Piecework

I.

BELFAST

We spent the first night high up on Finaghy Road North in streets completely devoid of light. IRA guerrillas waited in the darkness behind barricades made of sheet-iron and paving stones. The Falls Road, the main street of the Catholic district, was sealed off. There was heavy fighting in the White Rock Road. Finaghy was deadly quiet. There was no moon and occasionally the stillness would be punctuated by a distant burst from an automatic rifle.

The lads want the Army, an old friend said, they want to have a go.

Now, finally, everyone seems to want to have a go. The men of the IRA are fighting a civil war against 12,000 heavily armed British troops. In addition to the British troops there is the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) built on the remnants of the old discredited B-Special militia. Since Saturday at least 25 people have died in the fighting, hundreds have been injured. Almost 4000 refugees have traveled across the border into the Irish Republic. Factories have been demolished, homes put to the torch. More than 300 men have been arrested and held without arraignment under provisions of the Special Powers Act, a law that the Greek or South African government would love to have for themselves. The city is in a shambles and still the fighting goes on.

Yesterday the fighting was sporadic. A light drizzle fell through the day. There was shooting from the Divis Street flats, a brief battle made more complicated by the presence of UVF snipers. Most of all it was a day in which all sides caught their breath. The English Prime Minister Edward Heath had finally finished the yacht race he had been on while his subjects died and was back in London. There had been a call from Dublin for a three-party conference and some wanted to see what would develop. But nobody had any real hope.

In the light of day the signs of the bitterness and blood were everywhere on the Whiterock Road which leads to the largely pro-IRA housing estate of Ballymurphy. The walls of the city cemetery had been torn out in big gaping piles for use as barricades. Along the wall of the cemetery one of the “lads” (frequently a euphemism for the IRA) had painted in two-foot-high letters the ultimate question of an oppressed people: “Is There A Life Before Death?” It stood there in the gray morning light at once very Catholic and very revolutionary while children played in the rubble which had been pushed aside by the British bulldozers. Is there a life before death?

The night before, sitting in someone’s parlor on Finaghy Road talking to the women, who were fearful for their men, one middle-aged woman burst out, “If I was a man I’d get a gun myself. I was never bitter before. I thought you could take this life here and hope for the best. Well, there’s a lot of us here now just won’t wait. The men on this street are all unemployed, every last one of them and they’ve got nothing to lose. They feel disgraced in front of their women and children. Now they’re fighting. They’re goin’ after something and even if it’s all bloody hopeless, at least they’ll go like men.”

The women have been extraordinary. In the afternoon on the Falls Road at the corner of Broadway about 300 women and a few dozen children gathered around a Saracen tank and battered away on it with the metal tops of garbage cans until it left. Across the street a knot of men gathered in front of the Beehive, an ornate saloon full of brass and wood. They wore the sullen masks of men who had been too long unemployed. But the women were firebrands, led by a red-haired, tight-lipped young woman who gripped a stick in her hand.

“If the nationalists was all together, see, they’d be able to do it,” she said tossing her hair in the drizzle. “Too many of the men are Jilly-Jaries. They wear the skirts. But the women, we’re not afraid to die for the country.”

She talked about the First Presbyterian Church, a great orange-brick pile that stood in silence a few doors away. “We haven’t done anything to the Protestants. We haven’t touched that church of theirs. They’ve burned our churches. They’ve driven our people out of their area. But we know it’s not the Protestants. It’s the politicians.”

“I don’t know where it’s goin’,” the red-haired woman said, “but they can’t put the best of our men in prison. They can’t keep doing this without a fight. It’s a war now and I don’t care because I’m not afraid to die.”

The clouds moved slowly through the sky. The rain fell. An empty hearse from O’Kane’s Funeral Parlor came down the Falls Road. Someone else had been buried at the cemetery up on the hill and standing in the strange chill you were certain that before it was over Mr. O’Kane would have a lot more customers.

II.

BELFAST

From 8000 feet it looked like the same old Ireland; the green, placid rectangles running off to the Atlantic, as if the earth were celebrating its own sweet order; farm houses and hedgerows and cattle decorating its face; mists lacing the low hills. But as we descended into this hard northern city, that old Ireland began to fade, as the cold smoke of revolution twisted up from the red-brick streets, and the faces of the other passengers tightened into masks. The Belfast face is an anthology of masks.

“Too long a sacrifice,” wrote W. B. Yeats, “can make a stone of the heart.” And moving into Belfast in this desperate week, you saw that too long a sacrifice had already taken place: too many years of bigotry, too many years of being offered humiliation or exile as the sole choices of a life, and finally too much blood.

Instead you saw the skeletons of transmitting towers rusting in the countryside; suburban houses reduced to rubble; great gaping holes in the once tight-packed walls of the downtown avenues; plywood and tin covering a thousand shattered windows. Belfast was a town at war, its heart turning to stone.

And as we walked into customs, at Aldergrove Airport, for a long and tedious search, everyone there knew that the crunch had come. The day before, 13 Irishmen had been returned to the Irish earth, while 20,000 people stood in lashing rain and sleet outside St. Mary’s Church in Derry. Inside the church, the bishops and lord mayors and aldermen sat in silken mourning beside the families of the dead. But Ireland flowed up the hills of the Catholic ghetto called the Creggan, made up of men with cloth caps, women with worn faces, the working people of Derry, scattered under umbrellas holding off the rain. Bernadette Devlin stood outside in the rain, with Ireland.

That ceremony was at the heart of the crunch. Those 13 had been shot down on Sunday Bloody Sunday, and the Irish tragedy hurtled forward in a series of jump cuts: Bernadette Devlin slamming Reginald Maudling in the House of Commons; the British Home Stores in Belfast being blown apart at dawn; the Republic withdrawing its ambassador from London and sending Foreign Secretary Hillery to New York; and then 30,000 people in Dublin burning out the British Embassy. After Sunday there was more happening in Ireland than the IRA.

In the afternoon we went to the Lombard Room of the Royal Avenue Hotel, where officers of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Assn. announced to a packed smokey press conference that Sunday’s march in the border town of Newry would go on as scheduled. The British reporters practically interrogated the civil rights people as if simply showing up in a public place in Northern Ireland was a guarantee of violence. But in Derry last Sunday the only dead were Irishmen, none of whom were armed. If this Sunday’s march turned violent it would be the British Army that turned it violent, not Irishmen asking for civil rights.

At nightfall, a dense brown fog mixed with the smoke of burning buildings seeped through the city. We started to move towards the Catholic ghetto in the Lower Falls Road. British soldiers edged their way through the fog, their blackened faces looking as blank as the nose of a machine gun. In the distance, we heard a burst of automatic weapons fire, muffled shouts, and men running in the fog. There was no edge to the buildings, no conventional geography in those darkened streets.

We were put up against a wall and searched. There was the tap-tap-tap of a rifle again. Up ahead, a mangled pile of vehicles burned an orange hole in the brown fog. The British were trying to clear the barricades, which had been built to prevent them from having easy access to the area, and from the Divis Street flats, Irishmen with guns were shooting back. A knot of young people, grim and almost insanely courageous, heaved rocks and curses at the Saracen light tanks.

“Bastards, murderin’ bastards,” someone shouted from the darkness. There were more voices in the dark, running feet, smashing glass, isolated shots, and still the fog moved down the Falls Road. The British laid down a barrage of 4-inch-long rubber bullets from grenade launchers and the young people scattered. More shots came from the Divis Street flats. Two rounds slammed into the plywood covering of the shuttered bar where I was standing. And then suddenly it was quiet. The fog covered everything, and the British soldiers started to withdraw.

It was Friday morning and the night belonged to the IRA.

III.

BELFAST

You see them shopping along the Shankill Road in the dull grainy Northern afternoons: tidy women pushing baby carriages, men in wool suits, children playing with plastic guns. The side streets are bristling with Union Jacks and red, white and blue bunting, and you can see the gray iron wall of the “peace line” at the end of some of the streets, and the spray-can graffiti of the Protestant ghetto: “IRA Beware” and “No Pope Here” and “Home Rule Is Rome Rule” and “No Surrender.”

These are the Protestants of Northern Ireland, and seldom has a majority ever acted more like a minority; these are people who inhabit a fortress, their minds in a state of siege.

