A few old men in sombre black suits were drinking at the bar. I approached them and ordered a pint of Guinness—my first taste of the holy water. One of them turned to look at me, perhaps alerted by my Ozzie accent. His lined face, grey stubble, and shabby black suit reminded me of an Irish version of Mandu.
“You’re a long way from home, son.” His voice was as dark as my pint of the Black Stuff. “What brings you to our neck of the woods?”
He stared at me with the same piercing gaze as the Master and the Aboriginal shaman. There was a lifetime of experience behind those eyes, just as there was with those other two old blokes.
“G’day mate” I replied. “I’m a windsurfer and I’m here to chase storms.” It was a ridiculous statement, here in a bar on Dublin’s main street, but it was the best I could come up with at short notice. “I’m told you normally get a few coming in off the Atlantic in the autumn?”
His face creased into a grin. Mandu’s smile was radiant, like the sun, this bloke’s was a black hole—sardonic, cruel, sucking everything in and giving nothing back.
“That we do, son. You’ll be wanting to get yourself over to the west coast then. To the Maharees, where my family’s from.”
“Yeah. Right. I’m heading over there soon. I’m just doing the tourist thing first. You know, checking out the history and stuff.”
“So, you’re interested in our history … What about our politics?”
“Yeah, well mate, I don’t know much about politics, but I know that just like there’re a lot of storms here, there’s always been plenty to talk about—the Troubles and all that ...”
I tailed off into embarrassed mumbling. There you go Nick, sailing too close to the wind again. Oh well, might as well bite the bullet (a sly grin, given what was in my jacket pocket) …
“Actually, mate, there is another reason I’m in Dublin. I’m looking for a bloke called Martyn O’Connor. I gather he’s a regular in here?”
There was an awkward silence, a tumbleweed moment. Heads turned to eyeball me. I was acutely aware of the gun in my pocket. He left a bar’s rest for the tension to build ... then defused it, masterfully:
“Ah yes, well you’re in the right place, t’be sure.” He offered me his hand. “Good morning Nick—or would you prefer I called you Brian? Nice choice of alias by the way, Mr Cowen.”
My mouth opened to respond, but I struggled to connect brain and vocal cords. I stared at him, like a goldfish. After several uncomfortable seconds I realised his hand was still extended towards me. I shut my mouth and tried to look him in the eye as I grasped it. His handshake was firmer than necessary, his eyes stabbed me, and he still had that mocking grin.
I gulped down the rest of my Guinness. It helped. He ordered another for me. There was silence as the barman went through the required ritual: fill glass to within an inch of the top, wait a minute until the head settles, fill the remaining 5%, chop off the overhanging creamy bit. We watched patiently—it seemed inappropriate to speak while this was going on. The barman put my pint down in front of me and the old bloke in black broke the silence:
“So, we’ll call you Nick then. I never could stand that Cowen fella. Anyway, I believe my charlatan brother sent you?”
“Umm, yes, that’s right—but how did you ...”
“Ah well, there’s not much in this town I don’t know about. For instance, I know ... (a pause worthy of Mandu) ... that you’re carrying a weapon.”
The piercing gaze and cruel smile tortured me. I cringed into my barstool, completely out of my depth, a boy amongst men. He ignored my discomfort and ploughed on:
“No worries, as I believe you fellas say, I’d ‘ave done the same. In fact, we’re all armed ourselves, aren’t we boys?”
He gestured around the bar, to general poker-faced assent. I felt like a stooge in a game they were playing with me.
“To be honest with ya, I got a message from a fella called Pablo that Alex was sending you to settle things between us. Now that’s typical of my eejit brother—he sends some punk to do his dirty work because he’s not sure how I’m going to react if he turns up here again.”
“Again?” I picked up on his implication: “You mean you’ve met Alejandro in here before?”
That sardonic smile again.
“You’re sharper than you look, Nick. Yep, that’s right. I met this feckin brother fella just the once, in 1981, and it was indeed in this very bar. I haven’t seen him since. Then you turn up, thirty-six years later!”
