An Angle on the World

by Bill Barich

  Sometimes Laura feels that Barry hasn’t completely recovered from his time inside, and I was told similar things by other women who’d married former prisoners. It is routine for the men to be depressed and to lack direction. They went into Long Kesh as innocents, but they returned in a hardened state, with a long list of unaddressed grievances. Like prisoners of war, they had been through an experience that is nearly impossible to put into words. A man released from the Maze is an odd combination of hero and victim, and in the Falls he acquires a badge and stripe for having survived. He enters a caste of abused, powerfully emblematic individuals whose value to the I.R.A. cannot be overestimated.

  * * *

  One afternoon, Laura gave me a tour of the Falls. We started near her house, on Cupar Street, at the most depressing Peace Line in Belfast. It is a brick wall about twelve feet high, chipped by bullets and scribbled upon, which separates Clonard from the Shankill Road. Built in 1972, it’s supposedly a barrier to keep the warring factions apart, but many Catholics believe that the real intent of the British in putting it up was to define the limits of the ghetto and simplify matters for the Army and the R.U.C. The wall makes such a dull, primitive statement that you can’t look at it for long without getting angry.

  Years ago, before the Troubles, Catholics used to cross over to the Shankill to do their shopping. They assumed, with good reason, that Protestants got better bargains than they did. You can still do this, and I crossed over by myself one afternoon and was surprised to discover how much the two neighborhoods resemble each other. They are about the same size, and have about the same scale and population density. The same amount of free demolition work appears to have been done to them. Although the murals and the graffiti in the Shankill all praise the U.D.A., not the I.R.A., a visitor unfamiliar with the local political signs and symbols might be hardpressed to differentiate it from the Falls on a dark night.

  From Cupar Street, Laura led me past Clonard Monastery to the Falls Road, a busy thoroughfare, that links one Catholic district to the next. As we strolled along, she stopped now and then to greet her friends, most of whom were young married couples. “How you keepin’, Eamon?” she asked one man, reaching down to pat his small daughter on her sunbonnet. Laura doesn’t have any children of her own, which makes her an anomaly in the Fails, where broods still run to six or eight. Every pub we went by was smoky and crowded, including the infamous Felons’ Club, where Republicans hoist glasses in honor of their dead and imprisoned comrades, whose pictures decorate the walls.

  The sad truth is that the Falls has little except drinking to offer as entertainment. There are no movie theatres, no theatre companies or amusement parks, no discos, hotels, or ice-cream parlors. A video store did open recently, and among its most popular tapes are such Provo favorites as The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, and anything else having to do with Vietnam. Whenever new businesses try to come in, the I.R.A. does its best to discourage them, leaving people no choice but to patronize its various clubs, where the beer is always a third cheaper than it is in regular bars, and where you can hear a bit of approved, traditional music on weekends. Young men and women may not like the clubs, but they’ll go anyway to save some money, and also because they know they’ll be safe.

  The Falls is a ghetto, but it isn’t necessarily a slum. At its center, there’s a big, lush park with rolling lawns, finely tended athletic fields, and sparkling flower beds, and Laura and I walked through it. Farther on, we came to a side street where the houses were rather elegant, with yards and gardens, and roses climbing on trellises. We never went more than a couple of blocks without passing a church. A few of them were humble and impoverished, but more often they were the nicest buildings in the vicinity. One convent had grounds as lovely as a French château, its trees, fountains, and benches secure behind a wrought-iron fence. To be anywhere close to it was to feel the nearly organic power of Roman Catholicism in Belfast, and to realize how deeply its roots extend, binding family to family over generations.

  After a while, I became aware of how many men were gathered on corners, idly talking or just staring into space. A majority of them were in their late teens or early twenties, and they had the rough, bored, intransigent air of those who are eager for something—anything—to happen. The unemployment rate in the city is officially twenty percent, but in parts of the Falls it’s more than forty per cent. In Ballymurphy, about half the heads of households are unemployed. There are some cunning ways to stay afloat; one is “doing the double”—going on the dole, while earning additional cash by part-time work and getting paid off the books, and another is committing petty thefts.

