My Traitor E-Book

Sorj Chalandon

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 245

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

My Traitor tells the story of Antoine, an idealistic young French violin-maker, who takes a train from Dublin to Belfast in 1977 and is propelled into the heart of the Falls Road and the Republican movement, and Ireland's music, suffering and beauty. He meets Tyrone Meehan, a charismatic. high-ranking member of the IRA, who becomes his friend and mentor, and a symbol of the Irish struggle. As he increasingly identifies with his newfound home, Antoine leaves behind his life in Paris. Over the next three decades, from the streets of Belfast to the fields of Donegal, he witnesses the marches, the hunger strikes, the peace process, learning about bombs, prison, poverty and pride. In 2005 his world implodes when the IRA finally lay down their arms and Tyrone is revealed as an informer. An intense depiction of the nature of friendship and loyalty, and the emptiness occasioned by betrayal, My Traitor is a powerful lyric novel – an ode to Northern Ireland – paying an outsider's tribute to a wounded and extraordinary country. Acclaimed in France, My Traitor won several award on publication in 2007. One reviewer wrote: 'Why did Chalandon choose to write a novel rather than a documentary? Because fiction enabled him to go where he couldn't: to meet "his traitor" face to face, to look him in the eye and ask: "what about our friendship? Was that a lie as well?" We understand Antoine. We understand Chalandon. He doesn't falter. His book is a rugged account of a terrible beauty.'

Leseprobe

MY TRAITOR

Sorj Chalandon

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Tyrone Meehan

James Connolly

A Terrible Beauty

Mise Éire

Interrogation of Tyrone Meehan by the IRA

16 DECEMBER 2006

The Martyr

A Coffin on My Shoulder

The Ceasefire

Interrogation of Tyrone Meehan by the IRA

17 DECEMBER 2006

My Traitor

Interrogation of Tyrone Meehan by the IRA

18 DECEMBER 2006

The Secret

The Silence

Interrogation of Tyrone Meehan by the IRA

20 DECEMBER 2006

Gypo Nolan

Gráinne O’Doyle

Afterword: Why My Traitor?

Copyright

For Aude

MY TRAITOR

I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world.

May God have mercy on my soul.

Bobby Sands, Irish patriot, March 1981, on the first day of his hunger strike.

TYRONE MEEHAN

The first time I saw my traitor, he taught me how to take a piss. It was in Belfast, in the Thomas Ashe, a club reserved for ex Republican prisoners. I was near the door, beside the large fireplace, sitting at a table covered with empty glasses and dead bottles. It was the favourite spot of Jim and Cathy O’Leary, who offered me a bed whenever I came to Northern Ireland. Jim O’Leary was a friend. He had done time for transporting arms. He was a joiner, but Catholic, and therefore unemployed, like his wife. And he remained unemployed until the end.

The first time I saw my traitor was that evening, 9 April 1977, in the company of Cathy and Jim O’Leary. Jim was coming back from the bar, three pints of beer held tightly in his big hands. A dark, bitter beer, as heavy as a winter meal, with a sweetish ochre head that turned your stomach. He put the drinks down in front of me. He was joking with a man at a nearby table. In the Thomas Ashe, Jim knew everyone. The small crowd, living between freedom and captivity, was at home around these beer-filled tables; they had their own way of life behind the barbed wire. That Easter Saturday, I had been drinking since the middle of the afternoon. One pint here, another there, waiting for Jim to finish his business. He had brought me to the Rock, to the Busy Bee, another place protected by a doorman, a detour round a dead end, a meeting in a park, a handshake with Father Mullan, three words murmured in Irish to a passer-by, a banknote slipped into a hand, an intrigue between two doors. And I followed Jim. I was privy to no secret, no confidences. I barely paid attention. I never asked any questions. I was just proud to be walking with him along the worried streets, where these people greeted him. I was proud because they noticed me at his side. They remembered my face, and Antoine, my name.