“We’re British,” a man told me one afternoon, standing angrily on a corner of Sandy Row, with the stunted slum houses of the Protestant working class ghetto spread out behind him. “We’ll remain British, even if Heath sells us out, even if Faulkner sells us out.”

The man was a welder in the Harland and Woolf shipyards (in which there are only 100 Catholics in a 9000-man work force). He spoke in the hard, heavy accents of the Belfast working class; his tone, with all its cargo of intractable resentment and suspicion of betrayal, was unmistakably Irish. In London, he would be labeled “Paddy” along with the rest of the Irish. But here in Belfast, this city strangling on the stale meal of history, he was insisting that he was British; it was as if a can of tomato soup, through some act of pop alchemy, could describe itself as a ham sandwich.

“The basic confusion here,” a British reporter said to me one night, “is that they’ve got their notions of lunatic patriotism mixed up with their notions of lunatic religion. They’re sick with religion.”

The phrase was apt. If Belfast is not precisely sick with organized religion, it is certainly sick with churches (the buildings, not the faiths). The churches are everywhere: 55 for the Church of Ireland (Anglican), 65 for the Presbyterians, 35 for the Methodists, 4 for the Reformed Presbyterians, 17 for the Baptists, 9 for the Congregationalists, 6 for the Evangelical Presbyterians, 24 for the Roman Catholics, 4 for the Non-Subscribing Presbyterians, 8 for the Elem Pentecostals, 1 for the Christian Scientists, 13 for the Salvation Army, 2 for the Society of Friends, 2 for the Moravians, 5 for the Apostolics, 1 for the Plymouth Brethren, 2 for the Emanual Mission, 5 for the Free Presbyterians, 3 for the Church of Latter Day Saints, 1 for the Seventh Day Adventists, plus 1 Railway Mission, 1 Coalmen’s Mission, and a number of smaller gospel halls. There is one church for every 1000 adults. And in the 1961 census, only 64 people in all of Northern Ireland (pop: 1,500,000) described themselves as atheists.

The result of this overdose of organized Christianity has been destruction, bigotry, fear, hatred, paranoia and death. Walking the streets of this town, where the smoke from the bombed-out buildings hangs in the air for days while church spires stab at the skies like the spears of pagan armies, it is difficult to understand what Christianity thinks it is doing here.

There are, of course, thousands of Protestants who are neither bigots nor Bible-thumping fundamentalist lunatics, and a number of them have finally begun to talk about the inevitability of a 32-county Ireland. But down in those Shankill churches, many of the less educated are continuing to lock themselves into the prison of dogma.

The phrases have the high keening tenor of apocalypse about them: “Roman Catholicism is the Anti-Christ, Greatest of all Harlots, and Cause of all Our Present Discontents. Bernadette Devlin is the Pope’s Whore.”

The mixture of lurid sexual metaphor with statements of moral purity laces the language of the Protestant ghettoes; the language is accompanied by an almost touchingly naive belief in the now-forgotten slogans of the past. Consider the words of one Protestant battle hymn (“Ye Loyalists of Ireland”):

It’s a measure of how removed some sections of this city are from the rest of the world that grown men can still sing that song and mean it, in the last third of the 20th century. They can still march in the great Protestant parades on the 12th of July, festooned with orange sashes, crowned with bowler hats, in some pathetic imitation of their old rulers, talking as if the Battle of Boyne, when the Protestants smashed the Catholics, had taken place the week before and not in 1690.

“Rem. 1690,” of all things, is still scrawled on the crumbling walls of the Protestant ghettos, and wonderfully decorative paintings of William of Orange appear everywhere.

The terrible thing, of course, is that when all the festive marching has finished, and the dread invasion of the Papists has been repulsed, and all the defiant songs have been sung, the men of the Orange Order retreat back to Sandy Row and the streets off the Shankill Road, and they are poor again and wondering whether their sons will have to quit school and go to work, and whether their daughters will go off to England, and whether this week they might actually have a piece of steak.

There is much talk now in the North about the possibility of a violent Protestant backlash. In effect, there has been no fighting here between Protestants and Catholics since 1969; the fighting has really been between the IRA and the British Army. All arms searches have been in Catholic areas; no members of the Protestant militant groups — the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Tartans and others — were interned last Aug. 9th.

One reason for the ferocity of the Catholic and Republican resistance here is that the British Army’s task appears to be to disarm the Catholics, thereby leaving them at the mercy of a heavily armed Protestant majority. There are 100,000 licensed guns in the hands of Protestants, and one Belfast reporter told me that the number of unlicensed ones might be double that.

“This is what the backlash is supposed to be about,” the reporter told me. “It won’t actually happen, of course. You won’t get 100,000 Protestants fighting the Catholics any more than you ever see 50,000,000 Arabs assembling to fight Israel. But it serves the political ends of the people in power to keep talking about a backlash. They might, though I doubt it, actually talk it into happening.”

IV.

BELFAST

On the last day, the Saracens still moved through the city with their guns bristling and the eyes of the soldiers alert for sudden movement, while people stood on the streets in sullen hostility. The prisoners were still behind the wire at Long Kesh and Magilligan; there were still Irishmen stuffed in the hold of the prison ship Maidstone, standing in the Belfast harbor, within sight of the country they loved so much they were willing to die or be jailed for it.

A department store had been blown up, a bank raided, soldiers fired on in some country town.” Once again, it became devastatingly clear that reporters are essentially tourists at other people’s tragedies.

And yet when you prepare to leave this tragic country, there is always a sense that the story has not been fully told, that there is neither language nor sufficient compassion to properly spin the tale. The country hurt Yeats into poetry. It has not changed. Not in 50 years. Not in 300.

I wish I had been able to tell it all better, to explain that what is happening in the northeast corner of this island off the shores of Western Europe has something important to say to those of us who live in America. All the big abstractions are in it: the need for justice, the oppression that can lead men to violence, the destruction that always follows when decency and human goodness are set aside with contempt and bitterness.

But this is also about men who cannot feed their children and have seen them go off to Australia and America and Liverpool for five generations, and have decided at last that no more children will have to abandon the country in which they are born.

If that takes the Thompson gun, if it takes gelignite in the night, if it takes membership in the IRA, no matter; in Andersonstown, the Belfast stronghold of the Provisional IRA, there is 41 per cent unemployment among heads of families; but they are not leaving. They are prepared to die on their feet in their own land.

The story is also about women: easily the most extraordinary group of women I’ve ever met. Their men are in the concentration camps, or on the run. But go down into the Bogside in Derry, move through Ballymurphy and Andersonstown and Ballymacarat in Belfast, and you will see women holding it together; they paint the walls white in the afternoons to make the British soldiers better targets at night; they bang the garbage can lids when the soldiers approach, to warn the IRA men that the soldiers are coming and the arms must be stashed or used. They manage families, and have time for tea and gossip; but they are the iron of the Irish rebellion. In Edward R. Murrow’s phrase (used about the British in 1940), they are people who have decided to live a life, and not an apology.

Northern Ireland means something to Americans because much of what is happening here is happening in other forms in the United States. “We’re the blacks of Northern Ireland,” one young Irishman said to me. And there are of course parallels to the black experience in America. In Northern Ireland, Catholics are the last to be hired and the first to be fired. The artificial barrier of religion is used in the same way that the artificial matter of skin color is used in the United States, to separate working men from each other, to the advantage of a few.

In fact, since 1969 there have been no direct clashes between Catholics and Protestants in Belfast. There has been an urban guerrilla war between the IRA and the British Army; there has been much destruction of property. But there have been no true religious riots, no more than there were actual race riots in America during the late 1960s.

A number of blacks employed violence against property and against authority, an authority they believed was corrupt and oppressive; but there were never any large confrontations between blacks and whites. The IRA men are now essentially doing the same thing, with the large differences being that they are fighting in a much smaller country and they are a much larger minority in Northern Ireland than the blacks are in the United States. But their basic motivations, like those of the blacks, are economic. They are poor; they are the men of no property, and they want to live decent lives.

At present, the IRA are winning their guerrilla war. Even with internment, even with the presence of 15,000 British troops, the men and women of the Provisional wing of the IRA are continuing to fight. It is not just the killing of British soldiers by which you measure their effectiveness; they are also destroying the economy of the country.

They are winning because they are not losing. When a band of urban guerrillas can hold off the British Army and provide protection for their own people while causing extensive damage to the opposition, they are winning.