  Any delivery truck parked on the Falls Road with its back doors open may be liberated of some merchandise, which will then be sold in alleys, where the black-market trade is brisk, or through an ad in the classifieds, under the heading of “Unwanted Gift.” You’d be amazed by what people don’t want—TV sets, tape decks, couches, washers, dryers. A man without a job can also make some spare change by running errands for the I.R.A., acting as a go-between or as eyes and ears in a section of town where a Provo’s presence might be noticed by the R. U .C.

  On these street corners, you can see the conflict of Ulster in embryo. For every soldier on patrol in the city center, there are six patrolling in the Falls, along with police convoys and inspectors performing surveillance duties, driving around in unmarked vans that have small antennas on their roofs. The area is often crawling with men in uniform, so that you can’t go out to buy a quart of milk without encountering a roadblock.

  Laura told me that the troops are better trained than they used to be, but she still resents the constant infringement of her civil rights. A copper may have wonderful manners, but you still don’t like him knocking on your door at three in the morning and asking if you’d please let him have a quick look around your attic. The I.R.A. comes calling at odd hours, too, taking over houses as bases for its missions, and this constant pressure, the quality of living in suspension, never knowing when you’ll be violated next, rubs everybody’s nerves raw.

  There is a humorous side to the pressure, of course, as there is to almost everything in Belfast. In Little India once, right after a bombing, Laura peeked through her lace curtains and saw two slack-jawed, pasty-faced men in dark suits standing outside, about to ring her bell, and she flew into a panic. Former prisoners are picked up over and over again for questioning, so she hustled Barry out the back door and waited a few moments before letting the men in. They turned out to be Mormons promising salvation and handing out brochures about Salt Lake City. Meanwhile, Barry, who’s a military buff, had wandered off to watch a bomb squad run its robots through the debris on the next block.

  But there’s nothing funny about the attitude of the young men hanging around on corners. If a soldier comes within yards of them, they bristle. It’s a reflex action, pure and simple—a knee-jerk response created over the last two decades. They’re hostile because they’ve been taught to be; antagonism toward the Army is part of the code of living in the Falls. And, regardless of how hard a soldier tries to counteract the hostility, he’s destined to fail, for what has been bred in his bones is a sense of moral superiority—the colonial impulse in a nutshell—along with a desire to serve a high ethical standard he’s been subconsciously instructed to believe that the Northern Irish can never grasp.

  These confrontations occur daily. A soldier passes by on his rounds; he may nod or look stern, or make a small attempt to be cordial, but whatever he does will be met with derision. The young men (and sometimes young women) will turn away. They may swear, spit, or mumble insults. If children are close by, they may throw stones and then run and hide. And if the soldier makes the slightest move to retaliate, perhaps only by asking to see someone’s I.D., he pushes the situation nearer to the boiling point. He’s supposed to be above provocation, keeping a stiff upper lip, like the guardsmen at Buckingham Palace, but it is a supremely difficult task—the same task Great Britain has set itse
lf in trying to defuse the I.R.A.

  An army caught in such a bind suffers morale problems, and when soldiers return to England from the North they’re often confused. Some of them claim to have been bothered less by the fear of death than the frequent humiliation. They talk about how it feels to have a gob of spit land on your cheek, or to be castigated by children, or to stand silently at attention while a woman old enough to be your grandmother calls you vulgar names. The R.U.C. is even more susceptible to this subtle, peasant warfare. Its members are paid well for accepting hazardous duty in Ulster. But alienation from the community seems to get to them after a while, and they have soaring rates of alcoholism and divorce. Suicide is rare in Northern Ireland, but since 1978 thirty-three R. U. C. men have killed themselves. All but two of them used their own service revolvers.

