The Heart's Invisible Furies

by John Boyne

  I smiled. I found it hard to imagine Maude doing anything of the sort.

  “You know she assaulted The Man from the Revenue after you went to prison the first time?” I said.

  “Did she? Why?”

  “She said that he’d worked so hard to prosecute you that her name was in all the papers and the result was that Amongst Angels had reached number four on the bestseller charts. She slapped him in the middle of the Four Courts.”

  “That was a blow to her all right,” he said, nodding. “I remember her being very upset about it. She wrote me a letter afterward and it wasn’t pleasant, although it was incredibly well written. Is she upstairs, Cyril? Why not ask her to come down and I’ll try to make amends to her before I go to sleep.”

  “No, Charles,” I said, shaking my head. “No, she’s not upstairs.”

  “She is. She must be. Please send her down. I want to tell her that I’m sorry.”

  I reached out and brushed a strand of long white hair from his forehead back across his head. The skin was cold and clammy to the touch. He lay back down and closed his eyes, and I waited with him until he was asleep before going to bed myself, lying in that single bed looking through the skylight at the stars above, the same stars that I had stared at more than forty years earlier, dreaming about Julian Woodbead and the things I wanted to do to him, and I understood at last why Charles had wanted to come back here. For the first time in my life, I started to think about my own mortality. Should I fall or have a heart attack, I could lie on the kitchen floor decomposing for weeks before anyone thought to come looking for me. I didn’t even have a cat to eat me.

  Charles lasted another four days and, with impeccable timing, passed away when Alice, Liam, Cyril II and I all happened to be at home. He’d been rambling all day and it was clear that he didn’t have long left, although we didn’t think it would be just yet. Alice and I were downstairs preparing dinner when we heard Liam calling us from the floor above.

  “Mum! Cyril! Come quick!”

  All three of us ran upstairs and into the bedroom where Charles was lying with his eyes closed, his breathing slowing down. We could hear the effort it took for him to make every sound.

  “What’s happening?” asked Liam, and it astonished me to see that my son, who had shown almost no emotion whatsoever in the time that I had known him, was close to tears, particularly since he hadn’t even met his grandfather until a few weeks earlier.

  “He’s going,” I said, sitting down and taking one of his hands while Alice took the other. From the hallway outside, I heard the sound of a maudlin violin tune being played and rolled my eyes.

  “Does he have to do that?” I asked.

  “Shut up, Cyril,” said Alice. “He’s only trying to help.”

  “Then couldn’t he at least play something more cheerful? A jig or something?”

  “Tell her it wasn’t my fault,” muttered Charles, and I bent my head down closer to his mouth.

  “What wasn’t your fault?” I asked, but he shook his head.

  “Cyril,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Come closer.”

  “I can’t come any closer. We’re practically kissing as it is.”

  He pulled himself up a little in the bed and looked around the room with a horrified expression on his pale face before grabbing me by the back of the head and pulling my face close to him. “You were never a real Avery,” he hissed. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “I do,” I said.

  “But Christ on a bike, you came close. You came damned close.”

  And with that he released me and fell back on his pillow, said nothing more and we all watched as his breath slowed down until, finally, he was breathing no more. Somehow, I felt entirely removed from the scene at that moment, as if my own soul was ascending from my body toward the heavens. Looking down from above I could see myself, my wife and son sitting in the room over the remains of my adoptive father and I thought what a strange family I had grown up in and what a peculiar one I would leave behind one day.

  Two days later we buried him in the church graveyard at Ranelagh and when we returned to Dartmouth Square Alice sat me down and said that she was happy that I’d been there toward the end and pleased that she’d been able to help but that was it, she didn’t want any misunderstandings between us, and I would have to go home now.

  “But I don’t even own a cat,” I said.

  “What has that got to do with anything?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “And of course I must go. You’ve been very kind to me, you and Cyril II.”

  “Don’t—”

  “Sorry.”

  I slept there one final night and early the following morning packed the few personal items and clothes that I had brought with me and left the house for good, while my son, my wife and her lover were still asleep, depositing my key on the small table by the front door, opposite the chair where Julian had sat as a seven-year-old boy, and making my way outside into a cold autumn morning to find that a gray fog had descended on Dartmouth Square, making the path to the main road practically invisible.

  2001 The Phantom Pain

  Maribor

  In the summer of 2001, shortly after my fifty-sixth birthday, Ignac invited me to accompany him to Ljubljana for a literary festival. Usually his wife, Rebecca, went with him on publicity tours but having given birth to twin girls only a few months earlier—their second set of twins following a pair of boys born only fourteen months before—she didn’t want to leave Dublin and so he asked me along instead.

  “He’s very anxious about it,” Rebecca told me when she wheeled the enormous two-level buggy into Dáil Éireann one morning, appearing a little dazed to see sunlight again. Collapsing into a chair opposite me, she looked as if she could fall asleep for weeks if given the chance. “I think he regrets having accepted the invitation at all.” One of the babies on the upper level promptly threw up all over one of the babies on the lower, leaving a parliamentary secretary glaring over at us with disapproval as a round of raucous crying ensued, mostly from Rebecca herself.

