It was a major job, as the house was so far off the beaten track, and might not be finished before they left, but at least they would have a number to give to Tom’s Dublin friends. A green van emblazoned with the Psuedo-Celtic P&T symbol arrived at the house, followed by a truck which had seen better days carrying the additional poles that would be needed to connect Tom to the nationwide network. It drew attention to itself when it drove through town, and would surely have been followed by the little kids who stared at it if didn’t necessitate such a long walk. A couple of middle-aged working class Dubliners stepped out, and were greeted by Siobhan and Schillerz, who had been alerted by all the noise they made, and asked if this was the house of Mr. Thomas Cornelius O’Grady. It was hard to know whether this question or it’s affirmative response generated more relief, as Schillerz clutched Siobhan tightly and she looked up at him with a glance that seemed to presage a hopeful future. The two Dubliners set to work straight away, trying to figure out what would be the most economic way to set up a connection with the main phone line in town. They opened up an OS map, pressed it down against the bonnet of the car to prevent it blowing in the gentle summer breeze. They beckoned the couple, whose obvious affection for one another neither fazed them of affected the temperature of their cardiological cockles in any way. They wanted to establish which fields were on Tom’s property and which were public property. She stood between them and surveyed the map in a way that reminded Schillerz of Dietrich in The Scarlet Empress, and there was hardly a higher compliment he could pay. Then he thought, realising how long it would take, that he should offer some assistance. This offer was greeted with a mixture of pleasant surprise and suspicion. “Now why would you want to do dat now?”, one of them asked in the sort of thick Dublin accent that left Schillerz to ponder on how he had ever passed himself off as a middle-class Dubliner. His response was measured, avoiding terms like `honest toil’, `salt of the earth’ or anything else that suggested he just wanted to slum it for a few days. “Well, now, we wouldn’t be able to pay youse none”, came a reply from the alpha-prole, to which he responded with an apathetic shrug and said he just wanted to speed up the job, as they would be leaving in a few days. “Oh, off to help defeat that fucker Hitler, are we? Pardon my French, mam.” “Yes, I suppose we are, in a sense.” “Well, I suppose we’ll need all the help we can get putting in those poles.” At those words his partner whispered something in his ear. “The Union? Sure how are they going to find out? Sure we needn’t be worrin’ ‘bout them.” Schillerz, whose compatriots were members of huge, disciplined unions bfore being coralled into Gentleman Ley’s DeutschesArbeitFront could not possibly have comprehended the arcane, tangled web of demarcation disputes that would have confronted the Dubliners if their union bosses did find out. So Schillerz was handed a Pick and asked if he knew what to do with it. He had never used one before, but knew it couldn’t be all that complicated. For the next day and a half, Siobhan, who had made all the preparations for travelling and was at a bit of a loose end, took her turn to watch him toil. It wasn’t out of Schadenfreude, a word that she would understand neither linguistically nor conceptually. No, she took pleasure of the purest, most visceral type in watching his lean, muscular, bare torso strecthing in the mellow sunlight, glistening with the sweat that only intense manual labour can draw. Every few hours she would bring them a cup of tea. That’s a bit of a relief for the neo-Darwinian evolutionary psychologists out there, I’ll be bound. By the evening of the second day, they were ready to install the phone, and called Tom out to view their work. He came out to see Schillerz, still without his shirt, with his arm around his daughter, his pectoral muscles tightening as he spoke, his abdominals starting to peer out from behind his stomach fat, like some noble son of the soil in a Soviet Propaganda painting of the same period, with the fruits of his labour displayed prominently in the background. While the Dubs looked on, he looked at them with a combination of admiration and maybe a scintilla of envy, a knowledge that while we were all young and beautiful once, he might never have been quite as beautiful as this, and certainly never would be again. The phone was installed, a big, awkward one with a dumbell-like handle and little holes to stick your finger in that would eventually accommodate bits of food and dust and other types of detritus that one would neither be able nor wish to identify. The Workmen looked on, with the sort of satisfaction in a days work well done that mechanisation had robbed so many of but, like the double-edged sword, fit wind that it was, had granted them. They stared at it, placed like a multiarticulate Hindu Deity, either given pride of place or positioned to channel the positive energies, man. However, the lads from the P&T weren’t that au fait with the whole feng shui thing, and merely stood there, slightly awkwardly, waiting for him to make clairvoyant contact by the mechanical means they had provided, so they could ride into the sunset and return to that lil’ homestead they called Dublin. After a minute or so, this became a little embarressing, so one of them, the Jay to his partner’s Silent Bob, asked, “Isn’t there anyone you want to call right now?” “Well, there is, but I don’t have any numbers right now. I was hoping you’d supply a directory with the telephone.” “Oh Jaysus, we almost forgot.” He ran out to the van, apologising on the way out, and returned, as quick as nouveaux riches businessmen forget their old friends, with a lumbering mass of paper, what the Domesday book might have looked like if Gutenberg had preceded it’s publication. He took it in his hands like Charlemange accepting communion in Rome, then surveyed the names of those he could now contact with an Olympian, or Ozymandian if you will, detachment, then thought of how each of these smudgy pieces of ink represented a life, a set of desires and dreams and pains and joys and sexual fantasies and guilt and memories and dental problems and needs and friends and vindictiveness and other stuff that he could drive himself crazy if he thougth about them too long. So, while the workmen twiddled their thumbs and looked at their watches, he looked up the name of a friend of his, a sub-editor with The Irish Times. He put his hands tentatively into the first of the holes he would have to swing round, the zero that suggested he was connecting himself to some sort of sacred ground zero the way an electrical appliance is earthed to the centre of this planet that keeps us all from floating round aimlessly in the cosmos, the way a Borgia would have placed his hand into the lion of truth. He got the number right first time, and when the phone on the other side of the line rang, his reply had the exultanacy of a Saint Catherine or a Teresa of Avila. The workman left, returning a grateful valediction, after the start of the conversation, which to a fly on the wall of Tom’s house, would have sounded a little like this: “Hi, Sean, ‘tis me, Tom O’ Grady.” “Just this minute. The lads who installed it are just out the door.” “Ah, sure who else would I choose to phone first?” “Ah, not too bad, not too bad. Still getting those pains now and again. And my daughter is going to be leaving the roost tomorrow morning.” “Well, ‘tis a long story, I s’pose I can tell you in more detail next time you come down. Actually, that’s sort of the reason I got the phone installed. You see, with my daughter gone away...” “Well, no, I really wouldn’t need someone here permanently, just someone to come down once or twice a week to check I’m Okay.” “Really? You think you’d be able to swing that?” “Of, course, I’d be enormously grateful.” “Ah, get way outta that. You have so much talent that you’d always have been a success, even without my help.” “Of course, I’d be delighted to do it.” “Ah, no, no, I wouldn’t be looking for any money. I’m not short of a few bob myself, and I know how hard times are right now. How are things up in Dooblin right now, by the way?” At this point our hypothetical volant invertebrate would stop secreting whatever fluids he had to to stay on Tom’s wall and fly off to see if Plato had excreted anything to tempt his palette, as he would have heard most of the rest of the converstaion before, even if he did have a lifespan of only twenty-four hours. He was still on the phone to his friend when our two young friends came downstairs from the bathroom, where she had gently sponged his aching limbs, the sort of task that’s a pleasure to those in love, and a chore for those in a lasting marraige. He looked sparklingly clean, as if she’d taken him back to the manufcturers and exchanged him for a new model. When the corner of Tom’s eye caught sight of them coming down the stairs, he decided it was an optimum moment to wind up the conversation. “Listen, I’ll have to let you go.” He gave his number and told his interlocuter that he couldn’t tell him how grateful he was, which may have been a relief. He put the reciever down in the reverent way a nurse hands a doctor a scalpel, and beckoned our heroes over enthusiastically. “Oh my Lord, kids, you’ll never believe my good fortune.” They looked at him and wondered what piece of serendipity could possibly compensate for their imminent departure. “The Irish Times are looking for someone to write a twice-weekly column on the current international situation that will inform people of what’s going on out there without falling foul of the censor’s dreaded blue pencil.” They looked at him, he with a look of genuine confusion, she with immanent, almost tumescent optimism. “And they want me to be that person.” He closed his eyes, anticipating the hermetic embrace in which Siobhan would immediately smother him. When she did, he held out his right arm from under her shoulder to receive Schillerz’ manly handshake. When the initial ecstasy which he had inspired in his daughter had subsided, she was moved to ask: “But how will you get up to Dublin every week?” “I won’t have to. They’ll send down a secretary with a typewriter twice a week”, adding, as his cheeks turned a pale shade of crimson, “As if I was a delphic oracle”, then turning serious again, concluded, “This way my pains won’t keep me out of commission for more than a few days, and I often got by for longer without food on my travels.” Siobhan embraced him again, and just to show he wasn’t being neglected, gave Schillerz a bit of a hug as well, and then went in to prepare what was to have been a valedictory meal but had been transformed by this alchemic deus ex machina into a celebratory dinner, though they might have had a little difficulty cooking the seven courses that Roman generals or East Asian businessmen would have feasted upon. However, with a improvisatory spirit that surfed the wartime zeitgeist with the grace and dexterity of SoCals finest they prepared a meal that the King might not have considered fit but would have left the chancellor satisfied and the keeper of the privy seal in a frenzy of gastronomic bliss. It certainly kept these commoners happy, and Tom was certainly not one of those self-made men who tried to trace his ancestry back to the Milesians, confident that his own accomplishments were enough to prove a nobility of character rather than of lineage. For Schillerz, too, though many of his beliefs had been cast to the winds, and doubtless carried like seeds in Shelleys West Wind ode to germinate elsewhere, as though obeying some physical law of thermodynamics that kept the fanaticism of the human race at a constant level, the idea of the dignified, loyal working man had stayed with him like an ex-girlfriend who he could never quite let go of. So, like prolitarian parvenues