It was early evening. The beers kept coming and coming. My eyes were stinging from the cigarettes. I was drunk. From all the pints. Jim’s laugh and the laughter all around. The rough exclamations, the tumultuous waves that shook the tables. The look on Cathy’s face as she searched for her reflection in a raised glass. And then that music.

—A rebel song, Jim whispered to me.

I looked over towards the stage.

O then tell me, Sean O’Farrell, where the gath’rin’ is to be?

I remember closing my eyes. I had my pint in my hand, and two others waiting on the wet table.

The musicians were singing of the war.

When I first came to Ireland, I had little knowledge of the language of this country. When it was the rough, country, stony accent of Kerry, or the earthy Donegal accent, I did not understand a thing. I let the English words probe my school memory. I caught a sentence, a sound, not much. The musicians were singing of the war. A rebel song, Jim had said. But what about? I didn’t know. It was over my head. I simply listened to the pain of the violin and the plaintive notes. For a long time, all I remembered of the Irish words was their harmony, their colour, their effect on the people sitting at the tables around me. Later, a long time after, hearing them over and over again, I was able to make sense of these lamentations. Those that mourned the Great Famine, those that celebrated the 1916 Rising, those that told of the War of Independence, or the hunger-strike martyrs. But when I first started coming to Ireland, I would just let myself get carried away by the seriousness of the people. I watched them covertly. I let myself be guided by a woman’s raised hand, or by a man standing facing the stage, saluting the song like an old soldier. I nodded my head along with them. I held my fist in the air when they did. I laughed when they laughed and stood when they stood. Often, between two songs, a musician would talk into a mike. It was as brief as a salute. A few words, a name I understood because it was uttered with respect. Then the singer would point his finger towards a table at the back of the room and a man would stand up, half-laughing, half-shy, applauded by the standing crowd.

—He did thirteen years. He was released this morning, Jim might whisper.

Or else it was a prisoner’s wife, applauded as a guest because she came from another town. Or the mother of an IRA volunteer, killed in action, who was remembered. Or else it was an American visitor with Irish roots, huddled in a new Aran jumper, wavering in the face of all this attention.

One thing and one thing only was instantly familiar to me: the Irish national anthem. ‘A Soldier’s Song’ was my first landmark. Sometimes it would be played at the beginning of the evening when you gently set your pint on the table, still thinking about the day just past. Other times, the band would play it at the end of the evening, to let you know it was closing time, just before the lights were switched off and then back on again in the most violent way, with glass collectors shouting that it was time to go home. I have always loved that moment when the anthem is played. That communion, that ceremony of belonging, when Ireland calls her daughters and her sons to the foot of the flag. Jim no longer had to tell me when it was time. Even before it was played, in the silence after the songs, the way in which the musicians got themselves into a new position on the stage, in the solemn waiting, the anthem had already begun. And there, in the midst of everyone, standing amongst them all, with the same look of pain, the same chalk-white face, the same rain-drenched hair, the same feeble breathing, I was just like an Irishman.

On that Saturday, 9 April 1977, I arrived in the morning, for a few days, as usual. I had left France, Paris, the neighbourhood around Place de l’Europe, my little workshop, the smell of wood and varnish, all that unsmiling grey, to come here and close my eyes.

—This is your home, Jim said.

It wasn’t true yet, not quite. I had only been coming regularly to Northern Ireland for two years and I still had a guest’s habits. I amused them. I would push a bar door instead of pulling it; I looked left before crossing the road; I would wait for my beer to be finished before ordering another. But even so. Here I was, once again, among them. I was the Frenchman at Cathy and Jim’s table. I was just there, because it was normal, because people greeted me on the streets, because cars from the neighbourhood beeped their horns at me, because I came here without asking for anything, without demanding anything, without explaining anything and without taking anything. On the Falls Road, in Divis Flats, in Whiterock, in Ballymurphy, in the Short Strand, in Springfield, in Ardoyne, in the Markets, in Andytown, in these areas of extreme poverty, of ugly beauty and of violence that newspapers fear, Belfast whispered to me that I was, in some way, at home.

