Pearl Read Online Free PDF Page A

surveillance, as if, walking into the courtyard, she would set off a siren. The heels of early workers clicked in the damp air.
    Pearl didn’t know what to do with herself in the week before classes started. She would sit in the student canteen, eating her grilled cheese sandwiches, too shy to speak. Pub life seemed beyond her; she’d had no experience of a social life built around drinking. She tried to walk the city but didn’t know what she was looking for. She remembered a saying her mother lived by: You must be sure that you enjoy one thing every day. Most days, for her, it was the colors of the doors or the painted surfaces of the buildings, bright blue, candy yellow, festive in the dim air. And the voices of the people, and their good manners, which made her hungrier, as they suggested a warmth she felt herself a failure to be unable to take advantage of.
    It wasn’t any better when classes started. She was shy, and no one seemed anxious to include her in their conversation. She was taking classes in the Irish language. It was her Irish teacher who suggested to the class that even though they were beginners they should go to meetings of the Gaelic Club, just to hear the language spoken. That was where she met Finbar, whom she probably wouldn’t have talked to in the United States. At home she would have found him an embarrassment: shoulder-length hair, army greatcoat, tie-dyed shirt, overlarge boots. But Finbar talked to
her.
And it seemed to her that she hadn’t had a conversation in the two weeks since Jessica had left. She let him buy her a drink. They discovered they both had a facility for languages.
    .  .  .  
    Perhaps you would feel more sympathy for Pearl if you could say she did what she did for love. That she had met a young man, loved him, given herself to his cause. But it didn’t happen like that. For Pearl, it was more an affair of the mind than the heart, more a thing of words than of the body. Also, she was very lonely. She was alone in a strange city. It was winter. The sky darkened early. She didn’t know how to make things work: the buses, the telephones. And there was the accident of her roommate’s getting sick and having to go home. How much of what happed to Pearl is traceable to a microbe? To the weak sun? To the failure of the Dublin buses?
    But no, you will say to me, that can’t be it; there must be more than that, more than the sun, the washing machine, the buses. Of course there is. But that is the beginning.
    It would not be right to say she fell in love, but after she met Finbar she felt happier, not so alone. Finbar McDonagh. He had a circle of friends, boys who dressed like he did, who wore their hair to their shoulders, who collected in his flat to talk about politics. Because of Finbar and his friends, Pearl had to learn a whole new set of terms. Republican is not the party of Ronald Reagan and George Bush; to be Republican means you believe in a United Ireland, an Ireland healed after the split that occurred in 1922, when the six counties of the North were declared not part of Ireland but of Britain. Then, if you learned the word
Republican,
you needed to learn many new names: Michael Collins, Éamon de Valera, Pádraig Pearse. And then you had to learn that the opposite of Republican is Unionist, or sometimes Loyalist: names for the Northern Protestants who want to keep the North a colony of England. Names for the enemies.
    Everything Finbar and his friends did was connected to the Republican cause. They studied the Irish language because it was the language of the Republic; they played Irish football because it was the proper game for people with their politics. There was only one worthy endeavor and only one vision: a united Ireland free of any English taint.
    She was fascinated. It was a new kind of being political, different from that of her mother and her mother’s friends, who went to meetings to stop the construction of buildings too tall for the neighborhood