at the king’s table, they feasted on the grapefruit sprinkled with the sugar ration they had decided to splurge, drank the cheap wine they had bought at the off-licence the week before as if it was the finest champagne, and savoured the biryani with little thought that in a day or two they would probably have to get by on cod and chips from a copy of the previous day’s Daily Mirror. And why should they, when Siobhan could take an apple tart out of the oven at the perfect moment when the crust is crumbling but hasn’t turned hard yet, and pour the freshest, thickest cream that she would come across for a long time on it and carve it up the way the great powers would have done to Africa in 1875. After they had savoured the last of Siobhan’s cooking, they talked for an hour and a half. It’s truer to say that they asked questions and he answered. Interesting, actually, that “he”, as you probably know, is Tom, while “they” are his daughter and her boyfriend. Right now, though, it didn’t seem to bother him that his daughter’s greatest affection was for another, for just as the apple tart came out of the oven at the perfect time, everything else, just for this moment seemed to have clicked into place. So he answered their questions, always after a slight roll of his eyes, as if just behing them a cerebral google search was going on in the mercurial web of Tom’s mind, questions about London, about the people and how they should deal with them, always answered without either the reflexive contempt of the nationalist or the fawning admiration of the West Brit. Schillerz never ceased to be amazed at his knowledge of postcodes and tube stations, from someone who hadn’t been to the Anglo-Saxon metropolis in fifteen years. Then they went into the living room, put on a bit of Duke Elington, which seemed to exorcise some important information from the back of Tom’s cavernous mind. “Oh Lord, I nearly forgot, I had a few friends who went over to live in Kilburn a few years ago. They might still be there, if you ask around in some bars in the area, you should be able to find them.” “Where is Kilburn?” asked Schillerz. Tom was surprised that he hadn’t mentioned it in any of his spiels, though, thankfully, though he was given to extemporaneous modes of discourse, didn’t say anything like “Kilburn’s not a place, it’s a state of mind, man.” “It’s a bit like Northern Ireland in reverse, though the Irish community would never demand that the metropolitan police change their name to Gardai and take an oath of allegiance in Irish or go round in big gangs beating up natives. Actually, the people there are a bit like the original Anglo-Norman settlers here - more Irish than the Irish. Actually, ‘twould be lovely to get a place there, if you could.” Ominous, portentous words from a man who could predict which way the war was going to go but didn’t know exactly which areas the luftwaffe were going to have in their sights. Schillerz and Siobhan merely nodded, unaware of any of the twists and turns that the war would take before the wounded, tattered dove came home to have it’s wings healed. But then war only brings into a sharp relief the thin line we walk between sentience and whatever it’s opposite may be. When they had ostensibly exhuasted Tom’s knowledge of the subject, they decided it was time to go to bed, as they had to be up early in the morning, though, almost superfluous to say, none of them would let each other go without a litany of melancholy, lachrymose valedictions. They ended, finally, at a late hour, with a silent, last final look at each others faces and a final embrace that had the solemnity of an irrevocable sacrament. Then they made the final, inevitably anticlimatic journey back up to the bedroom, where the state of consciousness that Hamlet and Henry IV sought in vain came with the felicity of an erection on a fourteen-year-old boy in a room full of naked women. Perchance to dream? An hour after Morpheus took them into his languid embrace, Schillerz was in a London composed of images from Pabst’s Threepenny Opera, Tom’s tales of the city, and his own imaginings. He was walking through the dark, puddled streets after time had been called at a tavern, past the pock-marked beggars and the garishly dressed prostitutes, one of whom called out “Evenin’, ‘andsome, fancy a bit of vis?”, and grabbed her crotch, sending a shudder through his veins at the thought of the diseases she might be carrying in hers, and the fat, balding, businessmen she might have passed them on to, and the stupifying narcotics she would spend their tainted half-crowns on. His pace stepped up to a trot, or as close to a trot as someone’s pace could be without seeming incongruous in this stygian pit of a place. He was eager to get home to his warm homestead where a less repellent girl would be waiting for him, so he rushed after the next bus he saw, the No. 42. He sat down among the cigarette butts and bits of old newspaper, waited for the conductor to come along, but it never happened. So he looked at the faces of those around him, listless and sullen, silent but for the odd squelching sound of a nose being blown, and the passing buildings, which all merged into one another, Big Ben sprouting like an unwanted erection from the stately trellisses of St. Pauls, the gothic spires of Westminister Abbey mellowing into the modernist arabesque curves of Westminister Cathedral . He got off the bus, still without having paid any money, and looked for his house, which was also no. 42. He got there, having to step over some beggars and around some dog-shit, and started to knock on the door, but he got no reply. He knocks harder, causing his knuckles to redden to the hue of cox’s pippens and echoes to resound around the dark, wet streets, yet still there’s no reply. He bangs the door with his head, shouts out Siobhan’s name forlornly like Brando in A Streetcar named Desire. Then he knocks some more, the sounds echoing, resounding, resonating, a clangerous, multisonous, plangent, stetorian noise that no-one could ignore, the knock the grim reaper would produce before dragging his victims to that fatal shore from which no traveller ever returns. He wakes in the kind of cold sweat most of us only experience when we die of flu, and hears a loud knocking on the door downstairs. He looks at Siobhan, who is still asleep. He gets out of bed, taking care not to wake her, and tiptoes into Tom’s room. He’s sitting up in bed in a Buddha-like stance, but there’s no nirvana on his face, but a look of panic, panic that causes him to bite his nails while scrathing his beard. Schillerz, who now starts to feel his fear, asks him what the continuing knocking is about. “I don’t know”, he replies, not moving except to take his hand slightly away from his mouth, “But I fear the worst.” Schillerz, genuinely puzzled, asks what this could be. “Remember when I told you about those laundries they put unmarried pregnant women in?”, he asks, still motionless. The blood seems to drain from Schillerz face and leaves him a ghoulish wraith, a shadow of a man like a long-term POW. He touches his forehead as if anticipating the pain and providing it with an outlet. He bends down towards the ground, as if the shock had destabalised his vertabrae, or as if looking down into the dark, Boschian pit to which his loved one has been condemned, displaying, in a bitter, salient, irony, a love that could transcend any scrap of paper that binds them together. When he recovered enough equilibrium to formulate a coherent sentence, he looked up, like a disciple of a boddhavista seeking enlightenment, and asked, “What can we do?” Tom responded by remaining in the same position, gave a desperate, despairing look, and uttered, in a tremulous, quivering voice, three words that Schillerz had never heard him utter in all the time they had been together. “I don’t know.” Schillerz was palpably shocked, and Tom recognised this, though his slight falling-off in Schillerz’ estimation was not the most pressing thing on his mind. Schillerz could only gasp and ask, “You don’t know?” This was the butterfly-wing flapping that pushed Tom from the cliffs of despair into the valley of wrath. “No, I don’t know. I haven’t a clue. I’m ignorant. I don’t have a fucking clue what to do. Are you fucking happy now?” This outburst seemed to turn him from a passive Gandhi into a histrionic, gesticulative, vitriolic... Schillerz drew back from any comparisons he may later regret. At the same time he heard the rustling of blankets that suggested that Siobhan had woken up. There was an awkward moment when they waited for her to come into the room and an even more awkward one when she entered, scrathing the dust from her eyes and asking what all the noise was about. The two males look at each other, each only too willing to relinquish alpha status right now, willing to discard the responsibility of telling her like a particularly virulent bout of gonnorhea. After a few seconds of this masochism, Schillerz, still feeling as if his speech organs had come off worse in a feline altercation, walked over and caressed her stomach, inducing a horrified, apoplectifying anagnorisis that left her with a terror that could only be released in a gradual crescendo of negation. “Oh, No”, polite and measured like a parent whose son has got a bad school result. “No, No”, pressing her hand against her forehead, running it through her hair, like a wife who finds out her husband is an alcoholic. “Jesus, No”, pressing both hands against her temples, like a middle aged woman who has been diagnosed with Cancer. “Fuck, No”, shrill and piercing, like a woman who faces the prospect of being imprisoned in a laundry run by psychotic brides of Christ for the rest of her fucking life. She falls back to the wall, as if all the energy had been sucked from her legs, which are spread open in an ungainly sprawl that seems to express her forlorn grief better than any words could. She shakes her head like a boxer trying to strengthen his neck muscles, each angry toss seeming to elicit another “No”. Eventually she is moved to ask her father the same question that Tom asked of him. Now he is in a more advanced state of reaction to the horror, and says, simply and calmly: “I don’t think there’s much we can do. You could try to escape, but they probably have the place surrounded.” “I escaped from the police before”, Schillerz offered. “That was just the police. This time they probably have some nuns and priests with them, the people who get subsidised for every woman and child they imprison. They won’t let you go so easily.” The idea of running hand in hand through the fields with his pregnant girlfriend chased by nuns holding their habits on with one hand seemed a bit surreal, but not that much more surreal than the situation they were already in. In any case, neither Siobhan nor he were in any condition to run anywhere. As the knocking continued, Tom suggested that Schillerz go to the front window and look to see who was there. Tom’s worst fears were proved correct as Schillerz peeked from behind the venetian blind to see a paddy wagon, three gardai, two nuns, a priest and a doctor. One of the police was banging ferociously at the door, so much so that for a second Schillerz thought he saw his mouth froth slightly. The other two tapped their truncheons against their thighs and looked as if they were making ominous suggestions to one another. He returned tentatively to Tom’s room, was adressed, in an improbable moment of levity by his olympian moniker and asked what information he had brought back from his flight-footed journey to the breach. He paused, searching for the right words, though he was surely aware that no amount of verbal massaging could rectify this situation. “It doesn’t look good. There’s six of them, altogether, and it looks like they might try to break down the door any minute.” Siobhan, who was holding onto her father the way bladder wrack does to the rocks when the tide is in, pressed her lachrymose face against his slender