I wasn’t the only foreigner roaming these streets. Journalists wandered everywhere, as well as sympathizers for the Republican cause: Germans, English, Dutch, French who talked too loudly, Americans overwhelmed by their ancestors. They walked around these places of Republican combat, without ever being able to enter them. When they pushed open a pub door, conversations died out. Not maliciously, not aggressively. They just died out, that’s all. Wariness and old habits made the locals stop. But when I pushed open the club door and sat at Jim’s table, the voices had other things on their mind. I was the violin-maker from Paris, the silent one, the one who came here to share some time.

The first time I saw my traitor was that day, in that club, on Easter Saturday. I was standing, fists clenched by my sides because the musicians were playing my anthem. My head was spinning. Eyes closed, enveloped in the smell of turf. ‘A Soldier’s Song’ was in full swing. On the last note, the room clapped. Not in a congratulatory way, but in thanks. I felt good, sitting back down at the table beside the door. Jim was still standing, putting his coat on, but was having difficulty with the sleeves. Cathy was huddled in conversation with a woman with her back to me. I needed to take a piss.

The toilets were in the basement, beyond the bar stocks and the piled-up kegs. A dozen or so men were there, talking about anything and everything. There were hands gripping shoulders, loud voices, drunken promises, tired eyes; zips open, even before reaching the urinal. There was unity, roughness, laughter, hoarse voices, battered faces, hair greasy with cigarette smoke, weary looks. And me, pissing with my forehead pressed against the tiles. Clumsily shielding myself and the quiet splatter of urine.

—Watch your shoes, son, my traitor said, smiling.

I looked at him. Piercing blue eyes, bushy eyebrows, white hairs creating chaos above his ears. He was unshaven. Under the neon lights, a worn face speckled with silver. Beside me. Pissing like me. A cigarette butt in the corner of his mouth, with one eye almost closed. Pissing like me, but he was farther away, with something almost elegant about his stance. In fact, he was elegant. A small man, in a brown tweed jacket with ochre and green thread, a checked shirt and dark woollen tie. He had kept his cap on. A brown herringbone cap from Shandon’s, pure wool, soft from good use. A lot later, years after, he and I went to Donegal together, beyond Lough Foyle, in the Republic, just to buy me the same one.

—Do you want me to show you?

I still had the anthem in my head, beers to drink, Jim and Cathy who were waiting. All those sounds from the back of the room that sang of drunkenness. I too was out of it.

—Do you want me to show you? my traitor said again.

—Show me what?

—How to take a piss.

So I said yes.

I was facing the urinal – a spout, a gutter that ran along the wall. My traitor placed one hand on my shoulder and gently pulled me back. I was still pissing. It was hanging out. I hadn’t had time to put it away. He laughed. Not nastily. He was just amused at my embarrassment. He asked me what the hell I was afraid of. That someone would see my penis? Here? In this men’s room? This prisoners’ bar? Come on! Smiling, he pointed at my shoes. I was so close to the wall, so worried about it all, the urine was hitting off the white tiles and splashing back onto my shoes in small embarrassing drops.

—That’s not how you do it, he told me.

Standing, facing the urinal, he took three steps back and placed his left hand against the wall.

—It’s like this.

He was stable. Feet spread out, one hand above his head, flat on the tiles, and the other directing the flow. He stood there, like that, stretched out like a bridge, bracing himself above the urinal. He looked at me. There, he said, like this. Once the body was positioned like that, away from the communal gutter, a man could let himself go. I was still standing back, urine on my shoes.

He pissed for a long time.

I had noticed him before, earlier that evening. He was at a big table near the stage. A table of men whom everyone greeted. I saw him because he was looking at me. He talked as he watched me. He laughed as he watched me. He raised his glass as he watched me. When it was time for the national anthem, he had stood up. When I opened my eyes on the last note, he was putting his cap back on. And now here he was pissing. Showing me how. One arm stretched out, a balanced body, and no splashes anywhere.

—You French?

I looked at my traitor. My zip was still down. He let me know with a flick of his chin. We went out together, returning to the over-lit bar.

—I could spot you a mile off. The French move their upper lip when they talk, said my traitor.

