Irish Journal

by Heinrich Böll

  In the dark back yards, the ones Swift’s eyes saw, this dirt has been piled up in decades and centuries: the depressing sediment of time. In the windows of the secondhand shops lay a confused variety of junk, and at last I found one of the objects of my journey: the private drinking booth with the leather curtain; here the drinker locks himself in like a horse; to be alone with whisky and pain, with belief and unbelief, he lowers himself deep below the surface of time, into the caisson of passivity, as long as his money lasts; till he is compelled to float up again to the surface of time, to take part somehow in the weary paddling: meaningless, helpless movements, since every vessel is destined to drift toward the dark waters of the Styx. No wonder there is no room in these pubs for women, the busy ones of this earth: here the man is alone with his whisky, far removed from all the activities in which he has been forced to participate, activities known as family, occupation, honor, society; the whisky is bitter, comforting, and somewhere to the west, across three thousand miles of water, and somewhere to the east, two seas to cross to get there—are those who believe in activity and progress. Yes, they exist, such people; how bitter the whisky is, how comforting; the beefy innkeeper passes the next glass into the booth. His eyes are sober, blue: he believes in what those who make him rich do not believe in. In the woodwork of the pub, the paneled walls of the private drinking booth, lurk jokes and curses, hopes and prayers of other people; how many, I wonder?

  Already the caisson—the booth—can be felt sinking deeper and deeper toward the dark bottom of time: past wrecks, past fish, but even down here there is no peace now that the deep-sea divers have invented their instruments. Float up again, then, take a deep breath, and plunge once more into activities, the kind called honor, occupation, family, society, before the caisson is pried open by the deep-sea divers. “How much?” Coins, many coins, thrown into the hard blue eyes of the inn-keeper.

  The sky was still feathered with manifold grays, not a sign of the countless Irish greens, as I made my way to the other church. Not much time had passed: the beggar was standing in the church doorway, and the cigarette I had placed between his lips was just being taken out of his mouth by schoolboys, the end nipped off with care so as not to lose a single crumb of tobacco, the butt placed carefully in the beggar’s coat pocket, his cap removed—who, even when he has lost both arms, would enter the house of God with his cap on his head?—the door was held open for him, the empty coatsleeves slapped against the doorposts: they were wet and dirty, as if he had dragged them through the gutter, but inside no one is bothered by dirt.

  St. Patrick’s Cathedral had been so empty, so clean, and so beautiful; this church was full of people, full of cheap sentimental decoration, and although it wasn’t exactly dirty it was messy: the way a living room looks in a family where there are a lot of children. Some people—I heard that one was a German who thus spreads the blessings of German culture throughout Ireland—must make a fortune in Ireland with plaster figures, but anger at the maker of this junk pales at the sight of those who pray in front of his products: the more highly colored, the better; the more sentimental, the better: “as lifelike as possible” (watch out, you who are praying, for life is not “lifelike”).

  A dark-haired beauty, defiant-looking as an offended angel, prays before the statue of St. Magdalene; her face has a greenish pallor: her thoughts and prayers are written down in the book which I do not know. Schoolboys with hurling sticks under their arms pray at the Stations of the Cross; tiny oil lamps burn in dark corners in front of the Sacred Heart, the Little Flower, St. Anthony, St. Francis; here religion is savored to the last drop; the beggar sits in the last row, his twitching face turned toward the space where incense clouds still hang.

  New and remarkable achievements of the devotional industry are the neon halo around Mary’s head and the phosphorescent cross in the stoup, glowing rosily in the twilight of the church. Will there be separate entries in the book for those who prayed in front of this trash and those who prayed in Italy in front of Fra Angelico’s frescoes?