shoulder. He had no other advice but to accept the force majeure with which they were confronted, though nothing in this world or any subsequent one could cause him more pain. He delegated Schillerz the responsibilty of going downstairs to let the representatives of Church and State in. Reluctantly, he went down, opened the door, and feigned innocence. “Good Morning officers. How may I be off assistance?” “Don’t give me any of that”, said the corpulent, sorrel-faced officer as he pushed his way past. “Where is the little tramp?” Even to someone brought up in Nazi Germany, this was a bit shocking. He could only recoil in horror as they went up the stairs and came back down with the flailing body of Siobhan, emitting high pitched screams that the guardians of the peace only drew away from, realising that they had induced a wrath that was impossible to repress. They dragged her by the heels, past the incredulous face of Schillerz, out to face the reproachful, sanctimonious faces of the nuns, and held her up by the shoulders as the doctor held a stethescope to her uterus and determined that she was indeed carrying a bastard in her womb. They then bundled her into the van like a mailbag and got ready to drive away. Schillerz who was getting over his shock, ran out and shouted, “Take me, too. I’m the one who got her pregnant”, but got no response. “And I’m a Nazi spy!” Still no answer. He raised his hand aloft, shouted “Heil Hitler!” No response. He started to sing Deutscheland UberAlles, but even after he surmised the guard’s heads were towards eternity, he continued, standing there on a chilly night in his silk pyjamas outside a country house in Ireland singing the German national anthem. Any other time, Tom, who was making his way down the stairs, would have found this a cause for amusement, but this time the irony was far too bitter. He just put his arm around Schillerz’ shoulder, but, though the singing stopped, it was replaced by an even more fearsome prospect.” “Hit me.” Tom was a bit taken aback. “Hermes, you know I’m a believer in the Hindu notion of Ahimsa.” I can’t cause pain to any person.” But... you won’t be causing me any pain. I can’t feel any more pain than I do already. You’ll be relieving me of pain. Hit me, please.” He held out his jaw, but Tom could only say, “I’m sorry, you’ll have to find your own way of dealing with this”, at which Schillerz burst into tears and threw his arms around Tom. After a while they went inside, made some herbal tea, and talked for hours, Schillerz becoming more and more shocked at each additional detail of the life that awaited the one that they loved. But there was another leitmotif in their conversation that they kept coming back to like a heroin addict to his dealer. How did they find out so soon? It wasn’t like there was any sort of visible bulge that would have given her away like a Scarlet `A’. “Are you sure you didn’t mention on on the train”, Tom asked repeatedly. Every time Schillerz racked his weary brains, went over every detail of that journey and every trip they had made into town, but could only recall the fearful paranoia that had led to the most diligent discretion. Eventually Tom accepted that there might always be this one epistemelogical hole in his life, though he had far from given up the hope that enlightenment may strike Schillerz at any second. Then it was Schillerz’ turn to ask Tom what his plans were. “I’ll get on to some friends up in Dublin, see what I can do.” His ostensible equanimity made Schillerz wonder if the Tao had made such a big impact on him or if he was just in the denial stage. He gave Tom the final embrace of the evening and staggered up to bed. After the initial, inevititable, tossing and turning, he actually got a few hours sleep, enough to leave him relatively coherent when he woke the next morning to the distant echoing of Tom’s prognosticated phone conversations, which were in that grey limbo between audibility and distinctness. He decided he would go down and find out what strings Tom had been able to pull and if the marionettes at the other end had danced to his tune. He went downstairs, immediately feeling Siobhan’s absence permeate the house like a choking, stifling miasma. As he made his way down, he started to pick up snatches of Tom’s conversation. “So you’re really sure there’s nothing you can do? “I know they have enormous power but...” “Damn right I’ve done a lot for you.” “Sure, I’ll keep you posted.” When Schillerz entered the room he had put the phone down and was crouched in the armchair with his head in his hands. When he heard Schillerz’ footsteps he looked up. “Well, Hermes, I guess it’s times like this a man really learns who his friends are”, he uttered in a voice stoical and querelous at once. Schillerz, to whom the import of his words was immediately obvious, was at a loss to find any words of comfort. “I suppose perhaps it was a bit naive to expect any of my friends to be able to help”, Tom continued. “I know they all would if they could, but the forces they are up against are extremely powerful.” Seeing the despair in his black-ringed eyes and hearing the grief in his voice, Schillerz wondered whether he should make his own suggestion as to how she should be freed, but was held back for the moment by a fear that it might be treated as a sick, tasteless, joke. Instead he asked if Tom had had breakfast, was told that he’d been up at the crack of dawn and that the receiver had almost become an extension of himself, which prompted Schillerz to offer him some. He accepted, but the contrast between last night’s feast and this functional repast could hardly have been sharper, either in it’s preparation, which was peremptory and cursory, not granted even the attention a student gives to a part-time summer job, or it’s consumption, which was languid, apathethic, and unfinished, at least in Tom’s case. For Schillerz, it seemed impolite to indulge in complete satiation of his appetite when Tom sat across from him, silently, listlessly, struggling to chew the bread rolls that Schillerz had hastily prepared. When he had put the rump of his roll down on the plate and left it to ossify into inedibility, he summoned the moral energy required to ask: “So what do you want to do now?” “Well, there was one thing I had in mind, but...” “But what?” “But I was unsure if you would think it tasteless or inapropriate.” “Try me.” Schillerz hesitated, caressing the space in front of him as if he might pluck the appropriate words from the air. “Well, neither of us wants to see Siobhan rot in that Magdelen hell-hole, right?” If this story was taking place fifty or sixty years later, Tom would have said “D’uh!” but right now was limited to an unassuming, affirmative shrug of his shoulders. “And your attempts to free her through conventional channels have, so far, been in vain, right?” Tom nodded. “Well, I’m trained as a spy and in survival techniques and espionage and...” Tom, realising where this was going, interjected: “If you want to try and free her by breaking in there’s a few things I should warn you. If you get caught, you’ll probably go to jail. If I’m still alive when the war is over, I’ll petition the German legation here to get you released, though I dare say they’ll have much else on their minds. Either way, you’ll have lost some of the best years of your life.” “The best years of my life!”, he riposted, bitterly, and displaying an unfamiliar flair for melodrama, went on “How could they be the best years of my life if the woman I love is rotting in a borstal while my child grows up getting fucked up the ass by paedophile priests?” Strong words, but with a logic that Tom nonetheless found compelling. “So what’s your plan?” He hesitated again, said, “I may have seen more prison escape movies than were good for me, but here goes.” Then he hesitated and qualified: “I’ll need some help, though, and maybe a car.” Tom gave a shrug that suggested he could summon all the help Schillerz needed with a casual click of his fingers. “Okay, well, here’s the plan. Right. So... We find out which home she’s in and...” “I know which one it’s likely to be.” “Okay, so... I dress up like a woman, some friends of yours dress up like nuns or priests, have me committed to the same home. I hide some form of weapon in my clothes, find Siobhan and free her while the car waits outside. Then we drive to the ferry and get out of this godforsaken country.” Tom considered this plan with a mixture of paternal pride and caution. “That’s really imaginative, but there’s one or two things you have to bear in mind. One of the first things they’ll do when you get in there is strip all your clothes off, so...” “Why would they do that?” “Don’t ask. Just bear in mind it gives you little time to manouver. So you have to be really quick, otherwise...” he made the symbol of a wrought iron gate falling between Schillerz and freedom. Then he paused a bit and reflected: “I know some people who may be willing to help, they have a car and would be able to get nun’s uniforms, though...” “Though what?” “Well, religous orders here are an intimate group, so if they aren’t recognised... well, we can think of something to cover our bases. Do you know, this strategy is so bizzarre that those zealots won’t see it coming in a million light years... It may just work.” He excused himself, blushed slightly at the realisation of how cheesy and hackneyed this line might seem to a neutral observer, and started flicking through the phone directory. Schillerz felt a surge of pride at having his idea accepted, as if he had won a minor battle in what had become an oedipal war of intellect with Tom. Then, like one of those anti-climactic post-coital moments, he reflected that he was a spy, a man of action, while his new mentor was a man of intellect. Yet now the intellectual was leaping into action with the elan of a poet from the first war before he became bogged down in the pestilent trenches, while Schillerz was looking out the window reflectively, like Bismarck or Frederick the Great in one of those propaganda biopics he had seen, but shorn of the copious facial hair and monocle and pointy Prussian helmet. He thought of the ironies inherent in this latest vicissitude that life had thrown at him and how aleatory the world seemed and all that, then looked down at Tom, who for all the world could have been a CEO of a high-flying dot.com if he had more, smaller phones, a laptop, and maybe a condenser microphone. In truth, he was more like a Hollywood exec, who, then as now would have been pitching wildly implausible scenarios round the place, with all the gusto, bravado and brass balls that would have required. When Schillerz turned his attention to Tom, he started picking up the following snatches: “I know it sounds mad, but can you think of a better idea?” “I know it’s a lot to ask, but then I’ve done a lot for you in the past, haven’t I?” “Thanks. I appreciate it. I’ll get back to you. Thanks. Bye.” He turned to Schillerz, said, somewhat cursorily, “well, that’s the car sorted out. Now, tell us, what sort of stuff do you think you’d need to break out of that prison?” “Well, I have a lot of the stuff I would need already, but some elementary mountaineering equipment might come in handy if escape from an upstairs window becomes necessary. And well... if you could get floor plans....?” Tom’s eyebrows raised sceptically, then he started to scratch his beard and said, “Hmm, I know a friend who does a bit of mountaineering, nothing serious, d’y’know, just a bit of abseiling of the Old Head and...” he interrupted his own ramblings to start leafing through the phone directory. To his delight, his friend’s phone number turned out to be listed, but it was a friend whom Tom hadn’t spoken to in a while, so he had to make some small talk which Schillerz was not minded to pay any attention to, and drifted into another reverie. He started to think what it must be like in the place he was planning his daring rescue from, though none of his darkest childhood