Hand in the Fire

What a cruel archivist she was to keep them unread. She was the perfectionist, I thought, storing these precious handwritten letters, gagged and sealed, with no right of reply.

Anyone who lives in a foreign place must ask themselves that question all the time: Have they been forgotten? It made me wonder about myself. I was hoping that my presence here was not like this one-way correspondence, that I was not just a worker and that they would miss me, if I had to leave for some reason and not return again.

7

The Garda officers came looking for me on site around lunchtime. With all the other workers eating their take-away food and staring at me, they asked me to confirm my name and address. Was my real name Vid or Vim? Was I a Polish national? They suspected I was trying to conceal my identity and wanted to see my passport, evidence of my work permit, which I did not have with me at the time and which I agreed to provide as soon as possible. But they needed to see it immediately. They were polite and took me to my apartment and then on to the station for further questioning.

At the station, they asked me to cast my mind back to a particular night and tell them whether I had been involved in an assault in which a man had been seriously injured. They gave me the date and the location and an approximate band of time in which the assault had taken place. They wanted to know about my movements on the night in question and asked me if I had made an anonymous phone call to a particular Garda station alerting them to the crime. They informed me that a man with a foreign accent like mine had reported seeing the victim lying in the street but then refused to identify himself. I told them I had not made any such call and that the incident had nothing to do with me.

‘That’s very strange,’ one of the officers said. They explained that the victim had claimed I was known to him, that we had met in a nearby bar on the night in question and that I had been seen in his company by several witnesses. It was reported that I had accosted his daughter and then subsequently, on the same night, assaulted him on his way home. He was recovering from multiple injuries, including a broken hip and a broken jaw. He was pressing charges against me, as well as another unknown Polish national who had yet to be identified.

‘Was it your friend who made the phone call?’ they wanted to know.

They asked their questions too quickly for me to think. It was a shock to discover that I had become the main suspect. I had no idea what to say to them. I denied that I had assaulted anyone. They asked me if I needed legal aid, but I let them know that I was already fixed up with a lawyer, so they allowed me to make a call.

Kevin arrived as soon as possible, dressed in a dark suit and carrying a brown case. He knew some of the officers and spoke to them in an informal way as though they were friends. He winked at me and we were given a chance to have a few words alone.

‘I know this is a bit of a shock, Vid,’ he said. ‘But listen, don’t worry. They’ll never get anywhere with this line of enquiry. They’re only groping around in the dark. You simply deny everything. You didn’t assault anyone. You have no recollection whatsoever of what they are alleging, am I right?’

‘I will have to tell the truth,’ I said. ‘I can’t lie.’

‘Nobody’s asking you to lie, Vid.’

He smiled at me and placed his hand on my shoulder. It was good to see him. His presence brought a great surge of confidence back to me.

I didn’t want to let him down either. He had stood by me. At last I had a friend and was beginning to feel at home here, so I couldn’t afford to lose that. But I felt so inadequate in front of the law. I was too honest. I didn’t have the knack of out-staring the questions and sneaking up on the facts. You had to be born with that kind of gift, like a good card player. I was a newcomer to the table, all nervous and unsure of myself, ready to bet everything on one hand and blurt out the unabridged truth.

‘You have the right to remain silent,’ he reminded me. ‘You understand that, don’t you?’

‘I’m afraid they will turn everything around with their questions.’

‘You don’t even have to say yes or no.’

He seemed so relaxed, slipping his phone in and out of his inner pocket to check messages. His sandy hair fell naturally across the corner of his forehead. His nose leaned a tiny degree to the right and his smile moved across with it, very openhearted, I thought.

‘They’re asking me who I was with that night,’ I said.

‘I know what you’re talking about, Vid.’ He nodded calmly. ‘But the fact is, you don’t remember anything, am I right in saying that? You have a very poor memory, isn’t that so? You were involved in a bad car accident back home in Serbia. You sustained head injuries which caused severe brain trauma. With the result that you are now left with bouts of prolonged amnesia.’

‘That’s right,’ I said.

‘Show them the scar on your head,’ he said. ‘You suffer from memory loss, short term as well as long term. You have big gaps where you cannot remember much about growing up. Nothing about school, not even much about your own family.’

‘Well, yes.’

‘You can hardly remember where you come from, isn’t that so?’

‘Just about.’

‘Explain that to them,’ he said. ‘Make it clear to them what a painful condition this is, not to be able to remember your own past. You don’t even recall much of what happened in your own country and who was brought before the European Court or anything of that sort.’

‘More or less,’ I agreed.

‘Some days are a complete blank,’ he said. ‘How does that sound?’

He went over the details of the night again, shaping it into a brief and unambiguous synopsis. I could remember being in the pub and meeting the victim. I could recall having a friendly chat with his daughter outside the back door while she was smoking, but I had no recollection of anything after that.

