For I see the Children of Lir in their lonely flight from one abode to the next, and the snow falling softly on the dark, mutinous waves of the Sea of Moyle, without considering what language they are couched in. They are swans in any language. So I think. I wonder if it were so for my father. In many respects, he had a better command of Irish than of English, having come to it with the zeal of a convert who takes nothing for granted. He learned his stories from master storytellers, and learned them properly, complete with the ornate, alliterative leitmotifs that ran as mnemonic and rhythmical devices throughout the narrative, which could not but affect his everyday speech, so that when I transcribe or translate his instructions to me, they appear overly stilted or formal in English; but it was not so in Irish, because those mechanisms are part of the inherited grain of Irish speech. Irish was not his first language, but he spoke it better than I, whose first language it was, and who took it for granted.
As I write with the Swan it makes a little whispery music as it traverses the page. Every pen, every nib is different, and sometimes I fancy I can identify each pen in my collection from its sound alone, the different faint scratches and squeaks they make. And I think of the room depicted in the twice-stolen Vermeer, silent but for the faint music of the quill. Vermeer never sold this painting in his lifetime: after he died penniless on St Lucy’s Day, 1675 – the darkest day of the year – it was one of several given by his widow to the local baker in exchange for a long-overdue bread bill. It then passed through a series of ownerships, some unknown. During its restoration in 1993, it was discovered that not only the wax seal but the stick of sealing-wax had been overpainted, perhaps at the request of a previous owner who considered these to be untidy details. And, thinking of these thefts and veilings and revelations, I now remembered that Gerry Byrne, the artist whose show I curated in Berlin, had made his reputation by reinterpreting iconic works of Irish art: to a mountain landscape by Paul Henry, for example, he would add British army watchtowers, and helicopters in the sky – helicopters, in particular, became a kind of signature of his, an emblem of surveillance.
Byrne was particularly fascinated by the work of Sir John Lavery, who had donated some thirty paintings to my employers, the Belfast Municipal Gallery, in 1929. Among these was the work entitled The Daylight Raid from My Studio Window, 7th July 1917. It commemorates the occasion when twenty-one German Gotha biplanes carried out the second aerial bombing of London, and were engaged by aircraft of the Royal Naval Service and the Royal Flying Corps. It is a big painting, some six feet by three. Lavery depicts his wife, Hazel, at a window, which, given the scale of things, would be about fifteen feet by eight in real life. When I was first shown this painting by my father I thought the window looked like a real window in the wall of the gallery, giving out on to another world. Hazel Lavery is kneeling at the windowsill, apparently watching the aircraft swirled like insects in the sky beyond.
I seem to remember that the scene prompted my father to embark on a reminiscence of the Belfast Blitz of 1941, but I might be wrong on that point. What I do know is that neither of us were then aware of the painting’s most curious feature, which was pointed out to me by Gerry Byrne some time in about 1979 or 80. See here, said Byrne, and he grasped me by the elbow, you can’t see it unless you’re low down, you have to get the light hitting it at the right angle. See here? and he pointed to an area of the painting which I had always taken for a rolled-down blackout curtain, just above the windowsill. And, as I squinted at it, I could see a darker patch on the putative curtain, shaped a bit like a keyhole. Do you know what he did? said Byrne, there used to be a statue of the Virgin Mary there, he painted it out before he gave the picture to the Gallery, back in the Twenties, and to hide that, he made up a blackout curtain, first curtain I ever saw that rolls from the bottom up. Stroke of genius, or what? and he laughed ironically. And, as he spoke, the keyhole blotch assumed a ghostly figural presence, and there flashed into my mind a vision of just such a statue – Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, to be precise – which had adorned my childhood bedroom. I could see her blue robes, her hands extended in that archetypal gesture of maternal comfort. Old bugger, I suppose he couldn’t have the good Unionist trustees of the Belfast Gallery thinking he really was a Catholic, and his lovely wife a Catholic too, kneeling before an idol of the Madonna, said Byrne.