memories from the crazy days of the Weimar republic could possibly prepare him for the bleakness that awaited him. He was visualising it in terms of the prison in My Life for Ireland when Tom plucked him down like a not-quite-fully-ripe apple and brought him into the slightly surreal world that for the time being was his reality, and handed him the telephone, the first time he had actually used it. Through a crackling, bronchitic line, he heard someone with a strong Dublin accent say: “So, you’re the boyo who thinks he can save Schillerz’ daughter from that godforsaken Magdalen laundry. D’ye really think it can be done?” With a frankness that surprised even himself, he replied: “I have no idea. But I’m certainly willing to try.” Sounding slightly taken aback, the voice on the other end of the line responded, “Well I’m going to call down to Tom’s house within the next week, so we can see what yeh’re made of. I’m Dan, by the way.” Surprised at the alacrity with which Tom was putting his wild scheme into action, he replied, “Hermann, but Tom calls me Hermes, a name I’ve grown comfortable with.” Dan lauged awkwardly at the formality of his speech and said, “Alright, then, I’ll be seein’ yeh, Hermes”, then disconnected and left Schillerz to listen briefly to that buzzing that always suggested the void. He put the receiver down and turned to Tom, who was scratching his beard in the way he did when he had some difficult qundary to resolve. “So, we’ve got the car, the hooks and ropes, now we just need the nun’s uniforms. You know, I’ve been led to believe that in England, they have so-called “Vicars and Tarts parties where upper-class types dress up, often transexually, as ministers, nuns and whores.” Schillerz thought for half a second that Tom was pulling his leg but then realised that the gravity of the situation would not allow such levity. So he asked, bemusedly, why they would do such a thing. “I don’t know, it’s the sort of thing that seems risquee to their puritanical Anglican minds”, he said with a gesture of disdain that was only just too mild to be a sneer. Anyway, I’m guessing that, in one of the protestant enclaves here they might do something similar. So, who do I know in Trinity?” His eyes rolled a little while he tried to answer himself, then it seemed that some unseen power that dwells among us touched his forehead and provided it, sending him scurrying badger-like into the pages of his phone directory. He explained his plan, and though Schillerz was not standing so near the phone and the line was no better than when he was on it, the cachinnatory response was audible to him. It took him a long enough while to add a half-crown or so to his phone bill to convince them, but Schillerz was relieved to finally hear the words: “So when can you bring down the suits?” “Excellent.” “Oh, about a week or so.” “That’s brilliant. Thanks, Rich. I know who my friends are.” He put the phone down, repeated the last statement to Schillerz, and reflected silently on it’s veracity. It gave him an uncharacteristic sense of self-satisfaction to know that he his lifetime of altruism was finally being reciprocated, contrary to the words of the Gita as he was aware these thoughts were. Then he turned to Schillerz and said, Well, now all we have to do is wait. And wait they did, though it was more like the wait for the No. 5 to Rossa Avenue via College Rd. than the absurdist fable that might have been formulating under Beckett’s beret as they waited, reading books that they could not keep their minds on, listening to music that they did not give their full attention, sitting through awkward silences at the dinner table when Siobhan’s abscense was felt most acutely. After just over three days of this eternity-injuring, Tom was trying to show Schillerz how to milk the cow while Plato looked on apathetically, until the sound of a car pulling up the gravel path alerted him to the arrival of a car, which he felt compelled to announce by barking loudly. Tom beckoned him to quieten while he squinted to see whose face it was behind the front window pane of the model T pulling up before him. Before he could, the car had stopped and the burly, swarthy figure of Dan had stepped out and was making it’s way to shake hands with Tom. He had the sort of face that suggested the sort of experiences that Tom had had in the way that Tom’s suggested only an internal life of the intellect, a square-jawed Hemingwayesque quality that was surely an asset in affairs of the heart, Schillerz reckoned. He exchanged the obligatory pleasantries with Tom before the latter got around to introducing them both. Scillerz displayed a reluctance to shake his lacteal hands with those of Dan, who brushed them aside and took Schillerz hand into his with the firmness of grip that might have been experienced by Wallenstein on his last night. “So, Tom’s been telling me all about your plan. I have to admire your imagination, which is something, Lord knows, I’m not that rich in myself.” Schillerz could discern no trace of regret in that statement. “So, do you have any more confidence that it might work?” “Well, none of the confidence I had has diminished.” Not used to Schillerz teutonic formality of speech, he just laughed and beckoned them over to the trunk of his car where his mountaineering gear was being stored. As he walked he scanned the house for possible outlets for their use. Then he opened up the trunk, surveyed it briefly to ensure he had everything he needed. “So, Hermes”, he asked, “how much of this stuff do you think you could smuggle in?” Just the basics, I guess, a rope, maybe a harness... whatever I can fit into my false uterus and breasts.” Dan gave an uneasy grin, wondered how Schillerz broad teutonic chest and slender waist could ever be contorted into the shape of a pregnant Irish girl. “I’ll need to bring a knife as well. A gun would be better, but...” “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about it. Those nuns might be pretty tough when they’re dealing with teenage girls but when they see a German spy pointing a meat cleaver at them they’ll become a bit more womanly.” A few months ago this equation of femininity with passivity or impotence would have made perfect sense to him, but now... it wasn’t really worth bothering his head about right now. “Okay, red baron, see how this harness fits.” He thrust it into Schillerz’ chest peremptorily, then started to look for the rest of his equipment. Schillerz gave an uneasy glance over at Tom, who responded with a stoical, that’s-the-way-he-is look. As Schillerz tried on the harness with it’s deck-chair, map folding complexity, memories of his landing on this island came flooding back with Proustian alacrity, though his madaleine was a harness that clutched his groin tightly, suggesting... I don’t know, you tell me. His reminiscences were brought to an abrupt halt by Dan’s grabbing and tightening of the harness, a gesture which seemed to stop just short of his pulling Schillerz like a recalcitrant dog, something that would have bothered our hero if the situation hadn’t been so urgent. Clearly gaining some perverse relish from the idea of giving orders to a German, Dan led the two of them inside Tom’s house. He made the usual platitudes, the house was looking well, apparently, and hadn’t changed at all at all since he was last here. He led the way up the stairs like a bailiff who’d been given power of attorney, prompting tom to give the odd reassuring glance in Schillerz’ direction. He opened the creaking door to Schillerz’ room, said, somewhat flippantly, “‘t’might be just as well to open the windows anyway”, looked over at Schillerz who was giving him a patiently indulgent look. “So”, he suggested in the manner of your second-favourite teacher, “You have two basic options. Either you find something to hook this:” he held out the hook to Schillerz, “...onto, or else you fasten this:” he showed Schillerz the longer rope”, “..around. If you’re in a hurry the hook might be the better option, but we’ll try it with both.” With those words, he fastened the rope with the hook to Schillerz’ harness and plunged the hook under the windowsill, and added, “Okay, herr Hermes, let’s see what ye’re made of.” With a lack of nerves that surprised himself, he climbed out the window and abseiled down the wall comfortably. Trying not to look too impressed, Dan shouted down, “Okay, let’s see you get back up.” “Why would I need to do that?” he asked, “I’m not going to have to break into the building.” “You have to prepare for every eventuality”, he replied after a cursory fumble around his cerebral drawers. It wasn’t a reply that seemed honest to Schillerz, but he was determined to respond to the dagger Dan had thrown down, and climbed back into the house with the felicity of someone who had been doing this his whole life. Dan helped him out with the last few steps, then, not wanting to let his protege get uppity, he asked how much Siobhan weighed, adding, “Bejasus, the last time I saw her she was only up to here on me”, and holding his hand around the level of his waist. Schillerz had been too polite to ever try to ascertain the answer to that question, but Tom, who by now was sitting patiently on the bed, said, “I think she was about eight stone though...” he thought for a second and added ruefully, “She might be a bit heavier by the time we see her again.” “Okay, we’ll have to find something that weight for Hermes to carry out the window.” Just to be on the safe side, Tom pointed to what passed for a paunch around his waist, which prompted hushed laughter from the other two. Then he suggested that if he tied a few sacks of rice and potatoes together, they might equivilate to Siobhan’s weight. It saddened Schillerz slightly to think of something so mundane being substituted for something so ethereal, but he couldn’t think of any better idea, as eight stone of roses or saffron would surely be too bulky and expensive. A trip to the kitchen and bathroom and some boy-scout knot-tying later, they had put together some of Siobhan’s bulk and weight, if not her Coca-Cola bottle curvaceousness. Once again Schillerz was able to carry it down the wall, if not with quite the same ease that he was able to unburdened. Dan mischievously thought of trying to make him climb up again, but, not wanting to push the envelope, suggested he did it again. Schillerz’ exhausted, crimson faced look seemed to forlornly ask why. Though not possesing a PhD in semiotics, Dan understood him enough to say “You have to be comforable doing this.” So he dragged the rice and potatoes back up the stairs, and did the whole ting again. And let that be a warning to you, my child, if you give to carnal desires without God’s sanction this is the sort of thing that’ll happen you. He continued this Sissyphean cycle a few times till Dan in his finite mercy decided he had put him through enough suffering and told him he had reached an adequete level of proficiency, or words to that general effect, and might just need a bit of practice in fixing hooks. So he just dragged Siobhan’s doppelganger to the hallway and staggered with the lightheadedness that only those of you who’ve put your body through a similar workout would recognise. He went up to the bedroom and dropped his perspirant body next to that of Tom, who, though he loved him like a son and didn’t have a homophobic bone in his body, still couldn’t feel comfortable in that position, and got up, broke the awkward silence by suggesting that Dan show him how to fix the hook. While Schillerz tried to catch his breath, Dan started to comply, while Tom went down to fix dinner. After watching Dan for a while, Schillerz lifted his weary body from the bed where he had left a lineament of perspiration, grabbed the hook, and plunged it back into the windowsill, which, it seemed would forever bear the marks of that day’s adventures like a sailor’s wooden arm. Dan, whose reading consisted mainly of cowboy stories, was moved to admit, “Hermes, you’re alright”, and shook his quivering