TransAtlantic: A Novel

by Colum McCann

  —You’re American? he asked.

  —Lord, no.

  She finished the small glass of champagne.

  —Canadian. Sort of.

  —Sort of?

  —Newfoundland.

  —Beautiful place.

  —Lottie Ehrlich was the name. Once. Long ago.

  —I see.

  —I go back to the Druids, really.

  She laughed and pushed the right side of the chair and it spun gracefully. He could hear elements of Irish in her accent.

  —I live out by the peninsula. Strangford.

  —Ah, he said. I’ve heard of it. The lake.

  —Indeed. The lough. You should come visit, Senator. You’d be most welcome. We’ve a small cottage on the water.

  —Well, I’m rather tied up now, Lottie.

  —We’re hoping you’re going to sort out this mess for us, Senator.

  —I’m hoping that, too.

  —After that you can return to your backhand.

  Lottie smiled and made her way around the back of the court to talk with the tournament winner. She pushed the wheelchair along entirely by herself, but then she turned around with a grin.

  —Really, Senator, your problem is that you’re not planting your back foot properly.

  HE SAW HER a few times after that. She was a regular at the club. She had, by all accounts, been a handy player once. She had lost her grandson to the Troubles years ago. The Senator never inquired how the boy died: he did not want to get himself in the business of having to choose sides, whose fault, whose murder, whose bomb, whose rubber bullet, whose bureaucracy.

  What he liked about Lottie Tuttle was the manner in which she insisted that she still push herself along in the wheelchair.

  He saw her early one morning guide the chair out to the middle of one of the courts. She wore a wide white skirt and white blouse. Even her racquet was ancient, a great wooden frame with red-and-white catgut. A younger woman set up on the opposite side of the net and lobbed a few shots at her. They played for half an hour. Lottie hit only three or four balls, and afterwards she sat at the back of the court, exhausted, her swollen arm wrapped in ice, until she fell asleep and dozed under a blanket.

  HE RUNS THE gauntlet of the offices at Stormont. Rows of low squat buildings. Hardly palatial. The Gulag, they call it. A good name. Appropriate.

  His car pulls up slowly. The crowds are gathered outside the gates. Candles on one side, flags on another. He keeps his head down, inhabits the backseat. But in the rear of the crowd he spies a man carrying a sign, and a bolt of joy moves through him: The incredible happens.

  Hallelujah to that, he thinks, as the gates open up, and the car nudges through, flashbulbs erupting at the windowpane.

  He walks from the car park and takes the steps two at a time: even jet-lagged, he wants to carry an energy into the building.

  THEY ARE ALL here now: the North, the South, the East, the West. The Unionists at one end of the corridor, the Republicans at the other. The Irish government downstairs. The British upstairs. Young diplomats plying the middle ground. Moderates scattered about. Pretty young observers from the European Union walking through with clipboards. The hum of the photocopy machine. The pattering of keyboards. The smell of burned coffee.

  His walk is careful but energetic: handshakes, eye-flicks, nods, smiles. Tim. David. Maurice. Stewart. Claire. Seamus. Charles. Orla. Rory. Francoise. Good morning. Great to see you. We’ll have that report ready at noon, Senator.

  A bounce in his step. Along the drab gray corridor. Into the small bathroom. A quick change of shirt. He shoves his arms briskly through the sleeves. He would hate to be caught shirtless. He leans into the mirror. The hair grayer than it should be. And a little more scattered on top.

  He whisks a quick comb through the hair, parts it sideways, splashes a bit of cold water on his face. A river comes back to him, he does not know why: the Kennebec. There is a song he heard once, at a dinner in Dublin. Flow on lovely river, flow gently along, by your waters so clear sounds the lark’s merry song. The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy. He has heard them often, late at night, singing in the hotel bars, notes drifting up to his room.

  His staff is waiting in the outer office. Martha. David. Kelly. They, too, are dark-eyed with lack of sleep.

  They phone down the hall to bring in de Chastelain and Holkeri. Followed by their own staff, Irish and British both. A long trail of the weary.

  —How was your flight, Senator?

  —Wonderful, he says.

