Pearl (3 page)

She would say to you, proud of the economy of her death: It is all of these.

All right, all right, you might be saying to me. But what about Stephen Donegan? Who is this boy and what were the circumstances of
his
death?

You have to trust me: it will all come later.

Pearl isn’t thinking about him now, and we must proceed as she proceeds. We must follow Pearl, follow the pattern of her mind. She is starving; she moves from clarity to blankness: there are moments of hallucination, flashes of what she thinks of as pure darkness, then pure comprehension.

Suppose we are standing on a pier. It is early morning; we are in some warm climate, maybe Florida. We are looking down from where we stand on the pier, down into the water. A school of fish swims by, smallish but colorful. Then, appearing as if from behind a cloud—but there are no clouds, only distance—a bird swoops down, sensing the far school of fish. He dives, lands in the water; the school of fish gives up form and cohesion, scatters. Dark gaps of water appear between clusters of fleeting color. The new form disappears into the darkness under the pier. If we wait, the form will re-cohere. Will it be the form we first saw or will it be a semblance of itself? No matter: it will be distinguishable to us as one cohesive whole.

This is how it is with Pearl. The beak, the wingspan of her anguish flies at her, scatters her thoughts, breaks up the center. First there is a cohesion, then descending wings, then clusters; then the clusters re-cohere. To understand now we must follow the new form: clusters that come together, and separate, and then come together again.

In her clear moments she sees faces—her witnesses, she calls them—hears voices telling her their stories, telling her she is right to do what she is doing. The faces come to her, hover in the air before her eyes, then fade and disappear. Faces in frames, faces surrounded by blue air. A blue that appeared when the darkness that surrounded her began to lighten, when she felt she was truly in the place of rest.

The faces and figures (they are torsos only; she never sees their hands) are cut out of bright air, as with a knife: cut with extreme precision and then pasted with the same precision back into the air. So they are at once separate from their background and a part of it. One shoulder perhaps shading off into a darkness only the width of a pencil line, the shadow of a greater darkness. The faces are illumined, particularly the air, by a light whose source she cannot see, a light that strains their eyes and makes them tighten their mouths. She begs them to stay until the time when she will understand.

We all like to believe that before death there is a moment of great clarity: what we call understanding. But suppose there isn’t, only a series of shadings-off? A set of increasing vaguenesses, then darkness, and then nothing at all?

It is possible.

She doesn’t see Stephen Donegan’s face: Stephen Donegan, whom she calls Stevie. When she says his name, only a shape appears: dish-shaped, featureless, white. She sees other faces. Faces she thinks of as witnesses telling her that she is right to do what she is doing because it is too much for her to live with. Because the most truthful thing to be said about human beings, the most common thing about them, is that they will do harm. And she too has the will: what she has done to Stevie shows that she is one of them, one of the crowd with stretched lips, bloody eyes, the vacant patient stare that with its blankness can erase the world.

Perhaps you are thinking that if you knew more of Pearl’s background you might understand why she is doing what she’s doing, why she is where she is. But what do we mean by background? If we knew what we meant by background, would it help us to say more clearly what the nature of the foreground is? A painter might spend far more time considering the background of her work than what is nearest to the eye. Let’s imagine we’re looking at a Romantic painting. There is a blackish-purple sky, tall thin-leaved trees; through a gap in the trees a white full moon surrounded by a haze of cloud. In the front, three small figures stand, bent, their backs to us, looking at something on the ground, trying to see something in the moonlight, something that absorbs them but that we can’t begin to discern. Of what use is it to say that the sky, the trees, the moon, must be known as the background? Would it mean that the figures are more important than the sky?

So what could I tell you about Pearl’s background that would be of use in answering the question
What is this woman doing here?
By which you would mean starving, chained, lying on the ground in front of the American embassy in Dublin. If I told you that Pearl’s grandfather was a Jewish convert to Catholicism, that her mother is the supervisor of several day-care centers in the Washington Heights section of New York City but had a history of involvement in radical politics during the Vietnam war, that her father was a Cambodian who disappeared into his own country before her birth, would that explain anything about why she is where she is on Christmas Day of 1998?

Perhaps you should know what she looks like. A beautiful girl, people have said, struck by looks that they almost always call unusual. Black Asian eyes but light brown hair, commonly called dirty blond. A wide forehead. Thick eyebrows, darker than her hair. Her body: long-legged, small-breasted, tall. A beautiful girl.