For I knew that Sir John Lavery had been born in Belfast of impoverished Catholic parents in 1856 or so. The exact date of his birth is unknown. Orphaned at an early age, he was taken into care by relatives in Scotland. He began his working life in a Glasgow studio, retouching photographs, but when the studio burned down he began painting. His reputation was made when he was commissioned by Queen Victoria in 1888 to paint her state visit to Glasgow. Thereafter he moved in the highest echelons of British society. I had thought myself something of an expert on Lavery’s work, and I was a bit piqued when Byrne told me of this sleight of hand. But how did you spot it? I asked him. Oh, I always thought there was something fishy about the blackout curtain, you know, it’s very sloppy painting, unlike the rest of it. So I asked Burrows about it. Burrows? I said. This was Freddy Burrows, the Keeper of Irish Art, my boss; we’d never got on, and he made a point of telling me as little as possible. After all, Conway, he’d say, we’re not here to educate you, I think you’re well able to educate yourself, so just get on with it. Yes, Burrows, I got him over a couple of drinks, and he spilled the beans, said Byrne. I’d always thought of Burrows as an archetypal Presbyterian, certainly not one given to casual drinking. Oh, said Byrne, you’d be surprised, everyone’s got a guilty secret, and he tittered meaningfully. So we’ll have to put things to rights, said Byrne, and over the next few months he worked on a version of The Daylight Raid, painting a garish Madonna on the windowsill, and replacing the German bombers with British helicopters. He called it The Daylight Raid by Sir John Lavery, 1929.
But of course, Nina, much of this was known to you, for when I mentioned it before our trip to Berlin in the winter of 1982, you said, Burrows? Yes, he’s a client of mine. Charming man, if you get to know him. You were wearing an unfamiliar perfume that day. What’s that? I asked. What’s what? you said. Your perfume, I said. Oh, Vol de Nuit, you said, Night Flight, by Guerlain, 1933. You offered me your wrist and I caught a burst of orange, then cool wood and balsam notes followed by an enigmatic hint of spice.
Wherever you are
As I write to you, Nina, a surveillance helicopter is poised motionless in the sky to the east of Ophir Gardens, and the windows of my study tremble to its broadcast reverberant din. There have been many changes in Belfast since you left in 1984, though of course you might well have returned at intervals without my knowledge, and for all I know you might be in Belfast now. Your card is postmarked Paris, but that was last week. If you are here – the possibility disturbs me – you might have noticed that your old MO2 offices have been turned into penthouse apartments, and the ground floor of the building is now the Linen Warehouse Restaurant and Bar. In the side streets are cafes, gyms, aromatherapy boutiques and retro clothing stores. Belfast is booming, and not with bombs. Yet beyond the bright clatter of the lattes and Manhattans, the gleaming dishes, silverware and linen, are dark recalcitrant zones where July bonfires have been smouldering for days, and the reek of burning tyres sometimes infiltrates the inner city. Above the fragile periphery the helicopters maintain their desultory watch, scanning the ruined terraces, the blasted interfaces and the paint-bespattered Peace Walls. Every summer the Loyalist housing estate on the other side of the Cavehill Road from Ophir Gardens blooms with paramilitary regalia, flags that become tatters over the winter.
It was not always so: the estate went up in the late Seventies, built on a former allotment site which I imagine had been established during the last war, given the shortage of fresh vegetables. By the time we moved to the district in 1955, it was already semi-derelict, a few little ordered plots surviving among the encroaching brambles, nettles and chickweed, gooseberry bu
shes and tall rhubarb plants gone to seed, tumbledown potting-sheds overgrown by convolvulus and ivy. It was a kind of paradise for us children, where we could get pleasurably lost in war games. Later, when I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and thought myself to be James Joyce, I posed before a derelict greenhouse wearing an outfit bought in the Friday Market – a Forties jacket and waistcoat and white duck trousers that emulated his turn-of-the-century gear – and had my photograph taken by Paul Nolan, who thought himself to be Cartier-Bresson. You met Nolan once or twice: a good fellow. Like me, he took early retirement, a victim of the creeping bureaucracy that finally overwhelmed our vision of what we thought we were doing.
