The Heart's Invisible Furies

by John Boyne

  “What?” I asked. “What’s the irony?”

  “Well, by rights it should be the other way round, shouldn’t it?” he asked. “You should be lying in this bed rotting away from the inside out and I should be sitting over there, looking down at you with puppy-dog eyes and wondering where I’m going for dinner when I can eventually get the fuck out of this room.”

  “That’s not what I’m thinking,” I said.

  “Sure you are.”

  “No, I’m not,” I insisted.

  “Then what are you thinking? Because I know for sure that’s what I’d be thinking if I was in your place.”

  “That I wish we could go back in time, both of us, and do things better or differently. We’ve both been fucked over by our natures, can’t you see that? Seriously, Julian, sometimes I wished I was a fucking eunuch. It would have made life a lot easier. And if you don’t want me here, well what about having someone you love come over? Where’s your family? Why don’t you tell them?”

  “Because I don’t want them to know. There’s hardly anyone left anyway. My mother’s long gone. Max died a few years ago.”

  “No! How?”

  “Heart attack. And other than that there was only Alice and Liam, and I don’t want my sister knowing anything about this.”

  “I wondered when her name would come up,” I said tentatively. “Can we talk about her?”

  He gave a bitter smile. “We can,” he said. “But be careful what you say. I may be lying in this hospital bed, but there’s still no one on this planet whom I love more than her.”

  “What I did all those years ago,” I said, “It was terrible. You don’t have to tell me. It’s something that I’ve had to live with. I hate myself for it.”

  “No, you don’t. That’s just a thing that people say.”

  “I do.”

  “Well, at least you apologized,” he said. “When you wrote to her afterward, I mean, and threw yourself on her mercy and begged her forgiveness for humiliating her in front of three hundred people, including the President of Ireland, not to mention ruining her entire life. The second guy who had done that in a couple of years. Oh no, wait, I’m wrong, amn’t I? Because you never wrote to her at all. You just left her there. You weren’t even man enough to say sorry. And you knew what she’d been through before when she’d been stood up at the altar by that fucker Fergus. You knew all about that. Only this time she got as far as the altar but not out the other side of the reception. Jesus Christ, how could you have done it? Do you have no decency, Cyril?”

  “You made me do it,” I said.

  “No, I didn’t! What are you talking about?”

  “That day. In the sacristy when I…when I told you how I felt. You made me go through with it. I could have stopped it right then—we could have—but you forced me—”

  “So you’re saying it’s my fault? Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “No, it’s mine. I know that. I should have never let things get that far in the first place. I should never have started anything with Alice. But I did and I can’t change that.” I took a long breath, recalling the person I had been at that time. “I thought about writing,” I said, starting to tremble at the memory. “I did, honestly. But I was in a terrible place. I was close to suicide, Julian. You have to understand, I needed to get away, to leave everyone and everything behind me. To start afresh. The idea of even communicating with Alice…I just couldn’t have done it.”

  “That’s because you’re a fucking coward, Cyril,” he said. “And a liar. You always were and I bet you still are.”

  “No,” I insisted. “I’m not anymore. I don’t have to be now. Because I don’t live in Ireland. I can be exactly who I want to be now that I’m not part of that country anymore.”

  “Just get out,” he said, turning away from me now. “Can’t you leave me to die in peace? You won, all right? You get to live and I get to die.”

  “I didn’t win anything.”

  “You won,” he repeated quietly. “So stop gloating.”

  “How is she?” I asked, refusing to go. “Alice, I mean. Was she all right afterward? Is she happy now?”

  “What do you think?” he said. “She was never the same. She loved you, Cyril; do you actually understand that? You who seem to set so much store by the concept. And she thought that you loved her too. I mean, marrying her kind of gave her that impression.”

  “It’s all so long ago now,” I said, shaking my head. “I never even think about those days anymore. And she’s probably forgotten all about me, so what’s the point of opening old wounds?”

  Julian stared at me with an expression that suggested he wished he could rise from the bed and throttle the life out of me. “How could she ever have forgotten you?” he asked. “I told you, you completely ruined her life.”

  I pulled a face; yes, it must have been difficult and embarrassing for her back then. Of course, I accepted that. But time had passed. I wasn’t that much of a catch; she had surely got over it by now. And if she hadn’t, then she should have. She was a grown woman, after all. I would take responsibility for hurting her but not for ruining her entire life.

  “Did she not marry again?” I asked. “I presumed she would. She was young and pretty and—”

  “How could she marry again?” he said. “She was married to you; do you not remember? You didn’t leave her at the altar, Cyril, you left her at the fucking reception in the middle of the Shelbourne Hotel! The vows had already been exchanged.”

  “Yes, but surely she had it annulled,” I said, feeling a sense of anxiety building inside me. “Once it was clear that I wasn’t coming back, she must have done that?”

  “She didn’t get it annulled,” he said quietly.

