Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan

by Ruth Gilligan

  ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t a clue what you’re on about.’

  Aisling looks up. She didn’t even realise she was still talking. ‘What?’

  ‘This bird. Her brother Gerry. I… I don’t know them.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No, it’s…’ Though she doesn’t say what it is. She couldn’t possibly.

  ‘But if… if you want to leave your number or something,’ the stranger offers as an afterthought; a bit of festive charity. ‘I suppose I can ask my parents when they… What did you say your name was again?’

  Aisling takes a moment, fumbling for the wallet in her jeans. She digs through old receipts, a dark-haired face in a passport photo whose eyes she must not meet, before she spies them. She got them printed when she first moved to London, all pomp and ceremony and arrogance embossed:

  Aisling Creedon

  BA MA

  Current Affairs Expert

  Her identity, spelled out before her eyes. The one she is stuck with now whether it is truly her or not.

  Once the door is shut, Aisling walks back down the path. The paving slabs are laid at awkward angles – cracked like they have been dropped from on high. And she remembers then the word that she was looking for – the one that has been missing all along. A lamentation. A lamentation of swans. And she realises that they must be the saddest birds in the world.

  1NB Ask Joseph? Halakicly Halachally Halllll

  2Shoping List: Buter, 2lbs Suger, 5lbs Ginger for Mammy’s cake

  3Doyle family = 4 humans, 17 catle, 14 sheep, 8 chickins, 3 dogs (and tink Piper’s about to pup…)

  4Birth family. Like adoptid? Magdalin Laundries – same for Jews???

  5Dear Mammy, I’ve got something I’m sorry I’m after fallin for a fella calld Joseph who’s a Jew…

  6Máire & Joseph. Joseph & Máire. eriáM & hpesoJ.

  7Tell Gerry too. Get train to Dublin? Wendsday 25th, 6:25, 4s 6d

  8Borscht (Joseph’s favorit): 6 beetroot, 5 onins, 2 pints stock, ½ lemon

  933 hours 52 minuts to go. 2,032 mins. 121,920 seconds. (Mammy taut me maths)

  10Always sed 2 babbies. Same as Gerry and me.

  11Babby born w big secret? Never meet Mammy & Daddy? Tell the poor thing there dead???

  12Gerry for goodbye tomorro, 33 Glenvar Rd. Joseph says never see my brother agen.

  13Daddy castratin bulls?!

  14Cookd borscht last nite. Joseph sed tasted shite bad.

  15Goodbye pressie from Gerry. Silver necklass. Angel charm.

  16Swimmin holiday. Lough Erne. April 1933.

  17Story bout midwife who told stories wile deliverin babbies?!

  part five | Words…

  1941

  What about…’

  ‘What about words…’

  ‘What about words that…’

  But the questions wouldn’t come any more, let alone the answers. Half-glanced things like an old man’s mind gone to mush.

  Ruth heaved her weight down onto the footrest of the spade. She paused for a moment, her body suspended on the inhale. The possibility. Until the earth gave way and the sleán oozed in – through the white stuff at the top and then the proper, filthy black, layer upon layer like a history. Next she cocked the angle of her wrists, just how Joe, the farmer, had shown them. She leaned back and shoved forward to scoop the sod onto her shovel, jerking left and right to prise it free from the gnarls of roots that tried – so desperately – to cling on.

  Ruth felt the weight of her compass swaying in her pocket. She didn’t reach for it any more.

  She tossed the lump of peat towards the wheelbarrow where some of the other volunteers stood – more of the eager cluster she had managed, somehow, to recruit for the week. Sorting, stacking, drying, smiling. Surprisingly efficient for a crowd of newcomers. And a decent pile built up by the time Joe finally called ‘lunch’ and they collapsed into the farmhouse for a round of sandwiches, thickly sliced cheese on white.

  ‘From the farmer down the road,’ Joe boasted as he doled out the tea. ‘So fresh you can still taste the rennet.’

  He had been waiting for them last night when their bus finally arrived from Dublin, welcoming them to Clara Bog with a rousing spiel. He said it was a fine thing they were doing for their country, given she was so desperate for the turf –the coal rations leaving her struggling altogether. And Ruth had tried to feel even a bit of pride as Joe finished up and led them to the barn for a night cap and then bed, only, the draught of the place meant she had barely managed a breath of sleep.

  They headed back for the afternoon session now, the January sun rousing a bit of a hum off the place. It was an earthy smell, the very opposite of the sea. Ruth found it strangely nice. The bog rolled out for miles, a browny-green expanse, tatty with heather all the way West towards County Clare where eventually it became the Burren, the ground turned to rock instead; a plateau of limestone; flowers poking prettiness between the cracks. They said some of the species there didn’t grow anywhere else in the world. Oddballs. One of a kind.

  Ruth paused for a moment; half-noticed a man in the next group, offering a smile in her direction; a funny dent bumped into his chin. She looked away and leaned back into the dig.

  When Joe came out next he brought a radio with him, music for them to sweat by. He turned the dial through a limbo of static until a trio of fiddles jigged out, another layer of sound over the clink of shovels.

