Lark's Eggs (29 page)

‘Will you go back to America?' I asked them.

‘No, we'll keep moving.'

‘Will you go back to St Petersburg?” I asked Alush now.

‘Sometime. It's changed, it's not Leningrad anymore.'

For some reason as I said goodbye to him I thought of the Jewish man I'd seen during my last few months in Britain, on the night boat from Dover to Ostend, as I crossed to Amsterdam, in a prayer shawl, tallow and black striped, quietly droning prayers.

In this city I'd once asked an English boy if I could sleep with him. He was small, muscular, possessed of good looks, cleft in his chin, sleeper in his ear. We slept platonically alongside one another, his penis unaroused, gathered in. There'd been a Dutch boy, his
flatmate
, in the next room. The English boy had once worked in
community
centres for Catholic and Protestant children in Belfast. A year and a half later he visited me in South-East London, shortly after I'd moved there, with his New York Jewish fiancée and brought sugar pretzels. A woman from Ireland, red-gold-haired, exiled in London, had come there a few weeks before—the same night as
there'd been a little Irish-Mauritian boy present who had hair the colour of the candy carrot aloft a carrot cake—in a hobble skirt and in a wide-brimmed hat with chick feathers on it and called the food I'd prepared ‘beauteous'.

In this city I'd once walked through Central Park as a concert of Jewish laments was being held. From this city I'd once returned to Iowa and the flag with the wild rose of Iowa on it blowing over the pumpkins alongside the Stars and Stripes, against the cornfields at sunset. In this city I'd once purchased a woollen tie of solid yellow for myself.

The fox has an earth and the badger a set but back in the part of the West of Ireland where I'd lived I had to look for a new abode.

The Traveller boys in cast-off Harris tweed or herring-bone jackets swim the horses in the river, bits of slate blue or citron, unpatterned material at their necks.

Later the boys in extreme viridian and chrome-yellow football jerseys, some with piercers in their brows, as a last sulky goes by on the bridge, will fish on the pier for white trout.

A priest at school one autumn had read Ovid's words about how, even after years in exile, he still broke down crying when he remembered his last night in the city. 

During my last days living in Berlin I'd gone to an American movie at the Berlin Film Festival and afterwards the director stood on the stage in loafers and jeans alongside the German youth who was introducing him, beautifully groomed, who looked from side to side, glad to be there, wearing a jacket threaded with chintz, a last pattern breaking from the palm of a hand.

I returned to Berlin very briefly that fall, when the German Coxes and the Kaiser Crown pears were in the fruit stores, standing beside the Stalingrad Madonna on Martin Luther Day, 31 October, in Gedächtniskirche with its algal blue light from the stained glass.

At the close of October I swam in Grünewald Lake. You could just make out a last swimmer on the other side and I remembered Alush telling me by the Lake of Pines in Komorova about those who broke the ice in winter to swim at the Men's Bathing Place on the
Neva where boys did somersaults into the river in summer, samizdat scrawls on the wall of the bathing hut, illustrations that looked like Cyrillic letters. On New Year's Day people held feast-day candles as they swam and there were presentations of bunches of red carnations.

I'd seen a wedding party there on one of the White Nights—they were from Belorussia (a boy in a shirt with a contraband
pattern
—an imbroglio of apricot tuxedos, black bow ties, teddybears who promised music—mimed driving a tractor to show that)—the groom and the best man, chintzy maidenhair fern in their lapels, urged on by a mother of one of the bridal pair in a Sultana's turban hat, by a girl in a Veronese green dress with ostrich-egg baubles around her neck, stripping naked and somersaulting into the
lacquered
water.

