Irish Journal Read Online Free PDF Page A

been thirteen myself: in a great dark apartment in south Cologne—residential apartment house, is what it would have been called in 1908—I sat clutching my Christmas report; vacation had begun, and through a worn place in the cinnamon-colored drapes I looked down onto the wintry street.
    I saw the street colored reddish-brown, as if smeared with unreal, stage blood: the piles of snow were red, the sky over the city was red, and the screech of the streetcar as it swerved into the loop of the terminus, even this screech I heard as red.But when I pushed my face through the slit between the drapes I saw it as it really was: the edges of the snow islands were brown, the asphalt was black, the streetcar was the color of neglected teeth, but the grinding sound as the streetcar swerved into the loop, the grinding I heard as pale green—pale green as it shot piercingly up into the bare branches of the trees.
    On that day Kevin Cassidy died in Dublin, thirteen years old, the same age as I was then: here the bier was set up, Dies irae, dies illa was sung from the organ loft. Kevin’s frightened schoolmates filled the benches; incense, candle warmth, silver tassels on the black shroud, while I was folding up my report, getting my sled out from the closet to go tobogganing. I had a B in Latin, and Kevin’s coffin was being lowered into the grave.
    Later, when I had left the church and was walking along the streets, Kevin Cassidy was still beside me: I saw him alive, as old as I was, saw myself for a few moments as a thirty-seven-year-old Kevin: father of three children, living in the slums around St. Patrick’s; the whisky was bitter, cool, and costly, from Swift’s tomb ice needles came shooting out at him: his dark-haired wife’s face had a greenish pallor, he had debts and a little house like countless others in London, thousands in Dublin, modest, two-storied, poor; petty bourgeois, stuffy, depressing, is what the incorrigible esthete would call it (but watch out, esthete: in one of these houses James Joyce was born, in another Sean O’Casey).
    So close was Kevin’s shadow that I ordered two whiskies when I returned to the private drinking booth, but the shadow did not raise the glass to its lips, and so I drank for Kevin Cassidy, who died 20.12.1930 at the age of thirteen—I drank for him too.

4
MAYO—GOD HELP US
    In the center of Ireland, in Athlone, two and a half hours by express from Dublin, the train is split up into two. The better half, the one with the dining car, goes on to Galway; the underprivileged half, the one we remain in, goes to Westport. We would be watching the departure of the dining car, where lunch was just being served, with even more painful emotions if we had any money, English or Irish, to pay for breakfast or lunch. But as it happens, since there was only half an hour between the arrival of the ship and the departure of the train and the exchange bureaus in Dublin do not open until 9:30, all we have is flimsy notes, useless here, just as they come from the printing presses of the German Federal Bank, and central Ireland knows no rate for these.
    I still have not quite got over the scare I had in Dublin: when I left the station to look for a place to change some money, I was almost run over by a bright-red panel truck whose sole decoration was a big swastika. Had someone sold Völkischer Beobachter delivery trucks here, or did the Völkischer Beobachter still have a branch office here? This one looked exactly like those I remembered; but the driver crossedhimself as he smilingly signaled to me to proceed, and on closer inspection I saw what had happened. It was simply the “Swastika Laundry,” which had painted the year of its founding, 1912, clearly beneath the swastika; but the mere possibility that it might have been one of those others was enough to take my breath away.
    I could not find a bank open and returned discouraged to the station, having already decided to let the train for