‘Will I tell them that he hit me?’ I asked.

‘I wouldn’t mention it. That would only give you a motive.’

He was so convincing. I admired the way he could see things with such clarity. He had the ability to think on his feet and look ahead while he was speaking. He knew where each sentence would end before he even began. In contrast, I spoke almost entirely in beginnings, or endings, with nothing sounding in the least bit finished or credible.

‘Just a bit of advice, Vid. Don’t let them put words in your mouth. And don’t be the big storyteller. Doesn’t suit you. Best to remember as little as possible.’

That was it. He spoke to the officers again and told them it was clearly a case of mistaken identity. First of all, I was not Polish, so they appeared to have the wrong man. They discussed this for a moment and then insisted on taking a statement. A woman Garda typed it up on a computer, then printed it out and produced a pen from the back of her hair for me to sign. Kevin later said to me that she was quite pretty, despite the fact that she was in uniform and that she was so small, not even the size of a milk carton.

‘That’s very convenient,’ one of the officers remarked at one point, referring to my memory loss, but Kevin objected quite vigorously to that suggestion, saying it was completely out of order. Calling somebody’s disability convenient, that was not on. They had the wrong man, he reiterated, and I liked that idea. It was so good to have him by my side. There was no progress made with the enquiries. At the end of the interview, they told me that I would need to come back in order to be formally identified by the victim, but in the meantime I was free to go.

Two weeks later I had to show up again for the line-up, which was made up of immigrants like myself mostly, with a man from Nigeria at one end and a man who turned out to be a plain clothes policeman in the middle, just to mix things up a little. The electrician was still on crutches, but he had no hesitation in pointing to me right away, without even wishing to look into my eyes.

To me it felt like I had been picked out as the only person who didn’t belong here.

On the same day, I was brought before the court and charged with the assault. I don’t even remember the words that were used because I was hardly listening to what they were saying. I think my mind shut down completely and refused to hear anything. I suppose I was clutching at the familiar things in my life, images of home which I was running away from but which might still give me some comfort. I was thinking of the streets of Belgrade, the trees in summer, the sound of the language, the Cyrillic writing we learned in school. The people in the cafés, the wasps around the cakes. None of those things had prepared me for what was happening in court. I was concentrating on the shape of the houses on Washington Street, my route to and from school on the bus. I could see myself passing by the cinema and I could even remember some of the movies I had watched there, the posters outside on the wall, the excitement of paying the money at the box office, getting the ticket stub and walking into the cool, darkened auditorium on a hot day, like the only refuge from the heat. I could see my life condensed into a number of key memories, like the sound of the bus doors clattering as they closed and the bus pulling away and leaving diesel fumes behind, mixed with the smell of coffee and leather goods and a million other things. I could remember the stalls with vendors selling bootleg merchandise. I could feel the heat of the summer lying across the lazy streets when I emerged from the cinema, hitting me in the face like a cushion, even though it always took a long time to step out of the story of the movie back into reality. I could remember the face of an old woman who begged on the corner, next to the bakery, still sitting on a small wooden box at that very moment, in her own city, while I was in court a thousand miles away, completely out of place.

I wondered if it was a mistake to leave your own country. My first impression here was of everything being so wealthy and inviting. The shop fronts were new and the goods on display were neat and ordered, with lots of choice. Belgrade seemed so dull by comparison. I could recall passing by a ladies’ fashion shop with the mannequin of a woman with one amputated arm. She had rosy cheeks, but her nose looked like it had been bitten off and the plaster inside her nostrils was showing as though everything had been affected in some way by the war.

I heard my name being called out a number of times, badly pronounced. Next thing I was standing in the street again, free to go, awaiting trial. The whole thing was over so fast that I had no time to pick up what had been said. It would have been so much more depressing if it hadn’t been for Kevin encouraging me, clapping me on the back as though I had won a prize. He was doing everything in his power to sort this out.

‘We’re in this together, Vid. I will not let you down, I swear.’

He reminded me that I was doing him an enormous turn and that he would see me right. He would engage the best legal minds in the city to work on this case. He got me a cup of coffee and told me to put it out of my head for the moment, but I could think of nothing else and even thought of leaving and going back home to my own country to escape from this, as if that would solve my problems.

‘We’ll get you out of this,’ he assured me. Once again, I felt the rush of confidence coming from his words. I felt safe and welcomed, as always, until I was on my own again, walking home.

