Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan

by Ruth Gilligan

  Ruth smiled. The opening exchange always made her excited – the unlikely friendship and the possibilities yet to come. Only, as she looked at her father now she saw that it wasn’t the play he was reading at all. Instead they were a different set of lines – the ones he had received in return – the letter from The Abbey Theatre’s patroness, written in her elegant, fountain-pen curl.

  Dear Mr Greenberg,

  Well, first let me say how charmed I was to receive the manuscript of your lovely play The Fifth Province…

  By now Ruth knew the thing like a script itself, whispering it each night as she lay in bed.

  …part of the Gaelic Revival, using the Jewish plight as a metaphor for that of the Irish…

  And she let the prose play in her head again now, the rhythm finding time with the chug of the track.

  …my own new play The Deliverer…

  …the betrayal of Moses with the betrayal of Parnell, just when Independence seemed…

  …so close and yet…

  And soon they were speeding faster on it, downhill towards the end.

  Come to Dublin for a chat…

  …after the show in the foyer…

  …the portrait of Mr Yeats…

  On and on ’til it reached all the way to the heartfelt farewell.

  With warm regards,

  Yours sincerely,

  Lady Augusta Gregory.

  The first time Tateh read it aloud Mame had left the room. For once, neither daughter had followed.

  And it was as if he had written the words himself, the eagerness with which he had looked up then, the letter held forward for approval. ‘She… she liked my play?’

  First to Ruth – the easiest bet.

  Then to Esther – the more satisfying.

  And then all the way around to another set of eyes that had hovered in the doorway; the ones that should and should not have been watching in equal measure.

  It was Niamh, the maid.

  The servant.

  The muse?

  So many words, and yet none was quite right.

  It was almost four years now since they had hired the local lass full-time. By then, all the other women on the street had had a girl helping out, the communities mingling more and more. So Tateh had insisted Mame deserved the same – they could just about afford it – and plus, they trusted this Niamh girl. She had been their shabbos goy right from the beginning, the one who came in to turn on their lights and fire up their stove every Saturday morning when the Sabbath decreed they weren’t allowed to do so themselves.

  ‘Well, boy, my God says it’s Sunday that I’m to rest, so does that mean ye will be round tomorrow to fix me a pot of tae?’

  The memory of the joke made Ruth smile now, leaning in to the window’s rising heat.

  And she tried to imagine if Niamh had come along today, her red hair yanked up into a knot, her apron smeared with butter and egg; pink sprays of berry blood. She would have kept them entertained, that was for sure, prattling merrily and causing Tateh’s eyes to brighten in a way Ruth only saw for one other thing – when they asked him the story behind the Princess of the Bees and he refused, gleefully, to tell.

  Because apart from the cooking and cleaning, the gentle little jokes, Niamh had brought something else into their temporary-for-ten-years-now home – stories. A whole new set of them. Just when all the old ones had started to grow stale, along came her endless stream of myths and legends from this native land; warriors and kings who fought and romanced for anyone who wanted to hear.

  And Ruth did. Every last word.

  ‘And since we’re doing chicken tonight, boy, did you ever hear about a lad called Sweeney?’ Niamh would be stood at the kitchen counter, sweat teeming down her forehead as she prepared the evening’s stew. ‘He was a crazy old lad, put under a curse that turned him half-bird half-man.’ Next she would pluck a handful of feathers from the freshly killed fowl. ‘So he wandered the whole of Ireland like an eejit, but no matter where he went he always returned to the same place, the Valley of the Mad!’ Then she would throw the feathers into the air, the plumage raining down, landing on them like an off-white confetti.

  And Ruth would be wired on the telling, sometimes even joining in: ‘Sweeney, Sweeney, half-man half-bird!’ Tossing a handful skywards and trying the accent out for size. ‘How’s about that, boy?’ Until Esther’s cough from the doorway made her leap, the sound as if she had choked on a stray bit of down.

  Ruth returned to the train window now, feeling the sting on her cheek where Esther’s handprint had landed that night. The dull hum of heat and something about ‘a traitor’; about ‘staying true to your roots’. Words she had already heard from her mother a hundred times before.