His accent made this sound like: “dirty-six years” and I couldn’t suppress a grin. I looked him in the eyes and caught just a hint of a twinkle there. He was seventy-eight years old—ancient, like Mandu, but I was beginning to feel a similar connection, bridging the generations.
“So, Mr O’Connor ...” I began, but he interrupted:
“Please, Nick, call me Martyn.”
He put his hand on my shoulder—a gesture familiar from blockbuster Mafia movies.
“OK, Martyn, Alejandro didn’t tell me you two had met before ...”
I was wondered what else he’d left out, and how much of what he had told me was true.
“Didn’t he? It didn’t go well, so I’m not surprised. It was a few months after he’d been back to Buenos Aires for the funeral. Alex was just twenty-eight, not much older than you. We all think we can solve the world’s problems at that age, don’t we?”
I shrugged. If the past two years had taught me anything it was that there was no chance of me solving any of the world’s problems.
“I was a revolutionary in my twenties,” he added, “but I was forty-two when my brother showed up here. Old enough to be a cynic. He had a hard time getting me to listen to his story, that’s f’sure.”
A flicker of a smile, as he replayed their meeting.
“For a start, it was news to me that I had a brother. This was the first I’d heard of him.”
I nodded.
“Then he told me that our mutual father, Ludwig Langer, had been living in Argentina and only just passed away … and that was news to me as well.”
I nodded, again. Of course, none of this was news to me.
“Y’see, I was raised by my mother’s family, over in Dingle, and they’d told me that both my parents had died fighting the Nazis. I was only five when my Father escaped from Germany with me and I hardly remember anything about him or our life there. It was all so long ago …”
He scratched his head, searching for something from his early childhood.
“There is one memory in here … (he tapped his forehead). I remember the day my mother disappeared, the day she was arrested …”
He paused and closed his eyes, reliving that terrible day seventy-four years ago. He shook his head sadly, and continued:
“My grandparents didn’t know much about Ludwig either—just that he had a funny German name but he wasn’t a Nazi; he didn’t share my grandparents’ religion or their politics; he had some strange ideas; and he was in love with my mother but he never married her. Granny O’Connor had an old photo of them, taken on Gowlane strand before I was born. They look happy together …”
He smiled, wistfully.
“So, my father was never mentioned, but they were always talking about Caitlin. She was a real hero in our village—getting herself educated, then fightin’ the Nazis and the Brits. I grew up worshipping her, tryin’ to follow in her footsteps, live up to her legacy. Then this brother fella showed up, to tell me all about Ludwig Langer …”
He frowned, and now I understood his cynicism: a stranger turns up out of the blue, claiming he’s a blood relative with a closet-full of family secrets …
“Anyway, he managed to get me t‘listen to his story—how my parents met, how my mother died, how Ludwig had never forgiven himself. I told him I could see why—it sounded as if the bastard had sold her short, given in, and collaborated with the Nazis.”
I shrugged and said that in my opinion it was more complicated than that.
“Is that right, Nick?” His lips twisted in amusement, his black hole of a smile. “Perhaps you know more about this Langer fella than I do?”
I shrugged, again. There was no need to reveal my hand just yet.
“So, when Alex told me about the will, how he’d inherited the lot, I suggested that he’d inherited his father’s guilt along with the money.”
I nodded and wondered if he knew about all the other stuff Alejandro feared he’d inherited—depression, mental instability, terminal dementia. None of it seemed to have affected Martyn though.
“Now, here’s a thing … Alex told me he only found out about me when he read our old man’s journal, and then it turned out we’d been living in the same town!”
He shook his head and grinned at the memory.
“You couldn’t fekin make it up, eh? Anyways, after he read this journal he even went over to Dingle to dig into my mother’s family. Of course, anyone who’d met Ludwig was dead and buried long before he got there.”
He took a swig of Guinness.
