Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan

by Ruth Gilligan

  The voice grew louder with the list. Ruth checked them off with a twitch of fingers behind her back.

  ‘…fifth and sixth were filled with more jokes – he had a great one about a pigeon and a swan… But it was the seventh, after the show, that convinced me.’ Mame paused for a breath now, a chestful, sucking in the air for the climax. ‘He walked me home to my parents’ house. It was a warm night and the stars were out, but of course, already he could tell that I was not the type of girl to be moved by such things. And when we finally reached my gate and we were just about to say goodbye he… he tried to kiss me.’

  There was another pause, all of them poised together now, united there at that gate.

  ‘But how could I? I knew that my father would have noticed me missing, and that he could maybe see us through the window. I could only imagine the punishment – he was not a kind man. But for some reason I grabbed Moshe’s bony hand and led him round the back of our house to the barn, into the darkness out of sight, where yes, I admit, I let him kiss me.’

  Ruth felt a little triumph for her father now, brave with this imperious young woman. She scanned the room. Leaning in, each face looked like a better version of itself.

  ‘I had had other kisses, I am willing to admit, but this one was… different. The smell of straw and animals was all around, but our mouths could taste only each other, until we backed our way up against the wall so hard that we heard a loud bang. A smash. And then a buzz.’

  It started low, but Ruth could already hear the sound inside her – a warning hum for what was about to come.

  ‘It was a beehive,’ Mame continued. ‘So of course, I screamed. I had always been terrified of the things. And I ran outside, crying frantically; heard the back door of my house opening and my father storming out and booming in his deep, threatening way. But Moshe knew that if my father saw him I would be done for. Courting strangers? Even speaking to a man? Nu, what kind of good Jewish girl does this? So instead Moshe waited in the shadows until I reassured my father that I had just got a fright – had seen a fox – and led him back inside.’

  By now Ruth’s skin had grown sweltering hot, her dress clinging tighter than ever.

  ‘In the darkness of the barn the bees did their worst. They swarmed, they stung, over and over, every bit of him – the doctors said he could have died. Should have died. Nearly lost the sight in one of his eyes, which is why he always had to wear those hideous glasses.’ Mame swallowed the last word, her first hint of emotion all night. ‘And ever since then he called me his Princess of the Bees. May… may his name be blessed.’

  A wall of hush lingered in the room. Not one of them moved. Instead they just hovered there in the darkness of a North Lithuanian shed with a beautiful young girl and an earnest young boy, stupid with love; a woman they had never quite liked and a man they had never quite understood. But suddenly the light had caught them differently, just two characters in a story, right back at the beginning – a story that had finally been told.

  As Ruth realised that now, everything really was lost.

  June

  Jaysus, she has a fine rump on her all the same, eh?’ Alf kept his whispers low, trying his very best, though his wheelchair had started to rattle with the thrust of his laughter. ‘Virgin me arse – I’d say she had her fair share of shtuppings in her time, all right!’

  I smiled back at him from where I sat. At the joke, yes, but also at the whole scenario, still struggling to fully get my head around it. Because here I was, huddled on the floor of the corridor at one o’clock in the morning opposite a legless grouch while he made filthy jokes beneath a gigantic statue of the Blessed Virgin, a crown of lit-up stars mangled into her pious little head.

  ‘Moany Mary, nu?’

  It was almost a week since Alf had suggested relocating our sessions from the secret garden. He said we needed something more regular, something other than a snatched half an hour here and there. ‘Why not make it a nightly job, eh Shmendrick?’ A credit, I suppose, to how well the story was going. How well we were.

  That said, when he first led me to the new spot I was still half-convinced he was taking the proverbial – two sons of Israel, crouched at the foot of the mother of the New Testament – talk about ironic! But it wasn’t her Testament we were interested in, or her Beloved Son, only that the flicker of her nocturnal headwear spat out just enough light to write by, and that her position in Monta­gue House was just far enough away from the nuns’ dormitory to be safe for whispers; for the scratch of pen on yellow jotter page.