  They grin and nod: of course it wasn’t. Their own war stories. Delayed flights. Forgotten anniversaries. A burst water pipe on Joy Street. A missed wedding in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. A flat tire on the road from Drogheda. A sick niece in Finland. Something in their separateness has bound them together. They are all entirely sick of the process, but the deadline has jolted them awake.

  —So tell me, he says, where do we stand?

  What they have is a sixty-page draft, two governments, ten political parties, little less than two weeks. Strand One. Strand Two. Strand Three. None of the strands yet set in stone. The incredible weave of language. All the little tassels still hanging down. The tiniest atoms. The poorly tied knots. There is the possibility of an annex. The rumor of a rewrite. The suggestion of a delay. Where are they in London? Where are they are in Dublin? Where are they in the Maze? Or is that Long Kesh? There has been a call for transcripts of the plenaries. What exactly does substantive negotiations mean? Did the security team check the political background of the canteen staff? There is talk of a farm on the Tyrone border where whole crates of rocket-propelled grenades have been hidden. Someone has leaked the MI-5 report to the London Times. Could anyone please decommission the Sunday World? Paisley is cooking up a protest outside the gates. Did you hear that Mo Mowlam took off her wig again? Can you believe that they tried to smuggle a tape recorder into the Stormont inside a sofa? There are whispers of assassination attempts from within the prison walls. A 440-pound bomb was defused in Armagh. Someone threw a Molotov cocktail into the grounds of a Catholic kindergarten. The Women’s Coalition has called for calm and decency. The light in David Trimble’s office was on until four thirty in the morning. Someone should make sure that the Sands graffiti in Ballycloghan is scrubbed off. The one thing that should be working flawlessly are the photocopy machines. Make sure the word draft is stamped clearly across every page. Was there absolute clarification yet on the North-South ministerial council?

  Everyone jumping off their own ledges, sailing out into the middle of the air, developing patterns of flight on the way down.

  LATER IN THE morning, alone in his back office, he turns the desk lamp on. A small tilted urn of light. His desk has been cleaned. His photos dusted. The pile of papers stacked high. The red light on his private message machine blinks. He skips through the messages: seven in all. The second to last from Heather. She must have called in the middle of the night. Listen, she says. The sound of his son sleeping. Listen. The small intake of Andrew’s breath. He plays it twice and then a third time.

  Sixty-one children.

  He flicks the buttons open on his sleeves, rolls the cuffs back, phones downstairs to see if they’d bring him another pot of tea.

  ONE SUMMER IN Acadia he learned chess. Move after move. Swap. Remain. Stay. The incredible switch of the king and the castle amazed him. You had to touch the king first and then bring the castle across. He was fascinated by the edge of the board. There was a saying: The knight on the rim is grim.

  He learned to keep the knight over at the edge, safe until, late in the game, he could come inside and there was a whole board with eight sudden squares.

  FOR THREE DAYS he and his staff stay in the Europa. In downtown Belfast. The Hardboard Hotel, they call it. The Piece Palace. Bits of it blown up twenty-seven times over the past few years. The most-bombed hotel in Europe. It is still, for some reason, the hotel of choice for the journalist
s, most of whom he knows on a first-name basis. They hang out in the piano bar, all times of the day. He has seen them often, the first drink placed down in front of them, practicing their posture, their casual disregard, their unreadability. They sit at the back as if the act of drinking has been forced upon them. Its obligation. And then all of a sudden the first drink is gone, and they are half a dozen towards obliteration. Stories of Sarajevo, no doubt. Srebrenica. Kosovo. As if Northern Ireland is a slight melancholy demotion. The very idea of a peace process is sentimental to many of them. A mysterious part of them needs an epic failure. They are out most nights, looking for the burning barrels and the kneecapped girls. Or else they are looking for a leak, some shred of scandal, some sexual sectarianism. When he enters the lobby, they try to cadge a quote. He understands it, the base desire at the core of a story. To put their own version of events into the world. It is the tabloids that he avoids the most: the Sun, the Mirror, the News of the World. He is careful whom he is seen stepping into the elevator with, just in case they take a candid shot of him.