hand, before heading downstairs to see what culinary delights his fidus achetes was preparing. Schillerz elected to catch his breath and allow his dry throat to moisten before making that journey. When he had finally exorcised the required energy from whatever hidden calorific reserve it was stored in, he went downstairs, saw that one of the bags of potatoes that was used to simulate Siobhan’s mass was opened and bereft of some of it’s contents. He wondered what gloomy fate this might portend, then, like a squadron of fighter planes that relieved a bomber at the last minute, anger at Dan’s unwillingess to carry the rice and potatoes back to the kitchen saved him from going down that dark cognitive road. The dinner was an awkward affair, as Schillerz was tired and lacked any real will to talk to Dan, who’s character he found hard to rationalise. If he was a brutal monster, or overtly sadistic it would have been easy for Schillerz to reason that sometimes war or domestic tyranny often led to such perverse alignments. Yet Dan and Tom were so friendly with each other, that this Machiavellian, in the pure sense of the term, judgment seemed unwarranted. Perhaps he had some prejudice against his race, and like an erstwhile Berkeley or Hampstead or Dublin 4 liberal, he thought, well he might. So he finished off his dinner in silence, paying little attention to the banter going on around him. When Tom offered to let Dan stay for the night, Schillerz’ ears pricked up, and he listened with moderate amusement to Dan’s excuse that he had made up too many stories to explain to his wife to explain his late nights at the pub and that the truthful account of today’s events would thus fall on deaf ears. Schillerz responded with relief to this revelation, and he didn’t detect all that much melancholy on Tom’s face either, though he was hardly going out of his way to find it. He went upstairs to reflect on another days crazy adventures, but ended up falling asleep for hours then read for a bit and went back to bed again. The next day had a feeling of deja-vu about it. As if following some pre-ordained biblical plan, the next of Tom and Schillerz’ accomplices turned up, at much the same time of day, in much the same circumstances, as if this were a tightly budgeted movie and it was cheaper to shoot several scenes on the same location. While Dan was a man’s man, however, the two people that showed up that day were the type of Irish people whose anglophilia could be mistaken for camp by someone who didn’t know any better. One had his hair brylcreamed into a Wildean mane and a carefully shaved goatee beard, the other, who Schillerz identified as being the quiet one, had skin so pale that Schillerz couldn’t rule out the possibilty that he used some form of make-up. The extroverted one left the car first, followed awkwardly by the shy one. “So, Tom, You’re teaching our continental friend the ways of men of the soil”, he averred, in a voice that seemed to affirm what Schillerz had suspected, high-pitched, langourous and slightly oleaginous. Tom and Schillerz both got up, rolled down their sleeves, and went over to shake hands. Schillerz got the sense that he was being eyed up, though the effete Dubliner could hardly have recognised the look Plato was giving him, which was meant to suggest that though his sexual orientation might be his own business, that Schillerz was strictly off limits. Tom, for his part, made a remark about having to milk the cow himself since his daughter had gone, which prompted a slight palliation of interlocuter’s ebulience. “Oh, yes, I’m so sorry about that. It only happens in this awful country y’know. Such pointless persecution...” His eyes drifted over towards Schillerz again, and surveying his high cheekbones and taut chest began to feel an empathy with her that a heterosexual male might not have been able to. Tom moved to punctuate this awkward moment by introducing them. “Oh, I’m sorry. This is Hermann, who we call Hermes, this is Richard and this is...” his face drifted over in the direction of Richard’s companion, with whom he was not acquainted. “I’m Benedict”, he offered, tentatively, offering his hand for a brief, tenuous shake before retreating back into a foetal, conchiferous stance, with both hands clutching his opposite biceps. Richard, for his part, took rather more time to shake Schillerz hand, and it wasn’t the firm, manly handshake he’d gotten the day before, but a gentle caress which made him feel a little uneasy and hopeful that these two would just give them the stuff they needed and be on their way. Sensing this, Tom tried to expedite the process by asking if they could have a look at the uniforms. Richard seemed to respond to this request enthusiastically, as if this moment was the culmination of several days effort. He led Tom and Schillerz, accentuating the sense of deja-vu, to the boot of his car, from which he extracted two nun’s uniforms and a priests, complete with wimples, collars and every other requisite accoutrement. Tom, who had seen and done much, was still impressed, and Schillerz was beguiled enough to put his atavistic homophobic fears to one side, at least for a moment. Tom was moved to joke that he was tempted to try on the priest’s uniform and go around hearing confessions and fantasise a little about the dark secrets that might lie behind the whitewashed houses beneath the thatched roofs, but thought better of committing such gratuitous mischief. Instead, he held up one of the nun’s uniforms and tried to imagine how his friends would fit into them. It was a while since they had last met and he hoped they had not put on too much weight. So impressed was Tom, he was moved to embrace Richard. Schillerz looked on with a mixture of admiration and queasiness. Then, to Schillerz’ resigned disdain, he invited them to stay for dinner, which they accepted. Quickly, not wanting to be stuck with the visitors for too long, Schillerz offered to make it for them. This caused Schillerz’ eyebrows to raise at the thought that maybe Schillerz’ distancing from himself was the result, not of ideological indoctrination, but of self-supression. It was wishful thinking, for though Schillerz was uneasy in the presence of gays, he was at straight as the border between two sub-saharan african states. While he cooked, Schillerz could pick up snatches of conversation from the living room. He heard Tom asking his friends what things were like in Dublin right now and heard Richard reply something along the lines of how hard it was to get beaujolais that year. Like the hyperinflation in his country a generation earlier, the shortages caused by war seemed to affect everyone differntly, though they appeared to be leaving class stratifications intact. It seemed, for the other sporadic pieces of discourse that reached his ears, that the theatre and the opera went on as before while the hoi-polloi still had their GAA matches to keep them off the grey, forlorn streets. Perhaps it was like that in Germany twenty years before, with most people going about their daily lives, though he had brought up to believe something far different. I would discuss how peoples recollections become influenced by the official historical line, but Orwell and Douglas Coupland have already done that much better than I could. Dinner was an awkward affair, with Schillerz, sitting next to Tom and across from the two visitors, interpreting every glance and each compliment to his culinary skills as a come-on. Tom regretted not having informed him that Richard liked to play these games, as this information might ultimately have added a few days to his life or at least his tenure of a full head of hair in it’s original colour. He tried to communicate this information in non-verbal ways, which succeeded only in making everyone uncomfortable, so that by the end his two visitors only wanted to leave as soon as possible, which wasn’t the worst outcome from Schillerz’ point of view. They asked when they could come back for their suits, and Tom levelled with them and said he was unsure he would ever get them back, but that he would reimburse them for any loss incurred. Knowing that he was as honest as a Finnish Summer’s day was long, they thanked him, and walked out to the car with them. Pointedly, Schillerz, like a sulky teenager, stayed in the house. Afterwards, Tom tried to explain to them why his friends behaved the way they did, but Schillerz said it was okay, he understood, which was, if not a black lie, then certainly a slate grey one, but it at least allowed him to excuse himself and go upstairs and recover from a day that was as stressful emotionally as the last day had been physically. It was another few days before this tripartite comedy of manners would reach it’s denoument, which gave Tom enough time to explain what sort of people he would next be meeting, which is something he might have been advised to do before Schillerz had met the other outre characters, even if he hadn’t spent as much time in their taxing company as he would have to with the next of the dramatis personae to walk onto Schillerz great stage of sui generi. Over a cup of green tea and with Mozart’s clarinet concerto playing in the background, Tom explained that they were a lot like him, intellectuals whose Alexandrine or Byronic fantasies of the soldier-poet had led them to fight in the struggle for Irish independence, only to become horribly dissillusioned when they saw what sort of country they turned out to be fighting for. One of them spent the thirties fighting for the socialist wing of the IRA, then cut his losses when he realised what a pointless struggle this was, the other was young and affluent enough to back to college and study law, and became what would now be called a human rights lawyer, fighting endlessly against censorship and against the misogyny inherent in the new constitution, a battle Tom likened to Achilles fighting the river, noble but doomed. Tom recalled the chats they had had together in the trenches and behind the barricades, which Schillerz had little difficulty in imagining, though he was still moved when the occasional glistening of Tom’s eyes became evident. Though Tom could often be rambling, tedious and self-righteous, Schillerz would miss these fireside chats when he got to England, if he got to England. If not, maybe they would share a prison cell together, though this wasn’t a hypothesis Schillerz wanted to dwell upon. When they did finally arrive, there was a sense of cup-final replay deja-vu about it, as Schillerz had realised how hollow his last set of valedictions had been. When Tom’s friends finally showed up, Schillerz found that they were pretty much like Tom had described, much to his relief. The lawyer, Oliver, indeed had something of the ex-revoutionary about him, in the furrows that lined his face behind the thin spectacles and beneath the neatly combed hair, like the severed limbs that rotted beneath the fields in Flanders. The other, Stan looked as though he might have left the war, but the war had never left him, reminiscences thereof refusing to let his hair settle into any sort of pattern or his eyes look directly ahead. While Oliver wanted to know what things were like in Germany from an intellectual point of view, what was thought in schools and what the newspapers and radio were like, Stan was only interested in it’s military aspects. Strangely, his morbid interest in the violence of the Reich did not faze Schillerz in the least, indeed there may have been something cathartic in it. Tom, for his part, was willing to play the Anna Pavlova Scherer role, gently urging all of his fellow confabulists to share their stories of love, war and the other stuff that made up the rich tapestry of their lives. It reminded him of the days when his humble living room became a salon, and he wished they could stay longer than the couple of days they had to spare, so that when Oliver asked him where the nuns uniforms and mountaineering gear were, it felt like the sword of Damocles