When I first went to Northern Ireland in 1963, the IRA were considered a tiny band of dreamy fanatics. That is no longer the case.

The two most recent events that insured their continued existence were the start of internment on Aug. 9 last year, and the killing of 13 civilians in Derry on Bloody Sunday. Those killings ended any possibility that the general Catholic population could ever accept the authority of the Northern Ireland government at Stormont, and destroyed any vestigial belief that the British Army was there in a spirit of fair-minded good will.

After Bloody Sunday, it was up to the IRA to fight on forever, if necessary, because there seemed no other choice.

They will not have to fight on forever, of course, because the British government will not be able to sustain the Northern Ireland situation much longer. Public opinion polls show that a majority of British people want the troops out of Northern Ireland.

The Heath government is floundering around in multiple crises: Rhodesia, the miners’ strike, the great power shortage, and unemployment that has passed 1,000,000 and is climbing. Before this year is out, and probably sooner than later, the war in Northern Ireland will go to a conference table.

At that conference table, everyone who might upset a settlement must be represented. The IRA will be there, because, like the Viet Cong, they have bled for the right to be there. The militant Protestants will be there, so that their suspicions about the motives of the Catholic South can be eased; in talks with literally hundreds of Catholics in Northern Ireland, not one ever said that he or she would like to do to the Protestants what the Protestants have been doing to the Catholics for so many years. Not one argued for union with the Catholic South on terms dictated from Dublin.

Such a peace conference must lead to the final end of the British presence in Ireland and the creation of a new state. The tough, hard people of Northern Ireland have fought for too long to see their fight usurped by the comfortable middle-class bureaucrats of Dublin.

They want a new Ireland, not simply an Ireland in which the six counties in the North are tacked onto the South. A peace conference would almost certainly lead to an all-Ireland constitutional convention, with full representation for every possible point of view, from right-wing fascist to the Maoists and the great majority in between. And from that convention will come the new Ireland, shaped and led by the Irish.

All of this assumes that there is reason and compassion in London, which might be a false assumption. But if Heath and the British government keep on this way, there is no prospect for anything except more killing and more destruction. Until the day when reason prevails, the fighting will go on.

V.

There are no Saint Patrick’s Day parades in the Ireland of Gerry Adams. There are no leprechauns. There is no green beer. There are few toora-loora-loora sentimentalities, no room for sure-and-begor-rah stage-Irishmen. Gerry Adams lives in the real Ireland, and it’s a very dangerous place.

“I suppose there’s a 90 per cent chance I’ll be assassinated,” Adams said in early 1984, “and that upsets me on a human level.”

On March 14, 1984, some of the people who would like to permanently upset Adams on a human level made their move. In broad daylight in the shadow of the Victorian city hall in Belfast, three members of the Ulster Freedom Fighters, a Protestant paramilitary group, came roaring from a side street in a gray Cortina and fired nine shots at a car carrying Adams and three friends. Adams was shot in the neck, right shoulder and upper arm. But this time, to the dismay of his enemies, Adams would live.

At 38, lean, bearded, tweedy, he is the head of Sinn Fein, the legal political party that supports the outlawed Irish Republican Party (IRA) in its fight for a unified Ireland. He is the elected member of the British Parliament from West Belfast, although he refuses to swear an oath of loyalty to the British Grown and formally take the seat. Adams is a republican, with a small “r,” and a socialist. And though he is capable of self-mocking laughter, dark ironies, private humors, Gerry Adams is a very serious man.

Some of that seriousness is evident in the major facts of his life. Consider just one: from 1970 to 1980, Gerry Adams, the son of a day-laborer, spent 4V2. years in British prison camps without ever coming before a jury. During that same decade, he was on the run for 14 months, always moving, wary of informers, hunted by British Army agents and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), which is the British-financed police force in the six counties of the North.

It was a heartbreaking decade in modern Irish history, and Adams was an intricate part of its numerous tragedies. He was a close friend of Bobby Sands, who died in a hunger strike, and he knew most of the others who followed Sands to the martyr’s grave. Many of Adams’ other republican friends have been killed, maimed or imprisoned in the grueling war that started in August 1969. Some have given up, left the field of battle, stepped away from the movement, emigrated. Adams struggles on. Dismiss him as a romantic revolutionary, say that the dream of a united Ireland is hopeless, that Irish nationalism is an anachronism, but you must give Gerry Adams this: he has not chosen to live an easy life.

“Adams speaks with the authority of his experience,” a Dublin newspaperman told me. “That’s his advantage over all other politicians in this country, north or south. He has paid a stiff personal price for his beliefs, and that can’t be taken away from him.”

In the years since the 1981 hunger strikes, Adams has led Sinn Fein (“Ourselves Alone” in Irish) to a prominent place in Irish politics. Sinn Fein has broadened its base, rolled up large votes, and begun to build a Tammany-style service organization, with six advice centers in West Belfast alone. It now seems possible that Adams might supplant John Hume, of the Social Democratic and Labor Party (SDLP), as principal representative of the Catholic nationalist side of the northern political equation. At the same time, Sinn Fein has become more active in the 26-county Republic to the south, battering heroin peddlers in the slums of Dublin, trying to channel the anger and disillusion of unemployed Irish youth into politics, presenting an alternative to what Adams calls “the tweedledum and tweedledee” of the Republic’s two major political parties.

“I think we’ll do all right in the next elections,” Adams says. “We’ve got a few things going for us.”

There are a number of people who believe that Adams is a mere front man for the IRA, if not its actual leader. Since membership in the IRA would send him to jail, the truth might not be known until the war is over. But to some extent, the question is academic; Adams frankly, warmly, openly supports the IRA.

“If a section of the Irish people chose to resist by use of arms the British presence in Ireland, as needless to say they have chosen to do, generation after generation, then politically I will, of course, defend their right to do so.”

He is obviously aware of the terrible excesses of the war, the often murderous stupidity and carelessness, the outrages of the bombing campaigns. “I would certainly not attempt to justify any action in which civilians are killed,” he has said. “I naturally regret very much all such deaths. But since it’s not the policy of the IRA to kill civilians, I could not condemn them for accidental killings. In any war situation, civilians unfortunately suffer and die.”

And he adds: “The presence of the gun in Irish politics is not the sole responsibility of the Irish. The British were responsible for putting it there in the first place. And they continue to use it to stay in Ireland. No amount of voting will get them out.”

When Pope John Paul came to Ireland and delivered a homily on the need to end the violence, Adams said:

“I believe the Pope left a bigger, greater challenge to the Catholic Church than he did to the republicans. In principle, most republicans would agree with what the Pope said, but republicans don’t see themselves involved in violence. They see themselves involved in a perfectly legitimate struggle. I’m sure that if the Pope was asked for an opinion on an armed Communist takeover of some country, he would say it was quite legitimate to use force to resist it, and our opinion is that it is quite legitimate to resist the armed takeover of our country.”

Adams has spent most of his life in resistance to the British presence in Ireland. He lived as a child in Leeson Street in one of the worst Belfast slums, went to St. Finian’s primary school, St. Mary’s Christian Brothers School, and first saw action in 1964, when he was involved in the Divis Street riots. These were triggered by the display of a forbidden Irish tricolor in a window, an act that provoked a brutal attack by the RUC in which many civilians were injured. Soon he was deeply involved in republican politics, reading the literature of Irish revolution while working as a bartender at the Duke of York pub on Donegal Street. In those same years, he joined committees trying to alleviate housing and employment problems in Belfast and became a founding member of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. At the time, there were almost no IRA members in the North; the organization had virtually ceased to exist. Then in August 1969, Belfast exploded, and Adams joined the self-defense teams in the Catholic ghettos. In March 1972, he was interned without charges, along with hundreds of other young Irishmen, and sent to the prison camp at Long Kesh. He soon found himself in the notorious Cage 11, from which many IRA leaders were to emerge. Adams does not, however, agree with the widely held theory that Long Kesh was the university of Irish republicanism.

“Maybe I’m wrong,” he said one recent morning. “But I think that aspect was very much exaggerated. They’ve got to explain this so they say, ‘Well, they were all stupid, they all got arrested, they all went to jail, and in jail they all got very clever, and then they got out and caused all this trouble.’ I don’t agree with that.”

