The Little Red Chairs (2 page)

‘’Tis an honour to have you Sir,’ and he left the tired man to his meditations as into the little passbook he wrote the date and itemised the two brandies. The visitor said that in his part of the world, the brandy was made from plums and damsons, known as
rajika
, and at least forty per cent proof. It was mandatory at baptisms, weddings and the graveside of warriors.

‘Mandatory.’ Dara liked the fullness of that word in the mouth. And where would your part of the world be, he ventured to ask.

‘Montenegro.’

At the word Montenegro, he recalled another stranger from there, bit of a hermit, lived in a big house overlooking the sea and walked his cross dogs very early in the morning. His untimely death in his early sixties, that bit fishy. Only three mourners at the grave down in Limerick, three people all hunched under the one umbrella. Never knew him, but heard various stories from the sergeant to the effect that he was wanted elsewhere. Didn’t think it was an appropriate anecdote for the visitor.

He had come outside the counter, gobsmacked, as he would later put it, by the sagacity of this man, the knowledge, a walking university to himself. He heard of the beautiful scenery of Montenegro, mountains that rivalled the Alps, deep gorges, glacial lakes that were called the eyes of the mountains and valleys
abundant with herbs. Hewn into the rocks were little churches and monasteries, without windows, where people came to pray in the same way that Irish people were known to pray. Celts, he was told, had lived in the gorges of the Dolomite Mountains and along the river Drina in the centuries before Christ and the link between Ireland and the Balkans was indisputable. Scholars who had studied hieroglyphics in scrolls and artefacts in the several museums had traced the resemblance in the type of weaponry and armour that was worn.

‘So your people have suffered injustices just as my people have,’ he said.

‘Oh ’deed we did … My mother who comes from Kerry, used to tell us of the Ballyseedy massacre, nine men tied together and a grenade put down between them. Only one survivor and that was my grandfather and he appeared to her every year on the anniversary, March the 24th, God’s truth … stood at the end of her bed.’

The stranger hearing it, pondered it and then bowed his head in sympathy.

‘You are familiar with Siddhartha?’ he says after a long silence.

‘Well, not exactly,’ Dara replied.

Siddhartha, he was told, lived thousands of years ago and one day, at a ploughing match, he had a vision in which the sufferings of all mankind were revealed to him and he was told that he must do all he could to alleviate that suffering. While not being Siddhartha, as the stranger was quick to say, he too changed paths midlife. He withdrew to various monasteries to meditate and to pray. The question that perplexed him was how to get back the something he had lost. That something lost to modern man, call it soul, call it harmony, call it God. By withdrawing from the world and giving himself up to the magic carpet of
learning, he entered, as he said, the rose garden of knowledge, esoterica, dream divination and trance. With careful study he arrived at a simple observation, which is the analogy of opposites and from that he hit upon the idea of combining ancient medicine with modern science, a synthesis of old and new, the one enriched by the other.

‘I bring it to you,’ he said, and offered his hand as an assurance.

‘Cripes’ was the only word Dara could find.

‘A woman brought me here,’ he said then with a touch of mischief, describing how one night in a monastery, there appeared to him, pale-faced and with tears streaming down her cheeks, a woman, saying
I am of Ireland
, entreating him to come there. Dara, with his smattering of history, said that crying woman was well known and in every child’s copybook and she was called Aisling, which meant dream. Then he was handed the visitor’s card, with the name
Dr Vladimir Dragan
, in black lettering, plus a host of degrees after it. Further down he read
Healer and Sex Therapist
.

‘But I am known as Vuk,’ the man said with a tentative smile. Vuk was a popular name for sons in his homeland, because of the legend attached to it concerning a woman who had lost several infants in succession, deciding to name her newborn Vuk, meaning wolf, because the witches who
ate
the babies would be too terrified to confront the wolf-child. They were getting on great, when to Dara’s utter annoyance the bloody telephone rang. It was Iseult from the country house, wanting to know when the guest was arriving and if crab claws would do for his supper.

He stood in the doorway and under a sliver of moon, watched the man go down the slip road, the ice cracking under his feet, footsteps getting fainter and fainter as he crossed the bridge, away from the roar of the river, to a sister river that was not
nearly so rapid. He took gulps of the air, priming himself, knowing that presently the bar would fill up and he would have to provide a blow-by-blow summary of the encounter.

Desiree was first, a strapping girl in her pink mini-dress, her stout arms bare and a coat over her head, bursting for news.

‘God I could do with a fella, haven’t had a fella for half a year,’ she said, curious to know if the guy was presentable and married or single. Did he wear a ring? The Muggivan sisters were next, slinking in, in their grey coats and their knitted caps and ordering peppermint cordial. Fifi came with a few of her friends and Mona, alerted by the hilarity, came down from her living quarters, and like any customer sat on one of the high stools and ordered her usual tipple, which was a large port wine with a slice of orange. A widow for over twenty years she always dressed nicely in dark crepe dresses with a corsage of cloth violets on her ample bosom and she spoke in a soft, breathy voice. Mona had two staples in life: one was Padre Pio, in whom she had unswerving faith and the other was the romance novels of which she could not get enough. She devoured them, the way she devoured fudge in bed at night and looking around she welcomed the fact that the bar was filling up as things had been woeful since Christmas. There was also Plodder policeman, Diarmuid the ex-Schoolmaster and Dante the town punk, with his dreadlocks and his black gear, flanked by his cohorts: Ned, who’d done time for growing marijuana in window boxes and Ambrose, for stealing lead piping from the contractor he worked for. Business had bucked up. Seized with enthusiasm, Dara was proud to announce that the stranger was a gentleman, an out-and-out gentleman down to his pointy shoes. Soon he had them in the palm of his hand, as he pieced events together, adding a
few flourishes, such as the man’s transfixing eyes, his long fingers, expressive as a pianist’s, and the signet ring with the crest of an eagle, the colour of red sealing wax. Although a toff, as he had to remind them, there was also this aura of one of those holy men, pilgrims that used to travel around, barefoot, doing good. He mentioned the plum brandy,
rajika
, that was mandatory at baptisms, weddings and the graves of warriors and how the Balkans and Ireland had shared ancestors in times gone by.