It was lashing all afternoon after the court appearance. Nothing could be done about the weather. Even when the rain stopped, the trees were dripping and the gable ends of houses were stained with watermarks. I could feel the moisture at the back of my neck, inside my sleeves. I could see it hanging across the streets. The whole earth sagging under the weight of unhappiness, with more clouds, like heavy curtains being closed. Cars hissing along the streets as if we were all living in a fish tank. Passengers floating away on buses with steamed-up windows. The swings in the People’s Park were wet. The benches were wet. The lawns saturated like a green sponge. Nobody wanted to be out and nobody wanted to be in either. The faces of children at the windows, waiting for something better. I wondered if I could ever get used to it. The dampness seemed to affect everything here. Children got curls in their hair. Hall doors swelled up, causing trouble closing. Rusted railings. Rusted bicycle chains. You could hear people coughing. You could hear them complaining that it was impossible even to get the clothes dry.

At one point, while I sheltered in a doorway, a woman came along the street saying ‘rotten’ to everyone she passed by. I was in a trance, staring through the rain in front of my eyes, just hearing the word ‘rotten’ echoing again and again along the street. I listened to the water, like the sound of wheels spinning inside my head. Water running down the drainpipes and gurgling away into the sewers. Herringbone patterns rushing into the drains. Broken gutters where the water came spurting out in a fountain across the pavement until the whole city was turned into one great water feature.

I was angry. I even had time to feel betrayed. There were so many unanswered questions in my own head. Who made the anonymous phone call on the night? I refused to even think that Kevin would have done such a thing, calling the Garda station and putting on a Polish accent. A friend would not do that.

The following day, I quit working for the building company I was employed with. It was important to avoid running into the electrician or any of his mates. I got a job sanding floors instead, which was not ideal, and it made more sense to get out of the building trade altogether. It was best to lie low for a while, until this was all over.

I went back to security work. But it was not my style, standing around outside bars and night clubs in a black suit, looking people up and down and refusing entry. Not much better hanging around the door of a pharmacy all day. I decided to stop that and took up a job in a restaurant. I kept my hand in, doing a bit of carpentry work here and there with my friend Darius. But it was Kevin who really helped me out in the end, bringing me back to his mother’s house. She was so happy with the black ash wardrobes that she wanted me to do more work. The back door to begin with. It was falling apart and totally unsafe from a security point of view. You could almost walk in without even having to turn the handle. So they wanted me to put in a decent hardwood door with a proper three-lever mortise lock.

That kept me going for the time being and made me feel I was still part of the family at least.

8

It would take a good nine months or more for the court case to come up, so there was lots of time to sit around and agonise over the situation. Better to go out and have a good time while I was waiting, Kevin advised me. What helped to take my mind off things was that I found a girlfriend. Her name was Liuda and she was from Moldova, working here as a beautician on a temporary visa. I got talking to her at the pharmacy where she was promoting some skin-care products and we started going out.

I felt badly not telling her that I was charged with assault, but she was better off not knowing anything about that.

We got on very well together and maybe immigrants were better off sticking together, I thought, because we might have more in common. Put it this way, we both knew what it was like to live away from home and what a comfort it was to float around in each other’s arms. When it came to sex, you could say that we spoke the same language. Some of the things she did with her body gave me such a rush of blood to the head that I forgot everything. She was so full of stagecraft and imagination that I could never think of anything else but the act of making love itself. Her legs. Her mouth. Her breasts pointed slightly upwards at the tops of trees somewhere. Everything about her in bed demanded such full attention that I could not concentrate on anything other than the specific details of her body. The incredibly soft areas on the inside of her thighs. The brush of her nipple against the side of my face. All those breathy voicemail sounds in my ears. The encounter with her seemed to prohibit all memory. For instance, I could not remember any old people. I could not get myself to remember any dead people either. She distracted me from thinking about the news, about war and climate change, disasters of any sort, like famine and poverty and people dying of AIDS. She produced such a powerful urge in me, pulling me so vigorously inside herself that I became truly blank. In other words, we were fucking to forget. We created this little enclave of love and sex which inhibited us from getting a proper foothold in the real world.

Yes. You could say it was love, but there was no future in it. Under the circumstances, with my court case coming up and her being here on a temporary visa, it seemed pointless for us to accumulate too many memories together.

We did all the right things. We went for picnics in the Phoenix Park. We spent time at the Zoo. We went walking along the pier together. We took photos of each other with all the local landmarks in the background. Her eyes caught the sunlight – glossy, hazel-brown pebbles at the bottom of a stream. She came from a place where they still had bears and wolves and numberless trees, where nature might still make a big comeback some day. We heard the sound of the accordion coming and going on the breeze. We passed by the man from Romania playing a gypsy waltz and wondered why we had left home in the first place. We remembered the same kind of things, the sight of villages and church spires and headscarves and open shirts and unshaven smiles in the fields. We felt close to each other – same nostalgia, same tug of self-loathing, same shock of familiar tastes and images from which we had walked away.