  “Why would he be anxious?” I asked her when they were cleaned up again. “He’s attended hundreds of book festivals over the years. He must be comfortable with them at this stage.”

  “Yes, but it’ll be his first time back in Slovenia since he left.”

  “Since he was sent away, you mean.”

  “Do I?”

  “Well, that’s what happened, isn’t it?”

  She shrugged her shoulders and looked away. “It’s complicated,” she said.

  I frowned, uncertain what she meant. Ignac had always said that his grandmother had dispatched him to his father in Amsterdam immediately after his mother’s death, saying that she had no interest in raising another child. And that, as far as I understood it, was what had happened.

  “I’m worried that he’ll find it upsetting,” she continued. “He’s quieter than he normally is. And he’s not sleeping.”

  “Are any of you sleeping?” I asked, glancing down at the babies.

  “Well, no. Now that you mention it, I think I last had a full night’s sleep in March. I’m hoping to have one again next year at some point if I’m lucky. I just think it might be a difficult trip, that’s all. He’s so famous over there.”

  “He’s famous everywhere.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Look, why don’t I take care of the kids for a few days?” I suggested. “And you go to Slovenia with Ignac?”

  “Seriously?” she said. “You want to take care of four babies for five days?”

  “Well, not really, no. But I’ll do it. How difficult can it be?”

  She laughed and shook her head. “Oh, not difficult at all! It’s a total breeze!”

  “Come on, I can do it! And you look like you could do with a break anyway.”

  “Why?” she asked, her eyes opening wide in dismay. “Do I look awful? I do, don’t I? I must look like one of those wome
n. You know those women? Who look awful all the time? Do I look like one of them?”

  “You look as gorgeous as ever,” I told her, which was true, because despite how tired she might have felt, and regardless of how many babies she popped out, Rebecca always looked amazing.

  “I feel like that old woman from Titanic,” she said, resting her head on her hands. “Only less fuckable. The way my body looks right now, Mother Teresa would beat me in a swimsuit competition.”

  “I’m sure Ignac doesn’t think that,” I said, trying to dismiss this image from my mind.

  “I hope he does,” she said. “If he comes near me with that thing again, I’ll cut it off with scissors. Four babies in a year and a half is enough. Anyway, no, as much as I’d like to just run away and leave you to it, it wouldn’t be possible.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because I think I might be better at breastfeeding than you.”

  “Oh yes,” I said. “All right. Good point.”

  And so it was settled and I boarded a plane, finding myself swept up in the chaos of Slovenia’s best-known expatriate returning to the country of his birth for the first time in more than two decades. To my astonishment, photographers were gathered at the airport in anticipation of his arrival, along with television news crews, each of whom thrust microphones into Ignac’s face as they roared incomprehensible questions at him once we appeared through the Arrivals door. The hordes of children waiting were so deep and noisy that we might have been a boy-band coming to town. By now, of course, the eighth volume of the Floriak Ansen series had been published, so the enthusiasm was understandable, and Ignac, to his credit, spent more than an hour at the airport signing books while I sat with a cup of coffee before we traveled by limousine to the city center for a champagne-fueled meeting with his publisher in advance of a sold-out evening event at a local theater.

  Throughout her entire writing career Maude had given a public reading on only one occasion, and although that disastrous night is well documented in Alice’s biography,* she wasn’t actually present to witness it, but I was. It had taken place in a bookshop in the center of Dublin to a packed audience of literally tens of people and as a culture journalist from the Sunday Press introduced Maude, listing the titles of her various novels to date, my adoptive mother sat quietly in a corner, dressed entirely in black, lighting one cigarette after another and rolling her eyes at every supposed compliment he paid her. (She would give any male writer a run for his money, was one of his choice lines. Along with: She writes wonderful sentences but has even better legs. Not to mention: How she manages to write her novels while taking care of a husband and child is a mystery to me. I hope she’s not neglecting her duties!) When he was finished, she stood up, marched over to the microphone and with absolutely no preamble began reading from Chapter One of Amongst Angels, which had been published to universal indifference a few months earlier. Perhaps she had never attended a literary event before or perhaps she simply misunderstood the nature of public readings, for having completed the first chapter, which seemed to take an interminable forty minutes, the audience burst into applause and she glared out at them and told them to Shut up, for Christ’s sake, I’m not finished, before launching into the second. And then the third. Only when the last audience member shuffled out of the bookshop more than two hours later did she stop reading, slam the book shut and, taking me by the hand, storm out, hailing a taxi for Dartmouth Square.

  “What a complete waste of my time,” she complained as we drove through the traffic for home. “If they didn’t like my work, why on earth did they come along to hear me?”

  “I think they expected you to read for only a few minutes,” I told her. “And then perhaps to answer some of their questions.”

  “The novel is four hundred and thirty-four pages long,” she replied, shaking her head. “If they want to understand it, then they must hear the entire thing. Or, preferably, read the entire thing. How can they possibly get a sense of it from a mere ten minutes? The time it takes to smoke three cigarettes! Philistines! Barbarians! Boors! Never again, Cyril, I promise you that. Never again.” And on this matter, she was as good as her word.