When I swim in the river at night, having cycled by the light of Chipland, which perhaps may have illuminated a face or two—boys in bricolage (olive, umber) combat trousers as though an echo of the Serbo-Croatian War—or perhaps having cycled in from the Shannon estuary where people used to make boat pilgrimages to the holy wells on the islands—near the Buddhist monastery in Santa
Cittorama
, Sezze Romano, Latina, a Buddhist monk told me in London, the monks roast artichokes in the hills in the evenings and once an Irish boy came and stayed with them and his face was lit up in the evenings, an intensity of lips and a dust of henna freckles, like a face someone was looking for and, like a Russian, by the fire, he'd recite poetry or prose passages, often in the Irish language, as if the act of memorizing and continually repeating was the sole survival, the indemnity, of these words—I can see the light of Shannon Airport circling in the sky on the other side of the estuary and sometimes the tail lights of a plane taking off from Shannon Airport, heading to the Atlantic, are reflected in the river and the side growth, and further down the river a cob cries out for a companion. 

My father used frequently take the train to Athlone to buy sweets in the Bon Bon: army and navy sweets, rhubarb and custard sweets, banana sweets, chocolate macaroons, Winter Mixture, Dolly Mixture, cough lozenges, fudge and lemon bon bons. If I went with him I was content with yellow, twisted sticks called Peggy's Leg. On the glass shelf was a picture of a woman in a poke-bonnet advertising Variety All Sorts.

Afterwards we'd have a Coppa Vanilla Italia in the Genoa Café where there was a picture of Eva Marie Saint for years beside an illustration of a Knickerbocker Glory, before it was replaced by a picture of Monica Vitti.

Boys with elephant-trunk hairstyles, in shoes with winkle-picker toes, girls in circle skirts, with anklets, would be sitting around the tables.

Shortly before, Seán South and Fergal O'Hanlon had been killed during a raid on Brookborough Barracks in Northern Ireland. When
Rock Around the Clock
with Bill Haley and the Comets was shown in the Town Hall there was a queue, mainly of elderly and middle-aged women, halfway down Society Street. Their number increased when its hasty sequel,
Don't Knock the Rock,
was shown.

It was in the Genoa Café that my father told me the story of the French film star, whom people had seen in Swanwick's Cinema,
where there were potted plants beside the penny seats, play a monk who was burned at the stake, who gave street performances in Eyre Square in Galway, near the Imperial Hotel, in the autumn of 1937, exhorting people to join in with him.

In a pelerine—a long cloak for men—with back-swept
Phoenician
hair, beaked features, he looked like a raven.

He waved a sword embedded with hooks and a shillelagh of the type sold to American tourists, which he called the cane of St Patrick.

Waving these two appendages high in the air, he was spotted on top of Gentian Hill.

People, who'd once gone to Galway to see Edward
VII
—Teddy—and Queen Alexandra, took the train to Galway to see him.

A monsignor who was renowned for reciting filthy limericks in Galway parlours conversed with him about Euripides.

They sent him to the mental hospital in our town where he was detained for a few nights.

He recited a speech from
Richard II
for a file of mental-hospital patients being brought for a walk:

He then went on to Dublin by train where his exploits made national headlines. A man whom he exhorted to join him in a street performance hit him on the head with a crowbar at the suggestion. He was locked up in Mountjoy Jail and from there sent back to France in a straitjacket.

Perhaps because of his visit they started doing street
performances
on the boardwalk in Salthill in Galway during the War, plays about St Patrick and his bald charioteer Totmael, as well as doing displays of the four-hand reel.

The mental hospital staff started sending away to P.J. Bourke's for costumes and presented a play each Christmas.

When my father visited Dublin in the summer he always met Mr MacGonagle, the head of a travelling player company who came to town every October after the fair, always wearing a canadienne—a sheepskin coat—for his stay, because of the time of year, and went
for a swim at the Forty Foot with him.

Mr MacGonagle had labourer's shoulders, pale scrolled face, luminary's lips.

He'd known Maud Gonne MacBride. In old age she had turned from politics to the theatre and would sit in her drawing room, in a raven's wing dress, entertaining travelling players.

Once when the three of us, Mr MacGonagle, my father and I, were walking by the railings of St Stephen's Green, Mr MacGonagle waved to a red-haired woman, in Spanish maya black, outside Smyth's of the Green. She was an actress.