  She reached for her compass from her pocket. She closed her eyes, trying to picture the map. They should have passed Tipperary by now, give or take, which meant there would be Kilkenny next – Kilkenny then Carlow and then Kildare. Kill kill kill. She wondered if they would notice when they went from one to the other, or even when they crossed the province border into Leinster.

  And a while after the bird-man Sweeney and the Valley of the Mad, Niamh had offered Ruth another story, this time about a different place altogether.

  ‘“The Fifth Province” they do be calling it, boy. Do you know it?’ She had been darning a hole in one of Mame’s frocks, sometimes holding the needle in her mouth so it almost looked as if she were sewing up her lips.

  Ruth couldn’t help but feel nervous at the prospect.

  ‘Well, they say, boy,’ Niamh went on while Ruth stretched the hem for her, nice and tight, ‘they say “The Fifth Province” is where all the stories of Ireland live – all the unborn ideas, like. The land, I suppose… the land of the imagination.’

  As soon as Ruth heard it, she had let go of the hem; had felt something inside her like a prick or a sting. And then the following Friday when Tateh was just getting home from work she had gone out to meet him in the street. He had smiled, knackered mostly, but surprised too by the unusual welcome. His youngest, oddest child. Before she had handed over the idea – or at least, the bones of it as best she could manage – not her own imagining, but still, it was something.

  A bargain for love – the little pleas we make.

  By morning, the notion had taken root. Already the women could hear him mumbling under his breath; scribbling into his notebooks. There were bits in Russian for Mame, bits in Yiddish for Esther, bits in English for Ruth, bits in Irish for Niamh – a whole Babel of fresh material he wouldn’t let anyone see. Though they could read most of what they needed to on the new gleam in his specs as he wandered in and out of their lives, brighter and brighter each week until one Friday he returned home earlier than usual.

  His pack was still on his back as he marched straight up to the Post Office. He handed Mrs Geary an envelope, the front scrawled with a Dublin theatre address and a patroness’s name; a lick of stamps and a silent prayer.

  The wait was the worst. More sleepless nights – four too-hot heads on four not-quite-cool-enough pillows. Five if you counted Niamh’s little cottage out in Caherlag where she lived with her brother, the walls covered in holy pictures and figurines she purchased from an anonymous travelling salesman on credit.

  Until finally, the reply had come. The miracle.

  And now they were here.

  ‘Bubbeleh, do you see?’

  Out the window, the River Liffey looked almost solid, a road for swans to walk down. Along the quays the throngs of people made it seem as if the whole capital had gathered specially to welcome them.

  Kingsbridge Station, the sky-high roof overhead.

  Once the engine had stopped Tateh stood up; gathered his pile of papers to him.

  ‘You will be wonderful,’ Ruth tried, forcing herself back into her role – the only reason she had been all
owed to come along in the first place. Nearly a woman now, so she had to learn her duty.

  ‘Thank you, Bubbeleh.’

  ‘No really.’ She placed a hand on her father’s wrist. ‘Wonderful.’ She was surprised by the looseness of the flesh.

  ‘Well, as says Miss Niamh, let us hope I am the knees of the bees.’

  Though as Ruth watched him make his way down the concourse, spouting words no one else could understand, she knew he was only ever thinking of the Bees’ Princess instead.

  GIRL: Mr Murphy, there is something I have been wanting to ask you.

  PADDY: Fire ahead so, love.

  GIRL: It is these Provinces, Mr Murphy. These regions that Ireland is split into – four of them, I am believing.

  PADDY: Ah yes a’course a’course. Ulster, Munster, Leinster and Connaught.

  GIRL: North, South, East and West.

  PADDY: Well… yes, I suppose, in a manner of speaking.

  GIRL: But what I cannot understand is why there are only four of them? Because if the Gaelic… the Irish word for Province is ‘cúige’, ‘fifth’, then does that mean… Is there another one, Mr Murphy, hiding somewhere else? A fifth province?