had fallen and hacked off some cherished part of himself that could never be replaced. Nonetheless, he complied with their request, and brought down the nun’s uniforms. While Oliver responded to the idea of transvestism with a sort of detached titilation, Stan was a slightly edgy about the idea. So when Oliver got up to start trying on the nuns clothes, Stan just sat there like a moody teenager at a family gathering. As Oliver tried on the wimple, he looked over at Schillerz and said, “You know, Hermes, in Brehon times, Ireland used be a matriarchy.” Schillerz looked over at Tom, and, with a knowing smirk, replied, “I think Tom may have mentioned it once.” “Of course, we all more much the same clothes back then. It’s only since we’ve become urbanised that we’ve felt the need to differentiate ourselves sartorially.” Schillerz gave a glance over at Tom, whose satisified grin confirmed Schillerz suspicion that Oliver, too, was an O’ Grady protege, prompting him to go into a brief It’s a Wonderful Life reverie imagining what their lives would be like without him which I won’t bore you by recounting. Instead, listen to the banter that passes between the ex-freedom fighters as one of them tries to persuade the other to indulge in a bit of cross-dressing. Oliver, by now having taken off his jacket and replaced it with a nun’s cloak, and scratching the stubble that he’d have to shave off if he was to be fully convincing. He looks over at Stan, and says, “Okay, my friend, now it’s your turn.” With a hesitant, taciturn expression, he avers quietly that he’s sure it’ll fit him alright when the time comes. “Oh, c’mon, Stan, I’m sure I speak for everyone hear when I say that we’d all like to see how you look as a nun.” Tom and Schillerz’ faces wore strictly non-committal looks, but Stan, reluctant to antagonise his partner in crime, acquised. Schillerz watched this sight with a perverse mixture of amusement and foreboding, as he knew he would be next. To put off this dreaded moment, which, unbeknownst to Tom, he had been preparing for by trying on Siobhan’s dresses to see which was most him, if you will. He tried to put off the inevitable like so: “So you lads have got the look, but can you do the accent?” “Now listen here young woman”, replied Oliver, in a voice that was grating and high-pitched, “When are you going to take off those boy’s clothes and wear something more feminine?” Even Tom was impressed by this display of gender reversal, though later, in one of the long, lonely days that followed their departure, it occured to him that the transition from military life to civvie street required a far greater personality shift than a bit of ephemeral transgendering. Is this why, in our war-torn epoch, we’ve all become, as I’m reliably informed, adept at shifting from profession to profession like frogs leaping from lily to lily? I’ll leave that one to the sociologists. Schillerz, for his part, knew he would have to join them this twisted fashion parade, and went upstairs to Siobhan’s room, where her abscence still permeated the air like LA smog today. He came back down dressed in a loose number that still managed to showcase the pendulous false breasts and his piece de resistance, the uterus that contained the meat cleaver and the mountaineering ropes. Deciding that attack was the best means of defence, he took the cliché by the horns and entered the room in the campest way he was able, thrusting his falsies forward like the brashest Times Square strumpet to the applause of the other three. Then having clearly caught the modelling bug, he waited for a hushed silence to descend, before he showed them the sartorial prestigination of which he was most proud. Out it came, like an umbilicus through a Caesarean wound, the ropes which would lead the one he loved to freedom. The guys couldn’t help but be impressed by this combination of German efficiency and Celtic imagination. It was only a repressed vestigial self-restraint that prevented him from using the ropes as accessories for a lap dance, for which the others would be thankful if they knew what gyrations he had briefly contemplated. Instead he tucked the rope back in and went over to shake Tom’s hand. If this was a bigger gathering then Schillerz’ display would have been the main topic of conversation among the fissiparous circles of conversation, but here there was just a brief discussion of how he had made everything look so realistic, followed by an anti-climatically mundane conversation, which sparked into life again when Tom, who by the end of the evening had become uncharacteristically tipsy, assured Oliver and Stan that their families would be provided for if things didn’t go according to their wild plan. It was an awkward, bathethic end to the evening, but Tom, to whom everyone in the room owed so much, was forgiven unconditionally. The following morning had an air of formaility about it, as they went about their preparations for the Great Escape. Tom and Schillerz were already awake and having breakfast when Stan and Oliver came down, already dressed in their nun’s uniforms, which had become so crumpled that Schillerz suspected they had been sleeping in them, which he rationalised by reasoning that they wanted to become comfortable in them. They hadn’t gotten round to shaving yet, and neither had he. He felt a little awkward about letting them know where Siobhan’s make-up could be found, but the right moment to make this revelation would come along like a cab outside a nightclub. It seemed difficult to predict when exactly this moment would come as they sat around the breakfast table as if posing for da Vinci’s last supper or awaiting the hangman’s rope. The chilling thought that some of the alcohol they had consumed the night before would come back to haunt them never strayed too far from his mind. To punctuate the foreboding silence, he made a suggestion to Tom. “I never showed you how to use that army radio, did I, Tom?” “No, I thought you were going to bring it with you.” “Oh, no, It’ll just get in my way.” “Oh... I see. Well, I can’t see what possible use it could be.” “Well, I thought you might find it entertaining to listen in to abwehr officers, speaking German as you do.” “So why did you never show it to me before now?” “I was thinking about that myself. I suppose it’s a symbol of the person I used to be, it’s a part of myself I wanted to suppress.” Oliver and Stan, who weren’t that au fait with Freudianism, found this a bit weird, but didn’t want to press the matter, as their were more cogent, mundane things on their minds. “While you’re doing that, you must show us where the razors and make-up are”, interrupted Oliver, much to Schillerz’ relief. Tom, however, was a little more apprehensive. “I hope we have enough razor blades to shave you all cleanly. Remember, it might be as well to shave your calves, as the wind might blow your gowns and reveal your identity before you get inside the laundry and then...” Though he was not entirely certain the plan would work, he wasn’t exactly sure what the consequences of failure would be, and didn’t really want to give them too much thougt, especially as he would probably be fingered as an accomplice himself. Oliver and Stan, for their parts, baulked slightly at the thought of putting themselves through the sort of torture that women, for their sins, have to undergo with tedious regularity. But then they didn’t have to fight wars, go down mines or wear protective groin shields while playing sports, so perhaps whatever underlying order existed in the universe had some sense of gender balance. When breakfast was over, Schillerz started to show Tom his radio, while Oliver and Stan went into the bathroom. The radio was still in the tattered bag he had first brought with him which seemed to have a section of the room to itself, become part of the furniture. Actually, this was the first time Tom had been inside Schillerz’ room since he had come to live in his house, as if it was an inviolate teenage sanctuary from the big bad world of adulthood. Tom couldn’t help but be impressed by the teutonic efficiency he had brought to it, with his clothes hanging neatly in the drawer, his books arranged alphabetically on the windowsill, his bedclothes neatly pressed, pretty much the antithesis of the way Tom’s room would have been when he was Schillerz’ age. He watched with fascination as Schillerz got the radio started, listened to the crackling signals and gradually started to catch bits of dialogue. Schillerz listened in too, with a mixture of nostalgia and repulsion, intejecting occasionally with the odd explanation for what some of the code-words meant. They were still crouched, Buddha-like, around the radio when Stan and Oliver entered, transformed, as if obeying some long-supressed vocation, into nuns. Schillerz and Tom were startled into speechlessness for a minute or two, then, treading the thin line between flattery and disregard, said, “Well, Hermes, the gauntlet has well and truly been thown down”, at which Oliver’s face became even more crimson than it was before. So, while Tom interpreted the messages coming over the radio for his two nun chums like a Pythian Priestess at the Oracle of Delphi, Schillerz started to shave. He was agreived to find that they hadn’t cleaned the razor out properly after themselves, forcing him to hold it at arms length and shake it around a sinkful of water, as this was the last blade. He found shaving a struggle and dreaded the task of shaving his legs. He managed, with some effort, to get most of the stubble clean off his face, but realised that this razor was not up to the task of feminising his legs. So, pressing a piece of tissue to the one part of his face that he had cut, he went into Tom and asked if he had any razor blades lying around the place. Tom apologised and said that the only thing he had was non-safety razor he had bought of a blind barber in Bombay. Schillerz freshly-shaved Adam’s Apple protruded as Stan and Oliver bit their lips in an effort to supress their guilt. Tom led Schillerz into his room and showed him the instrument in question, the sort of thing cheap hoodlums might use to intimidate feeble old women. Tom asked if Schillerz would be able to use it, and he responded with a look of Heisenbergian uncertainty. The next time Tom saw Schillerz, he was holding up his skirt and revealing as much blood dripping from his legs as if he really was a violated young women. Not wanting to let him heamorrhage any more, Tom said, “just a minute”, rushed out the door and returned promptly with a small bottle of dark brown liquid. “This is sandlewood oil. I got in in Hyderabad. I don’t use it very often, as it’s impossible to get here, so I hope it hasn’t lost any of it’s potency. Just dab it wherever the bleeding is. As Schillerz didn’t want to spread any more blood around Tom’s house, he started to apply the oil instantaneously, from which unpleasant sight the other three averted their eyes as tactfully as possible. Then, when Schillerz groans from the stinging pains that the oil caused could no longer be supressed, they were compelled by that streak of morbidity that plagues us all to watch, and what greeted them, the sight of an androgynised man in a dress moaning with his legs wide open, wasn’t all that unlike the birth pangs he would soon be claiming he would have to undergo. Eventually, though, to everybody’s evident relief, the oil did it’s work and he went in to put on the make-up and impregnate himself with that false uterus. When they were ready to go, there was a finality and lack of emotion about Tom’s valediction that was missing from the last occasion he departed. Tom just embraced them all, asked them to give him a ring from Dublin to ensure him that it had all gone alright. Schillerz stepped into the back of the car, the first time that he would travel in a car on Ireland’s bumpy roads, which, conveniently might have added a convincing aura of morning sickness to our hero. While they were on the gravel path leading to the