Return to Killybegs

18. Killybegs, Tuesday, 2 January 2007

— Is that enough? Antoine asked.

— There’s never enough, I answered.

The wee Frenchman was laden down with wood. He was carrying the damp branches like a kid from the village. It had snowed during the night, but everything had frozen by morning. I looked at him for a moment, curved over a cumbersome branch as though afraid of damaging his clothes. I turned a log, he raised his head and our eyes met.

Earlier, when Sheila had dropped him in front of the house, he had looked at the big fir tree, my father’s house, my country’s sky, but he avoided my eyes and I didn’t search out his. I locked the door, turned my back on him and set off walking towards the wood, my axe at my shoulder.

— We’ll get some wood for the fire.

And he followed me.

I was dreading that look. And yet I was curious, too.

I hadn’t seen Antoine since 10 July 2006. I had brought him to the Kesh. Since the peace process, the prison camp had been deserted. Like Jack, the last prisoners of war had been freed six years earlier. What remained were the buildings, the watchtowers, the walls topped by barbed wire and the traces left behind by all of us.

Leaving Bobby Sands’s cell, the wee Frenchie had been deeply moved. I’d taken him by the shoulders and called him ‘son’. Thirty years earlier, I had christened him with that nickname. Blind drunk one day, he had told me that I was his Irish father. But this time the word had a different meaning.

— I love you, son, I told him in front of the prison door.

He looked at me. He wanted to answer, to whisper a word that would break the silence.

— I love you, I repeated.

Then he kept quiet.

My treason was drawing to an end. It was only a question of months, or weeks. After more than twenty years, I was no longer of any use to the enemy. It was going to let me go, to sell me. Antoine’s expression was one of the most beautiful ever directed at me, and also one of his last.

When the wee Frenchie used to look at me, I loved myself. I loved myself for what he believed about me, what he said about me, what he expected from me. I loved myself when he walked by my side like a general’s aide de camp. When he’d take care of me. As if his innocence could protect me. I loved myself through his devotion, the pride he had in me. I loved myself in that dignity he lent me, that courage, that honour. What I loved about him was all that his heart told me of myself. When Antoine looked at me, he saw the triumphant Fianna, Tom Williams’s companion, the Crumlin rebel, the unsubdued prisoner of Long Kesh. When he looked at me, Danny Finley was still alive.

But that day in Killybegs, that expression of Antoine’s had been extinguished. Him with his branches, me with my log. He was no longer seeing me. He was searching for the traitor. I smiled at him. I don’t know why. I built the fire. A white smoke was pushed back down the chimney by the wind.

— You can sit down, I said.

He took a seat at my father’s table, hands clasped between his thighs. I took off my wet cap and stuck it in my trouser pocket.

— If the Frenchman wants to come, he is welcome.

Father Byrne had passed the message on and here was Antoine, buried in silence.

— What do you want to know? I’m listening, son.

I turned my back, leaning over the bad wood.

— Nothing.

A tremor of a voice.

I served him his tea. He was looking at the wall, I was looking at the floor. Our eyes were no longer made for looking at each other.

— Do you want to know if Republicans died because of me?

— No!

He shouted, his arm flying up. He knocked his cup over, the tea burning his thighs. Not a cry, nothing. He moved his chair back.

— Do you not want to know?

He was watching the liquid dripping on the bare floor.

— You don’t want to know?

— I don’t know.

He didn’t know. He wasn’t angry, or sad. He was lost. A child deep in my wood. The IRA had warned him in Belfast. If he tried to meet me, he would be exiled. You turn your back on traitors, you don’t speak to them. You don’t cross the country to examine their faces. You don’t ask them anything. The traitor is ill. Those who have contact with him are infected. To see him is to understand him. To listen to him is to betray in turn.

— You know you can never come back to Ireland?

I was standing, back to the wall. He nodded. Yes, of course, he knew.

Since I’d bought him a cap the same as mine twenty years earlier, I’d never seen him without it. It was his Irish disguise. In Belfast, he thought it made him one of our own. In Paris, he used it to believe himself exiled. A farmer’s cap, the kind nobody wore any more, apart from old Tyrone Meehan and a few old men from postcards. With my cap, Antoine had become Tony. But this time it was a bare-headed Antoine who had come to see me. No longer wearing anything that tied us together.

The fire wasn’t taking. The smoke was clouding our expressions.

— And what about our friendship? asked the Frenchman.

Antoine stared at me at last.

— What about our friendship?

He lowered his head and I felt bad for having asked that. Answering a question with a question, the tactic of men without an answer.

He looked up at me again.

— Was it real, our friendship?

So that was it.

For a moment, I thought that the wee Frenchman had come here for me. To insult me or pity me. To tell me all the wrong I had done. To howl in disillusionment, anger, shame. But he had come for himself.

— I don’t understand your question, Antoine.

I turned back to the fireplace.

— Are you asking if I am your friend?

He nodded.

— That’s why you came this whole way, wee Frenchie?

Same timid movement.

I put my cap back on. His image of an Irishman.

— Look at me, and tell me what you think.

He shook his head.

— I don’t know any more.

— You don’t know much, huh?

He was disappointed. I was hurting. I don’t know which of us was the more wounded.

I could have answered him.