  (It takes a moment but his eyes widen. And then he smiles.)

  PADDY: Well, truth be told, Girlie, it is a good question you do be asking – fierce good altogether. Let me… Well, come here to me now and let me tell you a story…

  ‘So, Mr Greenberg, how did you find it?’ There was no hello, no warning at all, she just appeared, every buxom inch of her, smiling a wry smile as if Tateh and she were old friends from long long ago, maybe even lovers.

  The heap of her would have crushed him flat.

  ‘I do hope it was to your liking?’ Her questions bounced along the lowlit tiles of The Abbey Theatre foyer where the last of the evening’s audience buttoned their coats, swapped favourite scenes and canvassed suggestions for a quick post-show sup.

  ‘O’Mahony’s round the corner?’

  ‘Christ, the thirst on me.’

  ‘Sure it’s serious work, all that talk of Independence.’

  The theatre’s stained-glass doors had first flung open in 1904, all in the hope of ‘rewriting the Irish identity’; of using culture in the fight for freedom. The plan was to draw on the artistic expertise of the gormless-looking men and women whose portraits now lined the dusky hallway; the perfume-and-cigar air. Here before them, though, Lady Gregory looked anything but gormless.

  She wore a stiff black dress with a scooped-out neckline, her bosom hoisted up to meet her wrinkled, sun-toughened neck.

  For some reason Ruth thought of horses; the thick, slow lashes.

  Not that it mattered, but Ruth herself had found the play magi­cal; had spent the last hour happily watching Moses and his men, or Parnell and his, or whichever Messiah you wanted to suck out of the allegory. Either way, they were fighting hard for a land to call their own.

  The Chosen People!

  A Nation Once Again!

  But even despite the rouse of the thing, Ruth had to admit she had let her attention wander just a little; had spent the last hour also just gazing around her, soaking up the surroundings. The semi-­circle balcony scooped deep and wide like a patroness’s neck­line; the ornate lumps of stuccowork crusted up around the balustrade; the shining faces of the rows below as they stared up at the altar, utterly transfixed by the Word. And in a way, she thought, it was almost like a Saturday morning at Shul where she sat peering down from the women’s gallery, trying her best to follow the ­Rabbi’s lessons. Because there would always be a quiz from Mame on the walk home, so no choice but to get full marks – to please her mother the only way she knew how.

  Of course, Mame was supposed to have come along to Dublin tonight; to be here to clutch her husband’s fingers as they finally rewrote the family fate. But in the end, she had had to host a meeting instead – the usual get-together for her beloved organisation – in fact, these days, the only fate she really seemed to care about.

  The Zionist Women’s Group (Cork Branch).

  They gathered once a week to discuss the return to the Promised Land, each session a ritual of lists and tea and a Jacob’s biscuit? Oh God no – this isn’t a party, dear, this is history, thousands of years of it. The women would babble away for hours, discussing emigration plans, irrigation initiatives, the Jewish National Fund. The latter was going well at least, every Jewtown home now with a blue and white collection box sat proudly on their mantelpiece, gathering spare change to support those who had already answered the call and returned to the Holy Land.

  A penny a day is the JNF way.

  A penny a week is what we seek.

  Every Sunday Mame handed Ruth her pocket money and watched as she dropped it straight into the little slot. A dull clang. A rare nod of approval.

  Meanwhile, just outside the city centre, the Zionists had also purchased a patch of land so that the men could start to learn some of the skills the Promised Land would require – farming techniques; the sowing and the reaping – all the simple but vital basics. They took it very seriously, a piousness to every rake, despite the climate’s refusal to cooperate (not much chance of oranges with this endless rain, nu?), and despite how Niamh always had Ruth in stitches as she described the farce of it as she walked by en route to work: ‘So this morning, right, I see this local lad going: “Right well, today we will be discussing the procedure known as ‘bailing’.” To which one of your lot replies: “Oh, to us do not even talk – on enough sinking ships we have been to last a lifetime!”’

