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captain was giving curt orders. I immediately recognized an accent from my country. I saw the Dublin Fire Brigade truck. Irishmen. Thirteen fire brigades had crossed the border in the morning, from Dundalk and Drogheda, too. The residents were offering them coffee and bread. Irishmen. I went closer. I wanted everyone to know that they were from my country. Each time a passer-by joined the crowd I would tell them the good news. The Irish had come to help. I could see the border soldier with his blond moustache and his thin lips. I replayed the scene.
    —Have you come to fight the Jerries?
    —You bet!
    An old woman arrived with her arms in the air like a prisoner. She had mistaken the Dublin accent for a German one. She was removing debris from her house. She was groggy, covered in soot and bits of plaster. When people pointed out the Irish fire engine she sat down on the pavement, shaking her head, convinced now that the blast of the bombs had thrown her to the other end of the country.
    The crowd was spilling into the street. A few soldiers broke it up. They pushed a journalist from the Belfast Telegraph away and confiscated his camera. Ireland was neutral and its presence here, assisting a combatant country, even just fighting fires, could embarrass the Irish government. Our firemen went back across the border the same day.
    Our sadness turned to anger. I listened to the crushed city, the fragmented discourse. ‘I never did like washing the windows. Now I’ve a good reason not to do it any more,’ a shopkeeper had written on his cracked shop window. At the corner of Victoria Street and Ann Street, perched on a breeze block, a man was shouting that Northern Ireland was unprotected. That even the least important English town had shelters, anti-aircraft defences, troops, real fire services.
    —Do you know how many anti-aircraft guns we have here, do you? shouted the man.
    He was waiting for a response, but most people continued on their way, ashamed to lend him an ear.
    —Twenty-odd in the whole of Ulster! And anti-aircraft shelters? Four! Only four, counting the public toilets on Victoria Street! And spotlights? How many? Eh? How many beams for tracking the planes? A dozen! There were over two hundred bombers last night, Fritz’s best, eh? Junkers! Dorniers! And as for us, what did we have?
    —Damned papist! a guy passing yelled without turning.
    The speaker shook his fist at him.
    —Imbecile! I’m a loyal Protestant! British like you! A member of Coleraine’s Orange Order, so spare me your lecture!
    And then he got down from his breeze block. He pulled up the collar of his jacket and put his limp hat back on while muttering once more:
    —Imbecile!
    A Protestant. It was the first time in my life I’d seen one.

3
    Killybegs, Sunday, 24 December 2006
    I have often come back to Killybegs, to my father’s house. Even now there is still no electricity or running water. I left the cottage as it was. In memory of my mother, crouched before the fireplace, rekindling the embers, hands cupped around her lips, and of my father, sitting at the table, fists under his chin, waiting for the rain to stop.

    My wife Sheila never liked coming here with me. She used to say that the house was a tomb. That Padraig Meehan’s evil shadow flickered across my face when I was under his roof. My brothers and sisters never came back. United States, England, Australia, New Zealand. Apart from baby Sara, they all opted for exile. So I kept the key. I alone. I kept it as though protecting some scrap of memory. Since the Sixties it’s here I have always come to take refuge. To escape Belfast, the city, the fear, the British. To cross the border, find the Ireland that still belongs to our flag. I come from time to time, for a few days or a few weeks, to draw the water from the well, to shiver in front of the black hearth. To walk in the forest and gather the armful of wood for the night. To be startled by nothing but the crackling of the