‘She's from Galway,' he said: fox-coloured West-of-Ireland hair—brindles, spears of gold in it; face masked with freckles; an elegance of stance, of shoulders; rallying nose, chin.

Mr MacGonagle always wore a leghorn to the Forty Foot.

He could tell us how Sir Walter Scott once swam here in snug trousers and the other swimmers applauded him; how just after the War, a garda sergeant raided the Forty Foot, arrested two young men for sunbathing in the nude, led them away through the pell-mell of villas, had them brought to court, both in zoot suits, one in a tie with skyscrapers, the other in a tie with a ketchup sunset, they were defended by a theatrical personality who wore white gloves and maquillage and the case was thrown out.

On one of those first visits there I remember a naked young man with Titian-red pubic hair standing against the sea with
Hesperides
becalment.

In our classroom, which had a picture of Morough of the Battle Axes beside a painting of a Titan Pope Pius xii standing among a flock of sheep which I did myself, Mr McWeeney, our teacher, who had a Franz Liszt haircut, often played John
McCormack
records on a gramophone, as well as playing records by Delia Murphy, whom he called Mrs Kiernan, wife to the Irish Ambassador to the Holy See.

I'd seen a photograph of Delia Murphy in the Sunday paper, in an evening dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves, long cape fringed with sable, pearl ear studs, with a cardinal in a skull cap, beside a
headline
which said: ‘Irish girl bitten by shark.'

John McCormack was from Athlone and often on our walk
back from the Bon Bon and the Genoa Café to the train station my father and I stopped on the bridge over the Shannon, the subject of a poem Mr McWeeney frequently recited with thespian variations:

As a very young man with a roach à la pompadour who wore drape jackets with beaver-fur trim, he'd sung for Queen Alexandra who told him she was hard of hearing and could hardly hear the brass band in the Albert Hall but she'd heard every word he'd sung perfectly. Despite international celebrity he'd failed to impress Puccini and he believed this was because he was Irish. Neither Puccini nor Athlone liked him. John McCormack was born on the banks of the Shannon.

There was a boy from our town who went to Dublin, sat in the Mug of Four Café in Townsend Street in the mornings, waiting to be picked up for labouring jobs, returned as a Teddyboy in a dandy suit with a velvet collar, sang Lonnie Donnegan's ‘Rock Island Line' against a curtain that has crescent moons on it at the St Patrick's Night concert, was drowned while swimming in the Suck, near a ruined Elizabethan fortress where Sir Philip Sidney, who was painted by Veronese in Venice and the portrait lost, was said to have stayed on his way to Galway in a pair of Poulaines—French boots—to meet the sea-captain Grace O'Malley, the Teddyboy's shoes with 1¾ -inch soles, Persian melon socks, shirt with a harlequin pattern, Hi-Waist Y-fronts, drainpipes found on the bank among the cuckoo flowers.

In the Town Hall was a Men's Club above the cinema in which there was a picture of Doris Day in house pyjamas and the men had bored a hole in the wall so they could take turns watching the films.

They were taking turns watching
The Singer not the Song
with Mylene Demongeot the night the Teddyboy was drowned, when a Teddyboy friend of his walked in in a black V-necked jersey, black Slim Jim tie with horserings and scintilla white circles, Santa Claus red ankle socks, and played a game of billiards.

In the Royal British Legion Men's Club, which was a hut among
a grove of oak trees nearby for First World War veterans, there was a mosaic of pictures and photographs of British Royalty arranged by a man called Rusty Pistol, including one of Edward
VII
and Alexandra of Denmark at sea—Alexandra: Geisha-doll features, black boater, polka dot, mandarin neck with brooch, black wasp-waist coat with epaulettes and wide, pinstriped collar. Edward: pepper-and-salt beard, beefy features, sailor's cap and sailor's jacket, anchor tie-pin on the knot. ‘God save the King! Will no man say amen?'

Jumble Breetches, one of the First World War veterans, sitting on the Market Place wall, was rewarded with the sight of Princess Margaret driving through town in a Rolls-Royce, in a veiled flower toque and Marie Antoinette peruke, to visit her in-laws in County Offaly.

