The Little Red Chairs (7 page)

When she has finished she buries her head in the armchair and Ivan, who has been consulting a little notebook, sits back in his chair, willing them all to listen to him. ‘My country Czechoslovakia. My family nine hundred years in same place. We aristocrats. It say so in chronicles in museum. I am a little Russian from my mother’s side. My mother she say my grandmother every night have small shot of plum brandy for sleep. Then war happen. My family they lose everything, their estates, their money, they move to one small place, then another and finally we are in a little dingy house in a city. My mother a widow. I am very close to her all the time, I wash her hair and she wash mine. She have three jobs. I learn to cook alone. I make my first cake age seven. It has three flavours, chocolate, sponge with cheese and vanilla. A grand uncle he pay for me to go to food college in Austria. I graduate after two years and get work in Graz, not far from Vienna. I work later in Italy, then France. In each country I learn something new, in France baguette. I have no personal life, but then in hotel in Switzerland, where I have moved, a girl come and she from another part of Czechoslovakia, also aristocrat, pictures of castles in her photo album. We like one another, we talk in our language, we go skiing two weekends in wintertime. After one
year we decide to go home and tell our relatives that we intend to marry, to settle down. Her people eleven kilometres from mine. After two days she come to me. She find me in orchard pruning trees and I am so happy to be in my own country. She say to me, “Ivan, my family think you too old for me.” I say, “Be honest Wanda,” and she look at me all sad and she say no, it is not her, it is her family. I do not believe her. I do not know why she change her mind. I say thank you, goodbye and good luck. I go back to Switzerland and am alone. In time I recover. I think in basement of cousin’s house I have plum brandy from 1967, fifty per cent proof. I tell myself that when I have son I will go there and open that bottle and be drunk. When I have son. I decide to come to Ireland because I like Tolkien and Tolkien he like Scotland, New Zealand and Ireland. I speak no English. I bring recipes from Czechoslovakia, Austria and France, I learn a few things here, for example scones. I move from city to this place because I have forest, I love forest, forest and river. I cannot say how long I will stay. My friends I tell you this, we are a jolly group but put us in uniform and all that change. In war I don’t know who my brother. In war I don’t know who my friend. War make everybody savage. Who can say what lies inside the heart of each one of us when everything is taken away.’

Then it was Mujo’s turn.
Ne. Ne. Ne.
He rolls himself into a ball and Hedda kneels to console him, but he fends her off. He could not tell his story the way others did because the words had stopped inside him. He was dumb, dumbstruck.

Into the Woods

The new Doc brought our class to the woods, to walk in the footsteps of the druids and learn the healing properties in nature.

We were fifteen in all, boys and girls, and we walked in pairs through the town, over the bridge and about one mile more to Killooney Wood. We sang as we walked and when we could remember no more songs, the Doc sang folk songs from his own country, in his own tongue. Everyone wanted to be the person walking next to him. We were such a merry group that people waved to us from their passing cars. It was a sunny day and it was nice to reach the woods, where there was shade. Leaves were just beginning to sprout and were, as he said, at their most tasty. The boys were running and scampering around, climbing trees and one boy peed from a height, but the Doc just ignored it. He looked a bit funny in a long black smock, with his white beard and his white hair tied up in a topknot. Lena Lally asked him if he was married and he just smiled and said that perhaps she had a wife in mind for him. He had brought illustrated books with pictures of trees in them and another with pictures of mushrooms and in his chip basket there were two knives, a secateurs and a trowel.

Then it was time to pick some leaves. We were allowed to eat them or put them in the basket for a salad. One girl, Cliodhna, said hers was buttery and so everyone said buttery and we were all laughing and vying with each other to describe the tastes – lemony and apricoty and peachy and orangey and nutty. The
little wild violets under the trees were minute, and we did for them, gobbled them up and they had no taste at all. In our copybooks we wrote down the properties of each tree, the leaf, the flower, if it were a flowering tree, and the root. The oak leaf was fibrous, so everyone wrote fibrous. He told us then the medicinal value attached to each tree. Hawthorn for the heart, something else for the liver, willow for the gall bladder. The needles of the big cedars were oily, good as a breath freshener, but too intense for the mouth. Eating the catkins was like eating maggots. Lime flower, which was moist and mucilaginous, was a cooling yin tonic and especially, as he said, suitable for women during menopause. There were a few giggles at that.