  “But why not?” I said. “What, did she want to play Miss Havisham for the rest of her life, was that it? Look, Julian, I’ll hold my hands up and admit my part in this. I did a terrible thing to Alice and she certainly didn’t deserve any of it. I was the guilty party. A coward. A total shit. But like you said, I left during the reception; we hadn’t even made it to the bridal suite. She’d have easily been able to get the marriage annulled if she’d wanted to. And if she didn’t, then I can’t be held responsible for that. That was her decision.”

  He looked at me as if I was quite mad and opened his mouth to say something but then closed it again.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing,” he replied.

  “What?” I insisted, looking at him, certain that there was something he wasn’t telling me.

  “Look, Cyril,” he said. “Why don’t you stop with the bullshit, all right? You might not have made it to the bridal suite, but you found some place to have sex with her before you got married, didn’t you?”

  I thought about it, confused by what he was saying. And then I remembered that night, a couple of weeks before the wedding. I think you should come over, Cyril. Come for dinner, we’ll drink a couple of Max’s best wines and, you know, go to bed together. A night I hadn’t even thought about since it had happened. It took an effort on my part even to recall it now.

  A thought struck me and I felt a chill run through my body.

  “Who’s Liam?” I asked.

  “What?” asked Julian, who had turned away from me now and was staring out the window toward a sky that was growing overcast as the evening drew in.

  “You said there wasn’t much of your family left,” I told him. “That your father had died and there was only Alice and Liam left. Who’s Liam?”

  “Liam,” said Julian quietly, “is the reason why Alice couldn’t get the marriage annulled. The reason why she had to stay married to you and wasn’t able to meet someone else. Why she couldn’t find happiness with a husband who was a real man. Liam is her son, my nephew. Liam was your parting gift to her. And I suppose you’ll tell me now that you never even thought such a thing was possible?”

  I stood up slowly, feeling my legs weaken beneath me. I wanted to call him a liar, to tell hi
m that I didn’t believe a word of it, but what was the point when the truth was that I believed every word he said because what possible reason would he have for lying? I’d left Alice pregnant. She’d been desperate to talk at the reception, she’d kept insisting that she needed to speak to me in private, but I wouldn’t hear her out. She must have known already, or guessed, and wanted to tell me. But then I’d disappeared off to Europe and never contacted anyone from my past afterward. And so she’d borne the shame of it in Ireland in 1973, when an unmarried pregnant girl was considered little better than a whore and was treated by everyone accordingly. I’d always assumed that my own mother, my birth mother, had been unwed and given me up because of how difficult it would have been to rear a child alone in the forties. But things hadn’t changed that much since then. Had I done to Alice what my own father had done to my mother?

  But of course she wasn’t unmarried and perhaps that was even worse, because without a ring on her finger she might have yet met a man, someone who wouldn’t have cared and would have brought up the child as his own. But with the ring, there was no chance. Not then. Not in those days. Not in Ireland.

  “I didn’t know a thing about it,” I told him. “I swear, I never even thought about it for a moment.”

  “Well, you know now,” he said, his temper abating. “I probably shouldn’t have said anything. My mind is gone, that’s the problem. Just leave it alone, Cyril, all right? They’re fine without you. They’ve been fine without you all these years. They don’t need you now. It’s too late for you to involve yourself in their lives.”

  I stared at him, unsure what to say. I had a son. He would be fourteen years old by now. I stood up and slowly made my way toward the door but before I could go through it I heard my old friend’s voice once more, quieter now, frightened, scared at the end that his life was taking.

  “Cyril,” he said. “Please don’t go—”

  “If she’d wanted to let me know,” I said, interrupting him and considering the matter carefully, “she would have been able to. There are ways that she could have found me.”

  “So it’s her own fault, is that what you’re saying?”

  “No, I just mean—”

  “You know what, just get the fuck out of here, OK?” he said, his mood changing dramatically in a moment. “You treated her like shit and you spent a lifetime lying to me. I don’t even know why I’m giving you the time of day when I have such little time left. Get out.”

  “Julian—”

  “I said get out!” he shouted. “Get the fuck out of here!”

  The Last Night

  There was a thunderstorm on the night of May 11, 1987, and the rain pounded on the window of our apartment as I sat in my favorite armchair reading an article in the New York Times on Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, whose trial had just begun in Europe. Across from me on the sofa Emily was doing everything in her power to make me feel uncomfortable as she gave Ignac a foot rub and occasionally leaned across to nibble on the poor boy’s ear while he reread “Araby,” his favorite story from Dubliners. How he could stand the way she pawed him I didn’t know; she was like a hungry mouse working her way through a block of cheese.

  “I don’t know why anyone is interested in that stuff anymore,” she said as I made some comment about the lawyer who had been hired to defend the former Gestapo captain. “It’s all so long ago.”

  “It’s not that long ago,” I said. “And you’re supposed to be the historian, aren’t you? How can you not find it interesting?”

  “Maybe if I’d been alive during the war, like you, then I would. But I wasn’t. So I don’t.”

  “I wasn’t alive during the war,” I said, rolling my eyes. “As you very well know, I wasn’t born until August 1945.”

