Boy and Man

For the two Deirdres

Everything that rises must converge. Flannery O’Connor

Contents

Epigraph Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Chapter Thirty-Two Chapter Thirty-Three Chapter Thirty-Four Chapter Thirty-Five Chapter Thirty-Six Chapter Thirty-Seven Chapter Thirty-Eight Chapter Thirty-Nine About the Author By The Same Author Copyright About the Publisher

ONE

I am no longer a boy. I am a man. Almost. And I am here.

The sun shone. The Master went to the top of the hill and flew the kite. There was brisk wind and it took only a few sharp tugs and the twin cords tightened and the yellow and red sail took flight. At first it danced drunkenly. It swooped, as though the earth and not the air was its element, and the Master waved both hands above his head like the conductor of an invisible orchestra and the kite rose sharply into the blue. He unspooled the lines and kept his gaze focused on the thing that moved further and further from him but was yet connected. The wind pulled the cords tight but the line that was drawn from kite to man was curved into the distance, and a movement of the Master’s hands took moments to travel to the sail in the sky. Soon it was small and almost freed. So far up, it achieved a serene grace, its colours dissolved, its line invisible to any that might have looked up and noticed it from the winding roads below the hill.

It was April, the countryside thereabouts already in bloom. Over stone walls, yellow gorse blossom was draped. Bare branches of the thorn trees were spiked with white flower. The day itself was blue and mild. Spring had come softly to the west of Ireland and it was warmer even than the springs in the memory of old people. The first grass of the year was crisp and had made a dry whispering as the Master had climbed up through it.

Now he flew the kite. A short man over sixty with a tuft of white hair, he had only just come back into the world. Much of it he had forgotten. He knew because he had been told that he had been in a car crash. He knew because he had been told that he had been thought dead and then took breath and lived inside the quiet of a coma more than a year. So too he was told he had once been a Master at a primary school at the edge of the village. He had a wife and onetime a daughter who were both dead now. He had lived with a boy, his grandson, but the boy had run off. To such telling the Master had listened without comment, as though it told of another. He blinked and sat quiet, his blue eyes seeking in the fire any semblance of himself in the tale. But the life just spoken of did not seem his own. Some details – a red cup in his kitchen, a bottle of Power’s whisky half empty, some books, David Copperfield, a dog-eared copy of The Confessions of Saint Augustine, a pair of shoes with the laces tied and the heels broken down, the worn tweed of a jacket – such things seemed to speak of him and his earlier life, but even these seemed obscure. He had the feeling that he did not belong in the world, that perhaps he was meant to have died, and had somehow missed his exit. Now he was left in this After-place. The couple who cared for him, Ben Dack and his wife Josie, were the only ones to whom he felt any connection, but even that seemed tenuous. Who were these people and why were they caring for him? He didn’t remember them. They were not his relations. Why should they have brought him into their own house? For the Master the world was a jumble of things without meaning. Was that red cup important in some way, that boy’s jumper, that old book? These objects from the past, how did they matter if he couldn’t remember them? And if he had come back to life, as they said, what kind of life was it? The country too seemed barely recognizable to him. There were familiarities, brand-names, place-names, but Ireland itself as it passed across the screen of the evening news seemed another country, and he a foreigner in it. To neither the past nor the present was he connected.

The kite lay against the sky. It sat in the wind unmoving, and on the grassy hill below it the man was intent on the lines that rose upward. Time was nothing to him. His morning and afternoon would be divided by the arrival of hunger, when he would tie the lines to his leg and sit to tea-flask and sandwiches. He had no purpose or plan other than to remain there flying the kite. And while he did, a silent figure on the hill beneath a perfect blue sky, he was forgotten by the world he had forgotten. While the hours passed, the kite moved only little. Once it arrived in the high it held still and the Master did not indulge in any tricks, no stunts of flying. He simply watched the twin cords, looked up along the angle, tested the tautness of the lines, and waited; as if for answers he fished the heavens.