Then it was time to pick mushrooms. Before we did, he warned us
Never touch a mushroom that you are not sure of
, as many were deadly poisonous. From his book, we looked at pictures of mushrooms, including the poisonous ones and they looked identical to the harmless ones. They were on very thin little wobbly stalks and had a vivid red cap with thick white spots. The mushrooms we were allowed to pick were called chanterelle. He knelt down and got one knife to sever the stems and then the second knife to lift it away from the root, so that more mushrooms would grow next year. They grew in clusters, clinging to one another. While he was cutting, his topknot fell down over his face and he looked like one of those hags in a fairy tale who steal children and boil them in a big black pot. There were several kinds of chanterelle and they crumbled easily in our hands, like soft biscuits and we devoured them.

*

Later we were on a summit, with a view of the wood all around, the trees so nice and breezy and the sky above as blue as in the holy pictures of Our Lady, ascending into Heaven. We sat in a circle, our frocks spread out neatly at our sides and the boys stood, or else sat on their haunches, just to show how cool they were. Two bigger girls that were in charge of the picnic laid out a big plastic cloth and then plastic tumblers for the lemonade. The Doc said that in times of old, kings and queens always built their castles and their keeps on high places, so as to spot the encroaching enemy and then from the slit holes in the masonry aimed their bows and arrows, which were already dipped in poisons made from plants. He said how people barely realised the potency in plant and vegetable life and then he talked of poisoning, state poisoning and individual poisoning, saying that in the larger scheme of things, all wrongs were avenged and there was a cosmic payback for every bad deed.

In ancient China for instance unwanted people were disposed of at ceremonial dances. Feathers already soaked in several poisons were thrown onto very hot coals and the fumes asphyxiated the unlucky ones, who minutes before had been dancing merrily. In Roman times, it was also at banquets that unwanted family members were done for. Sometimes it was a knife already dipped in poison and normally used to cut meats, while more often it was in the wine, laced with arsenic, which was tasteless and without smell. Naturally, suspicion began to spread, which is why the unfortunate eunuchs and servants were made to taste the wine first. Craftily, goblets had been set in a particular place for the doomed. Suspicion was such that kings and queens were ever cautious. King Henry IV of France was so afraid of being poisoned that he cooked his own eggs on his own little portable
stove and drew his own water from the Seine. Napoleon believed there was arsenic in the wallpaper in his prison cell in St Helena, and believing he would die from the gaseous fumes, he insisted on being moved to another cell.

In an old Norse saga, a certain tribe ate a mushroom that was so lethal, it caused disorder in the mind and deprived them of their true feelings. They went wild and even the princes, to whom they were bonded, were terrified of them. They stopped at nothing. They bit their own shields, they uprooted trees and slaughtered all before them. The Berserks they were called.

‘Crikey, a Berserk,’ Cliodhna said and we all turned round and there was a strange guard in uniform, coming up the hill, bawling his head off. The Doc got up and told us to get on with our picnic and then he hurried down the slope and they met halfway.

*

‘What are you doing out here in this wood with these children?’ the guard asks in a broad country accent. He is red and breathless from the climb and is a cocky young pup, a bit overweight and trussed into his uniform. He repeats the question, only more threateningly and soon Dr Vlad realises that this accidental encounter could land him in treacherous waters.

‘We were having a nature class … we studied the various attributes of different trees and I told the children the particular medicinal value.’

‘You need a Garda clearance to take children out.’

