THERE’S SOMETHING unspeakable about the attraction between a man and a woman. It can’t ever be explained. How is it that I could be so foolish for a big, fat mongrel of a man like Bernie McDermott? He did something to me whenever I saw him that made me weak in my body and mind. I wanted to please him more than I wanted to mind my children. I think if he’d asked me to throw one of them over the bridge and into the rushing weir, I’d nearly have done it. Except if it was John-John. I knew my last child was his from the first moment I felt him inside in me. He gave me hell from the start. I was up before the sun every morning, retching and crying and gasping for breath. I could hardly walk for nine months with the pains he caused me. My other children were pure solid neglected. Only for John-John they’d have melted away from the hunger and the dirt. Bernie McDermott never even noticed until I was the size of a house. Are you fuckin expecting? says he. I am, Bernie, says I. Fuck me, I thought you were just getting fat. How’ll you figure out which of your mountain men is the daddy? Says I, it’s you Bernie. Me? Ha ha ha! If you fell into a bed of nettles, how would you know which one stung you? I was with no one only you for near a year, I told him. He punched me into the stomach then, and pulled over the dresser in temper. All my crockery was smashed, and my lovely Child of Prague my mother gave me. John-John ran from the back room to protect me and Bernie McDermott slapped him right back across the floor and in through the door again. He came here no more bar the time he called to make ribbons of my face over naming him inside in the hospital.
They’re big farmers, the McDermotts. Imagine if they knew there’s a solicitor inside in the city, the son of a whore, who’s kin of theirs. It’d frighten the life out of them to think of him with his brains and badness! He got the brains from me. I gave him the money to go in every day to the university. I got him all his books and the trendy clothes young fellas need to fit in. The day of his graduation, I stood outside the big building, squinting in through the glass, trying to see could I see him. Each student was gave two tickets for the ceremony. He gave them to his girlfriend and her mother. All I wanted was one look at him in his gown, with his scroll. One photograph would have done me, of him with his arm around me. I’d have had it blown up and framed and hung it in the porch, right in front of people’s faces as they walked in. I was foolish to let pride into my heart. I still paid for him to finish off his studying above in Dublin, though. The little strap of a girlfriend and the auld mother who was never let see me was brought to that graduation too.
I LOVE all my children the same way a swallow loves the blue sky; I have no choice in the matter. Like the men that came to my door, nature overpowers me. I cry over them in the dark of night. I often wake up calling their names. I don’t know why they all ran from me. I’ll never be a burden to them. I know a concoction that will send me away into dreams from which I’ll never wake. I’ve made it up already; I’ll drink it back in one go when I can no longer keep a hold of my mind or body. There’ll be no one sad after me, imagine. John-John will come out and take from the house what he can sell. And then he’ll ollagoan below in Ciss Brien’s the way people will buy him drink in sympathy. Isn’t that a fright, after a life spent blackening my soul for him, for all of them? Yerra what about it, sure wasn’t I at least the author of my own tale? And if you can say that as you depart this world, you can say a lot.
Vasya
THERE IS NO flatness in this land. It is all small hills and hidden valleys. Birds sing that I cannot see; they hide in trees and fly in covered skies. The horizon is close and small. There is daily rain that makes the earth green. Even in winter it is green. A short journey in any direction ends at the sea. I went one Sunday with a man I worked with and his family to the sea. I stood looking at the waves crashing on the beach for too long. I heard his child asking what I was doing. He hushed her. The man’s wife scolded him for bringing me. She thought I couldn’t understand. She was right and wrong: I didn’t know the words, just their meaning.
In this country I speak in sentences of two words or three. I nod and smile often and I feel redness in my face when spoken to. When I worked each day on building sites, the foreman would point at things and ask with his eyebrows raised for understanding. I almost always knew then what to do. Their voices are fast. My mother’s mother spoke that way, in a dialect of a tribe of reindeer herders from far north of my family’s ground. She was full of wonder at our goats and cattle and horses. When we were children we would laugh at her strange, speeding tongue and my father would chase us from the camp. We would be banished to the fire’s outer ring where the cold and heat battled. And still we’d laugh and my father would shout warnings from inside the camp. He was very fond of my mother’s mother; he had travelled north to bring her to live with us when we received word of my grandfather’s death.
The foreman’s voice is soft and contradicts his appearance. He’s younger than me but he reminds me of my father. The big work is gone now; many things are left unfinished. Some days of the month he asks me to help him to repair work that was done too quickly.
I’m called the Russian here, as almost everyone is from other countries. I don’t mind. On the plain where I was born all of our faces looked the same to foreigners. The Latvians take offence and complain bitterly among themselves about slights best forgotten. The Russian and Polish men speak good English and try to explain the differences. No one here has heard of Khakassia. The Irish men laugh all day while they work and shout across the sites at each other in whooping voices. There was a man called Shawnee who would slap me on the shoulder and shout in a singsong voice and make the other men laugh. I would smile and look down at my work and feel my face becoming hot. I don’t think he was being unkind.
Sometimes when I am in a good mood I act the fool. On the building sites I would ape the exclamations of the Irish. If I had difficulty with a tool or a machine I would put it down and stand up straight and shout CUNTOFAYOKE! The Irish men would look at me in mock astonishment and then look at each other and roar with laughter. GASMAN, they’d say, and shake their heads, laughing. I would feel happy, and then remember to be ashamed at myself for being a clown to please other men. I am too far from my father’s home and from my brother’s grave.
In the office where men and women go who have no work a girl asked me for a number, then for a stamp, then for the name of my employer. I could understand; I had heard all of these words before. Pokey Burke? She sighed. I looked at her in silence and shrugged. She rolled her eyes towards the ceiling. Then she smiled at me, but it was a smile that says I’m sorry. I didn’t understand the next words she said, but her voice was kind. Shawnee whispered loudly and slowly from behind me while the girl looked at her computer screen: Hey Chief, what she’s saying is you … don’t … exist! And all the men and women in the lines laughed.