  * * *

  The last place Laura took me was Milltown Cemetery, in the upper reaches of the Falls Road, where the I.R.A. buries its dead. Though the cemetery occupies a large plot of land, it wasn’t the first thing I noticed as we approached. Instead, my eye fell on Andersonstown Barracks. It stands on a low hillside just beyond the massed gravestones, and its buildings are a blackish gray and seem to be made of a durable, hard-edged metal. Every foot of fencing around the complex is topped with coils of concertina wire. From the fence to the barracks runs a net of steel mesh, to intercept grenades and other missiles. A soldier stationed at the barracks must feel that he is living in a cage, always looking out at a society from which he’s excluded, and this has to contribute to the Army’s sense of isolation and, ultimately, to its despair.

  The rows of graves that stretch toward the horizon must also play on the soldiers’ minds. For the wealthy, there are monuments of granite and marble, but nearly everyone else lies beneath a simple concrete slab inscribed with his or her name, a comforting or sentimental message, and the dates of birth and death. Some graves are marked only by homemade crosses, two sticks of the plainest wood nailed together. Grass grows in clumps throughout the cemetery, and paths worn into it connect one relative to another, an aunt to a distant cousin, illustrating again the bonds of family. At Milltown, you can see how an innocent victim of the Troubles, a boy accidentally shot or a girl burned in a fire, reaches out to touch, however lightly, every person in the Falls.

  On an elevated patch of ground, in the shadow of the barracks, the I.R.A. has its graves, more than fifty of them. A green picket fence sets the area apart, and as you wander from headstone to headstone you feel the grip that the dead hold over the living in Catholic Ulster, their undeniable power. There is a collective historical weight in the loss of so many sons and daughters, and it is a weight not easily shed. For a Republican, giving up the cause is the same as delivering an insult to fallen comrades. Yet in Northern Ireland there are ironies even in cemeteries, and when I came to the grave of Bobby Sands, a man with a Protestant name, I thought how curious it was that the I.R.A.’s greatest saint should have moved the world through passive resistance, not violence.

  * * *

  One means of getting away from the intensity of Belfast is to ride a train into the countryside, where the troops and insurgents are few. I did this on a pleasant Sunday, going to the Botanic station and boarding a local to Bangor, a pretty seaside town northeast of the city. Across the aisle, a boy was tapping his sister on the knees with a badminton racquet while their dog howled, and this bit of domestic comedy, too, had a calming effect.

  The train chugged over the Lagan and wound around the lough, and down in the marshy channels we could see children probing the muck for tadpoles and frogs, and dropping them into buckets. Soon a mild smell of salt blew in through the open windows, and we passed by suburbs with houses that were new and often quite impressive. They belong to Protestants of the upper class—judges, barristers, doctors—with some Catholics sprinkled in. As a friend put it, money tends to soften prejudices.

  Bangor has a prosperous, conservative, tight-lipped air. Once, it was just a resort village with a small fishing fleet, but now commuters searching for peace occupy its hills, its flatlands, and its budding tracts. A three-bedroom house in Bangor isn’t cheap; in a depressed real-estate market, it costs at least a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars at the current rate of exchange. But there is still a village quaintness to the streets, and little hotels and guesthouses overlook a rocky strand dotted with kelp. The Troubles don’t hit you in the face as they do elsewhere; instead they’re translated into the overzealous scrutiny you get in moneyed enclaves—a scrutiny that has less to do with religion than with the fact that the residents have something of material value to lose.

  It was lunchtime, so I stopped at a place called the Sands and had to ring a buzzer to be admitted. This crude and mostly useless sort of security causes embarrassment, and a woman who must have owned the restaurant joked about it and led me to a table in a hushed dining room. For three dollars I ate a price-fixed meal of roast lamb. As a waitress spooned turnips and potatoes onto my plate, she remarked on my accent and mentioned, blushing, that a Canadian had been in last week. Such information is always offered tentatively, with a quiet expectancy, as if the speaker were waiting to be reassured that other foreigners would be arriving shortly.

  The sun was lower in the sky when I came out, and the afternoon warmer. It’s hard to describe how appreciative everyone is for the small gift of decent weather. The chance to play a round of miniature golf on a lawn by the sea, to sit on a stone jetty and bask, to stroll on a beach with a lover and not have to think about bombs or rifles, it is no accident that the travel agencies in Belfast advertise vacation trips to Majorca, the Canary Islands, and the Costa del Sol, or that cabbies save up for junkets to Fort Lauderdale. Imbedded deep in the struggles of Ulster is an unspoken dream of being healed.