But what does any of this explain? How do any of us explain why we are where we are? How do we retrace our route; what maps do we consult to follow our road backward; who is the native guide? Do we look in the coils of our heritage? For the surfeit or starvation of early love? How far back is it useful to go?

In Pearl’s case, should we go back in the history of Ireland to the sixteenth century, the beginning of the English conquest? Or do we go back to Pearl’s first days in Ireland, at the beginning of the year 1998?

Certainly it would be one way of answering the question of what she is doing here. If by
here
we mean Dublin, it might be truthful to say:
She was studying the Irish language at Trinity College. This is her year abroad.

Let’s see where that will lead.

But if we take this route you must understand it is one that Pearl is no longer capable of traveling. Her mind will not move in a straight line. It will not connect specific events of the present to specific events of the past. There is a face she needs, Stevie’s face, but when she tries to call it up it is a blank, a dish shape, a featureless white plain.

There are other faces, other names: Finbar. Breeda. Mick. The names, the faces of her time in Ireland. Shall we go back to the beginning of that time? January 1998, when she arrived in Dublin, a student from Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, to study the Irish language at Trinity College.

We can go back to that. We are seeing what Pearl cannot see: a line.

But we are not starving; we are not cold or lying on the ground. So you can say to me—certainly you have a right to say to me—Tell me how she came to Ireland. And that, certainly, is something I can do.

3

Eleven months ago, Pearl Meyers saw the city of Dublin for the first time. Sharing a cab from the airport with Jessica Henderson, not exactly a friend but someone she liked well enough to sublet a flat with, twenty minutes’ walk from Trinity, a neighborhood with no real name, between Fipsboro and Stonybatter, between the Corn Exchange and the Four Courts. A one-bedroom apartment in a modern complex: a series of four-story buildings around a central courtyard.

There’d been the excitement, first, of having her own apartment. Not her mother’s, not a college dorm. She and Jessica, her not-quite friend, had shopped for posters, a tablecloth, agreed to share a hair dryer and a toaster, which the original tenant seemed not to own or had taken with her. They were just settling in, and what didn’t work in the flat was a joke at first: the washing machine that turned out to be unusable, because the water didn’t drain and so they had to empty it into the toilet; the doorbell that didn’t sound; the telephone whose wire fell out in the middle of every conversation. And then one night Jessica developed a high fever. She phoned her mother in Pennsylvania. Her mother told them to call the head of the program. It was four in the morning. They waited till eight. The head of the program said she would meet them at the hospital. In time, it was determined Jessica had encephalitis. She was kept in the hospital ten days until she was pronounced fit to travel. Then she was sent home to recuperate. Her parents, grateful to Pearl for nursing their daughter and prosperous in any case, agreed to go on paying her half of the rent for the rest of the year.

What had seemed a joke with the energetic Jessica now seemed an oppression. Like the number 137 bus, which stopped or didn’t stop at the place the sign indicated, causing Pearl to jump into the middle of the street to hail it; sometimes drivers would stop, sometimes not. Once when she asked a driver if the bus officially stopped there, he shrugged and said nothing.

In the morning, it was still dark at eight. She would sit in the armchair by the window, a mole-colored chair covered in velveteen with a pattern of unnameable leaves and flowers. The too-new bricks on the adjacent buildings sank her heart: an attempt at variegation: some rust-colored, some mustard, some a powder beige. The stone tiles of the pavement were already discolored from moisture. A metal door on the storage building reminded her of a prison, and the lights, still on in the transitional moment between dawn and light, spoke to her of surveillance, as if, walking into the courtyard, she would set off a siren. The heels of early workers clicked in the damp air.

Pearl didn’t know what to do with herself in the week before classes started. She would sit in the student canteen, eating her grilled cheese sandwiches, too shy to speak. Pub life seemed beyond her; she’d had no experience of a social life built around drinking. She tried to walk the city but didn’t know what she was looking for. She remembered a saying her mother lived by: You must be sure that you enjoy one thing every day. Most days, for her, it was the colors of the doors or the painted surfaces of the buildings, bright blue, candy yellow, festive in the dim air. And the voices of the people, and their good manners, which made her hungrier, as they suggested a warmth she felt herself a failure to be unable to take advantage of.

It wasn’t any better when classes started. She was shy, and no one seemed anxious to include her in their conversation. She was taking classes in the Irish language. It was her Irish teacher who suggested to the class that even though they were beginners they should go to meetings of the Gaelic Club, just to hear the language spoken. That was where she met Finbar, whom she probably wouldn’t have talked to in the United States. At home she would have found him an embarrassment: shoulder-length hair, army greatcoat, tie-dyed shirt, overlarge boots. But Finbar talked to
her.
And it seemed to her that she hadn’t had a conversation in the two weeks since Jessica had left. She let him buy her a drink. They discovered they both had a facility for languages.