  Ruth had bought a radio of her own a few years back. It was a Crosley, short and squat, with a peaked arch and a gauzed window at the front that reminded her a bit of a cathedral. A reverie of sound. It had been a rare indulgence, but she had decided it was a small price to pay for a bit of company, the place so quiet ever since Harry went away on tour and never came back. She listened to the Post Office Channel. 2RN. Talk of a Jewish station setting up, though nothing had been organised yet and, of course, now was hardly the time.

  To her left a couple of the volunteers had started to dance, their jigs high above the bounce of the earth.

  And as well as the radio station, the last few years had held so much promise for the community. It was nearly four years since De Valera’s rich tones had boomed live on air as he read out the Nation’s brand new Constitution. Bunreacht na hÉireann. The whole country had tuned in to listen, fifty articles and sixteen headings of independent beauty – Irish sovereignty, the Irish tongue – everything they’d ever wanted! And then right at the end had come the special subclause, just for them – ‘The Jewish Congregations’ – written onto Ireland’s spine at last.

  That night the Clanbrassil Street houses had been thrown open to the stars, every stash of Kiddush wine bled dry.

  But the hangovers had been quick to kick in. A few months of innocent bliss, of roots starting to take, before Dev began making other radio broadcasts; new alliances, out across the airwaves; a speech from the League of Nations Convention to declare how many visas his government would issue to the thousands of refu­gees who now wandered across Europe like a pack of blindmen clambering in the dark.

  Ruth held the radio to her face, the pulse of the word on her cheek like a kiss:

  ‘Zero.’

  Nobody.

  Had there been any wine left, that night they would have dregged it dry.

  Of course, she had tried her best to defend the Taoiseach’s decision – the only one amongst them who would. Because surely he didn’t mean it; surely in the months, the years that followed, as the panic grew and the threat of evil went from rumour to likelihood to bloody imminence De Valera would backtrack on his haste; would remember everything the Chief Rabbi had done for him during the fight for Independence and welcome all those poor, those petrified
souls – surely he didn’t mean it.

  But no, it turned out that he did.

  Surely.

  Nobody.

  Ruth looked away from the memory now, glancing over her shoulder at the group of strangers, all claps and yahoos and pointed toes. She closed her eyes and wondered yet again what she was doing.

  She had tried to keep on top of the news from Europe, despite the Censorship Committee’s best efforts. Only a few articles appeared in the Irish press, and those that did wouldn’t even refer to it as a ‘War’, only an ‘Emergency’. Somebody else’s problem. Even when the fighting started to play itself out up the road in Belfast, still the only bits of shrapnel Ruth noticed were the odd whispers around town; the chat off her co-workers huddled in the hospital canteen, affirming the same-old party lines:

  ‘Ah sure, we’re well out of it. A bit of neutrality and like, haven’t we done enough fighting lately to last us a lifetime?’

  ‘And what would they have us, join up with the Brits? Talk about a step backwards!’

  And in a way, Ruth tried to tell herself, breathing in-out, in-out like the almost-nearly mothers, but in a way she supposed she could understand their logic. After everything… And especially… Yes, half of her could almost-nearly understand.

  So she had tried to just focus on her work instead; to do what had to be done. But even in The Rotunda it was hard to stay distracted any more. Because things were quiet, so quiet – fewer Jewish women were being fruitful and multiplying – they didn’t dare. Their letters to the Continent kept going unanswered, while they were still stashed safely, guiltily here without a Chief Rabbi any more and nothing but dog biscuits for Matzoh bread (the suppliers blamed the rationing), so what kind of a life was this to bring a child into, nu?

  The locals meanwhile, for all their ‘neutrality’, had stopped using Ruth altogether. Would just prefer a native midwife, if you wouldn’t mind; if it wasn’t too much trouble. As if, even after forty years, that half of her just didn’t exist.

  So then why on earth had she agreed to this? she wondered now as she slumped on with the dig, putting the heft of her sigh to use. Some kind of last ditch effort? To try to convince herself there was a bit of loyalty in her old bones yet? Or was it just Ruth the runt all over again, forever trying to please, even when the other side had turned its back completely?

  She took her questions out on the peat, going harder with the sleán. She cut a sod and lifted it up, then saw something drop out. When she scooped it with her trowel the fieldmouse’s body was still intact, perfectly preserved by the pillow of muck. They were the smallest eyelashes Ruth had ever seen.

  As the afternoon stretched on her blouse slicked tight beneath her jumper, the muscles in her shoulders that pulled and pulled. But after a while she felt a new kind of weight land on her body too, the strangest sense that she was being watched.

  That face with the dimple; that smile across the way.

  She decided she would ignore it; would hunker down to attack the heathery scraw, the rough tufts like a stubble on a chin. Joe had given her a little knife to help – a scraitheog – a wrap of twine around the handle and a nick at the tip. She pulsed with the memory of Passover knives stabbed into the soil, ten times in ten different places, to be sure.