‘Well, I was not aware of that …’

‘Only parents, grandparents and teachers are allowed to bring children out … it’s the law here in this country and we take it
seriously,’ his interrogator said, bristling now with the importance of his own authority. The questions are not so much asked as pelted at him. Who is he? Is he a schoolteacher? Under whose authorisation has he embarked on this?

‘I am Dr Vladimir Dragan. I have lived here for several months and practised as a healer in the town.’

‘Oh, one of the New Age quacks,’ the oaf says with a sneer and then asks if he has the qualification to be a healer and certificates to prove it.

The doctor is telling himself to maintain composure at all costs. He looks down and at that moment a juicy pink worm is wriggling its way over a bit of fallen bark to get to its prey and he has a terrible instinct to tread on it, to squash it just as he would like to squash this upstart. He pictures his grandfather’s sabre sinking nicely into the folds of that thick neck. He has begun to perspire and blames the humidity. What humidity, he is asked.

‘Let me see your identity,’ and carefully from his wallet he retrieves the documents that he has always carried, including an ID card and driving licence. He watches every muscle in the oaf’s face as he reads, peering into it as if to find something incriminating. Then he is asked to turn around, for the guard to study him sideways, look behind his ears, compare the man standing in front of him to the man in the passport photograph. Pernickety to the last. He knows the type, he knows all the types. A few years further back and he could have had him executed.

‘You know you have broken the law,’ he is told.

‘Mea culpa.’ He is at his most beholden now, wipes his face with his handkerchief and comments once again on the hot day.

‘There’s a nice westerly breeze,’ the oaf says and then asks if
the schoolteacher, who allowed him to take this nature walk, had Garda clearance.

‘I couldn’t tell you the answer to that.’

He explodes, asks loudly what the country is coming to: civil servants and government officials sitting on their arses not doing their jobs properly, shirking their civic responsibilities. Did the teacher not know the law?

‘She’s a woman.’

‘Woman or no woman, the law is the law.’

The doctor is seized with rage. The same murderous and subversive rage that landed his father and that father before him in prison. Yet he manages to keep a grip on himself and in a guise of holiness, he takes the crystal pendulum that is hanging from his neck and waves it back and forth at his opponent, as though in a blessing. The guard ignores it, takes out his phone and moves a distance away, obviously to ring his superiors, to put the country on high alert.

In those moments, as Dr Vlad watches and waits, he remembers his wife’s last letter, saying they must never ever correspond again, since it was becoming too dangerous. He recalls her description of searches in the various houses he had lived in since his disappearance and at the end her begging him to give himself up.
No, no my dearest. If I am to give myself up it will not be to some imbecile in a wood in Ireland.
He remembers then his mistress of the dark tresses, whom he met through their occult interests, her tendresse, white poodles that she walked in back streets and maybe was walking at that moment and thinking of him. Those last two years together – while he was still a free man – were happy ones, feted in bars, greeted openly, pictures of him all along the walls, in combat attire and everyone knowing who he was.

The oaf has returned, even more het up, as obviously there is no signal in that wood and he has not been able to reach head office.

‘Let me see your identity again,’ he says, and this time, having stared at them, he takes out a small notebook and biro, for the defendant to make a statement.

‘Why do I have to make a statement?’

‘Because I’m telling you to.’

With utter confidence, the doctor gives his name, his age, his occupation, Alexandria where he was born, the various countries where he was educated, the Balkan countries he has lived in, the academies where he has studied, the cities in which he received honours, and the date when he arrived in Cloonoila. Then in Latin and French and English, from memory he lists the various medicines he has imported and for which he secured the correct permits. Mother Nature of course has also supplied him with cures, gathered in those very woods and local environs. He lists them: willow, dandelion, valerian, moss, not to mention the seaweed which he, along with others, harvests in the early morning and which he uses for his seaweed baths. Several times he has to repeat what he has said, because the scribe is not familiar with the words, and then, to compound the comedy, his biro has run out of ink, he licks it to set down a few more syllables and finally, has to resort to borrowing his captive’s fountain pen. This would be a farce, if discovery was not only seconds away and his true identity about to become known.