  Ignac, of course, made no such errors of judgment in Ljubljana. By now he was experienced on stages, knew exactly how long an audience was prepared to listen and had a good sense of how to charm them with a few well-chosen and self-deprecating quips during the interview that followed. His publisher had lined up an enormous amount of newspaper, radio and television interviews and by the third afternoon, when his writerly responsibilities came to an end, he suggested a trip to Maribor in the northeast of the country for the following day.

  “What’s in Maribor?” I asked, consulting the guidebook that I had clung to over the previous few days as tightly as Lucy Honeychurch had to her Baedeker.

  “It’s where I was born,” he told me. “Where my family comes from.”

  “Really?” I said, surprised, for I had never heard him mention the town before. “And you’re sure you want to go back there?”

  “Not entirely,” he said with a shrug. “But I think it might be good for me.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  He took a long time to answer. “It’s not as if this will be my only trip back to Slovenia,” he said. “I’ll come again but probably not for a long time. Not until the children are old enough to see it. And when that day comes, I don’t want to be still dealing with the past. I think I should see Maribor now, with you, and then lay it to rest forever.”

  And so we went, renting a car and driving north, eventually finding ourselves on the cold, run-down streets where he had spent his childhood and adolescence. He was quiet as he led me through the town, shortcuts and alleyways coming back to him without any hesitation, recalling shops and the houses of friends from his childhood. We passed a school that was boarded up, its facade covered in indecipherable graffiti, and another that had been built more recently but looked as if a strong wind might take it down. We ate lunch in a restaurant where the locals stared, recognizing their most famous son from newspaper articles and television reports, but seemed wary of approaching him, as if uncertain what his response might be. Only one person, a nine-year-old boy who had been sitting with his father reading a Floriak Ansen novel, came over, and when the pair spoke, before Ignac signed his book, it was in Slovene and I didn’t understand a word of it and asked no questions afterward. Finally, he took me down a cobblestoned lane that led to a tiny abandoned hut with boarded-up windows, a roof that was falling off, and he placed his hand flat on the front door, closing his eyes and breathing deeply, as if he was either trying to control his temper or prevent tears from falling.

  “What is it?” I asked. “Where are we?”

  “This is the one,” he said. “The house where I was born. Where I grew up.”

  I stared at it. It was so small that I could scarcely imagine a single person living inside, let alone two adults and a child.

  “There were just a couple of rooms,” he said, guessing what was going through my mind. “As a child, I slept in the bed with my parents. Then, after my father left, my mother made a nest for me on the floor. There was a toilet out the back. Nowhere to wash.”

  I looked at him, uncertain of what to say. We had never spoken of his father since that night in Amsterdam twenty-one years earlier when Jack Smoot had stabbed him in the back.

  “Do you want to go inside?” I asked. “If we pulled off some of these wooden beams—”

  “No,” he said quickly. “No, I don’t want that. I just wanted to see it, that’s all.”

  “What about your neighbors?” I asked, looking around. “Do you remember them?”

  “Some. A lot will be dead by now.”

  “And your friends?”

  “I didn’t have many. I won’t be knocking on any doors.”

  “Then let’s leave. You’ve seen it, let’s move on.”

  “All right,” he said. “Do you want to go back to the hotel?
”

  “No, let’s go for a beer,” I said. “I feel like we should get drunk, don’t you?”

  He smiled. “That’s exactly how I feel,” he said.

  We wandered down the road and I suggested heading back into the center of the town where I had noticed some decent-looking pubs earlier but he said no, that there was a bar close by that he wanted to visit. When we reached it, I was surprised that it was nothing special, just a couple of tables placed on the street outside a delicatessen, but we sat down and ordered a couple of Slovenian lagers, and he seemed happy to be there. There was a strange atmosphere in the air between us, however, and I felt uncertain whether he wanted to be left in peace with his thoughts or would prefer to talk.

  “Do you remember the first night that we met?” I asked him finally, recalling the evening that Bastiaan and I had discovered him lying on the street outside our apartment on Weesperplein, his dark hair bleached blond and a bruise discoloring the skin beneath his eye as a line of blood ran from his lip to his chin. “When we reached down to help you, it felt like picking up a frightened puppy who doesn’t know whether you’re going to feed it or beat it.”

  “You know I was planning on robbing you?” he asked, smiling a little.

  “You weren’t just planning it,” I reminded him. “You actually did it. You took my wallet the next morning, remember?”

  “Oh that’s right,” he said. “I’d forgotten that.”

  “Any chance I’ll ever see any of that money again?”

  “Probably not,” he said, smiling. “But I’ll buy you dinner later if you like.”

  “I was afraid you’d come in and kill us as we slept.”

  “I would never have done that,” he said, looking a little offended. “But I thought that if I could sell some of your things then I might be able to get off the streets. Get away from my father. It was only after I ran away the next morning that I came up with a better plan. I brought your wallet back, hoping that you might let me stay.”