“We talked for a long time, my half-brother and me, sat right here at this bar. The more we talked the more it was clear that we might share the same father, but we didn’t share much else.”
Yes, that made sense. I could see now that they were polar opposites.
“Alex told me that to satisfy Ludwig’s will, and inherit everything, he had to promise to continue his work. Apparently, that meant starting some sort of hippy group, like the one Langer had in Germany in the thirties, when he met my mother. They were playing around with drugs and eastern mysticism. You know, the kind of thing that was big in the sixties?”
I smiled, thinking of Timothy Leary’s work with LSD, not to mention my own experiences with the Plant. But Martyn was not amused by that sort of stuff:
“Well, let me tell you, Nick, we weren’t messin’ around with feckin drugs and the like in the sixties. Not here we weren’t. I was brought up to fight for something—something that matters—to get our country back, centuries after it was stolen from us. Like I said, in the sixties I was a revolutionary, a soldier. In those days we were fighting the British army on the streets of Belfast, not getting high on dope.”
He gave me a look of such intensity that I felt like a naughty schoolboy being reprimanded by his stern headmaster. Then he relaxed a little, and the twinkle returned:
“OK, so we drank a fair bit of the Black Stuff and we might have smoked the odd spliff or two ...”
I smiled, nervously.
“... but the point is: we were fighting for something we believed in—something we were prepared to die for—something we still believe in! Don’t we boys?”
The men-in-black at the bar nodded in agreement, still poker-faced.
“Do the words: ‘Bloody Sunday’ mean anything t’you, Nick?”
I nodded and told him I’d heard of it. For me, it was a historical event—something that happened on the other side of the world, twenty years before I was born—a few minutes of grainy news footage. But not for Martyn:
“I remember that Sunday like it was yesterday. I was there, in Derry, working with Martin McGuinness in the Bogside, mobilising against internment. British soldiers shot twenty-eight unarmed civilians that day. Some of them were my friends. It’s not something you forget ...”
Silence. I wasn’t sure if he expected me to react, but I couldn’t think of anything to add. Bitterness surrounded me in the bar. Then he snapped back to the present:
“When I met this brother of mine, I was still locked into violence as the only way out. But let me tell you this, Nick: Thank God, those days are behind us now! OK, we didn’t win, but in all honesty we were never going to win the armed struggle. It was always just a stalemate, and it went on for too long. The so-called ‘Troubles’—what a feckin euphemism that is! So many people died ...”
Now he was looking his age, sadness etched into his face along with the anger and defiance.
“Now we’ve got to win the peace. That’s where we’re at now: playing politics instead of waging war. Martin McGuinness made the same journey as me—from soldier to politician, and the Good Friday Agreement is his legacy. When he shook hands with Ian Paisley some of his friends down here said he was selling us out, but not me. Like I said: too many people have died already.”
I nodded in agreement but I was way out of my depth, drowning in all the history and politics. It was time to reveal my hand and bring the conversation back to my current mission:
“Alejandro gave me a copy of your father’s journal. I read it on the plane coming over here.”
“Did you now?” That menacing grin again.
I gulped down some more Guinness.
“It explains things—the truth about Ludwig and your mother.”
He stared at me—a make-my-day-punk stare.
“Alejandro wants you to have it, Martyn. I think he’s hoping that when you read it you’ll see Ludwig’s side of the story, maybe even be able to forgive him.”
He looked at me. The intense stare softened, he stroked his stubble and gave me a slight nod.
I reached into my rucksack, aware of the tension surrounding me. I had the feeling that one false move and I’d be confronting the ‘armed struggle’ personally, but I managed to extract the manuscript and hand it to Martyn without adding to the Troubles.
He started to skim through it, speed-reading sections that caught his eye. I told him to keep it. Then I drank up, thanked him for his time, said I’d convey his feelings to his brother, and turned to leave the pub—mission accomplished ...