But for Adams and his friends, much of the time in Cage 11 was well spent. “It was really a matter of putting in order whãt people already knew. That was my experience. Cage 11 was actually a wee bit different from all the other cages, because it was a wee bit crazy. It was sort of a M* A*S*H camp. The rest of the camp was militaristic, regimented, like a British Army thing, with officers of the day and so on.” Adams smiled. “Cage n didn’t have any of that.”

Today, Adams works most days in Connolly House, the headquarters of Sinn Fein in the Andersonstown section of Belfast. In a large room on the ground floor, local people wait to see Sinn Fein volunteers for help with problems. Sometimes the problems involve domestic disputes, erring husbands, disturbed children, other casualties of the war. Some visitors might have problems with government agencies or conditions in government-owned housing.

“We always did some of this work,” Adams says. “But now, with electoral legitimacy, we can call up on behalf of a constituent and do the same work with some clout.”

Connolly House is located in a small area of shops and two-story houses, and it was here that Martin Galvin of Queens came to speak last year in defiance of a British ban on his presence in the northern democracy. As soon as Galvin appeared at the side of Adams, the RUC charged, smashing into Irish and American members of the crowd. One RUC man fired a plastic bullet at a 20-year-old Irishman named John Downe and killed him. The American visitors, most of whom were members of Irish Northern Aid, which supports Sinn Fein and the IRA, were shocked by the viciousness of the assault. Adams was not.

“That’s the way they are,” Adams says. He likes to point out that the British have “a political code disguised as a moral code; they can use force and nobody else can.” Noting the current discussion of “widespread alienation” in the North, Adams says, “Thatcher’s way of dealing with alienation is to shoot the alienated.”

Adams clearly wants the support of Irish-Americans, but doesn’t believe Sinn Fein or the IRA should alter their goals to please potential supporters. He is, for example, frank about being a socialist, and doesn’t accept the conventional analysis that the Northern Ireland struggle is just a tribal conflict between Catholics and Protestants. He certainly doesn’t want a “Catholic Ireland” and has clashed on a number of occasions with the Catholic hierarchy. The Sinn Fein vision of a united Ireland is decidedly nonsectarian.

“Historically, the church was always in the position of being fairly divorced from the people and not being involved with them in any social issues,” Adams says. “There are all sorts of examples of absolute stupidity here. Ballymurphy, here in Belfast, has a fantastically high rate of unemployment and poverty, and it had visited upon it a multi-thousand-pound church that the people had to pay for, which didn’t even have dwellings for a priest. So now they have this big mausoleum in the middle of Ballymurphy, but the priest is still two miles up the road.”

As it did in 1916, the church has repeatedly come down hard on the IRA. “It’s a conservative church, there’s no doubt about it,” Adams says. But there have been some changes — in Irish terms, very big changes. The fact that so many priests could come out against the Reagan visit, so many nuns and sisters oppose the Central American policies — that’s a change, a big one. And there are a sprinkling of radical priests about the place. But you have to distinguish between the church and the hierarchy. I mean, I’m a member of the church, as is every other Catholic in Sinn Fein; the hierarchy is only part of the church, too.”

Religion is not, however, the critical problem. Adams says the first order of business is independence, and from that would flow an independent Irish foreign policy, built on “positive neutrality,” unaligned either with NATO or the Warsaw Pact: A socialist economy would include nationalization of natural resources, banks and major industries; limits on the ownership of large tracts of land; most of all, a planned economy.

“The present economy,” he says, “which is called a free-enterprise economy, is actually a planned economy, but it’s planned in favor of the small minority who control the wealth.”

He says charges that Sinn Fein and the IRA plan to create “another Cuba” in Ireland at the point of a gun, or institute some sort of totalitarian government on the Eastern European model, are absurd. The IRA gunmen are here for the moment, Adams says, “but once independence is secured, armed struggle is finito. Sinn Fein would then figure in an Irish democracy — which is denied us at present — for the things we want. But it would be up to the Irish people to say yea or nay. If the people accept it, fair enough. If they accept part of it, fair enough. If they reject it, fair enough.”

Adams doesn’t believe that such independence will come easily. The British, in his analysis, will not leave the North of Ireland quietly because “many of the reasons why Britain colonized in the first place still stand.”

One major reason, in Adams’ view, was national security. “She was always concerned that her opponents like France and Spain would form an alliance with the Irish and come in through the back door. That still comes up with NATO, still comes up with some of the right-wing Tories.” Adams believes there was also an ideological reason for the initial British conquest; Britain at the time was a feudal society, while Ireland was decentralized, somewhat radical, with communal ownership of lands and sharing of labor.

“That’s what they fear now,” Adams says. “A victory for Irish freedom, if it led to the radicalization of Ireland, would have an effect on Britain itself. You can see what the Tories are afraid of in the way they’re treating their miners. They would just have nightmares if people like me had something to say about the way this country is governed.”

In addition, there is British jingoism and racism. “We are the first and the last colony of Britain. And there is almost a racist attitude about Ireland. It probably would be simpler if we were black. We’re only 20 miles from their shores at some points. If we were in Cyprus, or Rhodesia, or Hong Kong, it would be much easier. And finally, although everybody doubts it, I believe there’s an economic factor, too. We are a market for their goods. Whatever industry is here is still majority-owned by the British. All the clothes I wear, the wallpaper on the walls, the tea I drink, everything comes from Britain.”

But what about the Protestants in the North? They represent at least 60 per cent of the population of the six counties, and their leaders have vowed to fight if they are forced into a union with the South. If the British pulled out tomorrow, as the Belgians once pulled out of the Congo, wouldn’t there be a bloodbath?

“I think there’d be a violent reaction, for understandable reasons, from some of the loyalists,” Adams says. “The reaction from loyalist paramilitaries, or what we call unofficial paramilitaries, would be fairly minimal, because they are small forces. The hard reaction would come from the official paramilitaries: the RUC and the Ulster Defense Regiment, which is kind of militia. We maintain that they are actually British forces, and it would be the British responsibility to disarm and disband them.”

Adams says it is crucial for Irish nationalists to assure the loyalists that they want them as part of the united Ireland, with full civil and religious liberties. But a separate Northern Ireland state, or statelet, independent of both Britain and Ireland, is “no go.”

“I think, at the end of the day, that people only fight, and only use physical force, when they think they are going to win, and when they have something very meaningful to fight for,” Adams says. “That’s what sustains the republicans. The Unionists, too, think they are going to win, and they think they have something very worthwhile to fight for. But they’d be fighting to persuade a power [the British] that’s withdrawing, not to withdraw. And what would they be fighting for? A 2¹A-county statelet?”

In June 1983, Adams said: “The ordinary Protestant needs reassurances and full guarantees of civil and religious liberties. But they cannot be expected to move away from their position of marginal privilege while there is no reason to do so. The British prop is what maintains this privileged position. It is the prop which created and maintains the sectarian division. Only when that prop is removed will Protestant, Catholic and dissenter be able to sit down and work out their own destiny.”

Adams obviously believes that the old dream of a united Ireland will come to pass, perhaps not soon, certainly not easily. But eventually. On this winter afternoon, he lights a small cigar, glances about the cramped cold room in Connolly House, and smiles.

“It’ll come,” he says. “I might not see it. You might not see it. But a united Ireland will come.” He pauses. “Would you like some tea?”

I.

BEIRUT, LEBANON

The apartment house was on the Avenue du Gen. Charles de Gaulle, on a cliff at the edge of the sea and its whitewashed facade was stained by the cold steady rain. I asked the cabdriver to come in with me, but he glanced out at the sea, and puffed on a cigarette and said he would wait in the cab. He turned off the lights of the 1971 Impala and kept the motor running. It was very dark.

The entrance to the 10-story building was around to the side, and more apartment houses climbed away behind it, each positioned for a clear view of the sea. There were lights showing in some of the windows, with wooden screens pulled down to the floor of the balconies. A few blocks away was the ruin of the St. George’s Hotel, destroyed two years ago in the civil war.

In the old days, this was one of the wealthiest sections of the city, with apartments renting for as much as $2,000 a month. But then the civil war happened and, when it ended, not many people wanted apartments in Beirut. So the owners kept them off the market rather than rent for less than the accustomed price. Then Israel invaded southern Lebanon and almost 265,000 refugees began making their way to Beirut. Some of them had guns.

One of them was standing right inside the door as I walked into the lobby. He was about 19, with a dark face gullied by acne. He was wearing a dirty dark-green uniform, and he was holding a submachine gun.

