Boy and Man. Niall Williams
piece belonged, only sky. By this evening Ben had joined the flat-edged outer pieces, which framed a jagged emptiness.
‘Don’t mind me now,’ he called over to the Master, ‘you have the television up if you want it. Won’t bother me.’
‘No thank you Ben,’ the older man said. He watched the fire. The turf glowed softly.
In front of him the muted television showed the country that was his but that was still unfamiliar. When he glanced up the news was of murders and road killings, of crises in hospitals. The most frequent word on world news was terror, and if he tried to consider this he grew frightened. For him the past was not only another country; worse, it seemed an implausible invention, one in which he was once the Master of a village school and had his grandson with him and they flew kites and read books and never felt afraid. The past was innocent and unbelievable.
‘All done,’ said Josie, dropping the weariness of herself onto the couch. ‘You all right Joe?’ she asked.
‘Yes, thank you Josie,’ the Master said.
Without looking up from the piecemeal sky, Ben asked, ‘Your programme nearly on, love?’
‘Yes, love.’
Ben left the puzzle then and sat beside her and rested his hand in her lap. Sometimes she held it and sometimes gently turned it with a kind of mild curiosity, the hand of another.
She turned up the volume. In the last item of the news a reporter walked out on a dusty landscape in Africa, explaining how fourteen Chinese businessmen had come to Ethiopia to negotiate oil rights. They had been kidnapped by rebel forces, who did not want the government selling the country’s natural resources. Now, in a dry hollow of sand, the fourteen bodies had been found. The handheld camera showed them.
‘Sweet mother of God,’ Josie said.
The Master’s chin rose and trembled and then he wept. It was something to which Ben and Josie had become accustomed. Since his return to the world he had been given now to these sudden moments of strong emotion. They arrived prompted and unprompted, could be brought on by anything, or nothing that was apparent. The Master simply wept. And these incidences, at first alarming, had in time been accepted by Ben and Josie as part of the after-coma; the bits of wreckage that must sometimes float down into the Master’s spirit out of the past. Always, he apologized, but was helpless to stop, though always too his chin battled against trembling and his brows lowered in a vain effort to hold at bay what came through him.
He wept.
Ben and Josie let him be. They offered neither tissues nor consolation, and in time the weeping eased and the Master grew serene again. While Josie watched a country singer on the television, Ben watched the Master and wondered what he was thinking. Was he thinking at all? Did he just sit without any memory of anything other than flying the kite earlier that day? Was that it? Was he blank? Josie had said he was probably happy. ‘It’s a kind of happiness isn’t it? To be alive and not to have any worries at all, isn’t that wonderful sure?’ She had said it because after the first months when Ben had tried often to get the Master to remember, she had been hurt for both of them when nothing had happened. It was not that Ben had wanted acknowledgement or any connection between himself and the man who had reminded him of his dead father. It was that he wanted some meaning out of it. What was the point of what the papers called the miracle, the Lazarus man, who had been dead and come back, and for what? To sit all day, or go and fly a kite? When Ben Dack’s heart bruised on this, his wife had tried to convince him it was for the best. ‘If he remembers he will have pain,’ she told him. ‘Without it, he has a chance of happiness. Leave him be now.’
And because he didn’t want to disagree with her, Ben said no more.
The country-and-western singer finished, and sang another.
‘There’s a break coming,’ Ben said.
She turned his hand in her lap. ‘You want tea so.’
‘Did I say anything about tea?’
‘Tea and biscuits I suppose.’
‘And biscuits! You’re a saint you know that? Absolute, one hundred and one per cent saint. Not another like you on the planet, says he.’
She stood and saw the simplicity of him she loved.
In the break Ben tapped his hands on his knees, glanced over at the Master, then back at the screen. Then he got up quickly and went across to the one bookshelf where they kept the telephone books and the farmer’s almanac and under some of these he found the Master’s copy of David Copperfield and brought it over to him. He opened it on the newspaper clipping that had been stuck inside and handed it like that to the old teacher.
‘There now, take a new look at that,’ Ben said quietly. ‘Go ahead. Give her a shot.’
‘Yes Ben,’ the Master said, with the strange politeness with which he had returned to the world. And he looked down, first at his book, and then at the piece of newspaper. He lifted it up and held it directly in front of him.
It was a picture of a boy.
The prisoner did not know what country he was in. He thought it was Germany or maybe Poland, but he could not be sure because when he was taken he was blindfolded and made unconscious. He saw only the small cell he lived in and the other he was brought to when they wanted to ask him questions. He was happy at least to see the cell. For the longest time he had lived with his eyes tied with a cloth that smelled of ammonia.
He did not have any record of the days. He knew it was a long time since he was taken, but he did not know it was three years.
How is it so hot? Ireland they said would be rainy and cold. Rainy and cold. But it is hot. Hot as Jaslo in summertime. And as soon as the image crossed Jerzy’s mind, he felt something reach into his stomach and twist out homesickness. Jaslo in summertime. He had been a boy with a boy’s freedom, fair- haired and strong and running along the roads in the hum of bees and the sweet sharp scent of pine from the foothills of the mountains. Jaslo. He had not thought of a future then. He had thought only of home, and of his mother, and never dreamed he would build walls in Ireland. It seemed not his life that he was living now but another’s that ran parallel and this sickened him and he fought the sickness with hard work.
He hurried for another block and laid it on the wall. About him the others worked without pause. Like machines, machines that make walls. Cement in our skin, thinned out each night with Polish beer. Each wants to go home. I know. Each one. Not just me. But Laslo says this is a man. A man is work. A man is not crying for his mother. For his home. This is today’s home. Tomorrow’s somewhere else. Jerzy Maski is not a boy. It is stupid to miss Jaslo, a small place. There is nothing there. No money. Who can live in Jaslo now? Only old people.
He laid the block and trimmed it and went for another. He thought of his elder brother who had gone away to become a priest and then not become a priest and then for shame not returned. He wondered where he was in the world and if he ever thought of his younger brother and if he knew that one day a letter had come from their Uncle Laslo saying there was work for good money in Ireland.
‘You go,’ his mother had said. ‘Yes you go.’ She wore black fifteen years after burying her husband.
‘I will stay with you.’
‘I don’t want you under my feet,’ she had said, and turned the lowered wings of her eyebrows to the fire.
And he had not said he would prefer university and to study architecture, for he did not want to hurt her having to say they had not the money. ‘I will go but come back when the big mountain of money is here beside you,’ he had said.
But now that he was in Ireland, and the money was good and the work was plentiful, he thought Poland grew further not nearer each day. Some mornings he woke well before the six o’clock start and thought of himself rising into another life back in Jaslo. He allowed himself the imagining of it the way you might a chocolate in