The sun shone on Jerzy Maski, lifting blocks and laying them to make rise the wall to the second floor of a new house on the outskirts of the town of Ennis. He had come from Poland a month earlier. Within two days he had a job, and was one of a crew of twenty-three that came like a dawn army in dusty cars and vans to build an estate of seventy-six houses. He was twenty-one years of age. He was fair-haired and strong, and liked to sing when he was drunk in the evenings when the eight other men in the house he shared spoke of Poland. They knew they were in the country only temporarily. They knew that after this estate there would be another, and more after that, but one day they would be told there was nothing more to build in that country. And the knowledge of that made easier the absence of Poland for Jerzy Maski. His English was poor and these people were different. This month had been his first away from Jaslo in southern Podkarpackie not far from the Carpathian Mountains. He did not mind the work, and while he was lifting the blocks and tapping them into place, while the walls were rising about him, he could forget the thing he felt most strongly. He could hide in work the feeling to which he would never confess: that if he paused long enough there would rise in his heart an unbearable longing to have his mother’s hands hold his face.

From the upper level of scaffolding, he saw a lorry bounce over the deeply potholed entrance to the estate and his uncle Laslo called up to him to come unload. He descended the ladder swiftly and his uncle smiled at his nimbleness and strength, nodded consent to an inner argument and led the way out through the doorless hall.

Laslo was in his late fifties and compensated for his baldness with an outrageous moustache. He smoked sixty cigarettes a day, wheezed all of his breath and joked that hell would be no difficulty because so much of him was smoke already. ‘Smoke and these boots,’ he would say, ‘these will do me in hell.’

They crossed the packed dirt of Eden Crescent, the semicircle of walled but unroofed houses, the way randomly stacked with deliveries, pipes, rolls of insulation, white aeroboards, plastic sheeting torn open and flapping in the breeze.

The lorry driver had already climbed down. ‘What a day. What a day what a day what a day. Cripes yes. Warmer than July, eh?’ he said, and clapped and rubbed his hands together. A short man with a ball of belly, he was red-faced and beaming. ‘Island in the sun men, am I right?’

They looked at him.

‘What is he saying?’ Jerzy asked under his breath.

‘I have no idea. Smile at him and nod.’

‘And point is. Point exactly is, the world, the sun, and the layer between. That’s the point. “Are we getting nearer?” says Mickey Cotter. Nearer what says I? “Nearer to heaven or to hell,” says Mickey. That’s a point. By jingo yes. Heaven, says Ben Dack. Choose heaven. But what a day what a day. Twenty-three degrees. Two three. Dear Lord thank you very much. Go raibh mile maith agat if you’re tuned in in the Irish, eh?’

The two Poles nodded away, and Ben Dack took this for encouragement. He clapped his hands again and said, ‘You’re doing some job with this country, men. Some job, indeed. When this country’s finished boy oh boy says he.’

Laslo nodded, Ben nodded back. When in turn Ben looked at him, Jerzy nodded too, and then the three of them considered for a time the half-circle of house shells. Somehow a cigarette had appeared on Laslo’s lip and, hands behind his back like a general, he surveyed the field and through the thicket of his moustache softly leaked the smoke.

‘I’ll make a start,’ Jerzy said, but his uncle touched his arm, ‘Wait. Wait a minute. No need to rush. Take a moment. Nod again.’ Laslo extended a hand as though they were speaking about the development. ‘Good ya,’ he said and nodded.

‘Oh ya,’ said Ben Dack. ‘Certainly ya, most definitely ya. As the man says, you’re the men can turn fields into factories. No bother to you. And no argument from Ben Dack because stands to reason, doesn’t it, there’s more of everything now, more of us more of you more cars more money more. That’s the word, more. Eden Crescent, Eden Dale, Eden Meadows. Must be fifteen Edens in Ennis alone. By cripes. Did Ben Dack ever think he’d see it? In Ireland. Because this isn’t Poland as Josie says. And – you’ll like this – I says, isn’t it? For devilment because Josie’s a saint and you’d want to sometimes, you know, well but also my point, my point obtusely as the fella says, is aren’t all places the same and the longer the world goes ahead spinning isn’t one place spinning into becoming another and isn’t that maybe the way because that’s what Time makes of it. And so what? So Poland Ireland wherever. Irepol. You get me?’