  “Well, close enough then. What did this guy do anyway? He’s an old man now, right?”

  “Yes, but that’s no reason why he shouldn’t be held accountable for the things he did in the past. And are you actually trying to tell me that you don’t know what he did?”

  “I mean, I think I’ve heard the name…”

  “He dragged forty-four Jewish children out of an orphanage in Izieu, for one thing,” said Ignac, not looking up from his book. “And had them deported to Auschwitz. Where, you know, they died. Most intelligent people would know that.”

  “OK,” said Emily, unwilling to argue with him as she would have with me. I was glad to hear a note of discontent in his voice. “Let me have a look at that paper.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m still reading it.”

  She let out a deep sigh, as if I had been put on this earth for no other reason than to torment her. “Anyway, Mr. Avery,” she said after a moment. “Has Ignac told you our news yet?”

  “What news?” I asked, putting the paper down and looking across at him.

  “Another time,” said Ignac quickly, throwing her a look. “When Bastiaan is home.”

  “What news?” I repeated, praying that they weren’t getting married or having a baby or doing anything that would connect him to this awful woman for the rest of his life.

  “Ignac’s been accepted,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For a place at Trinity College. We’re moving to Dublin in the fall.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling an unexpected surge of both excitement and anxiety at the mention of my hometown’s name. To my great surprise, my first thought was Does that mean I can go home at last too? “I didn’t think you’d made your mind up about whether or not to apply.”

  “Well, I wasn’t sure,” he said. “But I wrote them a letter and they got back to me and we had a few phone calls and they’ve said there’s a place for me in October if I want to take it up. I haven’t decided for certain yet. I wanted to talk to you and Bastiaan about it. Privately.”

  “We have decided,” said Emily, slapping him on the knee. “It’s what we both want, remember?”

  “I don’t want to rush into anything that I might regret.”

  “Have you spoken to them about scholarships?” I asked.

  “Oh don’t worry,” snapped Emily, perhaps sensing the same annoyance from her boyfriend toward her that I was and taking it out on me. “No one’s asking you for money.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” I said.

  “Of course it’s not,” said Ignac. “And, yes, I have. It looks like there’s a few different funds that I can apply for.”

  “Well, that’s good news,” I said. “If you’re sure that it’s what you want.”

  “It’s what we both want,” said Emily. “And anyway, Ignac’s not a child anymore. It would be better for him to be living with people his own age.”

  “So he won’t be living with you then?” I asked.

  “Someone closer to his own age,” she said with a half-smile.

  “I would have preferred to tell Cyril and Bastiaan together,” said Ignac quietly. “And when we were alone. As a family.”

  “Well, they had to find out at some point,” said Emily. “And Dr. Van den Bergh is almost never here, is he? He’s always at the hospital.”

  “He’s not always at the hospital,” I said. “He’s back here every night. You saw him only this morning.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Emily, we all had breakfast together.”

  “Oh, I’m no good in the mornings. I’d barely notice either of you at that time of the day.”

  “You need more sleep then,” I said. “That’s what happens when you get older.”

  The phone rang and Ignac leaped off the seat, happy to walk away from our sparring. He almost never joined in when Emily and I argued, and I liked to think that it was because he was not fully on her side. A moment later, he returned and poked his head around the door. “It’s Bastiaan,” he said. “For you.”

  I stood up and walked into the hallway, taking the receiver from the stand.

  “I’m glad you called,” I said. “You’re not going to believe what I’ve just bee
n told.”

  “Cyril,” said Bastiaan, and the serious tone in his voice sent a wave of dread through my body.

  “What is it?” I said. “What’s happened?”

  “I think you should get in here.”

  “Is it Julian?”

  “He’s taken a turn for the worse. He doesn’t have long. If you want to see him, you should leave now.”

  I sat down on the chair by the telephone table before my legs could give way beneath me. Of course I had told Bastiaan about my relationship with Patient 741 and he remembered me telling him about Julian more than a decade earlier when we had first met. But I hadn’t spoken about him since, so he’d failed to make the connection when he first began treating him.

  “I’m on my way,” I said. “Stay with him, will you? Until I get there?”

  I hung up the phone and reached for my jacket as Ignac appeared in the doorway. “What is it?” he asked. “Is it your friend?”

  I nodded. “Bastiaan says he’s near the end. I need to see him before he dies.”

  “Do you want me to come with you?”

  I thought about it for a moment and appreciated the gesture but shook my head. “There’s no point,” I said. “You’ll only be left waiting outside with nothing to do. And besides, Bastiaan will be there for me. You stay here with Emily. Or, you know, tell her to go home and stay here on your own.”

  I made my way toward the door and he followed me quickly. “Nothing’s decided, you know,” he said. “About Dublin, I mean. The offer’s there, that’s all. Emily wants to go, but I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

  “We can talk about this later,” I said. “I’ve got to go.”

  He nodded and I ran downstairs, hailing a cab on the street, and within about fifteen minutes found myself stepping out of the elevator on the seventh floor to find Bastiaan waiting for me.