  They see him as a man who had stepped out from another century, polite, reserved, judicial, an ancient American, yet it is also a form of disguise: underneath they intuit that he is cast for the very end of the twentieth century, biding his time, waiting for his moment. No one has ever quite fully figured him out, if he is driven by the fear of evil, or spurred on by the prospect of what is good, or if he lies in the complicated in-between. Mystery. Silence. Sleep.

  Upstairs, the suite is small and dark. The bed narrow. The bedcovers shiny with use. But there is at least a bowl of fruit on the table and flowers on the credenza. Easter lilies: a gentle nudge.

  Bags on the floor. Jacket. Shirt. Belt. Trousers. No Heather to tidy him up. He lies down, exhausted, the day’s work still trilling in him. He feels bad for the two security men who have to guard his door. He would like to invite them in, have them put their feet up, pour a soda from the minibar. They are good men, one and all, but what a job, to stand outside a door all night with only the silence of a man who has learned to sleep anywhere, anytime.

  Hotel rooms sharpen his loneliness. The hum of others who were here before.

  One of his aides once dropped a contact lens on the floor near the window in the downstairs dining room. She got to her knees and searched around by the baseboards. Bits of dust, stray edges of the carpet. She found the contact lens clinging to a piece of wallpaper. But when she fingered the lens, she noticed, for the first time, that the slice of wallpaper was newer than the surroundings. A perfect square, but the paper had been badly applied. A bit of the wallpaper had begun to peel. She noticed a scorch mark beneath, the blackness faded to red. Most likely a petrol bomb thrown years ago. The old hieroglyphics of violence.

  He has heard that the women of Belfast used to keep wet blankets by the door, just in case.

  He pulls back his own blanket, prepares himself for bed. He has a mobile wardrobe that accompanies him from place to place, a set of lurking ghost clothes. He finds the pajamas, gruffs his way into them. It’s easy then to fall asleep, if even just for a few hours.

  HUME. TRIMBLE. ADAMS. Mowlam. Mallon. McMichael. Cooney. Hill. Donoghue. McWilliams. Sager. One by one they visit his office. The air of worried men and women. Everyone with something to lose. This—he has discovered—is part of their generosity. The ability to embrace failure. The cost of what they might leave behind.

  They are at ease with him now. They know his ways. He does not like to sit behind his desk anymore. He has broken that territory. He comes out, instead, and sits by the small table that he has set up near the window with four wooden chairs.

  With each visitor there is a new set of biscuits and a warm teapot. He pours the tea himself. One of his small gestures. He is not sure if it’s a trick or not, but he likes the ritual. The trays are stacked upon his desk. That, too, is part of his routine. He does not want the meetings disturbed. Showmanship or decency: he is not sure which.

  He brings the trays downstairs to the canteen where the ladies in the hairnets hurry out to meet him, all fuss and apology.

  —What about ye, Senator?

  —Leave those trays be, Senator.

  —Ach, don’t be doing that. What’re ye like?

  —If ye weren’t married, I’d kiss ye.

  —Ye wouldn’t come home and clean my kitchen, would y’now, Senator? That’d be some peace process, let me tell ye.

  If the canteen is empty he will take a seat in the corner to watch them a moment. He likes their singsong, their bustle. They remind him of the ladies of Maine. The waitresses in the diners. The women in the tollbooths, leaning out their fume-darkened windows.

  One of the tea-ladies, Claire Curtain, has a scar on the left side of her forehead in the exact shape of a horseshoe. One afternoon she caught him looking at it, and she blithely told him that it was a result of a bombing—she was on her way to a concert in a bandstand, there was a horse regiment standing nearby, the blast went off, she was walking by along a tree-lined avenue, and she was hit in the head, left with an almost perfect shoe mark on her forehead, and what she remembered most of all was waking, concussed, confused by the sight of horse hooves dangling in the trees.

  THE CORRIDORS BUZZ. A faint chanting coming from the crowds outside. The nervous whirl of helicopters overhead. He climbs the rear stairs towards his office, a packet of McVitie’s Digestives tucked under the flap of his suit jacket.