Reminded him that one day, in Paris, he’d met me in the metro. It was rush hour, the carriage was full. I was going to meet Honoré the bureaucrat in a café at Saint-Michel. At the Opéra station, I saw the wee Frenchman get on. His cap, his IRA badge, his endearing charms. I was astounded. Paris, more than twelve million inhabitants and I had come across the only one I wasn’t supposed to meet. God, chance, my bad conscience or his naivety made us take not only the metro, but the same line, the same direction and the same carriage on that day and at that time. I was sitting in a square of four seats. He was standing, facing me, gripping the rail with a challenging expression. In Belfast, I would have called him over:

— Antoine? Are you on operation or what, lad? Look at yourself, wee Frenchie, anyone would think you were mounting an assault! Unclench your jaw! Take a deep breath!

I shrank down in the seat. A woman across from me, a newspaper reader, a mother with a child on her knees. I was against the glass. I looked outside, a never-ending tunnel. He was observing the people. Our eyes met in the reflection. His eyes opened wide, his mouth dropped. He stiffened. He was astounded. It was he who received me in Paris, always. He who put me up, fed me, helped me to not get lost. I was his Irish resistance. Through me, he was fighting. He had the cap, the badges, but also the thrill of the secrecy. He asked me once what I was coming to Paris to do. I smiled.

— Are you working for the Brits now or what?

He blushed. Apologized. Never again would he ask stupid questions. He would come to meet me at the airport and take me back again. He didn’t have a driving licence, I used to pay for the taxi.

— It’s on the IRA, I’d tell him.

I’d take the bill and he’d be dead proud.

That Wednesday, I had no reason to be there without him in the metro, with the little overnight bag he’d given me. He came towards me, politely nudging around people’s elbows. I turned towards him, gave him a brutal look, put my finger to my lips, those sudden gestures that demand silence. He froze in the middle of the carriage. I gave a hint of a smile, reassuring him. He relaxed. He moved his head slightly, a silent acceptance.

— Understood, Tyrone!

I was in the middle of an operation, on a dangerous mission. He wasn’t supposed to know about my presence there. The IRA was protecting him. And this time I’d spare him. He was wearing his wee smile. His son’s smile. The one that always made my heart clench. The smile of one who understands without a word, who accepts without question. My wee Frenchie, my companion in silence.

In the space of one station, he had taken up the pose again, cap down over his eyes. He was no longer fighting, he was on the lookout. He had gone from soldier to sentry. I got up. He threw a long look over the crowd. He felt as though he was from another world, another history, part of a secret. He was at war, they were at peace. And his OC was there, protected by their unconcern. What pride.

I stepped on to the platform. He was keeping watch. His eyes murmured that everything was quiet, no danger. That nobody had followed me. When the train left again, he gave a slight nod. Barely a movement, a signal between the two of us. And I saw him in his crowded carriage, his cap on his head, that smile on his lips, so certain that he’d protected our Republic.

I thought about that exchanged glance for a long time afterwards. I didn’t even tell Waldner or Honoré about the encounter. A few weeks later, in Belfast, I took Antoine to one side. Under no circumstances was he to disclose my presence in France to anyone. Ever. Not even to our friends in the movement. That was the rule when he was putting me up in Paris, it was even more important this time. And he understood. Of course, obviously, he understood. He was listening to Tyrone Meehan with the same degree of attention as you give to the first notes of your national anthem. He didn’t try to understand my war, he was living his own.

I could have told him all of that. I owed him a portion of the truth. I owed him a different perspective, the real one, that of the corrupted man, the disloyal one, that of the infidel. I wanted him to confront those eyes, for him to know them. And also for him to know the weak and hounded man. Inviting him to my deathbed was a way of offering him what was left of me.

— Do you know that I’m going to die, son?

His silence told me he didn’t.

— My God! You really don’t know anything about this country.

I moved away from the whitewashed wall. Sheila had just beeped the horn. She didn’t want to come in. She was against this visit and didn’t understand why I had accepted the presence of a foreigner.

Antoine got up. He was cold, his lips grey. I went to the door, opened it for him. I suppressed my gestures. I knew they would be our last.

— You haven’t answered me, Antoine murmured.

I was frozen, as though my body were in a tomb. I was hurting. A sharp pain, a knife being dragged from throat to heart. And I opened my arms. To him, and to Jack, whom I was missing.

Without a word, he took refuge in my damp jacket, my old woollen jumper, my winter scarf, my frozen coat. I felt the shabbiness of the Kesh blankets. That sickening mix of sourness, man and dog. We remained standing like that a moment.

I could have answered him.

For me, he was simultaneously the foreigner and my people. He who had seen me and he who would never see me again. He was the wee Frenchman and the whole of that Ireland he followed step by step. He was a bit of Belfast, a bit of Killybegs, a bit of our old prisoners, our protests and our fury. He was Mickey’s look, Jim’s smile. He was our victories and our defeats. He had loved this land so very much that he was part of it.

Was that friendship? I didn’t have an answer. Had I betrayed that love? Of course I had betrayed it. I had hidden myself behind Antoine, behind his courage and his convictions. I was unable to feel either guilt or remorse for that. It was also too late for forgiveness or a sudden crisis of conscience. The traitor and the betrayed, in one another’s arms. Yes, the man from the Parisian metro had used him. And so? Did that change this gloomy embrace?

He wore his city coat and black woollen gloves. My back was bent, my hair a mess, my cap wet, my crumpled trousers stuffed into muddy boots. He gave me a look I didn’t want.

I turned my back to him, raised a hand to say goodbye.

They could come and death could take me. It didn’t matter.