The Night Stages (16 page)

After he had pocketed his sketchbook, the girl gestured to one of the small tables that were set here and there on the grass by the river, and as if he had always known he would do so, Kenneth put his satchel on the ground and sat down. The autumn sun was so low that everything, even a blade of grass, stood dwarfed by its own shadow. A moment later the girl placed two full glasses on the cloth that covered the table and sat opposite him, examining his face in the rich light of late afternoon. Barges slipped by them on the river. Her dark hair seemed to blend into the bushes growing behind her, and her pale face was difficult to read. But, eventually, she took his hand and moved her thumb back and forth in his palm.

They danced that night, after the girl had brought him a sausage wrapped in pastry and a warm bowl of sauerkraut. Her revived father was playing an unidentifiable instrument as part of some kind of band and seemed unperturbed by the attentions his daughter was paying to the stranger. There were lights on and in the river, and the village on the opposite shore blazed with its own festivities. When the band paused between songs, a faint similar music could be heard travelling across the water.

Near midnight a gang of young men drew Kenneth away from the table and made clear that he should join them in the construction of a temporary bridge. Almost anything that could float was pressed into service: barrels, dismantled fences, rowboats, scrap lumber, tables, even a dead sheep, went into this frail, brief act of engineering, a large necklace strung across the neck of the river. When the chain of objects reached the opposite embankment, Kenneth found the girl and, hand in hand, laughing, they made the unsteady, hilarious journey to the other side, falling twice or three times into the river, then clamouring back onto the makeshift bridge via a floating wheelbarrow or wagon. On the far shore the dance they joined seemed simply to be a continuation of the one they had left behind. Morning found them doused by dew and sleeping in each other’s arms. Kenneth pushed the girl’s hair away from her face and kissed her on her lips and forehead before joining the young men who were, one by one, quietly returning home across the floating path. He had left his satchel near her father’s stall. It was as he bent to pick it up that he realized, after she had requested that he stop drawing, neither he nor she had uttered another word.

A year later, just before he left Europe, he returned to the Mosel in winter, a season so estranged from the one he remembered it was as if he were visiting another country altogether. He spent one night in a small riverside hotel in Koblenz, and the following morning he once again boarded a barge that was heading downriver toward Luxembourg, delivering its store of empty, blackened wine barrels to the villages en route. The golds and lime greens of the terraced vineyards, even the fawn
colour of the Roman walls that had pinned each plantation to its slope for two thousand years, had changed to the dark purples and dung browns of a time of stasis. The passing river barges hauled hills of black coal and girders of steel; the ochre coils of rope and pale yellow crates of wine that had surrounded him on his late summer journey were nowhere in evidence. The birds were larger, darker, and flew more purposefully through the cold sky along the path of the river valley. The river itself was the colour of gun metal. Half-heartedly, he looked for signs of the girl but found he could not even identify the spot where her father’s stall had been situated, and he realized then that the stall, the bridge, the full architecture of that harvest night had been temporary and easily dismantled. He did not feel any sadness about this. He had been blessed, he knew, by the wholeness of the experience. It was something transitory that could nevertheless be kept intact and undamaged in his mind.

The next afternoon, back in his room in Koblenz, he opened the curtains and was met with the full brunt of the Fortress of Ehrenbreitstein lit by the low winter sun. It had been built a thousand years before, placed so firmly and permanently into the stone cliff of the opposite shore, it was difficult to see where the rock ended and architecture began, and all of it now washed with this metallic, copper radiance. Turner himself had been intrigued by the improvised bridges of the Mosel, which he had rendered with the most minimal of brushstrokes in his pictures, as if making a statement about that which was tentative and fleeting. But it was the enduring fortress that fully absorbed the nineteenth-century painter’s attention, and for years he painted
Ehrenbreitstein over and over, using chalk or watercolour or oil, making it pierce, like the blade of an axe, through the mists of the two rivers that pooled and joined at its feet.

Standing by the winter river, Kenneth recalled that as he had begun to walk back to the village that summer night, while young men and old had been floating the components of the transitory night bridge back toward their own shore, he had seen the girl sitting patiently in one of the rowboats. He had waved to her and she had lifted her arm in return. Then, before he turned away, her father, back in place at the stall, had called out the words “Auf wiedersehen” and had lifted one hand as a kind of benediction, his white apron gleaming in the morning light. Moving away Kenneth had known he would forget neither of these two figures.

He painted the girl, now, in the background of the scene, a cherished but almost forgotten memory, and then he painted her again seated in the foreground, with fruit in her lap. Her father was more central to the scene, his white apron glowing, his large torso dominant, birds diving into the pastry he held aloft in his hands. Kenneth rendered, as well, one of the young men who had built the miraculous makeshift bridge, placing him in the foreground. The binoculars he held in front of his eyes were focused on the far shore of future seasons. And there, in the insistent bronzes and coppers he chose for the scene, was the forceful atmosphere of Ehrenbreitstein, the bright stone of honour.

G
erry-Annie said, “You can, of course. But not until after your hour with that book.” She pulled the grey volume out from under the tea cosy where it was kept and handed it to him. “Soon I’ll be demanding that you tell me everything that is written there.”

Kieran had been asking about the bicycle and had no wish to be pinned to a table by a book. “I’ve seen too much of this book,” he said.

Annie’s expression became stern. “How can you say that? Did you never hear of Tomas Rua’s sorrow at the loss of his books? Did no one ever sing you that song?”

No one had.

“ ‘Amhrán na Leabhar,’ ” she said, “a lament for the books the poet had lost at sea. He was a schoolmaster, as well, long ago now. Gerry knew that song. As do I.” She began to sing quietly, a tune so beautifully mournful that Kieran became lost in the cadence and felt he could see
the sinking books and feel the poet’s torment about losing them.