He said something in Arabic, barking out the words, and looking menacing. I smiled and slowly put my hands up.

“Press,” I said. “Reporter. I’m an American reporter.” He was very nervous and so was I. Then he shouted something over his shoulder, and another young man came out of the shadows from where the elevators must have been. His boots made a clacking sound on the marble floors. The first kid put the nose of his machine gun against my belly.

“What do you want?” the second one said, in faulty English.

“I am a reporter,” I said, as quietly as possible. “I want to talk to some refugees.”

“Reporter?” he said.

The first one took the tip of the gun away and started searching me. He found my wallet. There was a press card inside.

“For a newspaper,” I said to the second one. “In New York. Here’s my press card.”

“In New York?” he said. “Are you Jew?”

“Irish,” I said. He blinked.

Then the first one found my money clip. It contained some Lebanese pounds, some Italian lire, some dollars: a perfect roll for a spy. He showed it to the second one. They spoke quickly in Arabic.

“If you want to see migrants, you need to help them,” the second one said.

“With money?” I said. My hands were at my side now.

“Yes. Money,” the second one said. A huge truck groaned along the boulevard and the first man stepped to the front of the lobby and looked out. He kept moving the machine gun from one hand to the other.

“Of course,” I said, nodding at the money. “Take all of it.”

The second one had slung his gun over his shoulder, with the barrel pointing at the floor. He seemed relieved that he wouldn’t have to take a shot to get the money. He jerked his head, indicating I should follow. He said something to the first young man, who went back into the shadows. The elevators weren’t working, so we walked up two flights. He produced a flashlight from some where.

“You’re Palestinian?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Were you in the south during the fighting?”

“Yes.”

“What was it like?”

He shrugged. “Soon we go back.”

We stopped on the second floor and he led the way down the hall. He knocked on a door: bop-bop, bop-bop, bop. Something heavy scraped on the tile floor behind the door and then it opened. I could smell dampness and human beings and babies. The door frame was shredded where it had been smashed open. A chain hung from a sprung lock.

I couldn’t see anything in the apartment, but the young man said something in Arabic and a small oil lamp was lit.

“No electric,” he said to me. “They stopped all electric.”

My eyes adjusted to the dim light, and then there seemed to be people everywhere. An old man, with a beaked nose, a dirty white shirt, and a dark vest came forward. Behind him was a girl about 18, a woman in her 60s, and others: two boys about 10, a boy about 14. Somewhere in another room a baby was crying.

“Ask them how long they’ve been here,” I said.

“Three days,” the young man said, without asking. He said something in Arabic, apparently explaining who I was. They all started talking at once. I could see now that we were in a living room area, and people were asleep on two couches and on the floor.

“They want you to write about them,” the young man said. “They have been in a bad time for a week. They come from Burj al Shemali. They were bombed by airplanes. The Jews destroyed all their homes.”

Yes, there were some PLO commandos in the village, but they had all left for the south the night before the bombing. The Israelis bombed them a second time and four people were killed, including the husband of the teenage girl. That was when they decided to leave. No, they were not all related. They had joined the other refugees on the main highway for the north, and crossed the Litani River. It took them two days to walk to Beirut. They had left everything behind, cows, clothes, food. On the way north, they lived on oranges taken from plantations.

The old man said something, a long and complicated complaint, and the young man with the machine gun nodded.

“He said that when they came here there is no house to stay in. Too many people everywhere. He said that it was so cold here and they were all afraid because there was shooting in the street. He said that is why he came to this building.”

The young man looked around the dimly lit apartment.

“We took this place for them,” he said proudly. “Why is it empty when people are cold? So we come here and took it. The rich don’t care if people die.”

I asked if the people here would be going back to Burj al Shemali. The teenager started shouting, getting nearly hysterical, then suddenly kicked at a glass-topped table. It tipped over and glasses fell to the floor and smashed.

“She says that there is no more Burj al Shemali.”

Then he turned to me. “Are you finished?” The girl was crying now and the young machine gunner seemed embarrassed. I offered him a cigarette.

“No, you go now,” he said. “Not safe. You go.”

I said goodnight to the people in the room and followed the young man to the door with the baby still crying behind me. In the lobby, the first kid came over, more jittery than ever. His hands were on the gun and he pointed it at me, saying something in high-pitched, rapid Arabic, the barrel of the gun bobbing as he emphasized his points. The second one made a disparaging expression and casually touched the barrel, pushing me aside slightly, and tapping me on the back in the same motion. He was saying goodnight, and telling me to go while the going was good.

The cabdriver was still there and seemed surprised to see me. The rain fell steadily. I got in the back and lit a cigaret and tried to control the shaking of my hands.

II.

TYRE, LEBANON

We left in the morning, heading south along the coast. Men climbed telephone poles near the refugee camp of Ouzai, repairing lines wrecked in the Israeli bombing. A woman picked through the ruins of a house. The road was an inch deep in mud from two days of steady rain and the skies were a sullen gray.

But yesterday, as the first United Nations troops moved south to create a buffer zone between Israel and those Palestinians who live in Lebanon, the first signs of peace appeared. A man with his face wrapped in a faded blue kaffiyeh herding sheep along the edge of the road; farmers with dark sun-scorched faces selling lettuce and lemons; a young girl smiling and waving plastic sacks of oranges at the passing cars. The Syrian soldiers at the first roadblock were relaxed and pleasant, waving us on without a check.

But the aftermath of the brief week of war was everywhere. Trucks loaded with furniture, bedding and human beings still moved north, the contents piled impossibly high, held together with ropes and wires. In Doha, refugees squatted listlessly along the sides of the road, or moved into old abandoned luxury hotels with names such as Hawaii Beach Club, Milio’s and Kangaroo Beach. On the hotel balconies, I could see uniformed young soldiers of the Palestine Liberation Organization, watching the roads, cradling their Kalashnikov assault rifles.

“Everybody here from before went away in the civil war,” the cabdriver said. “Nobody came back. Now it is for the refugees. They just take it.”

A PLO armed personnel carrier went by in the other lane, a mustached young man in a blue sports shirt standing up as if posing for a poster, his hands on the grips of mounted twin .50-caliber machine guns. He was followed by two truckloads of bananas, being hurried north to market in the interval of peace. Another truckload of refugees, another checkpoint, and then we were in Damour.

Some of the most ferocious righting of the civil war took place here. Every building in sight had been demolished or hit. There were mounds of broken bricks everywhere, twisted steel girders, caved-in rooftops. A small grove of olive trees withered in the spaces between two damaged buildings. After all the previous destruction, the Israelis had bombed it again last week. Damour made the South Bronx look like 57th St. And still people were living there: Two men in a makeshift grocery store, listening to a syrupy ballad on the radio and arguing in Arabic; a man alone in an improvised liquor store set up in a shed; six Arab women in brightly dyed gowns pounding laundry in flat pans, living in a garage.

“Most of them are from Tal al Zaatar,” the driver said, shaking his head. “Now they have to live in these places.”

He was referring to the Palestinian refugee camp in northern Beirut that was under siege for 17 months before falling to the Phalangists in August 1976. Between 1,400 and 2,000 of the refugees were massacred then.

“That was terrible,” the driver said. “I was not involved in the war. I am Muslim. I want people to live together, Christian, Jew, whatever. But Tal al Zaatar, that was criminal.”

There was a traffic jam outside Sidon, as eight huge diesel trucks unloaded supplies that had been driven from Iraq. In the main street, kids played pinball in a place called the Morison Club, and others lined up at a small moviehouse to see “MacKenna’s Gold,” with Gregory Peck. Spray-canned political graffiti covered all the walls. For the first time we saw refugees heading south, instead of north.

“We want to go home before the Christians steal everything from our homes,” said a man driving a tractor, upon which were piled his family and seven black plastic bags full of clothing and food. “We left when the fighting started. Now the radio says the fighting is over. So we are going home.”

We passed the last Syrian checkpoint into PLO territory. Cypress trees lined the road. PLO fedayeen were everywhere, all of them carrying guns, a number of them young women. Some were hidden in trees, others walked in twos and threes along the road. They had their own checkpoints, announced in advance by rows of truck tires in the center of the two-lane road.

“The Israelis are over there,” one young PLO officer said, pointing to the rocky hills about three kilometers away. “They have not come any closer. The UN is supposed to go up there today and get them out.”