  So yes, most of the time Ruth could just see the humour of the whole affair, a perpetual pantomime only a mile away or crammed into her living room while she sat on the upstairs landing looking down. Needless to say, Esther was allowed to join the women in their gatherings. Needless to say, those days Niamh was told not to come to work.

  But then just last week Ruth had walked past her parents’ bedroom and discovered that the thing was starting to come a bit too close. Her mother’s best red dress had been laid out on the bed, a pair of earrings gilding the pillow. ‘Going out are we, Mame?’ she had asked in a singsong Yiddish, still the only tongue her mother would answer.

  But Mame didn’t look up; didn’t reply. Until: ‘To the New Jerusalem. Our home at last.’ Doting on the frock with a mother’s love. ‘And this is what Our God will see me wearing, the very first time my foot lands on Promised soil.’ And right then, the humour of the thing had choked, stuffed down into the satin shoes which sat at the foot of the bed. Ruth leaned closer to check. They were Mame’s wedding shoes – she hadn’t even known they had come to Ireland.

  She wondered now if Tateh did either.

  Back in the foyer, though, her Tateh was clearing his throat. Still he clutched the pile of papers to his chest, a bit like he had been wounded and the bundle was soaking up his blood – a staunch of words to stop the gush.

  ‘So if we could begin…’ he tried, eager to get things back on track. ‘If we could discuss, perhaps… the play?’

  Because no, Ruth told herself now, shaking all thoughts of her mother away. Because it didn’t need to be a leaving outfit any more – why not an outfit for an opening night? An Abbey Theatre première, the playwright’s wife glowing by his side? Ruth wondered if she could get a new frock herself, to wear to the big event. Maybe she could even bring Niamh along with her – she was her friend by now, wasn’t she? Her only one, yes, but wasn’t that better than none?

  ‘But of course, Mr Greenberg,’ Lady Gregory eventually replied, the gentle lisp of her words gliding down through the foyer. ‘Do tell me your thoughts. For I am simply dying of curiosity to hear.’

  So Tateh began, at last, a speech he must have been preparing for weeks – or really, for an entire decade – each line recited over and over to the stone walls he passed across the countryside, not a single
lick of glue or mortar to hold the shards of rock together.

  An act of trust, calcified over time.

  ‘Well, ever since to this wondrous island my family and I have come, an idea I have been looking for that is something… something special.’ He paused. Still his sentences puckered in the middle. But that was all right; to be expected. ‘Until I heard about this place “The Fifth Province”, you know it? This phrase your countrymen have. The realm of the imagination.’

  Ruth leaned into the idea now, feeling a blush of pride. She knew she didn’t deserve it, really – that it was Niamh’s doing most of all – but still she let it linger for a moment.

  ‘So then I wondered…’ Tateh added, his smile letting rip. ‘I wondered what would happen if… well, if this place were real.’

  And so he was away, explaining it all, plundering the ragbag of snippets he had managed to pick up over the years on the road. Bits of myth. Bits of rumour. Bits of inspirations stashed into his tattered backpack in between the poke of candlesticks and the indecent sheer of stockings; the wink of naughty farmwives as they stretched them out along their arms to check for a ladder or a snag.

  And he blushed himself as he poured out his stories, his Irish ones and his Jewish ones – just the same, really – all the connections he had found. While Lady Gregory listened on, eyebrows cocked in fascination. Admiration. Maybe even seeing a connection of her own. Because Niamh had told Ruth all about the patroness – about how she was a bit of an outsider herself. A woman. A Protestant. An upper-class. A youngest daughter who married a man with a Big House who evicted his tenants during the Famine – the poor things sent off to starve!

  But after his death, Niamh said, Lady Gregory had written a new past for herself; had learned the local language and collected the local folklore and then shoved it up on stage – oh, she knew about belonging, all right; about adapting. So it was no wonder she was stood here now, hanging off every word this genius had to say, his Fifth Province and his Promised Land and his second chance at last.

  ‘Now, let’s just hold your horses there for a minute, Mr Greenberg!’