A couple of his comrades-in-arms shuffled into my path and blocked my exit. Their leader wasn’t finished with me just yet:
“Let me get you another pint, Nick (he gestured to the barman). Thirty-six years since I last heard from him and then you show up here ... (he stroked his chin thoughtfully). He tried to get me to join his feckin group, you know—started rabbeting on about Langer’s philosophy, his travels, his ‘knowledge’ ... I told him where to stuff his hippy nonsense!”
A ripple of laughter from his mates. I sat back down at the bar and drained some more Guinness. I didn’t seem to have much choice but to accept his ‘hospitality’.
“When I got a message from yer man, Pablo, I thought there might be more to it. That maybe this feckin eejit half-brother might be sending someone to do me some harm. Then you walked in here, with your hand on the gun in yer pocket ...”
He showed me that ironic grin again, evidently amused by the idea that anyone would send me to do him some harm.
“By the way, Nick, after sixty odd years in this game I can usually tell when someone’s packin’ a pistol—it’s why I’m still around and not proppin’ up the daisies.”
I nodded, completely out of my comfort zone now.
“So when you walked in, tooled up, I was thinking that this might be some sort of assassination attempt ... (another stroke of his stubble) ... until you opened yer mouth.”
I felt the start of a blush. Too embarrassed to shrug, I smiled. He matched my awkward smile with his black hole of a grin.
“Let me give you some advice before you walk out of here. Watch yer back, Nick. There’s a reason why he gave you that gun. There’s plenty of bad fellas down here in the South y’know, from both sides, on the run, still killing people. It’s in their blood. They’d be lost without the kick they get from shootin’ people. So you watch yer back, OK?”
I nodded and thanked him for the warning. The cynical, mocking grin softened into genuine warmth.
“You’re a good lad, Nick. I can see that.” He patted me on the back, and I felt like a kid again. “I know what the blackfellas in yer country went through when those convicts arrived from England, and what you’ve had to put up with ever since. We’re comrades, y’know. Both of us have been colonised by those feckin Brits!”
Murmurs of agreement from our fellow drinkers. I was halfway through my third pint and the Black Stuff was working its
magic. We grinned at each other and now the smiles were genuine.
I told him about my own connections with the Emerald Isle—how I shared my surname with the famous half-Irish Ozzie outlaw, Ned Kelly, although of course I couldn’t match his high standards in the role. I told Martyn that I might not be much cop as an assassin, but I certainly shared his views about the Poms.
The laughter in the Oval Bar was unambiguous. I was one of them. A fellow outlaw, a brother-in-arms. Martyn asked to look at the pistol I was “packing”. I showed it to him and he appraised it expertly:
“Yeah, not bad Nick. It’ll get you out of a sticky situation ... (he aimed it playfully at my head) ... but only if it has bullets in it!” he added, squeezing the trigger.
It was still raining when I stepped outside—grey, misty drizzle that made everything ghostly. Did it ever stop here? Martyn’s advice to “watch yer back” was still rattling around my brain as I peered into the murky half-light, scanning the street. Could I trust anyone in this city of shadows?
Pablo was waiting for me, in a smart black van with blacked-out windows. He opened the passenger door and I climbed in. As usual señor Fix-it said nothing—no greeting, no questions about my meeting in the Oval Bar, no hint of where we were going. Instead, he gestured behind him. There, in the back of the van, was my trusty WHY? wave-board and a quiver of new sails. It looked like he’d been busy while I’d been talking to Martyn, and it explained why he’d been so keen to discuss windsurfing equipment after I’d finished reading the journal. A quick glance confirmed that he’d made the correct choices.
We set off in silence, travelling west. The grey city streets became suburban sprawl, and then we were on a highway through lush green countryside. It had been quite a while since I’d seen fields, farms, cows, sheep ... I’d got so used to WA’s stark monochrome deserts. Ireland was a relief, a breath of fresh air. Now we were out of the city the soft rain made sense—the softness was beguiling, mysterious. Instead of the harsh Australian glare there was this pale, misty, soft-focus light. I sat back, stared out of the window, and enjoyed the scenery.
Too Close to the Wind Page 27