  And so, simple as that, our Night Lessons began.

  We followed on from exactly where we had left off before – Alf and his lover, back from the bog, lying naked and intermangled in her Clanbrassil Street bedsit – the same ecstasy that had left me so out of sorts. But it was different now, because ever since I had spoken to my Ima on the phone I had remembered, all over again, the reason I was doing this – that I was in here because of her – the only incentive I would ever need, so no more complaining. And anyway, I reminded myself, sure hadn’t I agreed to help Alf with his story precisely because he had promised to get me out of here again? To get me back to her? And for that, I would have sat under any bloody statue; would have mangled the crown into my own skull until it ruptured a nasty gash.

  So no, I just had to bide my time; just had to keep on writing.

  And there was also a sort of familiarity to the process itself I was beginning to recognise. Because it reminded me of other sessions I had had through the years – different truth-sharings that had come to pass. Like the lads in Cheder who had bullied me to bits about my newfound silence:

  ‘Hush little baby…’

  ‘A willy up the bum makes a bold boy shtum!’

  But then after a while they had all sought me out, one by one, and asked if they could confess. It was a ritual our faith didn’t offer, a chance to spew their crimes aloud, off their chest and onto mine instead, knowing I could never pass them on.

  Like David Greenwood after he pilfered from his daddy’s wallet.

  Or Michael Steiner who set the cat on fire and blamed his retard little sister.

  Or Jacob Bloom who shifted a gentile outside the Blackrock Parish hop, a grope of her lacy pink bra that gave me a stiffy just to hear.

  At the time I could hardly believe it, these boys I’d known for years suddenly entrusting me with such gems! Such dirt! And yet, part of me also wanted to remind them that even if I had been able to talk, I wouldn’t have blabbed. Because didn’t they remember what Rabbi Hart had taught us in Cheder when we were younger? About the dangers of spreading slander and speaking ill? Because I remembered, all right. In fact, the spiel had never quite let go of me since, not then and certainly not now as I sat here in the ­scrotum-shrivelling corridor of Montague House.

  ‘Lashon Ha-ra,’ the Rabbi had announced, the syllables booming through the half-empty classroom. ‘The evil tongue is the scourge of the human race – the worst crime a Jew can ever commit.’ His superlatives made their way over the barely listening heads to where I had started getting angsty down the back. ‘It is a crime equal to Murder. To Idol Worship. Even to Adultery – a wife betrays her husband, so a person can betray their God with their words.’

  At the time it had sent me panicking, unable to believe just how disastrous one wrong speech could be – why the feck hadn’t they warned us sooner? What if I’d let my tongue already slip? Though remembering it now, the Rabbi’s last example couldn’t help but make me smile. A wife betrays her husband. Yet another undelicious irony, given everything that had come to pass.

  So Alf went on telling me his words, his secrets, a routine that meandered us nicely through June. He would go forward with the story, but also backwards too, circling over the same trampled ground to give me a little more each time – another skullful of details to flesh the thing out.

  Like the sandwiches
the farmer had made for their lunch on the bog, ‘the cheese so fresh you could still taste the rennet’.

  Or the country walls that jagged away in the distance, all the bricks slotted together ‘like jigsaw bits’.

  Or the stories his woman liked to tell him to kill time while they dug. My favourite was the one about the man and the woman who court via pigeon mail, until the woman falls in love with the pigeon instead. Yes, that one made me smile for the rest of the night.

  And Alf was so clear with every detail, painstaking with it, like, which was funny, because at other times he started to say that he thought his mind was beginning to slip. ‘Arra, I can feel it, Shmendrick,’ he whispered once, out of nowhere or nothing at all. ‘It’s… it’s beginning to go.’

  Part of me wanted to ask where precisely he thought it was off to, and what type of sambos they served for tea down there?

  That night as he spoke of her, though, the memory was perfect – a poetry to every line. Even when, finally, it was time to reveal how the story had ended; how the whole thing had cracked in two.