Laslo withdrew the cigarette and nodded.

‘What did he say?’ Jerzy asked. ‘He said Poland.’

‘He said that young man from Poland is a bull, must have women everywhere. Like his fine bull uncle.’

‘“Because what’s a country?” says I. And my saint Josie comes at me with that little furrow in her brow like she wants to say Ben Dack you’ve lost the last marble now. And “what’s a country?” she says and I says right exactly because look there’s no lines drawn from above. You get me? Not a single one. My point. Clear as daylight. Countries are made up. Am I right? Countries are all joined together and only pretend to be separate. Am I right?’

‘He is insane,’ Jerzy whispered.

‘Don’t whisper. Nod.’

They nodded profusely, and for some moments made a strange triangle of mute acquiescence, and then all three looked back at the house shells and in Polish Laslo said, ‘Are they not the ugliest houses you ever saw?’

Jerzy burst out a laugh, and Ben was pleased because the simplicity of his nature was such that he felt sympathy for all strangers and wanted them to be at ease.

‘With this fellow we could nod all day,’ Laslo giggled. ‘I think he would not mind.’

‘But our necks would ache.’ Jerzy said, and then couldn’t stop the laughter coming now. Suddenly it bubbled airily up inside him, quick bursting gasps of it, first one then another; each he tried to stop but couldn’t. Now the laughter grew upon itself and he opened wide his mouth and made a soft near noiseless wheezing as though he had a series of ‘h’s caught in his throat. He sounded not ‘ha’ but only an aspirate ‘h’ and his eyes watered with the effort. He squeezed them shut and bent forward and put his hands on his thighs and laughed down to the ground. Laslo and Ben were laughing too now, heartily, a bizarre human comedy none could explain, but as each looked at the other and had their laughter renewed they were helplessly bound. Each in their way – with shut eyes and wrinkled up nose, with mouth open and head back or tight-lipped, the chuckles snorting out – lost themselves to the laughter. Ben Dack clapped his hands. A giddy joy ran around in them, and for some time neither could they speak nor stop, but in that sunlit Eden Crescent were three men laughing in the mystery of what happens.

TWO

The population of Ethiopia is approaching seventy-two million people.

In the evening after his supper, the Master sat in an armchair by the corner of the fire. While Josie was still working in the kitchen, Ben Dack was engaged in the one activity that could count as his pastime. On a large wooden board set upon the dining table, he worked at a jigsaw. Some years before he had been given one as a present and afterward out of politeness more than interest he had made it. His next birthday Josie had given him another one. She had seen the contentment he got when he tapped a piece into place and the image became clearer. So the jigsaws had continued. Ben Dack never bought one for himself and always showed surprise when it was given and always soon afterward opened the box and began. When the puzzles were finished he used wood glue and then varnish and a simple frame. So now these were the pictures that hung on the walls of the Dack house. It had never occurred to Ben to break up the jigsaws and put them back in their boxes.

That evening the puzzle he worked was ‘The World’s Hardest Jigsaw’, it said on the box, a large image of blue sky and clouds. There were no obvious landmarks, nothing that might indicate where a piece belonged, only sky. By this evening Ben had joined the flat-edged outer pieces, which framed a jagged emptiness.

‘Don’t mind me now,’ he called over to the Master, ‘you have the television up if you want it. Won’t bother me.’

‘No thank you Ben,’ the older man said. He watched the fire. The turf glowed softly.

In front of him the muted television showed the country that was his but that was still unfamiliar. When he glanced up the news was of murders and road killings, of crises in hospitals. The most frequent word on world news was terror, and if he tried to consider this he grew frightened. For him the past was not only another country; worse, it seemed an implausible invention, one in which he was once the Master of a village school and had his grandson with him and they flew kites and read books and never felt afraid. The past was innocent and unbelievable.

‘All done,’ said Josie, dropping the weariness of herself onto the couch. ‘You all right Joe?’ she asked.

‘Yes, thank you Josie,’ the Master said.

Without looking up from the piecemeal sky, Ben asked, ‘Your programme nearly on, love?’

