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I thought about that exchanged glance for a long time afterwards. I didn’t even tell Waldner or Honoré about the encounter. A few weeks later, in Belfast, I took Antoine to one side. Under no circumstances was he to disclose my presence in France to anyone. Ever. Not even to our friends in the movement. That was the rule when he was putting me up in Paris, it was even more important this time. And he understood. Of course, obviously, he understood. He was listening to Tyrone Meehan with the same degree of attention as you give to the first notes of your national anthem. He didn’t try to understand my war, he was living his own.

I could have told him all of that. I owed him a portion of the truth. I owed him a different perspective, the real one, that of the corrupted man, the disloyal one, that of the infidel. I wanted him to confront those eyes, for him to know them. And also for him to know the weak and hounded man. Inviting him to my deathbed was a way of offering him what was left of me.

—Do you know that I’m going to die, son?

His silence told me he didn’t.

—My God! You really don’t know anything about this country.

I moved away from the whitewashed wall. Sheila had just beeped the horn. She didn’t want to come in. She was against this visit and didn’t understand why I had accepted the presence of a foreigner.

Antoine got up. He was cold, his lips grey. I went to the door, opened it for him. I suppressed my gestures. I knew they would be our last.

—You haven’t answered me, Antoine murmured.

I was frozen, as though my body were in a tomb. I was hurting. A sharp pain, a knife being dragged from throat to heart. And I opened my arms. To him, and to Jack, whom I was missing.

Without a word, he took refuge in my damp jacket, my old woollen jumper, my winter scarf, my frozen coat. I felt the shabbiness of the Kesh blankets. That sickening mix of sourness, man and dog. We remained standing like that a moment.

I could have answered him.

For me, he was simultaneously the foreigner and my people. He who had seen me and he who would never see me again. He was the wee Frenchman and the whole of that Ireland he followed step by step. He was a bit of Belfast, a bit of Killybegs, a bit of our old prisoners, our protests and our fury. He was Mickey’s look, Jim’s smile. He was our victories and our defeats. He had loved this land so very much that he was part of it.

Was that friendship? I didn’t have an answer. Had I betrayed that love? Of course I had betrayed it. I had hidden myself behind Antoine, behind his courage and his convictions. I was unable to feel either guilt or remorse for that. It was also too late for forgiveness or a sudden crisis of conscience. The traitor and the betrayed, in one another’s arms. Yes, the man from the Parisian metro had used him. And so? Did that change this gloomy embrace?

He wore his city coat and black woollen gloves. My back was bent, my hair a mess, my cap wet, my crumpled trousers stuffed into muddy boots. He gave me a look I didn’t want.

I turned my back to him, raised a hand to say goodbye.

They could come and death could take me. It didn’t matter.

19

I met Antoine in the Thomas Ashe in April 1977. He claimed I taught him to piss that night, but I have no memory of it. I saw him from a good way off, at the back of the room, sitting with Jim O’Leary and his wife, Cathy. Aside from two Basque sympathizers lost in the crowd, he was the only one wearing a Republican T-shirt. Everyone in the place was connected to the IRA, everyone except those who publicly glorified it.

At first, I took him for an American, the kind who shivers over his Irish roots, cries as he places his feet on our soil for the first time, and rushes off to buy a white Aran sweater and a tweed cap. The kind who loves everything about Ireland, from its mud to its rain, from its poverty to its misery. The kind who wants to make himself useful, asks for a gun, but is wary all the same of giving us his passport and declaring it lost at the American consulate.

And then I looked at his lips, their extreme mobility, that particular way the French have of elaborately chewing their words. He was speaking with his mouth open, the way people without secrets do.

I saw him again the following day, for the Easter parade. I was getting the Fianna to line up in the street when I caught his eye. He was crying. He was watching the crowd, our wives, our children and our men, and he was crying. Not the way a child or someone who is hurt cries, but silently, taking advantage of the rain to disguise his tears. When the hundreds of former prisoners lined themselves up in rows of three alongside widows carrying wreaths, and their children in their Sunday best, he turned to face the wall. The wee Frenchman wasn’t like the other visitors. He wasn’t observing our suffering, he was sharing it.

It was cold. We set off down the road and he followed us, one of the family now. A little earlier, I had called him ‘son’ for the first time. I’d positioned him on the corner of Divis Street, promising him a surprise. The IRA was my surprise. Several dozen fighters in parade uniform, wearing black berets and white belts. I looked at my men through his eyes. I felt his shudder. He had arrived the evening before and found himself plunged into the war. The helicopters, the armoured vehicles, our flags, our fifes, our drums. What did he see? Shadow soldiers, children without fathers, wives without anything left at all. Sad and weary, ours was a solemn portion of humanity, with our silent companions – poverty, dignity and death. Like him, my gaze was brushing over the worn coats, the muddy shoes. Like him, I looked at the rain-drenched hair, the exhausted faces. I glimpsed my bleak shadow in the reflection of a window. I couldn’t disown any part of these people. They were made of me as I was moulded from them. And Antoine stood there with his mouth agape. I was touched, and I was proud, too. My country was giving him a gift.