  ‘So I was lying asleep next to her in the bed, happy as a pig in shit.’

  We were running short on space so I had started writing in the margins of some of the pages we had already used. It reminded me a bit of the Talmud – the Rabbis’ words laid side by side.

  ‘I was bare-bollock naked and dreaming away, but also conscious the whole time that my waking world was pretty terrific too. Pretty fucking terrific. But the next thing I know I’m not dreaming any more, and me whole world is after ending. Because just like that I heard the fucking BANG!’

  The shout was so unexpected my body flinched, my wrist scratching a line of ink across the page. Almost, it turned out, as if it knew what was coming next.

  ‘The bomb woke me, but I couldn’t see a thing. There was smoke everywhere, thick as paint. And the smell? Christ! Until me eyes adjusted and I realised then that she… Jaysus, Shmendrick, she was… gone.’

  I was very young when my father first told me about that World War II bomb, one of the few to have landed on Irish soil. But as luck would (or wouldn’t) have it, it had fallen on Clanbrassil Street, right in the heart of Dublin’s Little Jerusalem, and for many the coincidence was just too ugly to manage.

  ‘We knew it was the Nazis,’ Alf dictated now, spitting the suspicion loud and clear. ‘Knew they must have found out where we lived and aimed straight for us. Bullseye!’

  With one hand I wrote while with the other I began to scratch, discovering a scab on my knee.

  ‘The Krauts swore it was just a mistake – a glitch in the radar, meant for London instead – sure what business would they have with little neutral Dublin?’

  When the crust chipped off I began to peel, the give of it a bit like an orange skin.

  ‘But really it didn’t matter, because either way the blast had split the gaff in two – literally straight down the middle. A line through the bed with me snoring away on one side, happy as fucking Larry, while the other side was just… just…’

  And even though it hurt, I kept going, using nails and all, because already my mind was skipping ahead to what exactly this meant – that if the house really had exploded, did that mean that she was…? That she had…?

  ‘And Shmendrick,’ Alf groaned, as if it were his knee now ­trickling. ‘I swear I looked for her for hours. Raked through the rubble. The fire brigade all slow and methodical with their search in case the foundations were fucked as well, but Jaysus, I didn’t give a shite about that – didn’t give a shite about anything except finding her there in the debris. There were beams everywhere, snapped in two like a shipwreck. And the dust!’ he wailed. ‘Billows of the stuff. Me skin completely covered. So that when I finally saw meself in a mirror that night I didn’t even recognise the freak staring back at me. A bog man, like. A proper bloody Golem.’

  I looked at him, half his face lit up by the Virgin’s light, the other half in shadow – half here and half all the way back there.

  ‘I searched for hours,’ he sighed, slower now, the effort of it defeating him once again. ‘From six in the morning ’til it was pitch black, but I found nothing. Not a trace. Not a hair off her gorgeous head or a lash off her lovely eyes – the green one,’ he paused, faltering in between. ‘Or the brown.’

  By the time he had finished I could feel it myself, the utter weight of the loss. I closed my eyes and hung my head; pictured the devastation. The smoke. The rubble. The tears. The redbrick terrace ripped in two.

  When we returned to our beds the blood from my knee dripped across the sheets. I let it flow, a pathetic solidarity.

  For the following days it stayed with me, the image of that halved-out house. The borderline between brick and nothingness; between bliss and tragedy. Of course, even without Alf mentioning it, it seemed a given that we would leave it a couple of days before our next session – God knows he didn’t appear to be in the mood for hurtling on.

  I tried to catch his eye across the canteen, but it didn’t work. He didn’t see.

  So the memory lingered, the pair of us united now by something other than love – a chance occurrence that had torn everything apart. I shook my head. They had shaved it again. My ears looked like they had been stuck on. But after a while, the melancholy of the story actually began to feel a bit out of place, because for some reason the rest of the House had a different air going on – an atmosphere that, unbelievably, had started to swell.