  The black-haired beauty with the greenish pallor is still staring at Magdalene, the beggar’s face is still twitching; his whole body is convulsed, the convulsions make the coins in his pocket tinkle softly; the boys with the hurling sticks seem to know the beggar, they seem to understand the twitching of his face, the low babble: one of them puts his hand into the beggar’s pocket, and on the boy’s grubby palm lie four coins: two pennies, a sixpence, and a threepenny bit. One penny and the threepenny bit remain on the boy’s palm, the rest tinkles into the offering box; here lie the frontiers of mathematics, psychology and political economy, the frontiers of all the more or less exact sciences crisscross each other in the twitching of the beggar’s epileptic face: a foundation too narrow for me to trust myself to it. But the cold from Swift’s tomb still clings to my heart: cleanliness, emptiness, marble figures, regimental banners, and the woman who was cleaning what was clean enough; St. Patrick’s Cathedral was beautiful, this church is ugly, but it is used, and I found on its benches something I found on many Irish church benches: little enamel plaques requesting a prayer: “Pray for the soul of Michael O’Neill, who died 17.1.1933 at the age of sixty. Pray for the soul of Mary Keegan, who died on May 9, 1945, at the age of eighteen”; what a pious, cunning blackmail; the dead come alive again, their date of death is linked in the mind of the one reading the plaque with his own experience that day, that month, that year. With twitching face Hitler was waiting to seize power when sixty-year-old Michael O’Neill died here; when Germany capitulated, eighteen-year-old Mary Keegan was dying. “Pray”—I read—“for Kevin Cassidy, who died 20.12.1930 at the age of thirteen,” and a shock went through me like an electric current, for in December 1930 I had been thirteen myself: in a great dark apartment in south Cologne—residential apartment house, is what it would have been called in 1908—I sat clutching my Christmas report; vacation had begun, and through a worn place in the cinnamon-colored drapes I looked down onto the wintry street.

  I saw the street colored reddish-brown, as if smeared with unreal, stage blood: the piles of snow were red, the sky over the city was red, and the screech of the streetcar as it swerved into the loop of the terminus, even this screech I heard as red. But when I pushed my face through the slit between the drapes I saw it as it really was: the edges of the snow islands were brown, the asphalt was black, the streetcar was the color of neglected teeth, but the grinding sound as the streetcar swerved into the loop, the grinding I heard as pale green—pale green as it shot piercingly up into the bare branches of the trees.

  On that day Kevin Cassidy died in Dublin, thirteen years old, the same age as I was then: here the bier was set up, Dies irae, dies illa was sung from the organ loft. Kevin’s frightened schoolmates filled the benches; incense, candle warmth, silver tassels on the black shroud, while I was folding up my report, getting my sled out from the closet to go tobogganing. I had a B in Latin, and Kevin’s coffin was being lowered into the grave.

  Later, when I had left the church and was walking along the streets, Kevin Cassidy was still beside me: I saw him alive, as old as I was, saw myself for a few moments as a thirty-seven-year-old Kevin: father of three children, living in the slums around St. Patrick’s; the whisky was bitter, cool, and costly, from Swift’s tomb ice needles came shooting out at him: his dark-haired wife’s face had a greenish pallor, he had debts and a little house like countless others in London, thousands in Dublin, modest, two-storied, poor; petty bourgeois, stuffy, depressing, is what the incorrigible esthete would call it (but watch out, esthete: in one of these houses James Joyce was born, in another Sean O’Casey).

  So close was Kevin’s shadow that I ordered two whiskies when I returned to the private drinking booth, but the shadow did not raise the glass to its lips, and so I drank for Kevin Cassidy, who died 20.12.1930 at the age of thirteen—I drank for him too.

  4

  MAYO—GOD HELP US

  In the center of Ireland, in Athlone,
two and a half hours by express from Dublin, the train is split up into two. The better half, the one with the dining car, goes on to Galway; the underprivileged half, the one we remain in, goes to Westport. We would be watching the departure of the dining car, where lunch was just being served, with even more painful emotions if we had any money, English or Irish, to pay for breakfast or lunch. But as it happens, since there was only half an hour between the arrival of the ship and the departure of the train and the exchange bureaus in Dublin do not open until 9:30, all we have is flimsy notes, useless here, just as they come from the printing presses of the German Federal Bank, and central Ireland knows no rate for these.