In the Town Hall, the autumn before the Teddyboy was drowned, the conductress, who'd studied in Heidelberg, who had a bosom thrust forward like a coast pigeon, wore lamé sheath dresses during performances, had slapped the face of the Lady of a rural manor who'd acquiesced to play Margot Bonvalet in Sigmund Romberg's
The Desert Song
, during rehearsals, which fact had more significance in the town than the 1916 uprising.

But the Lady of the Manor was nonplussed, returning to the Town Hall in early spring to play the changeling in Mícheál Mac Liammóir's
Ill Met by Moonlight
, walking about the stage in a trance in a bow-necked white organza nightgown from her own wardrobe.

The Teddyboy's father put an In Memoriam photograph in the
Galway Advertiser
each year—mouth nimbused by a moustache, poplin shirt, bootlace tie—like a lost portrait by Veronese.

John McCormack's ambition, when he was a boy in Athlone brought up on Dion Boucicault productions, was to own a Franz Hals, which he eventually did, purchasing Franz Hals'
Portrait of a Man
from the Blue Palace, Warsaw.

There was a priest in Loughrea who wrote a book that caused a great outcry but before that happened he used to bring John McCormack, when he was still only a teenager with a puppyfat chin, in wing collars and elephant ties with eclipses of the moon on them, to sing in the new cathedral, on which he'd worked himself, under a Sarah Purser stained-glass window.

‘Ties had beautiful colours that time,' said my father who
himself
was wearing a Windsor tie, as we paused on the bridge over the Shannon, on the way back from the Bon Bon and the Genoa Café, to the train station.

I was carrying home—from a shop where a woman was forever in the window, watched by small boys, rearranging cartoon postcards with double-entendre captions, one clipped onto the other—a copy of
Photoplay
which had a colour photograph of Sandra Dee in a poodle skirt with Capri-blue slashings and black and white ones of Georgia Moll, looking like a matreshka doll in
The Cossacks
, and an ensemble of Cossacks doing a Soviet dance.

Objects were metonymies for my father.

As he spoke he took out of his pocket a crouched figurine from the top of a slice of iced madeira fruit cake he'd got in the Genoa Café when the Christmas tree on the shelf was decorated with pine cones wrapped in tinsel and with bon bons.

‘Every colour you could think of. And beautiful designs.'

Ties were scarce. Businessmen and people like that always had them. In the country on Sundays and holy days people had ties.

Men only got a new shirt if they were married. The poor lads didn't know how to make a knot on the ties. They had to learn. It was an art.

The first thing you looked at in a photograph was a tie.

The men had stiff fronts and the mother had to iron them Saturday nights. Men's shirts had beautiful buttons. Some of them were so wide they covered the whole breasts.

‘Sometimes they were tiny.'

‘God of Abraham, Jacob, Isaac, have compassion for my children,' was a prayer Mr Vigoda, a Jewish tailor, who wore a kippa with mirror-moon discs, my father worked for in London
EC
in the 1930s, would recite aloud, behind algal brocade—a part of the world where Puccini's ‘O Soave Fanciulla' from
La Bohème
or Puccini's ‘O Mio Babbino Caro' from
Gianni Schicchi
dovetailed into ‘Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bow-Wow' and ‘I'll Send You Some Violets'.

At the train station on our arrival, boys in forage caps and maxie kilts, with mica-bronze freckles, in Athlone for a match, played, with drums and fifes, ‘The Brian Boru' and ‘Brian O'Lynn', watched by a
woman in a high turban, in pumps the blue of sea holly, with net uppers, clapped voraciously by thirteen-and fourteen-year-old girls, their hair sock-style, with brooches and hair clasps won in the
lottery
of Lucky Bags, and a Traveller man with an Elvis Presley
cockscomb
, in a polo-neck jersey, and his son who was in a corduroy jacket, short corduroy trousers, wellingtons, sold the County Clare colours, glitter-blue and lemon-gold.