In the long run, we were only preventing each other from integrating and moving ahead. It was there in our eyes, in the kind of choices we made, the places we went to, the kind of things we purchased that didn’t cost too much, like ice-cream cones.

For instance, one day I brought her to a place called Howth. It’s meant to be beautiful out there. Famous too, because this was the location where the writer James Joyce first made love to his future wife Nora, something which is commemorated publicly on the sixteenth of June every year in a national celebration of sex and literature and first love. People told me that Ireland used to be sexually repressed, but you’d never think it now, would you?

Howth was just another hill, basically, with a big golf course and some wealthy villas and gates and planes landing nearby at the airport. It didn’t really mean anything to us. When I gave Liuda the relevant tourist information, she shrugged as though I was talking about a past lover. We walked around and sat on a bench. We felt the dampness in the air, rising up into our shoulders. We gazed at the clouds moving fast overhead, which made us want to hold on to the bench with our hands. We kissed and touched, but we couldn’t really connect to the place. It was a mistake to bring her out there because it already belonged to somebody else. We were the latecomers. She looked lonely and pale, so we didn’t stay very long.

‘Come on, Vid. I’m cold,’ she said.

There was quite a breeze blowing and she started rubbing her arms. As we got up and walked back, I spotted a used condom hanging like a pink piece of stripped fruit in the gorse bushes. I deflected her attention, pointing eagerly like a child at the lighthouse, but I think she had seen the condom before me and didn’t mention it out of courtesy.

We were both dragging our feet. When you come from somewhere else, you develop all these prejudices about the people of this country being superior, more funny, more gifted with language and jokes. She said Irish women were strong and very independent. She wanted to learn that. Every time we stared into each other’s eyes, we were reminded only of our own inadequacies. We had to be realistic, I suppose. We were both on the lookout for something better. There was something missing, something preventing us from committing fully to this love in a damp climate.

We stuck it out together for about six months, but there was never any mention of us moving in together permanently. And the idea of setting up a family seemed completely out of the question. Think of it. We would remain strangers to our own children. We would be like two homesick parents, living in a fantasy. Lacking essential local knowledge. Routine stuff that everybody knows around here. Our children laughing at us and correcting our mistakes. Talking to us like we were deaf and blind and had no idea what was going on in the real world outside. We would speak to them in a foreign language and they would never get used to what we sounded like in our own mother tongue. It would remain a life of confusion and contradiction and naturally occurring blasphemies.

I tried to integrate her as much as possible into my life, but it never worked out. One night, I brought Liuda with me to meet Kevin and Helen, but that was a bit of a disaster. Nobody knew what to say except Kevin. He couldn’t take his eyes off Liuda all night. Kept talking only to her as though myself and Helen were not even present.

Liuda was very shy in his presence and hardly said a word. Helen was even more silent, almost aloof. The only thing she said all night was to mention Dursey Island.

‘I believe the cable car is down,’ she said, and Kevin looked up with great surprise, wondering where this thought had slipped out from. ‘They have a new one ordered from Germany,’ she added. ‘So I read in the paper.’

We had more fun on our own, Liuda and myself. At least we had love and sex, like living on our own island. We could also talk about our observations as outsiders, without offending anyone. We spoke about some of the funny things, the contradictions we experienced here. I loved listening to her talking about her clients and how envious they were of her complexion. She told me how Irish women often hated their own skin. They wanted the make-up lashed on thick. ‘Does my face look like a plate of chips?’ they sometimes joked. And how could you answer that? Beauty therapy was not about being honest but about making the customers feel good.

We agreed that people here didn’t want the straight answer all the time. They needed lots of praise. They loved exaggeration. They used compliments like mind-altering substances. She was on commission for skin-care products, so she got used to telling people that they looked gorgeous, cool, brilliant, absolutely amazing – out of this world.

She told me the story of how she came here. She met an Irish businessman who was in Moldova sourcing timber. She ran into him in a bar and he offered to get her a job. Paid for her flight over and put her up. She was nervous because she had heard about girls getting their passports taken off them when they arrived. But her passport didn’t matter as much as her visa, which put her at the mercy of her employer. She could not work for anyone else. So she lived with him and slept with him and cooked for him and worked in the office of his joinery firm.

Once he got tired of her, he allowed the permit to lapse. When he came back from another business trip with a new woman from São Paulo and a consignment of hardwoods that he swore were not from the rainforest, Liuda had to move out and find herself a new employer who would apply for a new visa. Asshole, she called him, and it made me laugh to hear her putting the emphasis in the wrong place. Ass-HOLE.

Inevitably, she was taken out of my hands, as the saying goes.

We were in a bar together one night and this guy came up to me in the jacks, talking about her. He was staggering around the place, pissing dangerously beside me in his urinal, chasing the green, pine-smelling dice around in circles with the force of his flush.