I smiled, not knowing what else to do.

—Where do you live?

—Paris.

—Have you got a job?

—I’m a violin-maker.

Sideways look from my traitor.

—Violence-maker?

—Violin-maker.

—Oh! A violin-maker? You’re young.

—Thirty-two.

He nodded, buttoning up his jacket. All around, women and men were struggling to get up. One girl had fallen under a table. A boy was letting himself be led out between two friendly shoulders.

‘If you don’t believe in the resurrection of the dead, come here at closing time,’ read a plaque up behind the bar.

—Are you here for long?

—Sorry?

—I’m asking if you’re here for long.

The Belfast accent – that incomprehensible, impossible accent the first time you hear it, when two is not pronounced as ‘two’, but ‘toïye’, when house is a ‘highse’, when small is ‘wee’, when yes is pronounced ‘aye’, and goodbye, ‘cheerio’.

—Are yee hir fer long?

Just a few days. I came for Easter.

—Easter, repeated my traitor.

Already, he was somewhere else. A man at a table had shouted his name.

—Tyrone!

My traitor went off just like that, without so much as a word. He crossed the floor with his arm out, ready to embrace the man who had called him.

Jim was waiting for me, sitting on the edge of a table. Cathy was finishing a drink that wasn’t hers. I glanced at my shoes, one lace undone and those negligent stains.

—Time now, ladies and gents! shouted the barmen, piling empty glasses along their arms, right up over their heads.

—Were you with Tyrone Meehan?

—Who’s that?

I had got used to Jim’s accent, and Cathy’s. I don’t know why. They had a slower delivery. As though they made an effort for me. When Jim talked to me, I understood almost everything. Not everything, but almost. I stared at his lips, trying to translate, even if some words before and after got lost on the way all the same.

—Have you never heard tell of Tyrone Meehan?

At that moment, by Jim’s voice, Jim’s eyes, his mouth that told of the respect for the name uttered, I knew that my traitor was one of those whom rebel songs celebrate. His name was Tyrone Meehan. Tyrone Meehan, who had explained to me that to piss like a man, you had to accept to show yourself like a man. Standing back from the urinal, looking elsewhere, hand outstretched, a forgotten cigarette in the corner of your mouth.

That night, Cathy, Jim and I walked home. Back up a deserted Falls Road, misty-wet with rain. How I love thinking about that moment when I am in Paris, hunched over a violin, watching the shadows in my street. We went past two British army jeeps and one foot patrol. Four soldiers walked in front, faces blackened, wearing camouflage and helmets, pointing their guns straight out into the night, and two others walked behind, backwards, kneeling down and taking aim at the sound of Irish voices going past. In the streets, behind the fences, dogs barked. From a window, a guy shouted something I didn’t understand. A girl was singing out of tune somewhere, far off in another street. The Brits were coming towards us. As they approached, Jim took me by the arm to cross the road. Nothing ostensible. Just the pressure of his fingers on my sleeve.

One evening, he had explained to me that the Irish Republican Army was there, everywhere, keeping watch over its territory. If this patrol were attacked, it wouldn’t do for a Jim, a Cathy, or an Antoine from Paris to stagger along between the sniper and his target. The IRA therefore asked its people to change footpath when enemy soldiers were approaching.

It is said that after the death of a child, hit by an armoured jeep in front of his house, the inhabitants of the street repainted their house fronts. All the facades painted white in one evening, from the ground up to the height of a man. The next day, there was a long, bright strip all along the street, two metres high. It was the month of May. Two nights later, a Scottish Para was killed by a single bullet in the throat by a roof sniper. It was then, searching the low houses one by one and roughly interrogating the population, that the soldiers realized: in this street of broken lamp posts, intruders had to stand out from the dark. They couldn’t be mistaken for a passer-by, for a neighbour in a hurry; they couldn’t be confused with the darkness of the bricks. They had to be visible, all this whiteness had to show them up and offer them to the gun. British soldiers became shadows, therefore targets, therefore dead. The people had repainted the walls of their street so that no enemy would escape from there again.