That April Sunday was the first and last time I saw Antoine cry. Much later, years afterwards, I asked him why. He simply replied that the tears had been his way of applauding us.

When I got out of the Kesh, I learned that Antoine had been used by the IRA. Appalled by my arrest, my laughable trial and sentence, and disgusted by the dirty protest, he had begged Jim O’Leary to find him a task, a role, some little thing he could do to help.

Ireland’s war is the business of the Irish. I have always distrusted foreigners who wanted to fight at our side. As for explaining our position to people in their own country, organizing information meetings, holding press conferences, mustering up demonstrations? Yes, of course, a thousand times. But I never considered entrusting them with a single round.

—That attitude will be the death of us, Jim used to say. Connolly taught us internationalism, not the cult of borders!

—The IRA isn’t an army of mercenaries, I’d reply.

He’d burst out laughing.

—Mercenaries, Tyrone? What do you mean by mercenaries? When your father wanted to fight for the Spanish Republic, was he a mercenary?

He got on my nerves. He was right, he was wrong, depending on my mood. I didn’t want a stranger to die in our war, or be taken prisoner. That was all. I imagined the British propaganda, the press, the Unionists. The IRA? A bunch of French, Americans or Germans looking for a revolution. The IRA? The newest attraction for Western leftists. Wake up, Ireland! Look who’s fighting on your soil in your name!

Jim made fun of me. He thought me a narrow-minded nationalist. One day, he asked me if I had even been out of Ireland. If I’d crossed the sea. If I’d heard a single foreign language in my whole life. If I’d come across a single viewpoint from elsewhere. If I had even the slightest idea of what Rome or Brussels was. If I’d even looked beyond my own backyard. He was hitting the nail on the head. I hadn’t yet betrayed Belfast for Paris. We were in the Thomas Ashe, ordering rounds. It was before the grass informed on me. Antoine was there, listening to us without speaking. They exchanged a quick, amused look. I said to myself that those two were up to no good. And I was right.

The wee Frenchman had made the most of my thirteen months under the blankets to defy me. Jim had arranged a discreet meeting between Antoine and an international affairs officer. Antoine was a Parisian violin-maker, probably unknown to British intelligence. Of course, he strode up and down our streets and drank in our clubs, but so did many others. He played the violin, that was his weapon. In the eyes of the police, he was an idealist looking for inspiration for his compositions.

Jim made enquiries. Antoine was living on a quiet street that led on to boulevard des Batignolles, the instrument-makers’ quarter. He had an unused utility room to which he gave Jim the key, on an anchor keyring. It became a hideout, with an inner yard and a simple low wall joining the neighbouring building. There were three metro stations at equal distances – Rome, Liège and Europe. It was an ideal, quiet location. Several of our lads stayed one after the other under this Paris roof. John McAnulty, Mary Devaney and Paddy Best. None of them ever met Antoine.

He also transported money to pay for somebody’s passage, and more money another time to assist several combatants on their way to Hungary. Twice, he hired cars with false French papers. He hid bulletproof vests in his workshop. He served as a translator. He accompanied an IRA officer on a night train from Paris to Bilbao. He didn’t ask any questions. Our reasons gave him a clear conscience and our suffering gave him conviction.

When I learned that Antoine had assisted the IRA, I went to see Jim. The exchange was heated and brief. I was his OC. I demanded the names, the places, the dates, the facts. The Frenchman was to be left outside all of that.

The following Saturday, I led the wee Frenchie into a room in the Thomas Ashe, a corner to ourselves, behind the bar. A man guarded the door. Antoine sat down and I remained standing. I threw his key on the table. The anchor.

—What is that?

He looked at me, flabbergasted.

—The key to my place.

—Who did you give it to?

He lowered his eyes.

—Who to, son?

He shook his head. He didn’t know their names. I was whispering. The clamour from the bar came to us in waves. On the stage, the band was playing ‘Danny Boy’.

—You are not Irish, Antoine.

I whispered it to him gently, the way you’d deliver bad news.

—What would you be if you weren’t Irish, the owner of Mullin’s had once asked.

—I’d be ashamed, my father had replied.

I leaned back against the wall as I told him that he was Antoine the violin-maker, not Tom Williams, not Danny Finley. He was a friend of Ireland, a comrade, a brother, but also a bystander. He had no ancestors who had died during the Great Famine, no grandfather who was hanged by the English, no brother who had fallen in active service, or sister who had been locked up. I told him that by indulging himself, he was putting people in danger.

Indulging? He gestured in protest.

—We’re not playing at war, we’re making it, son.

I told him that he couldn’t claim our anger.

And then I sat down across from him. I placed my hand on the table, palm up. I asked him to place his alongside. My farmer’s hand, his musician’s hand. Tyrone’s skin, Antoine’s skin. One worn by brick, the other polished by wood. Leather and silk.

—Promise me you’ll drop all that.

He looked at me.

—Promise me, I repeated.

I told him that he would remain our wee Frenchie, our violin-maker. He’d talk to us of maple, ebony, boxwood, rosewood. He’d place a cylinder of pale wood between our pints, swearing on his life that it was the soul of a violin. He’d play drunken jigs for us, the national anthem, a lament beside a grave to mourn one of our own. He would be our reflection and our difference.