Outside Aadlun, we saw the shot-up hulk of a maroon Mercedes taxicab, one of two ancient cabs into which 16 members of two Lebanese families had piled to escape the Israeli shelling of Tyre. They left in the early hours of March 17, heading for Beirut. But they were stopped by a group of Israeli commandos who had come ashore looking for a Palestinian leader. The commandos opened fire on the cabs. Fourteen people, including four children under age 5, were killed. At dawn, when reporters reached the site, the two cars were still jammed with corpses. Now the cabs lay like the shells of strange giant beetles, picked clean by ants.

The driver moved along more slowly now. We went through lemon and orange groves, and suddenly we were at the bridge over the Litani River. Lebanese soldiers waved us on. A dead horse lay at the side of the road, its neck jerked back at a right angle. It was beginning to swell.

Then we could see the long low curve of Tyre, with minarets sticking up against the sky. I counted 15 ships, from freighters to fishing boats, sunk in the harbor. We went up Ramel Road, where five apartment houses had been hit by Israeli shelling. Two Arab teenagers came over to see us when we stopped, one of them holding the rusting case of a hand grenade.

“They were out in the water and kept shooting,” said the first boy, who lived in a six-story apartment house with blue trim and white walls. He spoke in a mixture of English and Arabic. “Then the airplanes came from the other side, shooting.” He went around to the back of the house where he had lived, and showed us huge holes in the building’s wall. Blue Venetian blinds rattled in the wind off the harbor. The building was abandoned.

“Nobody was killed here,” the boy said. “They died down there, in the souk.”

In the souk — a casbah of winding narrow streets next to the harbor — there were three shell craters, from 15 to 20 feet wide, filled with brown, stagnant water. A three-story house had fallen into a mess of broken concrete, wood beams, plaster and corrugated iron.

We drove out to the abandoned night club on the edge of the city where the International Red Cross had set up its headquarters. It was right on the beach. A Swiss woman named Nicole (she said her last name “was not important”) was running the office.

“We had to move the first aid station into the center of the city, because it was too dangerous for the wounded to come out here,” she said. “So now we are just trying to help the refugees locate each other. So many got separated during the shelling and bombing. We have more than 700 messages here. All from people trying to find each other.”

Outside her office was the old dining room of the night club. Rain pelted the windows. Out on the veranda a huge Red Cross flag was held in place by rocks. One of the windows had been smashed. The wind made a ghostly sound.

We left the Red Cross building and went back into town to make our way to the UN command post. There were PLO soldiers at the bottom of the hill, most of them sitting aimlessly on piles of rubble. We started up the hill, heading east, and suddenly a man in civilian clothes ran out waving his hands.

“Don’t go,” he said. “Don’t go. Bad there. Shooting.”

About 50 yards ahead, we saw PLO soldiers running in our direction. Some dived into ditches beside the road. I could hear the snapping of small arms fire. And then the heavier chung-chung-chung of an automatic. The driver pulled violently off the road, and went to the side of a building, out of the line of fire. We got out and peered around the side. The PLO was firing now, a mixture of carbines and machine guns, but there was no return fire from up the hill.

Then, as quickly as it had begun, the firing mysteriously stopped.

“Lebanese army!” the man in civilian clothes said. “Not UN! Mistake. Small problem. Not UN, not Israeli!”

We looked around the building again and the PLO soldiers were climbing out of the ditches, peering up the road. All the firing had stopped. Later it would be reported, without details, as a minor incident involving a dispute with a local commander of Christian Lebanese troops. But on this road, in the soft rain, it was men shooting at each other with real guns and real bullets. The man in civilian clothes ran up the road, out of sight. A young girl in a yellow dress came out of the bushes across the way, peeling an orange. We never made it to the command post of the United Nations.

III.

SAIDA, LEBANON

The tents were dark blue and wet with the rain and they were pitched in a grove of date palms between the road and the sea. Children ran from tent to tent in the rain. A chicken-wire fence surrounded the enclave, and a PLO soldier stood at the gate, with a Kalashnikov assault rifle under his poncho.

“We are happy you are here,” said Labib Androuous, a Lebanese Catholic who was supervising the camp for the civil defense section of the government. “Welcome. Do you want a cigaret?”

Androuous was in his late 30s, with graying, black hair, and he nodded at the PLO soldier and took me into the camp. There were children everywhere, and women in shawls and long gowns, and teenage boys with wrinkled suit jackets that did not match their trousers. These were only a fraction of the estimated 265,000 refugees driven out of southern Lebanon during the brief, savage little war that was fought here last week.

“There are about 1,400 people in this camp,” Androuous said. “We have 145 tents and every tent has a number. We know from the number how many people there are in each family, and how much food they need for each meal. They get lunch meat and cheese, some sugar, some rice. We have also set up small gas fires for each tent, so that people can cook. And we have even given them eating equipment, knives and forks.”

He was obviously proud of the camp’s organization, and moved easily through the milling crowds of women, old men and children.

“Everybody here is Muslim,” he said. “Everybody. They are all Lebanese, not Palestinian.” His eyes moved uneasily to the PLO guard at the gate. “All of them are very poor. Most of them are farmers. They are without guns. Nobody here has guns.”

The rain had turned to a fine drizzle. One of the teenage boys came over with two small plastic cups of dense black coffee. He asked in Arabic where the visitor lived. In New York, he was told. New York? His eyes brightened, and he yelled to some friends that this stranger was from New York.

“It’s like telling him you are from the moon,” Androuous said, smiling and sipping the coffee. A group of teenagers crowded around. In New York were the buildings very high, like in the movies? Yes, they were very high. Is it cold there? In the winter, yes, with a lot of snow. Did I know Elvis Presley? No, I said, and besides, he’s dead. They nodded gravely as the words were translated. To the left, sheltered under a giant palm tree, a group of women watched in silence. An old man without teeth stood alone, staring at the new arrival.

“Where are the men?” I asked, looking around at the old people, the women, the teenagers and the children.

“Many of them stayed behind,” Androuous said. “These people are farmers.…When the invasion started, they had to leave. But they could not take the animals. So the fathers stayed behind with the animals. A cow can be the most rich thing in a family. For a week, many of them have not heard from the fathers, and now they are anxious to go back.”

He paused, and looked at a line of women waiting at a supply tent where blankets were being issued.

“Of course,” he said, “some of them have nothing to go back to.”

That was the growing reality of Lebanon. Every day as new refugees came down from the mountains, and reporters moved into the towns they left behind, it had become clearer that the Israeli intention was to wipe some towns off the face of the earth. Their people would then be moved far from the Israeli border. The strategy has hurt, but not destroyed the PLO, and has certainly left a lot of innocent human beings with “nothing to go back to.”

One such woman sat in a corner of a tent with a 4-month-old infant loosely cradled in her arms. She had cinnamon-colored skin, and high cheekbones, and hard white teeth. She was 28, but looked 10 years older. She sat there, making a low keening sound, like women in the west of Ireland when they are overwhelmed by grief.

“She is from Abassiyeh,” he said, as if that explained everything. Abassiyeh was a hill town behind Tyre, overlooking the coastal plain and the sea. Before the invasion, it contained about 8,000 people. But all reports indicate that it has been completely leveled by Israeli artillery bombardment. The town was bombed one final time from the air, a few hours before the cease fire.

“When the first bombs fell,” Androuous explained, “her husband told her to go out of their house, to take the children and go into the country and hide in the fields. He was packing their belongings. She was already outside when the shelling from the boats started. She looked back and there was no more house. She tried to go back, but the house was exploded.”

The woman was still squatting there alone, beyond communication, when we walked down to the sea. Over to the left was the stone shell of the old Hotel Saida, long abandoned, but now filled with refugees. At the base of the front steps a group of small boys took turns riding a green tricycle. A mound of orange peels, empty meat cans, and flattened milk cartons was growing at the water’s edge.

“We have a doctor now and a nurse,” Androuous said. “Some of these people have never seen a doctor. Not once in their life. They are simple people. They are not involved in politics. They want to be left alone with their land.”

Another woman, fat and bulky, came up to Androuous talking quietly in Arabic. He listened gravely, nodding his head, his arms folded across his chest. Then he spoke to her for a while and she went away.