.  .  .  

Perhaps you would feel more sympathy for Pearl if you could say she did what she did for love. That she had met a young man, loved him, given herself to his cause. But it didn’t happen like that. For Pearl, it was more an affair of the mind than the heart, more a thing of words than of the body. Also, she was very lonely. She was alone in a strange city. It was winter. The sky darkened early. She didn’t know how to make things work: the buses, the telephones. And there was the accident of her roommate’s getting sick and having to go home. How much of what happed to Pearl is traceable to a microbe? To the weak sun? To the failure of the Dublin buses?

But no, you will say to me, that can’t be it; there must be more than that, more than the sun, the washing machine, the buses. Of course there is. But that is the beginning.

It would not be right to say she fell in love, but after she met Finbar she felt happier, not so alone. Finbar McDonagh. He had a circle of friends, boys who dressed like he did, who wore their hair to their shoulders, who collected in his flat to talk about politics. Because of Finbar and his friends, Pearl had to learn a whole new set of terms. Republican is not the party of Ronald Reagan and George Bush; to be Republican means you believe in a United Ireland, an Ireland healed after the split that occurred in 1922, when the six counties of the North were declared not part of Ireland but of Britain. Then, if you learned the word
Republican,
you needed to learn many new names: Michael Collins, Éamon de Valera, Pádraig Pearse. And then you had to learn that the opposite of Republican is Unionist, or sometimes Loyalist: names for the Northern Protestants who want to keep the North a colony of England. Names for the enemies.

Everything Finbar and his friends did was connected to the Republican cause. They studied the Irish language because it was the language of the Republic; they played Irish football because it was the proper game for people with their politics. There was only one worthy endeavor and only one vision: a united Ireland free of any English taint.

She was fascinated. It was a new kind of being political, different from that of her mother and her mother’s friends, who went to meetings to stop the construction of buildings too tall for the neighborhood or to start the construction of vest-pocket parks, who worked on school board elections and traveled to Albany to lobby state senators about universal pre-K education. The language of this new politics was large; history was invoked, in poetry and song: colonialism, oppression, the true spirit of the Irish land. Heroes were called
martyrs
. Her spine thrilled when she heard the word; she’d discovered it secretly, on her own, as other children might discover the term
sadist
or
coprophilia
. She had never heard the word
martyr
spoken aloud.

But her mother had heard the word and spoken it; it was a word her mother was born knowing. So would you say that it was part of Pearl’s background even if it was silenced, rendered invisible? Maria Meyers was raised Catholic, but she was determined that her child would not be.

The most venerated martyr of them all was Bobby Sands. Bobby Sands, a hunger striker, dead by self-starvation in November 1982, when Pearl was almost four years old. She saw his smiling face first over the mantel in Finbar’s apartment, a place of honor that in other Dublin apartments, the kind of apartment she would never see, would be reserved for a picture of the Sacred Heart, Christ with hair the same length as Bobby’s but not smiling, no, not smiling at all.

Pearl first saw the picture of Bobby Sands framed in Finbar’s flat and then, later, enlarged, huge, on the wall of the room where the Cumman na Gael, the Gaelic Club, held its meetings. She enjoyed it there, enjoyed hearing Irish spoken, listening to the songs, moving on to the pub, and then to other meetings where the face of Bobby Sands was also on the wall. And she heard stories of great cruelties on the part of the British: torture, discrimination, civil rights denied; the innocent murdered, the guilty set free. She was excited because she felt that this, finally, was life, the life she dreamed of, where things were serious and people knew what was important and would say it. In Ireland, Pearl felt for the first time that she was a part of history. In America, history had no meaning for her. She could never see herself as part of American history: the founding fathers, with their pigtails and their faith in human goodness. It was in Ireland, beginning with Bobby Sands and his faith in the power of suffering, that she began to take her place. A place where people talked in large terms and sang songs about life and death and sacrifice, plaintive songs that seemed not about violence but about the loss of the hills, the mother, the beloved brave young man.