main road, Oliver drove slowly, but when they got to the main road, or what passed for that in this area of the country, they felt compelled to speed up in case anyone got a good look at their faces and realised that they were not really nuns, which hardly spoke volumes about his confidence in his disguise. It was also his fear that they wouldn’t be able to find the place and might have to ask directions, though they were willing to put their trust in Tom’s photographic memory. Indeed, they did find it easily enough, and a bleak, imposing, building it was too, just the sort of place where youth might grow pale and sceptre thin and die. As they parked in the driveway, they noticed a nun peeking from behind the venetian blinds and knew they would have to move quickly to keep the facade convincing. So Stan and Oliver both quickly exited the car, opened the back door and pulled Schillerz out unceremoniously. Then, each grabbing one of his shoulders, they dragged him up to the doorway, as he made a convincing attempt at a struggle. As they reached the doorway, they felt the thick mahogany door open and were greeted by the face of a nun who was, if anything, more androgynous than themselves. “So’s who’s this latest brazen hussy for us to beat some religion into?”, she asked, in a voice that was intimidating, haughty and bereft of irony. Schillerz was shocked and not a little angry at this, but maintained his restraint enough to keep his head down in guilt-ridden shame. With improvisatory skills that wouldn’t go amiss on the contemporary stand-up comedy circuit, Oliver said in his nun’s voice that she hadn’t been able to talk since her `incident’. “Is that so?” replied the real nun, walking towards Schillerz in a way that reminded him of one of the London gangsters in Threepenny Opera. There was a moment of sheer terror when the nun pressed her forefinger against his chin and lifted his face up so that his eyes met hers, but his fear that she would feel some residual stubble or recognise his gender and ethnicity in his features was proved to be based on an exagerated estimate of her imagination and intelligence. It seemed that she had fallen for their implausible scheme totally, but then she also probably believed that the Earth was created in seven days. “Well, young woman, you should have thought about that before you got yourself into this position. We say our prayers here three times a day, and anyone who doesn’t will have to face the consequences.” She turned around swiftly, pivoting almost like a basketball player on the one of those light cotton shoes that nuns wear that was covering her left foot, and bellowed, “Follow me”. While her back was turned, Schillerz, Stan and Oliver exchanged looks of disdain at her peremptory manner. She then pushed the door open and wasted no time in ringing the bell that drew a young but thoroughly indoctrinated nun eagerly towards the entrance. “Sr. Dympna, show this young trollop around the building, while I take her details.” This was another stage that they were unprepared for, but they thought it would give Schillerz plenty of time to ascertain where Siobhan was, while they fabricated a reasonably credible tale to string the young nun along. Schillerz, the nun heard, had been a problem even as a little girl, refusing to say her prayers in class. As a teenager, she’d been caught a few times behind hedges with boys, and the subsequent punishments only seemed to strengthen her resolve to indulge in such pernicious activities. So when this bulge appeared in her stomach, it had all the tragic inevitability of a Greek play or a biblical revelation. The nun’s reaction was a mixture of disdain and stoical familiarity. When Oliver had finished weaving this tale of tabloid-leader pandering, the nun, while writing sown these details, looked up from behind her spectacles, and asked, “And what about her parents?” “Her mother is a local girl from around here. Her father is... a protestant from England.” At these last words she stopped scribbling and looked up to the heavens as if to ask the God who she devoted her life to so zealously had imposed such a biblical plague on the island on which she had sprung, though gave no indication that this would inspire any leniency on her part, as the concept of diminished responsabilty was part of man’s laws but not God’s While Oliver’s small lies elicited bigger truths, Schillerz was being given a guided tour of the laundry. Even to someone born amidst the anarchy of the Weimar Republic, the images that confronted him were shocking, the odours nauseating. A dampness permeated the whole place with a miasmic, oppressive force which almost inspired him to look down and see if the nun had webbed feet. He thought of the irony that the insides of the woman’s body’s were probably as dry as the Kalahari, as he was shown their Talibanically desexualised bodies, their hair cut short, corsets supressing any curves that could inspire any sapphic desires. When he saw the girls at work, and the Dantean, abandon-hope-all-ye-who-enter-here imprecations on their faces as they performed their back-breaking, libido-diminishing labours, lined up in long, deindividuating lines by these time-and motion consultants of Christ, constantly invigilated by hawk-eyed nuns who didn’t want to see a single drop of elbow grease wasted. He saw the apathetic, listless, forlorn looks on their faces. But then when he came to the next room, where young girls were cleaning the floor, in a perfectly straight line in case the sight of anyone’s thrusting buttocks created any sapphic lust, he saw one face look up at him, and even shorn of her flowing blond locks and fed on gruel and worked to the bone, it’s beauty lived, a testament to the strength of the human character. Schillerz beckoned her to be patient as stopped to asked the nun, while fumbling desperately within his false uterus, “Sister?” “So, we’ve learned how to talk again, have we? Well, we’ll be able to make up all the prayer we’ve lost since...” She looked down at him fumbling around under his dress and asked, “Oh Mother of Jesus, don’t tell me your waters are breaking already?” Then she noticed what appeared at first to be an umbilicus but then turned out to be some sort of rope. Before she had time to figure out what latest inexplicable conundrum god had thrust upon her, a meat cleaver was being pointed in her face, and she was feeling a little faint and then she was collapsing. Just when Schillerz thought that things were going to turn out a little easier than expected, he suddenly saw a horde of young girls running towards him, in whose tangled mass he could just about make out the face of Siobhan, who planted a kiss on his cheek and told him she knew he’d never leave her live her life here. He told her they had no time to waste, but figured that it might be best if they just melted into the crowd. Meanwhile, Stan and Oliver had heard the commotion and realised that the slow-witted nun was able to make the connection between their appearance and the mutiny they appeared to have on their hands. So the ran out to the car, locked the doors behind them, and endured the banging on the windows by others for whom the idea of escaping form this stygian pit was not unappealing. Stan and Oliver had to turn their faces as we do when confronted with images of war and famine today, as the forlorn, emaciated girls screamed, “Get us out of this fucking place!”. With a slightly guilty version of his old teutonic pragmatism, Schillerz edged his way forward scaring the others away with the meat-cleaver, holding Siobhan’s hand with his other, struggling to try to ignore thier passionate supplications, that brought his skin out in goose pimples and tears to his eyes. After he had managed to bundle her into the car, she noticed Oliver starting to rev up, and pointed to the window, and shouted, “Wait, there’s my friend Mary. We’ve space in the car for her, sure we have?” The three men looked at each other, and, needing to make a snap decision, acquiesced. Schillerz exited the car, then escorted Siobhan’s friend in, giving a pained, apologetic look to those he had no room for. Then the car revved up and accelerated for a few seconds till they realised that another girls’s dress was caught in the door and that she was being dragged along the ground on her backside, ripping her clothes and bruising her hips, injuries that she would be blamed for if she stayed. Yet there was no room in the car, so they could only open the door and look back forlornly to see if she was reasonably Okay. Though she was writhing in pain, they reasoned, with bitter irony, that she would be better before she was married. Her well-being did not seem to concern any off the other girls, who saw freedom flirt briefly with them for the first and perhaps only time, and were going to take their chance to embrace it. Yet everyone knew that as they lifted their skirts up and rushed out the gates, running around like headless chickens or the Russians in the Odessa steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin, that they would all be rounded up and the strains of the prisoners chorus from Fidelio would be replaced with the funeral march from the Eroica. At least Schillerz would realise if if he had any time to collect his breath and thoughts. His throat was dry, and his heart was pounding with the intensity of a drummer in a power trio. Finally Siobhan broke the awkward silence that inevitably follows such unspeakable, unassimilable weirdness by saying, “I knew you’d come and rescue me. I told all the other girls...” she acknowledged Mary’s presence, “... but they wouldn’t believe me. They told me, especially the older ones, that they all had the same expectations once, but I told them you were different, you were special, you’d risk everything to save me, you...” she became overcome with emotion and placed her head on his shoulder, leaving Schillerz to reflect that she had a faith that may have been even stronger than that of her former captors, but for a creature of flesh and blood rather than an abstract deity. Much as he hated to spoil this moment of bliss, Oliver felt compelled to warn them: “We’re not out of the woods yet. They’ll have called the cops. We’re going to stick to the back roads for a while, so we should be Okay, just be ready to duck down if necessary.” “Okay”, said Siobhan, but what’s the plan after that?” “We plan to make the 6’ O Clock sailing from Dun Laoghaire to Holyhead. If we don’t, you can stay with us for the night, but every extra minute is time the guards have to catch up with us, and God help us if they do.” “Oh... Well, Thanks. And, by the way, who are you?” “We’re friends of you da, Siobhan. I’m sure I met you once, when you were a little girl.” He looked at her reflection in the rear view mirror, saw her haggard face, and realised how long ago this must have been, though he knew that she looked much older than she would when all this madness was over. Then he tilted the mirror towards her friend, and asked what she wanted to do. After taking a deep breath, she said in a voice that was high-pitched and querulous at once, “I don’t think I can stay in this country”, then looked over with a look of supplication to Schillerz. Schillerz in turn looked over at Siobhan who bore a simalary meek look. He took a gulp and said he supposed she could come along. Stan and Oliver both looked back and wondered what their young friend was getting himself into. However, not wanting to throw any spanners into the works, Oliver merely asked what her story was. If her story had taken place today she would be sick to death of telling the story to psychiatrists, psychologists, counsellors, therapists and maybe the odd journalist. But this was 1941, so she’d only prayed over and over again, as if the sin would be worn off her soul by a process of marine attrition. So she relished this oppurtunity to get the story off her chest. But there was another thing she wanted to get off her chest first. “I’d be delighted to tell