“She wanted to leave right now,” he said. “With her four children. I told her it would be better to wait a day, until it was safer. Who knows? Maybe her town is gone, too. She wanted to know if the Israelis were leaving, or if they would stay for a long time.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I said I didn’t know. I said the United Nations troops were here now, and we would know soon if it would be safe.”

The sea was pounding hard against the empty beach, drowning the din of the camp. He walked me back to the gate and shook my hand and wished me a good journey. The road was heavy with traffic. Iraqi trucks moved along slowly, their cargoes covered with wet yellow tarpaulins, presumably weapons for the PLO. A truck full of refugees came from the other direction and slowed to look at the camp.

The driver exchanged some words with the PLO guard, shook his head and moved north. Androuous walked through the crowd, nodding, listening, doing his work. Just past him I could see the woman with the cinnamon-colored skin, cradling her baby, squatting in her tent. She was still crying, for everything.

I.

The phone rings suddenly in the darkness of pre-dawn Managua. Can I be ready in 20 minutes for a trip up north with some of the Sandinista commandantes? An hour and a half later, I’m in a small bus with a group of journalists. The announcer on Radio Sandino is exhorting us to defend the revolution, while a young woman hands out sandwiches, cookies and Pepsi-Cola.

Ahead of us, two escort jeeps bristle with automatic weapons. Off the road, a small boy tends a chestnut horse, but doesn’t look at the convoy. The radio announcer gives way to Marvin Gaye singing “Sexual Healing.”

Then we notice who is driving the Range Rover, directly behind us, with Nicaragua Libre license plate MAY S 177. It’s Daniel Ortega. He is the 38-year-old “coordinator” of the nine-man junta that has ruled Nicaragua since July 19, 1979. He’s driving almost casually, talking to others, gesturing languidly with a free hand.

“Anybody want another sandwich?” the young woman asks.

Forty-five minutes later, the bus stops abruptly. We’ve gone a hundred feet past an unmarked dirt road, and the driver has to back up. So do the two jeeps. Standing at the junction with the dirt road are Ortega, Jaime Wheelock, who runs the nation’s agrarian reform program, Joaquin Cuadra, chief of staff of the Sandinista army, and junta member Rafael Cordova Rivas. Ortega is moustached, wearing glasses, the corners of his mouth pulled down in a permanently disappointed way.

“They look like they’re about to take over a college dorm,” someone says, and of course we all laugh with the shock of recognition. The Sandinista commandantes are obviously serious men, survivors of combat, prisons or torture. But most of them are children of the ’60s; they’re the first successful revolutionaries in the world who grew up listening to rock ’n’ roll. In an important way, the overthrow of the 45-year-old Somoza dynasty wasn’t a victory of the Stalinoid cementheads of the Kremlin; it was the only true victory of the New Left.

We see more of this loose, casual ’60s style as the convoy moves up the dirt road and we come over a rise, glimpse three Soviet-built MI-8 helicopters in a field, and rows of barracks with soldiers lounging in the shade. A sign says: “The People of Sandino Are a Victorious Army,” but from a barracks radio I can also hear a Spanish version of “The Great Pretender.” Ortega strolls over to some officers and soldiers, and starts to chat. Wheelock stretches, smothers a yawn, removes his hat and ruffles his hair. Cuadra says something and Wheelock guffaws. This is not the way Charles de Gaulle arrived at an army base.

Then we are hurrying across a field to the helicopters, bound for a “Cara al Pueblo” - literally “Face to the People” — a kind of Sandinista town meeting. A man in civilian clothes, with the grave flat face of an ex-pug, slides behind the mounted AK-47 at the open door. We lift off.

For people my age, I suppose every green countryside seen from a helicopter will always look like Vietnam. On this morning, over this land, the resemblance was uncanny. Down there you could see deep thick jungle, miles of dense valleys winding through mountains. You don’t take that kind of country with gunboats or air strikes or rhetoric; you can only take it with infantry.

This was not yet Vietnam, of course; but almost every Nicaraguan I met here fully believes that Ronald Reagan will be reelected and then use some pretext to mount a full-scale invasion. So all over the countryside, in places where Augusto C. Sandino fought the United States Marines from 1926 to 1933, and where the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) fought Somoza’s National Guard from 1961 to 1979, the Sandinistas are stashing arms: machine guns, ammunition, grenades, mortars. Managua might someday soon be carpet-bombed into dust, but the Sandinistas are preparing to fight a guerrilla war in the countryside for the rest of the century.

On this slate-gray morning, we land in a lumpy cow pasture outside a small town called Matiguas. Ortega, Wheelock and the others have landed first, and they wait for us to join them. A line of kids appears behind a barbed wire fence separating the field from a gravel road. Ortega leads the way to the fence, starts talking to the kids. “Are you going to school? How are the teachers? What are you learning?”

Then an aide separates the strands of barbed wire, and Ortega and the rest of us duck through, and the first rain begins to fall. More kids arrive, as Ortega strolls to a small plaza, where trucks and soldiers are waiting. A young girl approaches Ortega with a covered basket of tortillas. He takes some, chats with the girl, the rain pouring down harder, cameras whirring, flashbulbs popping. It is clear now what Daniel Ortega is doing: he will be the FSLN candidate for president in the eventual election, and this morning he is running for office.

We pile into cars and trucks, and then there is a wild jolting 45-minute ride along the gravel road, nothing truly visible through the gray walls of tropical rain, and a sudden lurching halt. Campesinos wait on horses, along with more Sandinista soldiers, civilian officials, rural bureaucrats. And then two white horses are brought forward, and Ortega and Wheelock mount them.

There’s a moment of hesitation: Wheelock and Ortega look like city boys playing cowboy for a day, the SDS off to a rodeo, and then they start to move. For one absurd moment, it’s as if Sandino’s army had been resurrected, or we’ve entered a scene from “Viva Zapata.” Here they come, the horses’ hooves clattering on stone, and below them in the distance are the people of Rio Blanco.

I can hear their cheers through the rain. It’s a shameless act of theatrical hokum, but it works. Wheelock looks down at a lowly foot soldier from the American press and struggles to suppress a smile. It’s as if he’s saying: Could Fritz Mondale do this? Or the world’s master of the manufactured moment, Ronald Reagan?

After that entrance, everything else is anticlimax. Ortega makes a speech, but the wind blows his words around, and the rain falls harder, while the crowd hurries back and forth from the speakers’ stand to a nearby shelter.

From the audience, the questions are no airy abstractions. Where is the promised school bus? Why does it take so long to get our milk to market? When will you fix these terrible roads? Soldiers want to know why mail takes so long to be delivered, and why, if they can’t have leave to go home, their girlfriends can’t come to visit?

Ortega and the others give answers, and then it’s over, and on to the next campaign stop. The rain never ends, but the commandantes, who lived with rain and worse during the years in the mountains, look as if they infinitely prefer it to the weatherless offices of Managua.

It would be a mistake, of course, to think that the Sandinista leadership is made up of kids on a lark. Ortega was in Somoza’s prisons from 1967 to 1974, was jailed numerous times before that, and fought as a guerrilla during the last three years of the revolutionary war. His brother Humberto was also a jungle fighter (and is now minister of defense). His brother Camilo was killed in February 1978, when he was the only FSLN member to join the rebellious Indians in the town of Masaya. Daniel Ortega looks young, but he’s not playing at being a revolutionary; he is one.

He is also, of course, a Marxist. Unfortunately, to call someone a Marxist these days is to say very little that is precise; the present governments of France and China, Greece and Albania (among others) could be described as Marxist, since their leaders were certainly shaped by the theories of Karl Marx.

But Ortega and the other FSLN leaders have repeatedly said that for them Marxism is only one tool among many; the core of their revolution is Sandinismo. This vague doctrine boils down to an absolute insistence on the sovereignty of Nicaragua. Sandino himself said it this way in 1928: “What motivates us is the desire that the Yankees not have a pretext for continuing to tread upon the soil of our Fatherland, and [the desire] to prove to the civilized world that we Nicaraguans ourselves are capable of solving the problems of a free and sovereign nation.”

During the revolution, Ortega was a leader of the Terceristas — or Third Force — the segment of the FSLN that was least dogmatic, most broadly based. He is believed to be among the more moderate, pragmatic members of the leadership. But at a casual airport press conference after the trip to Rio Blanco, he said that Nicaragua must have combat airplanes to defend its airspace against reconnaissance flights that are giving logistical aid to the contras. He would get the planes from France, he said, or from the Soviet Union, or from whoever else would sell them to Nicaragua. But he would get them.