‘Yes, love.’

Ben left the puzzle then and sat beside her and rested his hand in her lap. Sometimes she held it and sometimes gently turned it with a kind of mild curiosity, the hand of another.

She turned up the volume. In the last item of the news a reporter walked out on a dusty landscape in Africa, explaining how fourteen Chinese businessmen had come to Ethiopia to negotiate oil rights. They had been kidnapped by rebel forces, who did not want the government selling the country’s natural resources. Now, in a dry hollow of sand, the fourteen bodies had been found. The handheld camera showed them.

‘Sweet mother of God,’ Josie said.

The Master’s chin rose and trembled and then he wept. It was something to which Ben and Josie had become accustomed. Since his return to the world he had been given now to these sudden moments of strong emotion. They arrived prompted and unprompted, could be brought on by anything, or nothing that was apparent. The Master simply wept. And these incidences, at first alarming, had in time been accepted by Ben and Josie as part of the after-coma; the bits of wreckage that must sometimes float down into the Master’s spirit out of the past. Always, he apologized, but was helpless to stop, though always too his chin battled against trembling and his brows lowered in a vain effort to hold at bay what came through him.

He wept.

Ben and Josie let him be. They offered neither tissues nor consolation, and in time the weeping eased and the Master grew serene again. While Josie watched a country singer on the television, Ben watched the Master and wondered what he was thinking. Was he thinking at all? Did he just sit without any memory of anything other than flying the kite earlier that day? Was that it? Was he blank? Josie had said he was probably happy. ‘It’s a kind of happiness isn’t it? To be alive and not to have any worries at all, isn’t that wonderful sure?’ She had said it because after the first months when Ben had tried often to get the Master to remember, she had been hurt for both of them when nothing had happened. It was not that Ben had wanted acknowledgement or any connection between himself and the man who had reminded him of his dead father. It was that he wanted some meaning out of it. What was the point of what the papers called the miracle, the Lazarus man, who had been dead and come back, and for what? To sit all day, or go and fly a kite? When Ben Dack’s heart bruised on this, his wife had tried to convince him it was for the best. ‘If he remembers he will have pain,’ she told him. ‘Without it, he has a chance of happiness. Leave him be now.’

And because he didn’t want to disagree with her, Ben said no more.

The country-and-western singer finished, and sang another.

‘There’s a break coming,’ Ben said.

She turned his hand in her lap. ‘You want tea so.’

‘Did I say anything about tea?’

‘Tea and biscuits I suppose.’

‘And biscuits! You’re a saint you know that? Absolute, one hundred and one per cent saint. Not another like you on the planet, says he.’

She stood and saw the simplicity of him she loved.

In the break Ben tapped his hands on his knees, glanced over at the Master, then back at the screen. Then he got up quickly and went across to the one bookshelf where they kept the telephone books and the farmer’s almanac and under some of these he found the Master’s copy of David Copperfield and brought it over to him. He opened it on the newspaper clipping that had been stuck inside and handed it like that to the old teacher.

‘There now, take a new look at that,’ Ben said quietly. ‘Go ahead. Give her a shot.’

‘Yes Ben,’ the Master said, with the strange politeness with which he had returned to the world. And he looked down, first at his book, and then at the piece of newspaper. He lifted it up and held it directly in front of him.

It was a picture of a boy.

The prisoner did not know what country he was in. He thought it was Germany or maybe Poland, but he could not be sure because when he was taken he was blindfolded and made unconscious. He saw only the small cell he lived in and the other he was brought to when they wanted to ask him questions. He was happy at least to see the cell. For the longest time he had lived with his eyes tied with a cloth that smelled of ammonia.

He did not have any record of the days. He knew it was a long time since he was taken, but he did not know it was three years.

How is it so hot? Ireland they said would be rainy and cold. Rainy and cold. But it is hot. Hot as Jaslo in summertime. And as soon as the image crossed Jerzy’s mind, he felt something reach into his stomach and twist out homesickness. Jaslo in summertime. He had been a boy with a boy’s freedom, fair- haired and strong and running along the roads in the hum of bees and the sweet sharp scent of pine from the foothills of the mountains. Jaslo. He had not thought of a future then. He had thought only of home, and of his mother, and never dreamed he would build walls in Ireland. It seemed not his life that he was living now but another’s that ran parallel and this sickened him and he fought the sickness with hard work.