I remember telling you how the allotments had been swept away, and you said yes, your grandfather in Delft had kept an allotment, and grew cucumbers, lettuces and cabbages. Dill, too, that your grandmother would use for pickling the cucumbers. As you spoke, I thought of cool tiled pantries, and could see the tidy Dutch allotments, occupying strips of ground by the sides of roads and canals, the sheds painted in bright greens and reds, like toy houses, the rows of flowers and vegetables. I had not been to Holland then, and much of my conception of it was based on Dutch painting, which I loved, and the postcards sent to my father by his pen friend in Delft. I thought again how appropriate it was that my father should have learned Esperanto from a Dutchman, for the Netherlands seemed to me, as it did to him, a peaceable realm in which tolerance for one’s neighbours was both desirable and necessary. These were Esperantist virtues, said my father. The people of the Netherlands, he said, not having been granted much land by God, made land for themselves; but realising they could never make enough, they made space for each other. I was somewhat disappointed that Johann Wouters, like my father, was a devout Catholic, not an Orange Protestant, and that they hence had much in common to begin with. The One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church was itself a kind of Esperanto, for you could hear the same Mass in exactly the same language anywhere in the world; and when the Latin Mass, under the New Liturgy of the 1960s, was abandoned for a multitude of vernaculars, my father regretted the change. But like a good Catholic, he submitted himself to it. I think it was about the time of the New Liturgy that he threw himself even more wholeheartedly into Esperanto, as a substitute for the universality of Latin. As for me, I never properly learned Esperanto. Much as I admired it, I was uncomfortable with its dream of universal brotherhood.
Only after my father’s death did I begin to examine the history of Esperanto. I discovered that Ludwig Zamenhof had been given the Jewish name Lejzer, or Lazarus, at his circumcision, but had adopted the Christian name Ludovic, or Ludwig, in his teens, following the custom of the aspiring Jewish middle class of his milieu. Likewise, his father, a teacher of languages, had changed his name from Mordecai to Marcus. Ironically, Mordecai itself, then perceived as wholly Jewish, was once a disguise too, for in the Book of Esther it is the name of the Chief Minister of Ahasuerus, or Xerxes, the despotic king of Persia: it was the custom then of the exiled Jews to mask themselves in names familiar to their captors.
So what’s in a name, Nina? If I am Gabriel, the angel of the Annunciation, you are Miranda by another name, the admirable maiden of The Tempest. But it would also seem that names can mean anything you want them to mean, for the rabbis say that concealed in the pagan name Mordecai are the syllables for ‘pure myrrh’, and so it bears a holy perfume, an incense I remember from the Latin Masses of my childhood. I daresay Marcus Zamenhof would have been aware of this nominal labyrinth, for his own father was a noted Talmudic scholar, well used to pondering the intricacies of the Word, and Marcus himself became a teacher of languages. He also became an atheist, and in 1857 married Rozalia Zefer, the pious daughter of a Bialystok Jewish tradesman. Lazarus – Ludwig, as he would become – was the first of their eight children. Bialystok, as I mentioned in my first letter, was then in Polish Lithuania, and part of the Russian Empire. The town was a Babel. The native upper classes spoke Polish, the lower Lithuanian; a population of Yiddish-speaking Jews had long been established; there was a substantial German mercantile class; the administration and the army were Russian, and the golden domes of a Russian Orthodox church shone in the main square. The language of the Zamenhof household was mainly Russian, because Marcus believed it an essential tool to their progress. But Yiddish was also spoken, and by his teens Ludwig had also a fair command of Polish, German, and Lithuanian, as well as the Hebrew and Greek taught to him by his father. From an early age, said Ludwig Zamenhof, I was anguished that men and women everywhere looked much the same, yet spoke differently, and thought themselves to be Poles, or Russians, Germans, Jews, and so on, instead of human beings. Thinking that grown-ups were omnipotent, I resolved that, when I was grown up, I would abolish this evil; for no one, he said, can feel the misery of barriers as strongly as a ghetto Jew, and no one can feel the need for a language free from a sense of nationality as strongly as the Jew who is obliged to pray to God in a language long since dead, receives his education and upbringing in the language of a people who reject him, and has fellow-sufferers around the world with whom he cannot communicate, said Zamenhof.