But he would not have lamented the loss of this book. He could have recited certain pages verbatim – the instructions for writing a letter to a prospective employer, the population of Bolivia or Peru, the ports of call for the PNO line – but the possibility of the bicycle put all these facts out of his mind. “I’ll give the bicycle back to the man who owns it, I promise, if he comes back,” Kieran said, imagining someone who had made his fortune – a tycoon, perhaps – walking to the cottage door and demanding his bicycle.

But Annie did not answer and her look was troubled and faraway. She was pouring a kettle full of boiling water into the tub Kieran had filled for her early that morning at the pump. It was wash day and Kieran knew, because the day was fine, she would soon hang his shirts, three or four versions of himself, he thought, on the line to dry. She had sung all eleven verses of “Amhran na Leabhar,” but now there was no song.
No song
, his mother was saying in his mind.
The song is finished
.

Kieran was trying to concentrate on the list of the colonies of Great Britain, but he could not do it. There was some sorrow around Annie that came between him and the letters on the page, and he didn’t believe that sorrow was about the schoolmaster and his lost books.

“You know, Kieran,” Annie said slowly, “I am thinking there are men, yet, up in the mountains, talking.” She pulled herself upright from where she was bending over the tub on the table, but her head was down and her shoulders were
rounded. She appeared to be looking at her hands, which remained in the water, but there was something about the way she stood that made Kieran suspect that she had gone out of herself. And suddenly he understood: these men and their talking was something Annie actually heard in some part of her mind. The men, and Gerry among them, were whispering to Annie in the same way his mother whispered to him. It had been his suggesting that someone might come back that had put it in her mind, he thought, and that being so, he wished he had said nothing. Still, he was curious. “What are they saying, Annie?” he asked softly, the British Empire moving back to the distant parts of the world where it resided, even the bicycle dimming a bit in his mind.

Her face was pale. “They are saying there is to be fighting, that there will be killing.”

Kieran rose from his seat and walked over to where Annie stood. “Annie,” he said, recalling the tailor’s words, “that was a good long time ago now.” He put his arm across her broad back, his first physical act of premeditated kindness. Through the back door, open to the sun, he could see the shed where the bicycles were waiting. “There’s no need for fighting anymore.”

Annie sighed. “It’s a way men have, I suppose.”

“But not anymore. Not now.”

“There will be no more of it?” she asked uncertainly.

“No, not now.” He had seen the cross at Ballagh, commemorating Gerry and the others who were executed with him at that spot. As if it were an admission of defeat that
she did not wish to acknowledge, Annie, who was so proud of the statue in the town, would walk by this marker without a glance. But though she didn’t look in its direction, Kieran had never known her to continue talking when they were near the part of the road where it stood, and he himself had gone back alone many times to read the names that were engraved on its surface.

She turned back to her washing. “You may as well have the bicycle now while the weather is fine,” she said to him. “Do you know how to ride it?”

For the first time the thought struck him that he was twelve years old and had no idea what to do with a bicycle once seated on it. There had been no need for a bicycle if you were a child in the town, and, anyway, once the tantrums began his father would never have allowed one. Niall had had a bicycle once, but the dramatist in him took to stunts, and he was spotted by neighbours riding the vehicle across the Valentia River railway trestle on a dare. The bicycle was confiscated and then given away, and soon football began to satisfy Niall’s need for performance. After that, references to this form of transport were never again made in the house. Though his father had departed punctually each morning on a bicycle, and returned on the same at night, neither boy would have dared to touch the thing.

“No,” Kieran admitted now, “I’ve never been on a bicycle.”

Annie pulled her hands out of the water and dried them on her apron. “Well, I’ll have to show you how, I suppose. Go fetch the creature.”

Five minutes later, Annie was seated on the Purple Hornet, circling unsteadily while Kieran stood, full of aspiration, in the centre of the road. Finally, she dismounted and walked the bicycle over to the place where he stood, and he swung his leg over the bar and straddled the seat. His legs were quite long enough to steady himself with the bicycle upright, but Annie had to hold on to the back fender while he settled his feet on the pedals. “Look straight ahead,” she advised. Then she pushed him off in the direction of town, a few miles away and almost every inch of it downhill, calling after him that he only needed to pedal backwards to slow down.

As if he had been born to it, Kieran surrendered himself to being transported, every muscle and many of his brain cells knowing instantly what to do, his spine making fractional adjustments for balance, his peripheral vision on high alert, taking in the now blurred and soon vanishing graveyard on his left, a smear of black cows and one donkey on his right, and hawthorn bushes in the hedgerows like trails of white smoke emerging from his shoulders. The speed was like an electrical current entering his bloodstream, and he recognized almost immediately his need for it, and forgot altogether Annie’s instructions about slowing down. He shouted with joy as small houses, stone walls, the ruins of Ballagh Workhouse, tidy and untidy fields, staring sheep dogs, sedentary turf stacks, and two important-looking standing stones swept past him. On the flat stretch leading to the main road that would eventually enter the town, as if intuiting the boy’s reluctance to cross the line
into his previous life, the bike began to lose momentum. When the vehicle began to waver, Kieran jumped off prematurely. Unsure of how to dismount, and having forgotten in the ecstasy of his flying descent that there were pedals that one could use to gain speed and therefore balance, he landed, astonishingly, on his feet. Then he strolled casually back to where the bicycle lay on the road and picked it up by the handlebars, which now felt familiar in his hands. He walked the vehicle all the way back up the four miles of the hill, talking to it as if it were a horse or a dog, something animate and faithful, that had done him a great service and that should be praised and petted for its efforts.