  Only, when she stood up again the stranger had migrated nearer, taking the distraction too far. Because if this labour was ever going to have the effect she needed it to, then she had to be left alone. To be intimate. To rediscover the layers and layers of her country, the ones she had recently come so close to forgetting.

  ‘So tell me, love, does the turf look a different colour, depending which one you’re looking through?’

  The directness of the remark left Ruth no choice. She turned to the figure and opened her mouth; noticed her throat was clagged with thirst. Joe had mentioned tea flasks but there was no sign yet, lips as cracked and white as the ground.

  Of course, she wasn’t actually sure how to be rude to this lad – God knows it wasn’t in her nature. But she had no doubt it would come if she just gave it a lash; channelled her frustration towards the blushing jawline. The kippah. The chin-dimple scooped deep like a bellybutton as he smiled and spoke again: ‘I’ve never seen it before, the mismatch, like. But it’s…’ And then he laughed, a gentle thing, wrinkles cracking round his mouth to match her own. ‘Well, if you don’t mind me saying, love, but… it’s beautiful.’

  Ruth felt the weight drop out of her there and then.

  For the rest of the day they worked side by side, the afternoon spooling away against the backdrop of the radio. And there was another sound too, the gentle rhythm of his voice, an accent she couldn’t quite place.

  In the beginning, he just offered little things – passing remarks as they occurred to him, flecked up from the earth:

  The weather.

  The landscape.

  The names of the nearby towns:

  Tullamore.

  Ferbane.

  Banagher.

  Ruth thought of the compass in her pocket she could use to navigate.

  And she could feel herself relaxing into the stranger, trying not to think how long it had been since her last proper chat. Assuming, of course, the voices on the radio didn’t count.

  ‘So how about yourself?’

  ‘Is this your first dig?’

  ‘What do you do for a living, besides recruiting gombeens like us?’

  The questions, though, she didn’t take to so easily.

  She supposed Harry had never really asked much about herself. And then the expectant mothers, of course, always had far bigger things on their minds; tiny little things. So she was unused to the attention – couldn’t really understand why a total stranger would have any interest in all of that.

  ‘And what about your family?’

  ‘Have you siblings?’

  ‘Are they in Dublin too?’

  All the stories of her life she never dared to share.

  She dug on, replying with spadefuls instead. She went lower and lower in the same spot, the earth darker the further she went, walled up around so that the stranger’s voice had to go louder now to reach into the hole. And what about a plague of questions, she wondered as she wrestled with a particularly stubborn set of roots, a plague of question marks that hooked into your skin and pulled in every direction…

  North.

  South.

  East.

  West.

  …’til you were totally ripped apart?

  She stood up, cracking her knuckles one by one. The fourth digit on her left hand went pop.

  She played the notion over again in her head: A plague of question marks, raining down; a curiosity that rips apart. It was a nice idea for a story, she decided. To be honest, a bit of a gem. She presumed it was one of Tateh’s, from back in the earlier days – the better, brighter ones. Only, for some reason now she couldn’t seem to place it; couldn’t find its slot in the millions of files she had stashed within her skull, archived away in steel-heavy drawers to be picked out and presented to the delivery rooms, depending on the mother and the mood. But as she stood there in the coolness of that boggy pit, this one seemed to be pointing somewhere else instead, somewhere that even the compass didn’t know.

  Had she… made it up?

  Had she…

  Imagined?

  She leaned against her spade to steady herself, wishing she could sit down and not sink. Next she breathed in, certain of the error. The fluke – an accident she could never repeat. But then she tried another, just in case, this time daring it out loud:

  ‘What about a woman who drowns in a lake, but then her husband misses her so much he drowns himself too, and they meet again as strangers under the water and fall madly in love?’

  She waited a moment, a tingle across her body. She really was thirsty. But the
n she felt the shadow of the stranger’s head peering over the hole, blocking the meagre warmth of the sun.

  ‘Come again?’ The eyebrows were high up his face, the becoming-smile.

  So she did as she was told: ‘What about a woman who drowns in a lake, but then her husband misses her so much he drowns himself too, and they meet again as strangers under the water and fall madly in love?’

  The stranger’s laughter streamed down from above, a sound she craved as soon as she heard it.

  ‘Or what about a set of twins who speak in alternate words?’

  ‘Or a woman who is bilingual, but then the Irish and the English have a war on her tongue so it shrivels up and falls out?’

  Until Joe called ‘supper’ and hungry mouths dunked fresh-baked bread into stew then collapsed into barnyard beds.

  Lying there, Ruth thought she wouldn’t be able to sleep, before she lost her head deep deep in the straw.

  The next morning, she was convinced it had been a dream, maybe even delirium from the fumes of the muck – forty-seven years of age and she had finally lost the plot! But even on the way to their spot it was just the same, the possibilities already warming her up.

  ‘What about a man who plays the fiddle, but as he grows older a string breaks every year so he adjusts his songs accordingly, until finally he has no strings left at all so just plays a jig of silence?’

  ‘Or a man who sells picture frames and decides to put one around his wife and children and seal them behind glass? Only it makes them suffocate, so they still hang there now, mounted dead upon his wall.’