Was the newcomer one of those sharks, speculating for gas or oil, to bleed their green and verdant land?

‘No way … he’s a doctor, a philosopher, a poet and a healer.’

‘Jaysus, that’s a mouthful,’ Plodder policeman said, coming to his own conclusions. Close to retiring and a bit of a joke in the barracks, he was only sent out on small jobs, missing taillights or straying sheep, but he felt in his waters that this visitor was dodgy, a con artist of some kind, or maybe a bigamist.

‘Where is he from?’ Mona asked.

‘Montenegro,’ Dara said and then relayed the story about Irish and Balkan Celts being blood brothers and how the artefacts found in fields et cetera were similar to ones dug up around the Boyne.

‘Bollocks,’ Desiree said.

‘He’s staying …’ Dara said, pleased at his timing and then dropped the bombshell about the man intending to set up a clinic as an alternative healer and sex therapist.

‘Sweet Jesus,’ the Misses Muggivans said blessing themselves.

‘Oh, oh, oh … Sex therapist.’ Things got heated. There were those who smelt vice and corruption, while a few lone voices were insisting that he might be an
artery
for good. They were shouting each other down. It was too much for ex-Schoolmaster
Diarmuid, who had listened to this twaddle and was now asking them to please give him a chance to voice a sensible, mediating opinion:

‘There was a man called Rasputin,’ he began and walked around, scolding and pugnacious, still the Schoolmaster except no one was in awe of him anymore, ‘who hailed from the wilds of Siberia and infiltrated himself into the very nucleus of the Russian court, presenting himself as a visionary and a healer. He was going to lift Russia from its lethargy and darkness, he was going to cure the sick child of the Czarina, the future heir, of his haemophilia and he was going to perform miracles ad infinitum. Did he cure the heir? No. Did he save the Russian family from the firing squad? No. He was a fornicator and an imposter who got drunk every night and had carnal knowledge of most of the women in the court.’

He could hear titters and shuffling, but determined to have his say, as he made for the door, he warned them that Rasputin’s last supper was a plate of biscuits laced with cyanide.

‘That’s a grand story Diarmuid,’ Mona called, entreating him to stay, because she never liked a customer to leave in a huff.

Dante had been listening and presently, with a nod from Mona, he began to play on the bohrain, his soft brown hair falling over his face, his team waiting for their cue. Demands for Irish coffee were legion. Dara was being complimented on the fact that he could keep talking and still have a nifty way of getting the cream down the back of the spoon, before it trembled into the coffee. The music got wilder, thumpier, the cohorts doing their scherzos and trills with the spoons, while Desiree improvised her mock striptease. Dante was on his feet, tiptoeing around, hovering above each one, the Shaman, whispering the prophecy:

Santa didn’t come

His brother took his place

Santa’s dead

Santa’s dead

That’s what he said

Annihilated on his sled

That’s what he said.

So this is it, Son

This is it

Dark dark shit.

Mona, a little tiddly on her perch and nostalgic now, pressed the violets on her bosom and said, ‘Maybe he’ll bring a bit of Romance into our lives.’

Outside, the thermometer on the Folk Park gate read minus three, and inside they basked in the warmth of a fire that had been going since morning. Spirals of smoke drifted through the room, the faces curious, jovial, dreamy, wreathed in smoke, like beings captured in some strange nocturnal bacchanalia.

Fifi

Fifi wakened hearing voices. It could only be John, John dead almost three years and still paying his regular visits, ‘channelling’ as he would call it. He might as well be alive, she could picture him so clearly, with his tousled black hair, wild black eyes and the old green jersey with strings hanging off the sleeves, spouting the mysteries of the Divine, of which he was an initiate.

She never feared his ghost, it could only be an influence for good. They were soulmates, both having travelled the wide world, returning from their wanderings, to the sea mists and the ground mists, the Fomorian darkness as he termed it. There was nothing romantic of course, as she ruefully admitted to being ‘a dried-up old bird’ from all that sunshine in Australia, whereas John with his shock of hair and his wild eyes was still Orpheus, singing to some lonely Eurydice, whoever she may be.

Ah, the high-flow glorious nonsense of those times.

For two years he lived under her roof, in the back bedroom, which he named Manaan Mac Lir, Son of the Sea and God of the Sea. He did rough work, digging and hoeing, quite content to do it since it kept him close to nature, and pursued his mystical studies at night. The original agreement was for bed and breakfast, but with time things changed and moreover, he would bring back a hare or some trout and she would cook for him and they would sit and talk at the kitchen table, John expounding on God, paganism, Gaia, and St John of the Cross. Often he would
contradict himself, saying that the way to religion was to have no religion at all and they would almost come to blows at the kitchen table, shouting one another down, regarding the authenticity of the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection of Christ. She was a believer but for John, poetry was the true faith.

He disapproved of her summer visitors, camped out in the bog or by the seashore and gave the odd seminar at summer schools, which she was too busy to attend. Her guests came back year after year, some for the fishing, some for the shooting or festivals that went on all year round, along with nature walks and God knows what else.