Finbar’s first gift to Pearl was the complete writings of Bobby Sands. Bobby Sands described himself as an ordinary young Belfast boy, a boy who loved playing games, particularly Irish football, who loved walking in the mountains, who was particularly interested in birds. He did not begin by being political. He even played football on a Protestant team. He worked as a kind of mechanic for a company that repaired buses. And then the Unionists destroyed his neighborhood, setting fire to streets he’d lived on all his life, and evicting his family from their home for nothing, for being Catholic. He was eighteen years old. He said he joined the Irish Republican Army not because he loved violence but to protect his home and those he loved. He was arrested for participating in a demonstration that turned bloody, put into prison, set free; arrested again, found with a gun in his car. Put in a nightmare prison, a prison that became a synonym for inhumanity: Long Kesh, the H Block.

At first when he was imprisoned, he and his comrades were classified as political prisoners and therefore not required to wear uniforms or to engage in ordinary penal work. They were permitted to meet together, to study, to consult. These privileges were revoked by Margaret Thatcher. The imprisoned IRA men were reclassified as ordinary criminals, no different from murderers or rapists. They were required to wear ordinary uniforms. This they would not do. They stripped themselves naked, wrapped themselves in blankets, and took the name of Blanket Men. The guards became truly sadistic; Pearl read Bobby Sands’s stories of having his testicles squeezed and his anus violated; having his toilet privileges denied, his food pissed in, his shit not emptied from the pot they gave him; given food that crawled with maggots. The kind of detail her mother would have read of the martyrs to the Romans, the Communists. But her mother would have read them triumphantly; Pearl had to force herself to go on.

.  .  .  

In protest against their filthy conditions, the prisoners treated the wardens with some of their own. They refused to wash; they wiped their shit on the walls of their cells. They called this the Dirty Protest, but these words were inadequate for Pearl. Blanket Men. Dirty Protests: she felt the cold, the filth, the wafer-thin foam mattresses soaked in urine, the plastic pen refill Bobby Sands hid up his rectum so he could pull it out and write on scraps of toilet paper the poems that were in his head, that he was denied permission to write. Pearl could not help noticing: the poems weren’t very good. Then she despised herself for such a thought. What did it matter if the language was clichéd if you hid the means of writing it up your ass, if you risked being beaten senseless to write it at all? You had to think of poetry in a new way, she told herself; you had to think of everything in a new way if someone was willing to give up so much.

There were some things she didn’t understand. It seems that Bobby Sands and his comrades went on hunger strikes to protest being classified as ordinary prisoners. Margaret Thatcher stood firm: Bobby Sands and his kind were criminals, and criminals they would be called. She stood by as Bobby Sands starved himself to death. Eight weeks it took: he suffered horrible stomach cramps; he went blind; he lapsed into a coma. Then, as the world watched, he died. He was twenty-eight years old.

Margaret Thatcher let Bobby Sands die—and nine others who followed him—because the force of their deaths was less strong than the force of her determination not to be defied. Some commentators thought her being a woman made it even more important to her that she appear strong. In the end, those deaths were strong enough to turn the head of the world; not strong enough for one woman to give up her terror of appearing to be weak and allow these men to call themselves political prisoners, a name she thought incorrect.

Sometimes Pearl asked herself, Did Bobby Sands die for an issue of language? And if so, what did that mean about language’s power? And the power of his ideas, which frightened her: peace at the end of a gun? The words didn’t make sense to her. But she knew they must be made to make sense because someone died for them. It was the first time the thought came to her: the strength of offering up your life.

Pearl couldn’t get enough of Bobby Sands, but that was true of many people, in and out of Ireland. She took herself to the Sinn Féin bookstore to buy everything they had about him: posters and books and CDs of songs recorded by his fellow prisoners, songs about him, songs that yearned for the hills and the trees and the birds, songs about monsters of imperialism, one about the British occupiers called “Strangers, Devils, and Thieves.” She was drawn most not to the image of the smiling boy with the rebellious, playful, counterculture hair but to the bearded figure, whom she would not have thought of the way natives of Catholic Ireland would have: as a figure of the suffering Savior, Christ on the road to Calvary beneath his cross.

Bobby Sands pictures, tapes, bumper stickers, T-shirts, key chains, ashtrays, scarves. The artifacts of veneration. It didn’t occur to Pearl, but if Joseph had seen the Sinn Féin bookstore he would have understood that they were both in the same business: the business of religious articles. He would, perhaps, have been tempted to give them advice. On the layout of the store. On the fact that it wasn’t a good idea to take customers down to the smelly basement to get access to the credit card machine. He might have told them to think about investing in new lighting. It would, he might have said, be good for business. Because that is his business; he is president of a company founded by Maria’s father: Panis Angelicus, Inc.