Chapter 10 #8
Enda waits and watches for a letter from home: it comes close to an obsession.
It is the first thing she does when she comes into the house: she asks her landlady every day, Has anything come for me?
The answer is always no, and the landlady gives her a long look, from the feet up, as if wondering what might be wrong with her, if her family will not write.
Enda develops a crushed feeling about her ribs, a curious ache in her sternum.
Rose has not written; Rose has not replied; Rose may never reply.
Enda knows that Rose cannot write, never having really attended school, but there are others around who can write for her, can inscribe her spoken words: the priest, for one.
That her sister has not forgiven her can be the only reason.
From all the way across the ocean, on the other side of the world, Enda begins to feel the burning beam of Rose’s anger.
She remembers a tinker coming to the Lanes one day and showing their mother his basket of wares.
The one that had struck Enda had been a circle of thickened glass, the tinker showing them how it concentrated the rays of the sun and, if you held it over a piece of wood, you could create fire, bring forth smoke, could make burned striations and marks in it.
And it feels like that to Enda, as if she is being scorched by the focused, inescapable beam of Rose’s fury, all the way from the peninsula.
Some shift or change takes place in Enda now, almost two years since she left.
As well as the ache in her sternum, she loses the knack of sleep: she cannot receive its mercy.
She can drop off, after she’s been out, playing perhaps for a dance or at a wedding, but something in her clamours for attention at the darkest hours of the morning, rapping her on the skull, hauling her to wakefulness, so peremptorily that she sometimes comes to and finds herself tangled in the sheets, her mind thronged with home.
She might lie there, thinking about the house, the way the door hinges squeal in hot weather, the smoke trapped in the rafters, the smell of hay off the mattresses.
Lying awake in her bunkroom, the heavy heat of summer spread over her like twenty blankets she can’t throw off, she thinks about the lough, and how your feet appear through its peaty waters, the slippery coating on some of the stones so you need to tread carefully so as not to lose your balance.
She tries not to think of Eugene and Rose, tries to bat away or smother thoughts about how they must have searched for her, how it must have come to them, perhaps slowly, what had happened.
The confusion Eugene must have felt, how it has always been hard for him to comprehend where people are when they’re not in front of him, where people go, what absence is.
The vulnerable nape of his neck when he is bent over some task—peeling potatoes for Rose, arranging his bits of coral in stacks—and how fine his hair is, how he will only ever permit Enda to cut it, and when she does he has to shut tight his eyes because he loathes the noise of the scissors, metal against hair shaft, so she does it as quickly as she can, the ends of it falling like dark feathers about him.
It is a nightly torment, the jolting awake and the skeins of thought that bind themselves around her.
All day, she is here, in her new life, cleaning the rooming house, making the beds of the lodgers or scrubbing the front step, but it’s as if her mind wakes her in the dark hours to say: Here, you haven’t thought about home enough, what about the donkey, the way its long ears swivel when it hears you coming, or what about the noise of the streams after the spring thaw, can you recall that particular timbre of gurgling and rushing, can you?
The worst of it is not that she can’t sleep, that she is coshed by exhaustion, her face mealy pale, her limbs leaden, but that it is starting to affect her playing.
On a day when she has slept for perhaps two or three hours, she has set herself up in the early evening outside a tavern where men drink after a working day.
Dressed in her brother’s clothes, a cap pulled down over her narrow face, she has the fiddle in position, its case open at her feet to receive whatever coins people might drop into it, and she is halfway through an air about an enchanted tree.
A small crowd has gathered in the doorway of the tavern; several men are singing and whistling along with her, with varying degrees of skill.
Her breathing is in time with the meditative rhythm of the tune; everything, she is telling herself, is fine.
She is holding herself together, in this cold northern corner of the New World, all alone, keeping a roof over her head.
She is managing. She tells herself this. Not many could do what she has pulled off. Not many would have the stomach or the ingenuity for it. She knows this. She should be proud of herself.
And yet she isn’t. As the months go by, as the years stretch between the here and now and home, she feels less and less at ease in herself.