  I still have not quite got over the scare I had in Dublin: when I left the station to look for a place to change some money, I was almost run over by a bright-red panel truck whose sole decoration was a big swastika. Had someone sold Völkischer Beobachter delivery trucks here, or did the Völkischer Beobachter still have a branch office here? This one looked exactly like those I remembered; but the driver crossed himself as he smilingly signaled to me to proceed, and on closer inspection I saw what had happened. It was simply the “Swastika Laundry,” which had painted the year of its founding, 1912, clearly beneath the swastika; but the mere possibility that it might have been one of those others was enough to take my breath away.

  I could not find a bank open and returned discouraged to the station, having already decided to let the train for Westport leave as I could not pay for the tickets. We had the choice of taking a hotel room and waiting till the next day, till the next train (for the afternoon train would be too late for us to make our bus connection)—or in some way boarding the Westport train without tickets; this “some way” was found: we traveled on credit. The stationmaster in Dublin, touched by the spectacle of three tired children, two dejected women, and a helpless father (escaped only two minutes earlier from the swastika truck!), worked out that the night in the hotel would cost as much as the whole train journey to Westport: he wrote down my name, the number of persons traveling on credit, shook my hand reassuringly, and signaled to the train to leave.

  So on this strange island we managed to enjoy the only kind of credit which we had never been given and never tried to obtain, the credit of a railway company.

  But unfortunately there was no breakfast on credit in the dining car; the attempt to obtain it failed: the bank notes, in spite of the crisp new paper, did not convince the headwaiter. With a sigh we changed the last pound, had the Thermos flask filled with tea and ordered a package of sandwiches. The conductors were left with the stern duty of writing strange names down in their notebooks. It happened once, twice, three times, and the alarming question arose for us: shall we have to pay these unique debts once, twice, or three times?

  The new conductor, who joined the train at Athlone, had red hair and was eager and young; when I confessed to him that we had no tickets, a ray of recognition crossed his face. Clearly he had been told about us, clearly our names and our credit together with the number of persons traveling on credit had been telegraphed through from station to station.

  For four hours after Athlone, the train, now a local one, wound its way through smaller and smaller stations farther and farther to the west. The highlights of its stops were the towns between Athlone (9,000 inhabitants) and the coast: Roscommon and Claremorris, with as many inhabitants as there are people living in three city apartment blocks; Castlebar, capital of County Mayo, with four thousand; and Westport with three thousand inhabitants; on one stretch, corresponding roughly to the distance between Cologne and Frankfurt, the population dwindles consistently, then comes the great water and beyond that New York with three times as many inhabitants as the whole Republic of Ireland, with more Irish than there are living in the three counties beyond Athlone.

  The stations are small, the station buildings light green, the fences around them snow-white, and on the platform there usually stands a solitary boy who has taken one of his mother’s trays and hung it around his neck with a leather strap: three bars of chocolate, two apples, a few rolls of peppermints, chewing gum and a comic; we wanted to entrust our last silver shilling to one of these lads, but the choice was difficult. The women were in favor of apples and peppermint; the children, of chewing gum and the comic. We compromised and bought the comic and a bar of chocolate. The comic had the promising title of Batman, and the cover showed a man in a dark mask climbing up the outsides of houses.

  The smiling boy stood there all alone on the little station in the bog. The gorse was in bloom, the fuchsia hedges were already budding; wild green hills, mounds of peat; yes, Ireland is green, very green, but its green is not only the green of meadows, it is the green of moss—certainly here, beyond Roscommon, toward County Mayo—and moss is the plant of resignation, of forsakenness. The country is forsaken, it is being slowly but steadily depopulated, and we—none of us had ever seen this strip of Ireland, or the house we had rented “somewhere in the west”—we felt a little apprehensive: in vain the women looked left and right of the train for potato fields, vegetable plots, for the fresh, unresigned green of lettuce, the darker green of peas. We divided the bar of chocolate and tried to console ourselves with Batman, but he was really a bad man. Not only, as the cover had promised, did he climb up the outsides of houses; one of his chief pleasures was evidently to frighten women in their sleep; he could also fly off through the air by spreading out his cloak, taking millions of dollars with him, and his deeds were described in an English such as is taught neither in Continental schools nor in the schools of England and Ireland; Batman was strong and terribly just, but hard, and toward the wicked he could even be cruel, for now and again he would bash in someone’s teeth, a procedure fittingly rendered with the word “Screech.” There was no comfort in Batman.