He hurried for another block and laid it on the wall. About him the others worked without pause. Like machines, machines that make walls. Cement in our skin, thinned out each night with Polish beer. Each wants to go home. I know. Each one. Not just me. But Laslo says this is a man. A man is work. A man is not crying for his mother. For his home. This is today’s home. Tomorrow’s somewhere else. Jerzy Maski is not a boy. It is stupid to miss Jaslo, a small place. There is nothing there. No money. Who can live in Jaslo now? Only old people.

He laid the block and trimmed it and went for another. He thought of his elder brother who had gone away to become a priest and then not become a priest and then for shame not returned. He wondered where he was in the world and if he ever thought of his younger brother and if he knew that one day a letter had come from their Uncle Laslo saying there was work for good money in Ireland.

‘You go,’ his mother had said. ‘Yes you go.’ She wore black fifteen years after burying her husband.

‘I will stay with you.’

‘I don’t want you under my feet,’ she had said, and turned the lowered wings of her eyebrows to the fire.

And he had not said he would prefer university and to study architecture, for he did not want to hurt her having to say they had not the money. ‘I will go but come back when the big mountain of money is here beside you,’ he had said.

But now that he was in Ireland, and the money was good and the work was plentiful, he thought Poland grew further not nearer each day. Some mornings he woke well before the six o’clock start and thought of himself rising into another life back in Jaslo. He allowed himself the imagining of it the way you might a chocolate in a box, deliberate and pleasurable and too soon passed. He had himself rise from the bed and come down and light the fire and go outside in the little yard at the back and take the axe to the logs. He let himself feel the cool air coming from the mountains and to see his breath plume away on the morning. He lay in the bed and imagined he was this other and already could smell the first thick wood smoke coming down from the chimney with the press of cold air. He could see himself in the woollen jumper and thick trousers and even feel the easy swift motion of the axe and hear the crack as the log split sharply. He was there, paused in the after-stroke, and able to look out into the trees on a cool morning and hear the birdsong and be perfectly still in the opposite life to the one he lived now. He could see himself carry the logs inside and see each corner of the house in which he had grown up, know each chair and how it felt to sit in, and know the sounds of the latches on the presses, the song of the kettle. And these, in this other life, were all perfectly clear to him as he lay in the bed waiting for the alarm. They were as near as dreams, and he clung there on the edge of them, not yet realizing the life he had made up was his father’s.

So, with the alarm, each day he left that other life and went to lay the blocks.

In the evening Laslo complimented his work and passed him another bottle of beer.

‘You were working fast today,’ he said. ‘You are a very good worker, Jerzy, but no more laughing,’ Laslo teased. They both smiled. ‘What was he saying? I have not one idea.’

Jerzy finished the beer, took another.

‘Soon you will be singing,’ Laslo said.

But Jerzy did not sing that night, nor escape the melancholy, and at last rose and went out the front door of the little house and walked down the road beneath the April stars, swaying slightly with the beer and the sense of loss. In some ways the country was no different to Poland. At night you could pretend it was Poland. There was no one speaking. There was only the mild dark and the moon. He walked, saturated with loneliness. It leaked from him. He went out from the tight street of houses where televisions flickered blue and gold against the curtains and gates were closed on their cars. He said out loud ‘Jerzy Maski’ to none listening and then bowed and waved his hand in a wide sweep, as if to a partner in a dance. He staggered backward two steps, widened his eyes with surprise, then stumbled down off the kerb onto the road. He laughed to find himself so. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh-oh.’ And laughed some more, then he walked on down the centre of the road. His forehead was cool and yet beaded with sweat. The streetlights were wild blooms against the blue. In sudden moments he filled with loathing and ridicule. I am an idiot. What is Jaslo to me? I am a man now. Stop stop acting like a baby, a niemowle.