Blood-Dark Track: A Family History. Joseph O’Neill
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Название: Blood-Dark Track: A Family History
Автор: Joseph O’Neill
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007380770
isbn:
I asked Salvator whether my grandfather ever expressed opinions about the war.
‘Never. It was out of the question. At the hotel, there would be a German here, an Englishman there, and an Italian in between. You couldn’t open your mouth. You never knew who was working for who.’
I said, ‘What about my grandfather? Do you think he worked for anyone?’
Monsieur Salvator said, ‘Well, he was Germanophile, that’s for sure. His German was fluent, and he’d speak to the German visitors at the hotel.’ He continued pleasantly, ‘I personally think that he probably did work for the Germans. You see, once you’ve given a little information, that’s it, you’ve crossed the line.’
Monsieur Salvator didn’t elaborate on his speculation. Instead he stood up and made an aerobatic motion with his hand. ‘Every day an Italian plane flew over the port, counting the ships. You must understand, Mersin was an important place. It was full of intrigue, like Lisbon. Mersin,’ Mr Salvator said, pointing upwards, ‘was like Casablanca.’
Walking back to the hotel from Monsieur Salvator’s, I reflected that pretty much everything I had heard about Joseph suggested that he saw himself as a man apart, and indeed that seeing himself must have been an essential procedure of his psyche. It wasn’t that, Narcissus-like, he fell in love with his own reflection; it was rather that, in order to generate and project an image for which there was no local model, he would have needed to dream up an imagined version of himself by which he might gauge his style and conduct. To judge from his reputation as a self-cultivator, this relationship with his imaginary double must have been a powerful one; perhaps as powerful and enduring as any he knew. The question was: what was the character of this modular other? Who was he?
The notion of my grandfather as a fantasist made me think of certain other fantasists I encounter in my working life – the kind who wind up on the wrong end of allegations of fraud. What often marks the downfall of these men – almost invariably they are men – is not a cold ambition to enrich themselves at the expense of others but a fatal susceptibility to their own deceptions: a crazy, romantic belief that their get-rich-quick schemes, however flawed and tricky, will result in champagne for all. Could the same thing have happened to Joseph? Could some dreamlander’s misapprehension have led him astray – into espionage and subsequent imprisonment? I thought about what Monsieur Salvator had said about Casablanca. I was, of course, thinking about the movie, about a well-dressed man in a white tuxedo who tries to steer a neutral and profitable course through a sea of vultures, gamblers, desperadoes, lovers, black marketeers, drinkers, secret agents, beauties, idealists, rumour-mongers. Humphrey Bogart, as Rick, the owner of Rick’s Café Américain, had been almost exactly my grandfather’s age; and Casablanca was set in December 1941, precisely when my grandfather was running the Toros Hotel and, unless I was mistaken, only months before he was arrested.
I ran into my mother at the Toros Hotel reception. ‘Did you find the key to the depot?’ I asked. My mother reached into her hip pocket. ‘I have it here,’ she said.
With the key in my hand I ran up the hotel’s handsome granite stairs just as, twenty-one years before, I ran up the stairs clutching a telegram from Ireland that a waiter had handed me. I was in tears as I sprinted up to my grandmother’s apartment that day, because the telegram from my uncle said, ‘DAD DIED YESTERDAY STOP FUNERAL ON SATURDAY STOP BRENDAN’.
Now never marry a soldier,
a sailor or a marine,
But keep your eye on the Sinn Féin boy
with his yellow, white and green.
– Anonymous, ‘Salonika’
In summer, around Inishannon, the Bandon could be a jungle river. Rank, swollen trees – beech, oak, willow, ash, sycamore, horse chestnut, various evergreens – gather heavily over the banks, the trunks enveloped by vines and dangling plants, the forked branches supporting huge thunderheads of foliage. Everything is overgrown: river boulders and sandbars sprout bushes and weeds, the water surface is clogged with pale yellow blooms, and elongated strands of green vegetation run underwater. Further west and upriver, the Bandon slips along through meadows and copses and is only patchily visible from the main road. At Bandon, the old British garrison town of which it used to be said that even its pigs were Protestant, the river passes under Bandon Bridge. It is still remembered that in 1641 English troops tied 88 Irishmen of the town back to back and threw them off the bridge into the water, where all were drowned. Upstream beyond Bandon town, the river meanders by such townlands as Coolfadda, Shinagh and Laragh on its northerly bank and Castlebernard and Killountain on its southerly. It is briefly reunited with the highway, at Baxter’s Bridge, before twisting off again on a path of its own. The road, meanwhile, has started to resemble the secretive river it shadows – narrow, sinuous, and hemmed in by thickets and dense, overarching trees that barely admit daylight. Black-feathered birds drift like ashes out of the way of cars. The surrounding hills are obscured and the highway is reduced to a succession of blind turns. It’s enough to lead you, kept in this leafy dark, to imagine a conspiracy to conceal the world through which you travel – West Cork.
Finally, a valley opens up ahead. A ruined mill appears on the right. You are coming to the village of Enniskean. If you take a left, towards the gentle uplands there, and follow certain hedged-in lanes, you will arrive upon the townland of Ardkitt, where my grandfather Jim O’Neill was born and the O’Neill farm, now occupied by my second cousin Pat O’Neill, may still be found. If you drive straight on, through Enniskean and the even smaller village of Ballineen, you will come to places where my grandfather, long after he had left the country to live in Cork city, returned on nights when neither the moon nor the floods were up, to steal salmon on the Bandon river.
Jim usually took with him a son or two; often, too, his regular poaching sidekick, Dan Cashman, whose ready compliance with my grandfather’s commands outweighed the fact that he could neither swim, nor drive, nor see beyond the palm of his hand. The fishing party pulled up in the twilight at Manch, where the Bandon twists close to the road and where the fishing rights and riparian lands were the property of the Conners of Manch House. (Manch was also where Tom Barry’s Flying Column, having marched in rain through Shanacashel, Coolnagow and Balteenbrack, crossed the river after the Kilmichael ambush.) Arrival at dusk, when a car with no lights shining would not attract attention, was vital; the car’s electrics were doctored so that the brake lights could be turned on and off by a special switch under the dashboard.
My grandfather, Dan Cashman and my uncle Brendan quickly jumped out. They took two nets – darkened with a product actually called Nigger-Brown Dye – from the boot and skipped over the stile. They passed through the hedge and crossed the single track of the Cork, Bandon & South Coast Railway. There was the water, only a few dozen paces away through furze and long grass. Meanwhile another uncle of mine, Jim Junior, drove on and parked the car in a spot he hoped was both innocuous and discreet. Only fourteen, he would wait there anxiously until the others returned later that night.
Night fell. Nevertheless, it was possible to see clearly, since a night sky is navy, never black, and eyes grow quickly accustomed to the dark. Rain fell intermittently, which was good. СКАЧАТЬ