And this tune! Its mournful, lilting strains, its minor chords that climb and fall, the drone of the next string that must lie underneath it.
Enda feels the notes vibrate through her, down her veins, through her bones, and in her head blossoms a vision of the peninsula—field-boundary walls that undulate over every bluff and hollow, the water lilies that crowd into wet ditches in early summer, the surface of the lough that quilts itself in a breeze, the cows that turn their large eyes upon you, the darkness that rises up from the hills at dusk.
The music she plays is the land: it summons it; it conjures it here, to this street corner.
It is enough to drive her mad. How can she be here and there, all at the same time?
She is a person divided, split in two, a tree sundered by lightning.
Her fingers on the strings feel suddenly enervated and trembling.
She can barely move them towards the next note.
Her breathing is either too fast or too slow for the melody—she cannot tell.
She notices that two or three men have emerged from the kitchen door of an inn opposite; one leans on a wall, smoking a cigarette, watching her.
She slides the bow up, then down, in an abrupt flourish, ending the tune in the middle of a verse, and keeping one eye on the group over the road—there is something unsettling in the way the one with the cigarette is staring at her so intently, and she feels her leg muscles tense, as if readying themselves to run—she attempts to launch into a French march, a fleet and rousing song about a hero triumphing in battle, but somehow she cannot do it, the music deserts her.
Instead of feeling the tune, its verses and chorus, laid out before her like a path she has trodden many times before, each turning and curve familiar, she feels herself to be on a cliff, with nothing before her but a foggy void.
She feels the fiddle slide from her chin and she grips its neck with slippery fingers, her bowing arm falling to her side.
Across the street, she is aware that the man with the cigarette is approaching.
She sees the orange tip of it coming towards her, closer and closer through the dark.
The man is tall and muscled, an apron tied around him, his sleeves rolled up.
Enda takes a step back. If she cried out, would her countrymen in the tavern doorway come to her aid, would they fight this stranger? They are not as tall or as smartly dressed as him, but they are wiry and fierce, they would help her, surely. But they might discover she is a woman and then—
The stranger with the spattered apron has arrived before her and now he is bending over, and for a wild moment, Enda thinks he might be bowing to her. Then she hears a chink and he straightens up and she sees that he was, in fact, only putting some money into her case.
“Thank you—merci,” she says, or tries to say, but because no air seems to be reaching her windpipe, her voice comes out as a hoarse gasp.
The man remains before her, leaning with his hand on one knee, looking at her.
No light from the tavern window falls on his face so that he appears to her as a silhouette in the darkness, like one of the cut-out figures from the shadow-theatre booths she has seen at carnivals.
He says something to her, twice, both times a question, but it’s a word she doesn’t recognise.
“What was that?” she says.
He repeats it, twice. “Grozz,” he says, slowly and clearly, “?le.” He points at himself, his finger turned into his chest, and then at her. “Grozzle.”
Then it hits Enda. Grozzle. Grosse ?le. He is the very man she met in the immigration queue, the one who helped her at the medical station, who somehow saw through her disguise.
He is the same yet different—his hair is shorter, his beard gone, his large overcoat replaced by a shirt and an apron.
She lets out a laugh—a poor, forced version of one—and feels the panic drain from her.
“I remember you!” she says. “You had an accordion.”
The man nods vigorously. “Indeed, yes.” The word comes out of his mouth as yis or yish, or halfway between the two. “I still have it but not with me at this moment, otherwise I might have played with you. But I am working this evening, as you can see.”
“At the inn?”
He nods. “In the kitchen. Which is, of course, too hot for an accordion. And my companions might throw it into the stove by accident. Or perhaps on purpose. No, I would not bring it here.”
“You’re a cook?”
“For the winter,” he says, with a rueful shrug. “At home, I was a teacher. Here, I am a cook.” He tosses his cigarette end to the ground. “It is not so bad. At least I am fed.”
“That is always good,” Enda says, tucking the fiddle under her arm.
“I liked your playing very much.”