The Little Red Chairs (30 page)

The comb she chooses is large and white, a country comb, what her grandmother would call a rack, with wide gaps between the teeth, to collect the dirt. His mop of hair, which was recently washed, is easy to go through and his curiosity is boundless as to what female tricks she is up to.

Suddenly, without any undue pressure, the comb breaks and she holds the two halves in her hands, stunned with disbelief. So it was true what that cracked old man used to say, how in his long years as a ship’s barber he had combed many heads, famous and infamous, and unfailingly, where there was evil within, the comb broke to tell the tale, to confirm it.

‘Evil,’ she says.

‘Evil you say.’ He has turned sharply to look.

‘Evil I said,’ and she repeats the story of the ship’s barber and his certainty that character could be deciphered through a comb.

For a moment he is silent, then he kicks himself free of all caution, stands so quickly that the chair falls backwards and staring at her with hatred, he takes the broken comb and snaps it in pieces.

‘I have more combs,’ she says, tumbling the contents of a shopping bag onto the floor, where they fall and lie in an assorted mass of black, brown, white and tortoiseshell. Perhaps it is this uncustomary audacity that unnerves him, because she sees that he is shaking. She has gained a small victory over him. He is ranting. What is this bunkum, this electromagnetic bunkum, this gypsy scaremongering. He swears and blames himself for this most private of visits, then mimics her, the little draper’s wife in her cheap fur, on a quest for truth, justice, atonement.

‘Who says you have any claim on me, who – who,’ he asks.

‘I have no claim on you … except that we knew each other once.’

He is silent for a moment, then surprises her, treating the whole thing as a jest and from the floor he picks up the numerous combs, makes little tunes on them, runs them through his hair, through her hair, to no terrible consequence, and recalls her blushing, how wonderfully appealing her blushes were, an artwork in the making.

‘Shall we dance?’ he says, but he has already taken her in his arms and leads her into steps that she is unaccustomed to. It is to gain power over her. Soon they are coiling wordlessly around one another, but she knows this is only a ruse, as there are scores to be settled and he is a vengeful man.

‘Evil is a strange word for you to have spoken,’ he tells her.

‘Not so strange … when you think of the atrocities you have inflicted on mankind.’

He looks at her as if he might strike her and would have struck her were they elsewhere, with no one on guard beyond the door. His face is within inches of hers, the whites of his eyes becoming bloodshot.

‘Who sent you … what organisation is behind this … this dirty work?’

‘No one … I came alone … I had to.’

Her answer throws him, as he takes a few steps back and turns to regain his composure.

‘When we made love, what was on your mind?’ she asks quietly.

‘Pleasure,’ he answers.

‘When you were carving your pure homeland, with your guns opening fire even on ambulances, what was on your mind, or did the sheer numbers, the hundreds of thousands, deaden the truth of it all?’

For a second he freezes at the audaciousness of the question and she freezes too.

‘What has happened to you?’ he asks, looking her up and down.

‘A lot,’ she says unflinching, determined to stand her ground.

‘But you are well now,’ he says, suddenly, falsely solicitous. He lets go of her arm, walks towards the window and looks out, like a man conscious of his confinement.

‘I had looked forward to this visit … made myself personable,’ he says without turning.

‘I had looked forward to it, also.’

‘Then why destroy it … why bring evil into this room?’

‘Because it’s here, here … in every pore of your being.’

‘Take it back … Take it back,’ he says wildly, jabbing at the air, where it hangs like a viper, a nest of vipers, Macbeth’s unseen daggers.

‘I can’t take it back Vlad,’ and he starts at hearing the old name, the fond name, then tears at his hair, his skull, with an infantile mania.

‘That smorgasbord of crime of which I am accused is false,’ he says going towards her, ‘untrue, shibboleths … with breakdown happening in my country, in my people, in my psyche, what ought I have done, lain down like a lamb for the wolves to arrive …’

‘Do you not have bad dreams, nightmares?’ she says.

‘No … I sleep well … I dream well … I dream of women … I dream of my mountains … and I will, like Virgil, return home to die.’

‘You will be an old man if ever that happens …’

‘I am in breach of not a single crime of which I am accused,’ he says, his arm fending her off.

