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gather.’

Sister Bonaventure
No fanfare, not even a reporter from the local newspaper and certainly no photographs, as the doctor believed that a person’s soul was stolen by the influence of a camera. So it was just a tasteful sign in black lettering, on white parchment, announcing that Dr Vladimir’s clinic would open on Tuesday 22 February. In smaller print it said Holistic Healing in Eastern and Western Disciplines.
He was there almost a month, but still something of a stranger, a curiosity, glimpsed in the very early morning, his trouser legs rolled up, gathering stones from the river and on other mornings, he went with the shearers to gather seaweed for his massages and body wraps. Herbs and tinctures from China, India, Burma and Wales were despatched day by day and the postmistress, the town Sphinx, said that some of the stuff had a smell of cow dung.
He walked a lot and sometimes, after a long stretch, he sat on the bench over at Strand Hill, in his big overcoat, beside the letterbox that read Poop Scoop , sat there spouting verses in Latin as big waves came faithfully in. No one approached him in his reverie, until one day, Taig, an eager pupil, dared ask him whose poetry it was. He was told it was Ovid, a poet of the third century who had been exiled from Rome to the Black Sea. In his poems, he cursed and pleaded with those who had banished him, yet was always asking to be allowed home. So like Ovid, he too was a poet and an exile.
Fifi his landlady got to be familiar with his tastes, lamb or pork with red cabbage, which she bought in a jar from a supermarket, and crepes with different fillings, including a curd cheese with sugar. His wine was ordered from a vintner’s in Galway. At night, he pored over his medical journals and encyclopaedias and sometimes, very late, he went up into the woods with the big flash lamp to make phone calls. He had two cell phones, one for work and one that was private and in these late calls she often heard him shouting, up there in the woods, yet at other times laughing when talking to a comrade. He played a stringed instrument called the gusle and recited some of his poems on Sunday evenings in the front room, she being his only audience. Some he translated for her and she found them very macho, rigmarole stuff about bullets being slender and majestic and strapping wolves coming down from the hills. It was not like Yeats, no, not like Yeats’s wandering waters in the pools above Glencar.
Smoke rose from the chimney in his clinic and stacks of logs had been neatly piled in the front hall, yet no one had the courage to cross that door. In the end it was Sister Bonaventure who decided she would be the guinea pig. A nun, she had no fear of him and his Latin charm, prided herself on her free thinking, liberated as she was by the humane teaching of Pope John. John was her man. Yes, nuns, like everyone else, had to move with the times.
She and three other nuns now lived in one wing of the old convent, the major part having been sold off for a school, and as she put it, quoting from scripture, The sparrow hath her house and so they settled in. Faithfully each day, unless she happened to be gallivanting, she was able to get her school lunch for three euros, the same price as the children paid; meat or fish with a vegetable, potatoes, boiled or mashed and what more did anybodywant. She never drank. She had seen the harm and the woes that drink wreaked, families torn apart and farms auctioned off for half of nothing. So as to set a good example, she wore her total abstinence pioneer badge on her lapel. She no longer dressed in a nun’s habit, except for the veil, which she called her ‘bonnet’. She wore a navy skirt, navy jumper, black stockings and good strong black shoes for the journeys she made to isolated places, up by roads and bog roads, where she wouldn’t dare risk her little Mini, her chariot of freedom. The four nuns had their different duties, she doing charity work,