  June had arrived, summer at last and a decent enough spate of weather, I supposed – bluey skies and the sun splitting the stones, or at least, so the saying went. The World Cup had kicked off in Sweden, and even though Ireland hadn’t made the cut, it still gave the radio’s chatter something worth listening for. England had only managed a 2-all draw with the Soviets. I wished I could’ve seen the gobshites’ heads hung in shame. But regardless of the elements, or the soccer overseas, there seemed to be something else that was after giving the place a bit of a lift – an excitement that had suddenly caught on like a plague, or a dose of the shits, until eventually I managed to catch a glimpse of the reason why.

  At first, when the posters went up around the corridor I thought they must be fake, some sort of prank, Sister Monica always a demon for new ways to torment. But when the rumours bubbled over I realised that it was actually true; that suddenly it was just a matter of days before the outside world was coming in, here between the mould-slick of these very four walls.

  16th June. The Montague House Visitors’ Day.

  My pants were nearly doused for the thrill of it.

  The effect of my mother’s absence had remained just as intense, shittier than any sort of dose you could imagine. Of course, I had managed to remind myself why our separation was necessary, for the moment at least, but that didn’t mean I didn’t still crave her, even just the air around her.

  Her goldy hair that was paler than any I had seen in my life.

  Her big-small lips that spoke with an accent so different from Abba’s.

  But now it seemed the countdown to all those things had officially begun, left then right then left then right then left, because she was on her way – no longer just some image in my head – the prospect of it bringing out a brightness in me I barely recognised.

  Of course, I did feel a bit guilty at how easily Alf’s disaster ­managed to fall from my mind, the rubble and dust blown away on the wind. Next time I saw him in the canteen I didn’t go looking for his eyes. But I couldn’t help it, because actually, the more I thought about it, the more I had begun to realise something else as well – that it wasn’t just the promise of my mother physically being here that had me giddy, but the promise of what would happen next; what exactly she would do on 16th June as soon as we were back together again:

  1. Give me a kiss.

  2. Take a final look at this hellhole.

  3. Brin
g me home.

  To be honest, it was the loveliest list I’d ever made.

  As the days went on, I let myself imagine it a little more – the rescue mission come at last. Sometimes she apologised for the last few weeks; sometimes she cried; sometimes she begged for forgiveness, so vehemently I half-wondered if she had actually figured out the truth of what I’d seen. And sometimes I added other bits too, like in one version where Ima marched right up to Sister Monica and gave her a box in the face, blood glooping from her broken nose like ugly, reddy slugs. But in all these different versions, the bloody and the not, the grand finale was the same – that my Ima would lead me out the front door, hand me my flashcards, and officially set me free.

  Even in the car home I knew I would have a million things to scrawl:

  I missed you.

  Can you cook me borscht?

  Did you hear the one about the man and the woman who court via pigeon mail?

  Because see – I had learned now that not all love needed speech to survive.

  On the buzz of the notion, time flew by, the whole of Montague House wired up. Even Tourettes Tony seemed only able to shout out happy things, like ‘LOVELY CUNT’ and ‘ANGEL TITS’ – a better kind of smut. Until without warning the week had seen itself off and it was my very last night in the place, and, I supposed, my very last session with Alf.

  It wasn’t one of our longer ones – ever since the bomb the energy in him had been quicker to sap. Twice this week he had even forgotten, mid-spiel, what it was he had been saying.

  It took me a moment to realise he wasn’t taking the piss.

  So no, I decided that maybe it was for the best that we had reached the end of things – a natural conclusion or some shite like that. And sure, his side of the bargain had been rendered null and void by now, given I was on the way out anyway. Talk about jammy for him! Even if a part of me did still feel a pang at the prospect of goodbye.

  Back in the room I stashed the jotter away while Alf lumbered himself out of his chair, the usual wretched sigh. Instead of bed, though, I made my way to the wardrobe, squinting through the darkness for what lay inside – the handful of items they entrusted us with in this Godforsaken place.