After that discussion, the few reporters walked out through the airport lounges, where Crosby, Stills and Nash were singing about Marrakesh. Two weeks later, Daniel Ortega was in Moscow.

II.

The Church of Santo Domingo de Guzman was consecrated on May 4, 1963, but on this bright Sunday morning, as well-dressed people filed into pews for the 11 o’clock Mass, the building felt much older.

The altar was all wood and white cloth, with painted plaster statues of the risen Jesus and a serene Mary. At the foot of the altar stood a huge carved wooden chair, flanked by chairs of diminishing size. This was a church in the old style, serene as Sunday morning, marred only by the round fluorescent lights attached to the wood-panel ceiling.

To the right of the entrance there was a confessional booth upon which was fixed a permanent sign: EXCMO SENOR ARZOBISPO METROPOLITAN MONS MIGUEL OBANDO BRAVO. How extraordinary: In this small church, wedged on a breezy hill above the American and the Soviet embassies, every sinner had the chance to confess his failures of flesh and will to one of the most powerful men in Nicaragua. For this was the church of Managua Archbishop Obando Bravo, the acknowledged leader of the opposition to the Sandinista revolutionaries.

“If he were the candidate in the elections,” says Conservative leader Mario Rappaccioli, “he would get 80% of the vote, no contest.”

Since 1980, Obando Bravo has warned his flock against the “totalitarian” drift of the revolution, opposed the military draft, urged the Sandinistas to bring the contra leadership into the government. The Sandinistas have reacted in varying degrees of contempt and rage. But their slogan — “between religion and revolution there is no contradiction” — acknowledges their fear of Obando’s potential for trouble.

On this day, two thirds of the archbishop’s parishioners were female, and seven of these polite, oddly sad women wore pearls. They also wore dresses of muted blues and grays, sensible shoes and expressions that were more baffled than defeated. In Marxist caricature, they were, of course, the hated bourgeoisie, vicious exploiters of the poor, grubby materialists whose souls longed for permanent salvation in Miami. But Nicaragua is not Cuba; there are no mobs scaling the walls of the Peruvian Embassy, no long waits for exit visas; anybody who wants to leave can leave. These people have chosen to stay.

On this day, a young four-piece band in yellow long-sleeved shirts played at the front of the church. They were very good, but all eyes were on the archbishop. He entered forcefully, a squat compact man with gold-rimmed glasses, garbed in purple and scarlet. Everything about him was blocky: hands, features, feet, body, even the powerful tuneless bass in which he did some singing. During the hand-clapping up-tempo tunes, Obando’s mouth remained sealed; he would sing only one chorus of “Glory, Glory Hallelujah” through the long morning service.

His sermon was unremarkable, a reflection on Pentecost, an expression of mild bafflement about why his efforts to end the contra war had been so misunderstood, a prayer “for those in prisons, for those who are fighting.” His tall peaked archbishop’s hat was secure upon the blocky head; he dispensed Communion with paternal ease.

When the Mass ended, his flock walked out into the sunshine, whispering, murmuring, failure clinging to them like dandruff on a suit. I saw only one peasant family in the church: a man with a brown hawklike Indian face, his wife, his children. They sat in the last pew and didn’t leave until the last station wagon door had slammed.

Later that day, I went to Mass at the Church of Santa Maria de Los Angeles, a low circular building in the heart of a slum called El Riguero. The 1972 earthquake that moved Archbishop Obando from the ruined cathedral to Santo Domingo also destroyed the old church in El Riguero. This new church is the replacement, and it’s not yet finished. One huge mural on the far wall remains incomplete, but against the back wall are murals of what is called here the “Church of the Poor” or “The People’s Church.”

We see Jesus portrayed as a revolutionary, Sandinistas battling oppression, a portrait of Gaspar Garcia Laviana, a Spanish priest of the Sacred Heart who went off to the mountains in 1977 to fight with the FSLN. His farewell letter to his parish sums up for many the Christian roots of the Nicaraguan revolution:

“The Somoza system is a sin, and to free ourselves from oppression is to free us from sin. With my gun in my hand, full of faith and love for my Nicaraguan people, I will fight to my last breath for the coming of the kingdom of justice in our homeland, that kingdom of justice that Messiah announced to us under the light of the Star of Bethlehem.”

Garcia Laviana was killed in combat in 1978, and his name was remembered fondly during a brief talk at these evening services by the Rev. Uriel Molina. This remarkable priest, a native of Matagalpa, is one of the best-known exponents of the “option for the poor,” which motivates the pro-Sandinista movement in the Nicaraguan church. He is of the generation profoundly shaped by the style and example of Pope John XXIII, by the reforms of Vatican II in 1962, and most importantly, by the calls for change that came from the 1968 meeting of Latin American bishops in Medellin, Colombia.

“The Sandinista front was born at the same time as Vatican II,” Molina once explained. “In 1965, my superiors sent me to the only house we had in Managua, in the El Riguero neighborhood. That was before the earthquake when the old Managua still existed, and El Riguero was quite far from Managua. I ended up there in a little church, with very poor people.”

Almost 20 years later, the people of El Riguero are still very poor, and there are more of them; the poor have been crowding into Managua, the birth rate is up and the death rate is down.

On this evening Molina conducted services in a plain white robe, accompanied by a nine-piece band, which alternated up-tempo tunes and melancholy revolutionary songs. The only obvious members of the bourgeoisie were some visiting foreigners. The people themselves were simply dressed in clean clothes, their children freshly scrubbed. Nobody wore pearls.

At the end of Mass, Molina remained beside the altar and slowly removed his priestly garments; he finished in a sports shirt and slacks and then began to talk individually to his parishioners. The moment was oddly moving, part of the process of demystifying the role of the priest and emphasizing his work.

For the priests of Uriel Molina’s generation, the most crucial theologian has been a Peruvian priest named Gustavo Gutierrez, whose use of Marxist theory led to his book “A Theology of Liberation.” In a way, this has been the most revolutionary book in modern Latin American history, a call for revolt against the traditional church alliance with dictators, land owners, army colonels and industrialists at the expense of the poor. Molina and others who have embraced liberation theology grew up in a state of rage caused by the desperate poverty they saw around them and the indifference of the church. Gutierrez said that the problem was “how to say to the poor, to the exploited classes, to the marginalized races, to the despised cultures, to all the nonpersons, that God is love and that all of us are, and ought to be in history, sisters and brothers.”

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, such present Sandinista leaders as Army Chief of Staff Joaquin Cuadra, Vice Minister of Interior Luis Carrion, agrarian reformers Roberto Gutierrez and Salvador Mayorga, among others, came to El Riguero to work with Molina, to learn from him, to share his “option for the poor.” Most were middle-class university students seeking a moral alternative to the repression and corruption of the Somoza regime. Defying the desperate pleas of their parents, most stayed for a few years, sharing the poverty of the ghetto, and then moved on to the FSLN. Certainly the experience deeply marked them all and remains critical to the philosophy of the Sandinistas.

Commandante Alvaro Baltodano once told journalist Margaret Randall:

“We read the Bible, studied liberation theology and discovered that if you really read the Bible with your eyes open, you find that the history of the Hebrew people is a history of their fight for liberation. When you read about the life of Jesus Christ you realize that whether he was or wasn’t God, he was a man who was with the poor and who fought for the freedom of the poor.”

The history of the split in the post-revolutionary church in Nicaragua has been turbulent.

The division was clearly seen during the visit of Pope John Paul to Managua last year. On the same day, he humiliated a kneeling Rev. Ernesto Cardenal (the priest-poet who is now minister of culture), and then ignored the mourning mothers of 17 Nicaraguan soldiers who had just been killed by contras. This led to angry chants in the Plaza of the Revolution of “Queremos la Paz” (“We want peace”) from the pro-Sandinistas and “Viva Obando” from their opponents.

The Sandinistas insist freedom of religion is guaranteed in Nicaragua. But as junta coordinator Daniel Ortega says, “When priests enter a political discussion, rather than a theological one, we feel we have the right and the duty to answer them politically.”

Obando insists, “we want a system that is more just, more human, that does away with the enormous gaps between rich and poor. But we believe that Christianity is enough to change the conscience of man and the conscience of society without the need to resort to Marxism-Leninism.”

The division remains.