  On the train ride back, toward evening, a man sitting next to me held his pink-skinned baby girl on his lap and cooed to her sweetly, talking in nonsense syllables. In the presence of a moment of tenderness, I found myself understanding as never before that the ultimate goal of terrorists, whether conscious or not, is to destroy such human impulses, and to create an illusion that those of us on the outside have nothing in common with those who are suffering. We are meant to turn our backs, to be disgusted and sickened, to stay away. The darker and more bitter the landscape appears, the larger the profits to the paramilitaries.

  It was dusk when we reached the city. Instead of heading for the Wellington Park, I walked toward the center. An Elvis impersonator was doing a show later at the Limelight Club, and a few trendy students were already hanging around in front, their hair upswept and moussed into pompadours in homage to the King. The pubs near Shaftesbury Square were filling up, too, and out of them poured loud jukebox music. You hear it said that the electric night life in the city is a byproduct of its atmosphere of risk, but I always felt that it came from the breaking down of barriers, the smashing of taboos which occurs when young Catholics and young Protestants rub elbows. Old Orangemen may be set in their ways, just as aged Republicans are, but among the young, even some of those trapped in ghettos, there is a tremendous desire to be free of the burden of the past.

  * * *

  The Avenue Bar isn’t a place any stranger to Belfast would wander into on a whim. It’s a drab corner joint downtown, not far from the absurdly named Unity Flats, where poor Catholics and a few poor Protestants live, and it has nothing to commend it other than the ordinary tavern attractions, like beer, gossip, and a plate of hot food. The interior is plain, and the floor is pocked with black marks from stubbed-out cigarettes. In spite of its anonymity, the pub was bombed twice in the seventies, and to get in now you have to press a buzzer, as two men did on a Sunday afternoon in mid-May before committing a spray job.

  In paramilitary parlance, a spray job is a mass murder, and the usual instrument is a submachine gun. At the Avenue, one of the murderers, a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force, took such a gun from beneath his coat, aimed it at the twenty or so regulars
drinking and talking, and opened fire. As the bullets sailed around, customers dived to the floor and tried to hide behind upturned tables. Some threw bottles and pint glasses, shouting for help. The attack did not last much more than a minute, and when it was finished the murderers left as calmly as they had entered, climbed into a stolen taxi, and drove off.

  A passerby walking his dog later described the scene inside the pub. What he saw was two men stretched out in pools of blood, and a third man near them, a bone sticking out of his leg, who was crying, “I’ve been shot! I’ve been shot!” All three of them died before they reached a hospital; ten other patrons were wounded and required stitches and surgery.

  The spray job followed a pattern set by the McDaid murder, though on a grander, more vicious scale, and the ritual responses to the crime were familiar. First, the full newspaper treatment, with pictures of grieving widows, the victims’ bodies, and children trying to peek into the pub as workmen washed the blood from the sidewalk. Then the statements of outrage and condemnation from bishops, ministers, and politicians. A call for peace by relatives of the dead, and then the moment of apotheosis, when the dead themselves took center stage in the pomp and pageantry of funeral corteges that moved to cemeteries through streets lined with mourners. There were flowers, prayers, and many tears.

  At the same time that these rituals were going on, various parties were engaging in a war of disinformation, hoping to shade the event in a way that would benefit them. Sinn Fein, the political arm of the I.R.A., claimed that the police had been slow to arrive, even though a barman had pushed a “panic button” connected to the North Queen Street R.U.C. station, and that this dragging of heels always occurred when Catholics were under attack. The Ulster Volunteer Force issued a widely ridiculed rewrite of the murders, maintaining that its “soldiers” had been after a pair of I.R.A. men and had inadvertently killed and wounded civilians through human error. The R.U.C. rejected the U.V.F.’s account out of hand, and released documents to show that its emergency squad had reached the Avenue within minutes of the alert.