‘Was your essential nature always evil … were you ever innocent?’ she asks and he answers with a baffled look.

‘You remember in Cloonoila,’ she begins. ‘One day, in the classroom, you read the children a speech from Shakespeare about the Seven Ages of Man –
They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts
. You must have known it then that you had chosen the wrong part, the worst part, the way you know it now … that it could all have been different, you might be the poet you boasted of being and not one of the damned … it will find you yet … in all that solitude … it always does …’

‘Don’t go,’ he says and in that moment he is almost repentant, the mendicant, the broken Faustus, finally at a loss.

Something falls. There is a thud as she wakens from her dream to find that she is not in that conjugal room, but in the hotel, where the maid with the little muslin bonnet has come in and tripped over something.

‘Sorry madam, I come back later,’ the maid says and she sits up, startled, looking at the bedside clock.

When she comes to her senses, she rings down to ask if there is any message or fax for her and yet again, the answer is no.

Bar Den Haag

Each evening, Fidelma went down to the cellar bar. She decided it was where the strays went. Dimly lit, or rather just enough light to see the barman and an array of spirit and liquor bottles on shelves, the amber liquids and the labels reflected in the back mirrors. A toper’s dream.

The blind man was led in faithfully, by one of the hotel staff, seated in the same corner and had the same tipple – a warm port wine in a glass beaker with a curved handle, that he could feel for. Sometimes, a pair of lovers, ordering one drink for two and gorging on the nuts. There was a student bent over his iPad and swaddled in sheepskin. Nobody spoke, but the atmosphere was friendly.

On this particular evening, she was alone. She had gone in the day, as was usual, to the gallery, the same route each morning, under the lime trees, where, according to a brochure:
The sunlight filters through onto The Hague’s most distinguished boulevard, Lange Voorhout, lined with gracious mansions and neo-classical palaces, in the heart of Europe’s most picturesque destination and steps from the sun-drenched shores of the North Sea.
Steps also from the un-sun-drenched walls of the detention centre. It was a suspended time, torn between going home and seeing him one last time.

As always, at the busy intersection where three lanes met, she waited to cross, when others were crossing, so as to make sure that she looked in the right direction. By the tram stop there
were the noisy students, eating apples and spitting out the apple butts, and from a tour bus each morning older people emerged, heading as she was, for the museum.

She stood with the group, listening to one or other of the guides, in front of a massive painting of a young bull that dominated the entrance room. The brown velvet coat bore one rippled streak of white, like a gash, and inevitably the guide pointed to that and also to the incidental figures, a kid, a lamb, a ewe and a hatted farmer, but with no mention of the copulation that was about to happen.

In the next room there were flowers, panels of them, lily and iris and rose in such a wondrous crush, brimming out of their vases, so alive, as if they might leave their rust-coloured stalks and fly about. The view of Delft, in the adjoining room, was mesmerising to sit before, signature of morning and setting out, the sheet of blue water looking as if it too had been washed clean and the loop of sky girding it, also a ravishing blue.

In the evenings, when she returned and enquired at the desk, the same receptionist, or one equally brusque, said that if there were a message it would be sent to her room, except that there wasn’t.

He was a big man, his face a bit puffy and eyes bleary from drink. She recognised him from the court, always sat in the aisle opposite to hers, where Vlad’s cohorts sat and at the breaks, he tore down the stairs, never stopping at the water font, hurrying out to have a smoke. He too remembered her, dimly, had not come to seek her out, just wandered in off the street, beguiled maybe by the swank of the outside and doormen in full livery.

‘May I?’ he said, but he was already seated, his frame far too big, too clumsy, for the dainty velvet chair. Then he slapped his
thighs to show he was settling in. His voice was sometimes slurry – ‘How am I. No bad. How are you. No bad. Switzerland very nice place, very cold. I drive all over. Belgium no payee, lousy roads, two kilometres into France and you’re away. Not as big a turnout in the court as one would expect. Played his part well, big player in his time. Put on weight. He cooks for the gang, six of them in the detention wing, the VIPs, erstwhile enemies, all buddies now, united in their hatred for the International Tribunal in Den Haag. Table football, pottery classes, classroom languages and at night they swap jokes. What’s the difference between a Muslim, a Croat and a Serb? Muslim will smile to your face and stab you in the back, Croat won’t smile but maybe won’t stab you in the back, Serb will look at you proudly and deal with you like a man. They sing the old songs, the songs of the fatherland. Maybe you heard, we had border issues in my part of the world. Give the VIPs the opportunity, let them free and they will do the same thing all over again, take the lands and murder one another. You think I am Italian,’ and he laughed and shouted to the barman, who was not to be seen, to bring a refill.