  He was driven last summer, by Gerald, out to a farmhouse on the Plantation Road in Derry. He had been at a conference in Coleraine and it was still early: he was not expected back in Belfast until midnight.

  He thought at first that he might get Gerald to drive to the sea and take the coast road up around the headlands, but they swung south instead, out into a tangle of backcountry where Gerald had grown up.

  Chestnut trees arced the roads. Sheep and cattle paraded in the fields. The light lengthened, stretched the shadows of the hedges and trees. It reminded him of lower Maine: that lush, rained-upon feel.

  They drove along a length of carefully planted forest. Gerald pointed out his old school, the fields, the boxing club. It was nine or ten in the evening, but the sky was still bright, birds out over the haystacks.

  —You ever been this way, Senator?

  He shook his head, no. They crested a small hill and Gerald pulled the car in towards a blue gate. Down below, in the half valley, there were wide brown steppingstones across a river. Enormous oak trees bent to the water. A series of hedgerows slumped towards a distant farmhouse. Rough tractor tracks ran along the riverbank.

  Gerald stepped out of the car and leaned against the gate, his chin cupped in his hands. A summertime smoke drifted across the air: a wood fire, an odd thing on such a warm evening.

  —I lived over yonder when I was a child, Gerald said.

  He pointed to the small farmhouse tucked into the grove of high oak trees.

  —My sister’s there now.

  He knew what Gerald was asking. No harm, the Senator thought.

  It was late in the evening, but he could allow an hour to slip away.

  —You should give her a call, Gerald.

  —Ach. She’s there with her wee uns. Sure, she’d have a heart attack.

  The driver shifted in the silence, as if waiting for another response. Nothing more was said. The light fell slowly across the fields. The Senator reached for the blue gate. When he pushed the bar, the gate groaned and returned. The hasp was rusty. A few blue flakes fell down into the grass.

  —Just stretching my legs, he said.

  It was odd how uneven the field was: from the gate it had looked perfectly flat and smooth. Clods of earth. Old mounds of manure. Tough, thorny weeds. He stepped towards the enormous stillness of the trees. His good shoes squelched underneath him.

  Gerald called from behind him and then he heard the dull closing of a car door, the quiet hum of an engine. He glanced back to see the car crawling along, the roof just visible ove
r the hedgerow.

  The car beeped again. He raised his hands in salute, but kept walking through the field. His shadow slanted in the evening light. The northern sky took on colors now, in the distance, the aurora borealis. Reds, greens, purples. He could feel the hem of his trousers against the grass. Small splashes of mud rising up on the back of his heels.

  At the river he thought for a moment that he would just turn around and go back the way he came. A loud beeping. No car. He was out of sight. He unloosened his tie. The steppingstones were slick. He peered down into the water. The evening sun fashioned wheels of light on the surface. He thought he saw the dart of minnows. He held on to a tree branch and hunched a little to prepare for the fall, but landed safely on the middle riverstone.

  Leaves stirred about him. Odor of moss and reeds and trout. It thrilled him to think there were still moments like this. He looked up through the enormous trees. A ray of sky. He grabbed the long grasses on the far side of the riverbank, pulled himself up. His foot trailed behind him and splashed in the water. A cold swell around his ankle. He ran up the steep bank. The back of his shoe chafed against his heel. In the distance, again, a loud beeping.

  Fifty yards from the farmhouse, he saw her in the rear courtyard. At the washing line. Amid gray stonework and a couple of abandoned cars. She was young and aproned. Her hair was stretched into a dark bun at the base of her neck. The washing line ran for thirty yards along the courtyard. White rope between two tall poles. A large straw basket of laundry lodged in against her hip. She was taking giant white bed sheets from the line. Gerald’s sister.

  She walked along the length of the clothesline and unclipped the wooden pegs one by one, then put them in her hair.

  The sun appeared large on the western horizon now: the bed sheets were magenta.

  He heard the house phone ring from a distance: it carried through the air. Gerald’s sister stooped and put the laundry basket on the cobbles. She walked wearily towards the house. She seemed to sigh into the doorway. The ringing stopped.