ya, but first I’d like to take off this godforsaken corset.” “Oh, Lord, Yeah”, added Siobhan, and they both started to rech down under their dresses and start to fumble around, which reminded Schillerz that he had no need of those ropes, and that those exercises with the bags of potatos were ultimately superfluous. But he was not the only one forced to go through acts of physical awkwardness, he reflected, as the two girls around him struggled to unleash themselves from the ropes of shame, often to be foiled by one of the renegade potholes on Irish roads that would fill many Albert Halls if laid end to end. Eventually they found it easier to undo each others corsets, which made Schillerz and Stan feel like intruders in a female dressing room. (Oliver, sensibly, was keeping his eyes on the road) When they did get them off, there were such screams of ecstasy that everyone in the car was left red faced, whether from relief or embarrassment. Mary decided to fill the conversational vacuum that ensued by telling her story, a familiar one to anyone who knows the history of her time and place. “I was brought up as a Catholic, like most of the girls inside there”, she began, jerking her head back in the direction of the laundry. “I made my communion, always said the rosary and never polished my shoes too hard in case boys ever saw the reflection of my knickers. I was told over and over again by my parents and by the nuns at school that boys were only after one thing but when I ever asked them what that thing was, they’d tell me t’wasn’t for me to be askin’ such things. I wondered how, if men were all so bad, why my mother had married one. Me da never seemed like a bad person, just very pious, like me ma. And if they were so bad, why were men allowed to be priests, and women only nuns? Eventually I decided to find out for myself. I started meeting this boy at night, he was two or three years older than me. I’d sneak out the back window at night, we’d meet in a ditch about half way between our two houses. He started to tell me that he’d heard all the same stories about us from the monks, that the devil lay between our legs. Yet we didn’t seem that bad to each other, just the opposite I suppose. We started to kiss each other, and when I was doing it, I’d start to feel wet between my legs. He told me his penis started to get hard at the same time.” She took a gulp, and repressing tears, said, “I know it might seem bizarre to you, but we genuinely didn’t know that this was what led to pregnancy. The first month the blood didn’t come, I went to see the doctor. First he took my money, then he did some tests on me, then I saw him going out to make a phone call. The next thing I knew, I was in that fucking place. That’s where my baby was born, eight months later. I only ever saw him for a few days. He’s five years old now, I don’t even know what godforsaken shithole they’ve put him in.” By now she had realised that it was pointless to suppress her tears, and so did everyone else in the car. It might be easy to condescend towards the system of `education’ which led to such human tragedy, but schoolkids today are still told to `just say no’ to drugs, which are demonised now as fornication was then, and where does that get us? By now Oliver, to whose stoical eyes tears had been welling up in was confident the guards had been lost, and made a bee-line for the main road to Dublin. It took them through one of the most lush and verdant areas of the country. It stuck Schillerz as strange that the land of this country was so rewarded for it’s fecundity by endless fertilisation that made the green fields even greener. But then, thinking of something Tom had once told him, it wasn’t a great cognitive leap from agricultural engineering to the sort of social engineering he had just witnessed. This was a time when, paradoxically, though our carnal instincts as humans were more regulated than they ever were, nature was allowed to co-exist in some sort of tenuous modus vivendi with agriculture, so Schillerz, if he didn’t have such pressing concerns on his mind, might have been able to catch the odd lark leaping from a field, or a rabbit hiding in a burrow. Now, with every square inch used to grow milk for Europe’s lakes or grain for China’s cows, he’d be on a hiding to nothing. Though this would be his last day in Ireland for some time, he had little desire to appreciate it’s scenery this one last time. Instead, he drifted into a jaded reverie which gradually turned into sleep. An hour or so later, Siobhan, who’d just taken a break from noticing how vulnerable he looked to admire the scenery, progressively duller as Dublin drew closer, felt a sudden, shocking jolt. When she recovered her equanimity, helped by the nervous laughter of everyone else in the car, she looked into Schillerz’ lugubrious eyes and asked if he had been having a bad dream. He paused, for a second, then a look of horror came over his face that inspired a palpable sense of anticipation from the others in the car. He thought about whether he should repeat the dream’s terrifying, foreboding message, or if he should just make something up. Fatigue may have been as big a factor as honesty in his repitition of the dream, stripped down to it’s narrative essentials and robbed of the hues and nuances that make our dreams our own. “We...”, he looked over with a mixture of foreboding and affection at Siobhan, “We were after getting a place in London. Every night the lights went out and we’d hear the bombers overhead. The sky would light up occasionally as the bombs went off, I’d see the outline of the planes. Then one flew so low I could amke out the face of the rear gunner.” He paused, while Siobhan clutched his hand tightly to beckon him, Mary gulped in anticipation, Stan’s head was fully turned round, and Oliver’s eyes were darting frantically back and forth between the road and the rear view mirror. “The rear gunner was me. A Hail of bullets came through the window. I ducked down, just avoided them. When I caught my breath, I looked around.” Siobhan looked ominous, but was eager for him to end the account of the dream to relieve her tension. “I looked round and you were dead.” Siobhan placed her head on his shoulder, while everyone else looked away tactfully. Perhaps unwisely, he started to add some more details. “You were pregnant at the time, and your stomach started pounding, and...” “Oh, Jesus, stop, Hermes. We don’t want to hear this.” “Yes, I’m sorry”, he reflected. “I just needed to get it out of my system.” He pressed Siobhan’s face against his shoulder, endured another difficult silence. Oliver felt it incumbent on himself to offer a more optimistic outlook than that of Schillerz’ doom-laden subconscious. “Y’know, the Battle of Britain ended last year, and since then the Nazis have been concentrating most of their efforts on the Eastern front. You’ll have difficulties to contend with in London, no doubt, but German attacks won’t be one of them. Your dream probably reflects more guilt than forboding.” Seeing evidence of Tom’s paedogogy reflected in Oliver, he felt both a bond and a sense of relief. Siobhan, for her part, added, “There’s no need for you to feel guilty. Meeting you was the best thing that ever happened me.” Oliver smiled nervously, feeling this situation could easily sink into bathos. It didn’t happen, as they saved most of what Martin Amis would call “man-woman stuff” for the boat. It wasn’t too long before the grey, repetitive suburbs of Dun Laoghaire made their way into view. Schillerz, who had remembered the area with typical teutonic efficiency, offered to let Oliver and Stan drop them off in the centre of Dublin and make their own way to the ferry port. “Wouldn’t dream of it”, he replied. We’ll be there to wish you bon voyage, or whatever you say in Germany.” “Auf Wiedhersehen”, Schillerz replied, dutifully. Oliver gently reproached himself for not remembering this. Schillerz noticed that Mary registered no surprise at hearing of his origins, and assumed that Siobhan had told her the whole story more than once. He wondered how he conformed with her preconception of him, and assumed he would get the chance during one of those rare, precious tete-a-tetes with your girlfriend’s bestest friend. As they got close to the ferry port, evidenced by the growing number of seagulls flying overhead, he felt the sort of weary, seen-it-all weltschmerz that soldiers feel coming home from war, though, of course, in leaving Ireland for the United Kingdom, then as now, he was leaving a place of peace for a place of violence. There was one outstanding matter left for Oliver to wrap up. “Listen, Mary, I bought tickets for Hermes and Siobhan a week ago, but I can’t guarantee that we’ll be able to get one. If you can’t get a ticket for today, you can stay with me for a few days.” Though she could sense that he wasn’t trying to take any advantage of her position, she said she’d rather stowaway, giving him a look that suggested that she could easily endure one more night of discomfort. Oliver, in turn, made a gesture that suggested that he inferred no aspersion from this. When they got to the ferry port, there was a distinct feeling of deja-vu. It had become overcast again, so much so that Schillerz started to wonder if the clouds ever moved from their position over Dublin. They went up to the ticket booth, where the same person was dispensing tickets as before. The four of them stood patiently in line, Mary in particular feeling like a de-burqad Afghan woman as her body, which today would look good on a heroin-chic supermodel drew lustful glances from the country lads hoping to get jobs in munitions plants over in John Bull. When they got to the top of the queue, and asked as tactfully as they could if they could get tickets for that day’s sailing. That was about as much discourse as passed between them, as he responded with a dismissive sneer, to which Mary responded with an apathetic, stowaway-it-is-then look. As the ship had not come in yet, they decided to go to what passed for a departure lounge. While the rest of them sat down to chat, the terminally shy Stan went to go and get the Irish Times which he subsequently hid behind. To anyone looking at them, they could have been a couple of working class couples headed over to England, all tarted up in their best clothes, living as they did in a patriarchal epoch when the men got the meat and the women had to make do with some low-protein spuds. It was better that way, Schillerz supposed. Oliver told the three others of his impressions of London, a chimera which seemed different to everyone Schillerz had met who had visited it. Oliver seemed to enjoy being the centre of attention for once, a pleasure that Stan, glancing occasionally from behind the newspaper, did not want to deny him. He remembered a few friends of his over there who he encouraged the young couple and their new friend to check out. Then the departure lounge darkened as the great leviathan that took them to an uncertain but free future docked into port. They all made their valedictions and promises, and got ready to step on board. But on the way, Siobhan noticed a telephone box, one of those old green and yellow ones with the old P&T logo that you hardly ever see these days. She hardly needed to explain why she was rushing over there and dialing a number which she hastily drew from her purse. “Da!”, she wasted no time in calling out when the phone was picked up on the other end. “Siobhan! Where are you?” “I’m in Dun Laoghaire. I’m just about to step on the ship. Tell me, do you know if the guards are looking for us?” “Well, they came round here, and I `accidentally’ led it slip that you had relatives in Donegal, and God love ‘em, I think they fell from it.” “Oh da, I never doubted yeh!” “Not at all, my love. I hope you’ll be alright. Remember to write to me.” § If you haven’t read Candide before now, please do so. It’s a lot better than this book. You can probably get in in the library, or, failing that, on the web.