Boy and Man. Niall Williams
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He laid the block and trimmed it and went for another. He thought of his elder brother who had gone away to become a priest and then not become a priest and then for shame not returned. He wondered where he was in the world and if he ever thought of his younger brother and if he knew that one day a letter had come from their Uncle Laslo saying there was work for good money in Ireland.
‘You go,’ his mother had said. ‘Yes you go.’ She wore black fifteen years after burying her husband.
‘I will stay with you.’
‘I don’t want you under my feet,’ she had said, and turned the lowered wings of her eyebrows to the fire.
And he had not said he would prefer university and to study architecture, for he did not want to hurt her having to say they had not the money. ‘I will go but come back when the big mountain of money is here beside you,’ he had said.
But now that he was in Ireland, and the money was good and the work was plentiful, he thought Poland grew further not nearer each day. Some mornings he woke well before the six o’clock start and thought of himself rising into another life back in Jaslo. He allowed himself the imagining of it the way you might a chocolate in a box, deliberate and pleasurable and too soon passed. He had himself rise from the bed and come down and light the fire and go outside in the little yard at the back and take the axe to the logs. He let himself feel the cool air coming from the mountains and to see his breath plume away on the morning. He lay in the bed and imagined he was this other and already could smell the first thick wood smoke coming down from the chimney with the press of cold air. He could see himself in the woollen jumper and thick trousers and even feel the easy swift motion of the axe and hear the crack as the log split sharply. He was there, paused in the after-stroke, and able to look out into the trees on a cool morning and hear the birdsong and be perfectly still in the opposite life to the one he lived now. He could see himself carry the logs inside and see each corner of the house in which he had grown up, know each chair and how it felt to sit in, and know the sounds of the latches on the presses, the song of the kettle. And these, in this other life, were all perfectly clear to him as he lay in the bed waiting for the alarm. They were as near as dreams, and he clung there on the edge of them, not yet realizing the life he had made up was his father’s.
So, with the alarm, each day he left that other life and went to lay the blocks.
In the evening Laslo complimented his work and passed him another bottle of beer.
‘You were working fast today,’ he said. ‘You are a very good worker, Jerzy, but no more laughing,’ Laslo teased. They both smiled. ‘What was he saying? I have not one idea.’
Jerzy finished the beer, took another.
‘Soon you will be singing,’ Laslo said.
But Jerzy did not sing that night, nor escape the melancholy, and at last rose and went out the front door of the little house and walked down the road beneath the April stars, swaying slightly with the beer and the sense of loss. In some ways the country was no different to Poland. At night you could pretend it was Poland. There was no one speaking. There was only the mild dark and the moon. He walked, saturated with loneliness. It leaked from him. He went out from the tight street of houses where televisions flickered blue and gold against the curtains and gates were closed on their cars. He said out loud ‘Jerzy Maski’ to none listening and then bowed and waved his hand in a wide sweep, as if to a partner in a dance. He staggered backward two steps, widened his eyes with surprise, then stumbled down off the kerb onto the road. He laughed to find himself so. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh-oh.’ And laughed some more, then he walked on down the centre of the road. His forehead was cool and yet beaded with sweat. The streetlights were wild blooms against the blue. In sudden moments he filled with loathing and ridicule. I am an idiot. What is Jaslo to me? I am a man now. Stop stop acting like a baby, a niemowle.
In the centre of the Ennis to Kilrush Road, Jerzy Maski sang the first verse of the Polish national anthem. He sang it in a loud and manly voice and stood to attention, and for moments afterward, he was all right. But too soon, hope or resolve buckled in him and he flung his head forward and vomited. He was bent over like that when the first car came toward him. He lifted his head into the lights and arced his arm to block them. He cursed and saw the Latvian plate as the car flew past, its horn blaring. There was another car travelling fast behind it. In it were five men. The back passenger window was open and leaning out was a man with shaved head who yelled in a language Jerzy did not understand. He was extending his arm in an aim. Was it a gun he held? As the car whooshed past, the man’s hand jerked upward twice as though he released two shots. Then he withdrew back inside the car as it turned sharply towards the road to Limerick.
The moment returned Jerzy to something like clarity. He patted his chest and looked at his fingers for blood. Then he closed his eyes and shook his head hard, as if to shake from the framework of thought a thick, cloying grief. He blinked at the moon and then – as if in the throes of revelation – he walked purposefully down the broken line of the road. His arms he crossed, holding onto himself, his eyes he turned downward. If a car came and hit him so he would die. It was chance. Life was chance.
He walked past one o’clock and two. Single cars flew past. Beyond the town the countryside was stilled, as if it dreamt itself into a fairytale. But Jerzy Maski, moon shouldered, blue eyed, a blaze of fair hair, carried an invisible bowl of sorrow out of the town to Eden Crescent. When he realized he had not been knocked down, he went in among the half-built houses of the new estate and, in one of them, unroofed and unfloored, he passed like a ghost, and sat on two upright blocks at the dark opening where soon would be built a hearth.
The remains of the oldest-known modern humans were found in Ethiopia. They are estimated to be approximately 200,000 years old. They were excavated at a place near Kibish. Here, at the bottom of dry rocky layers of sediment of a lake that had once been washed by the waters of the Mediterranean, a team of archaeologists which included Richard Leakey made the discovery that changed all previous estimations of how long humans had been walking on the earth.
The Master stared at the picture of the boy. He was a boy twelve years of age, with dark straight hair and sallow skin. His expression was serious, as if he had decided against smiling for the photograph or was otherwise occupied by some troubling thought. He looked out from the picture at the Master the way faces do on the memorial cards for the dead. He was gone. He was lost in the world somewhere. Perhaps he too was dead. The Master had been told what had happened. On the morning of his Confirmation the boy had turned away from the altar rails. That night he had run away. It was presumed out of shame. He had left a note saying he was going to look for his father. But his father was unknown, the boy’s mother had never told. There were only two traces of the boy afterward. The first was that Ben Dack had identified him as the one to whom he gave a lift in his lorry as far as Dublin; the second, that he was one of the victims of the BBC bombing who had been brought to hospital but later left without being discharged.
And this was three years ago. For a year or so Ben and Josie had constantly kept in touch with the police to keep alive the search. They had posters printed. They had spoken on the radio. Ben had gone to London and seen the hospital ward and spoken to the nurse. He was told there was a file with Interpol, he was told that the search would never end, but in the time since the boy was put on file another two hundred and seventy-six names had already been added.
The boy was gone. He was in the world of the missing.
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