‘If I drink, I drink all night,’ he said, looking to make sure she did not escape. ‘We live side by side, different religions, Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim, we celebrate the feasts, Christmas, January 6, St Bartholomew, Easter. We never talk religion, we drink, we sing, but old wounds suppurating away. Bloody hell, sixty years of peace too much for warring men. Negativity. Unrest. The ideology caught on. Mobs enlisting. Our front. Their front. The shit happen. Our dogs know it before we do. Bang bang. Expansion, consolidation, elimination. He become president, supreme commander of the armed forces. Tongue of an angel –
war is alchemy
. He play the tyrant when he has to. Wolf-weaned, like Romulus,
wolf-weaned in the mountains of Montenegro, that is also my country.
Clean the bloody place of the scum
. Friends become foes, a necessity of history. Dogs going crazy to get to dead bodies clogging up the culverts in the dams. Drivers of buses also ordered to shoot prisoners, so that everyone is implicated. I get the letter with the army heading –
You must report to Army Base
. I am assigned to Kosovo to be a tank driver. I tell my mother I fetch food from UN Headquarters to deliver to the needy and she believe me. Big tank. Forty-eight tonnes of metal. Tank the size of this establishment. Six of us, two drivers, one mechanic, one loader, two gunners and commander up on top giving orders –
Fire, fire, twenty degrees to the left, twenty degrees to the right
, out in the countryside and in the villages. Different crew each week, so that we never meet, never have time to be friendly. I like to be friendly, it’s why I’m talking to you,’ and he peers at her for a reaction.

‘I came down here to have a quiet drink,’ she says, to brush him off.

‘Sorry, most sorry. Tell me go away … you see, I have to let off steam, today big occasion, landmark. I am you understand a small fish in the larger story, a little unhinged, but nothing to worry about. I am a driver now by profession. I carry electrical goods from one country to another. It happen. Flashback. Nice road, flat country, nice fat cows in the fields chewing and there they are, boys and men on the road, praying, calling out to those they loved. Faces I know from school.
Saber, the one on whom happiness falls
. I have to stop the truck and pull in. Fright goes on for many minutes. If it was a dream it would be okay, but it not.’

Everything that came out of his mouth was so wild and splintered and she wished that the barman would not keep disappearing, as there was an urgency waiting to be let loose.

‘We come through a mountain pass onto a road, nearly dark,’ he went on, ‘trouble break out in a village eight kilometres away and on the road, bodies just lying there … either to be shot or brought to execution site. No time to lose.
Drive over them, drive over them,
the commander he shout. I am a soldier, I take orders. The wheels buckle, the tank go bumpety bump and we lurch for a few hundred yards … I see nothing, I feel nothing, I think there will be mess, pieces stuck to the wheels when we get to the town, where trouble has started up. I know some of those boys from school, their names now on record, written on a stone slab. My shrink, she tell me I must make friends with them, they are dead, they will not hurt me, Saber, the one on whom happiness falls, Sayed, the one who is grateful for everything, grateful to be pulped. Jesus. My shrink she say they forgive. She talk of channelling. Conversations between them and me. The minutiae, the minutiae. I tell her unplug me, unplug me. My friend in Brussels, if he here now he would think I am a nutcase, sometimes I am a nutcase. That is what war does. All that killing and nobody any better off. I go in pub with him in Brussels, we drink grappa and we talk of the night we deserted, five of us, in the dark … handguns and grenades under our uniforms, stuffed to our chests. Whole place mined. One of our comrades, Agon, he step on a mine, only seven minutes away from freedom, of Albanian border.
Finito
. Wiped out. My friend in Brussels say how lucky we are, everything rosy. We have food, we have job. He has kids. He say kids bring him through, they listen and they cuddle, what do you say, do you say kids bring one through …’