As you might imagine, Nina, I am not penning these words in a smooth consecutive flow. Zamenhof’s words are not ingrained in my memory, the history of Esperanto is not at my fingertips, and I have to interrupt my writing every so often to rediscover passages scrawled in notebooks a good few years ago, when I began my Esperanto project, or to consult more fully drafted pieces, stored on the computer. And, as I transcribed Zamenhof’s words from the screen before me, in pen and ink, I felt, as my hand moved across the page, that it was somehow guided by the spirit of Zamenhof, that I felt as he felt, knowing just a little of the linguistic despair that was his, that his words were both his and mine, though written in a different language, for he had written them in Esperanto, not English. And, rewriting those words by hand, I began to see nuances in them I had not hitherto suspected, for my view of them is different now that you have re-entered my life. So much has changed.
While still at school, I had written on the computer, Zamenhof began thinking of a universal language, and by 1878 he had invented one. Five years previously his father had moved with his family to Warsaw, where, in order to supplement his income as a teacher of German in the Veterinary Institute, he took on extra work as a state censor. In 1879, when Zamenhof went off to study medicine in Moscow, he left his extensive notes for the new language in his father’s care. Immediately recognising the danger of possessing such documents, written in a secret language by a poor Jewish student, his father burned them. In Moscow, Zamenhof became involved with Zionism, but grew disillusioned with the movement, which he found too exclusivist. He returned to Warsaw, and to his dream of an international language. Finding it destroyed, he reconstructed it from memory.
In 1886, the year in which he matriculated in ophthalmology, he became engaged to Klara Zilbernik, the daughter of a prosperous businessman. For two years Zamenhof had unsuccessfully sought a publisher for a booklet in which he which described the new language. Klara’s father, impressed by the idealism of his future son-in-law, offered to have the book printed at his expense. This was done; the proofs were held for two months in the censor’s office, but fortunately the censor was a friend of Zamenhof’s own father, who by now had withdrawn his objections to the project. On 14th July 1887 the censor authorised the booklet, and it was published in Russian; Zamenhof soon afterwards translated it into Polish and German. An early follower translated it into French under the title La Langue Internationale.
These editions all contained the same introduction and reading-matter in the international language: the Lord’s Prayer, a passage from the Bible, a letter, poems, the complete grammar of sixteen rules, and a vocabulary of 900 roots. The work was signed with the pseudonym ‘Doktoro Esperanto’ – esperanto meaning ‘one who hopes’ – and the new language, by general usage, became known as Esperanto. Dr Esperanto and Klara Zilbernik we
re married on 9th August 1887, and the first few months of their life together were spent promoting Esperanto, putting the booklet describing the new language into envelopes and posting them to foreign newspapers and journals. It was known as the Unua Libro, the First Book.
There was no English translation for some time; Zamenhof considered his own English insufficiently adequate for the task. A German friend did produce one, which Zamenhof published, but English speakers found it incomprehensible.
In the autumn of 1887, a certain Richard Henry Geoghegan read an article about the new language. The Geoghegan family lived for many years at 41 Upper Rathmines Road, Dublin. Richard’s father was a doctor who emigrated in 1863 from Dublin to Birkenhead in England, where Richard was born on 8th January 1866. At the age of three he suffered an accident which left him crippled for the rest of his life; but the good Lord, as my father might have said, by way of compensation, gave him extraordinary linguistic gifts: he had a perfect command of French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Latin, and became a noted expert in Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, and other oriental languages. He considered himself an Irishman: he spoke and wrote fluent Irish, and often visited the land of his fathers. In the autumn of 1887 he happened to read an article about the new international language and wrote in Latin to Zamenhof, who sent him the German edition of the Unua Libro. Geoghegan immediately learned the language from it. When Zamenhof sent him the English translation, Geoghegan pointed out its many shortcomings, and undertook to translate the book himself, publishing it in 1889. The German–English translation was withdrawn.
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