  A different comfort awaited us: our red-haired conductor appeared and wrote us down with a smile for the fifth time. This mysterious process of frequent notation was now explained. We had crossed a county borderline again and were in County Mayo. Now the Irish have a strange custom: whenever the name of County Mayo is spoken (whether in praise, blame, or noncommittally), as soon as the mere word Mayo is spoken, the Irish add: “God help us!” It sounds like the response in a litany: “Lord have mercy upon us!”

  The conductor disappeared with the solemn assurance that he would not have to write us down again, and we stopped at a little station. Here they unloaded what had been unloaded at all the other stations: cigarettes, that was all. We had already acquired the habit of estimating the size of the hinterland according to the size of the bales of cigarettes unloaded, and, as a look at the map proved, our calculation was correct. I walked through the train to the baggage car to see how many bales of cigarettes were still left. There was one small bale and one large one, so I knew how many more stations were ahead. The train had become alarmingly empty. I counted eighteen people, of whom we alone were six, and we seemed to have been traveling for an eternity past peat stacks, across bogs, and still there was no sign of the fresh green of lettuce, or the darker green of peas, or the bitter green of potatoes. Mayo, we said under our breath. God help us!

  We stopped, the large bale of cigarettes was unloaded, and looking over the snow-white fence of the station platform were some dark faces, shaded by peaked caps, men who seemed to be guarding a column of automobiles. I had noticed these at other stations too, the cars and the waiting, watching men; it was only now that I remembered how often I had already seen them. They seemed familiar, like the bundles of cigarettes, like our conductor and the little Irish freight cars, which are scarcely more than half the size of the English and Continental ones. I entered the baggage car where our red-haired friend was squatting on the last bale of cigarettes; using the English words with care, like a novice juggler handling china plates, I asked him the significance of these dark men with the peaked caps, and what the cars were standing there for; I anticipated some kind of folkloric explanation: a modern version of an abduction, a highwa
y robbery, but the conductor’s answer was disconcertingly simple:

  “Those are taxis,” he said, and I breathed a sigh of relief. So whatever happens there are taxis, just as sure as there are cigarettes. The conductor seemed to have noticed my suffering: he offered me a cigarette, I accepted it gladly, he lit it for me and said with a reassuring smile:

  “We’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  Right on schedule we arrived ten minutes later in Westport. Here we were given a ceremonial reception. The stationmaster himself, a tall, dignified elderly gentleman, took up a position in front of our compartment, a friendly smile on his face, and by way of welcome raised a large engraved brass baton, symbol of his office, to his cap. He helped the ladies, helped the children, signaled for a porter, guided me deliberately but unobtrusively into his office, wrote down my name, my address in Ireland, and advised me in fatherly fashion not to depend on being able to change my money in Westport. His smile became even gentler when I showed him my German bank notes, and he said, “Nice, very nice,” adding kindly:

  “There’s no hurry, you know, there’s really no hurry, you’ll pay all right. Don’t worry.”

  Again I quoted the rate of exchange, but the dignified old man merely waved his brass baton gently from side to side, saying:

  “I shouldn’t worry.” (And all the time the billboards were exhorting us to worry. “Think of your future. Safety first! Provide for your children!”)

  But I was still worrying. Our credit had brought us this far, but would it take us any farther, a two-hour stop in Westport, two and a half hours by bus to our destination, across County Mayo—God help us?