—Did I never introduce you to Tyrone?

I said no. I watched the soldiers watching us. They were young. They were tense. They were silent. A hidden radio crackled. Jim was staggering. Cathy was putting her shoe back on. The street was quiet; the club far behind us, the windows deserted. The last black taxis drove slowly past. A few shouts here, a drunken clamour there. The wind. A seagull from the docks. The orange hue of the streetlights. The grease-stained fish-and-chip wrappers rolling around on the pavement. The helicopter. It seemed to shadow us, always, everywhere, far off, with its noisy blades and bright beam of light. It wasn’t following us; not particularly. But it was always watching us. And perhaps watching me, too, the Frenchman walking with Jim and Cathy, who had just met the great Tyrone Meehan.

We went into the living room. Jim sat in his armchair. The remains of turf and coal were smoking in the grate. Just the remains of those beautiful flames that had turned to grey when we came in from the rain. It was damp and cold in the room.

I have always known that house this way, with the air bubbles in the wallpaper, water running in rivulets down the bathroom walls, the big cracks in the ceiling, and the window pane of my bedroom replaced by cardboard. It was a simple house, a working-class house, made of dirty bricks and a slate roof, stuck to an identical house, and to another, and to another, and to yet another. An infinite row, winding, Catholic, and dreary. On the opposite side of the street they were the same, and the same in the nearby dead end, and in the next street, in all the streets around here. One door opened out onto the street; a second door, a glass one, opened into the living room and the stairs that led up. The living room was narrow. A television on a coffee table, a fabric sofa, an armchair and a dresser. On the wall, there was a photo of Pope Paul VI in a gold frame, a picture of the Sacred Heart and a poster of Paris rooftops that they had brought back from their honeymoon. Behind the living room, a tiny kitchen. Just a sink, a fridge and a gas oven. No table. In Jim and Cathy’s house, you put your plate on your knees. A door gave out onto a garden, a tiny wasteland, closed off by a wooden fence topped with barbed wire. The toilet was out there. A shed, a hole in a cement vat and a spade to spread the lime.

Upstairs, there were two bedrooms. Theirs and mine, when I came here. Since the death of their son, Denis, they had changed nothing. I slept in his little bed. His drawings were yellowing on the walls. His photo was everywhere. He had been killed by a plastic bullet in 1974. He was twelve years old. Since then, Jim and Cathy had been living on their own. At first, they didn’t want to have any more children. And then they tried. For a long time. And then they gave up. Cathy went for tests; Jim refused. He said they had suffered too much, that his desire for love had been buried with Denis.

I had pulled an old jumper over my own one. I was absently rubbing my hands above the cold hearth. Jim had kept his jacket on. When it was very cold, he would sometimes even wear his coat in the house. He turned on the television. Cathy made tea. I hate tea. I have never understood tea. Each time, everywhere, as soon as I step inside anywhere in this country, a woman holds a cup of tea out to me. So I drank Cathy’s tea. I watched her wrap herself up in a large brown tartan blanket. I watched the images flashing on the television and the plastic Virgin Mary that was flashing on and off at our window.

—Tyrone Meehan is a veteran, said Jim, setting down his cup.

—A veteran of what, I asked.

—Of everything. Of all combats, of everything that means that we can drink this tea calmly, and almost safely.

That night, I was tired. It was a pity. I liked it when Jim talked. But I was barely listening. The journey, the beer, the piss, the hatred and glee we felt when coming across a foreign patrol in this city I wanted to call my own. Jim was sitting in his armchair, with Cathy balancing on the arm, and I was hunched up on the floor beside my chair because everything was lurching. And Jim told me about Tyrone.

JAMES CONNOLLY

I first encountered the Irish Republic in Paris, one November morning in 1974. Under the gaze of a smiling man wearing a round-collared shirt. The lad who showed me the photo used to come into my workshop a lot. He would just drop in, without an appointment, without knocking, and sometimes for no reason. He would push open the door, case in hand, pull out a stool and sit beside me.

His name was Pierre though he preferred to be called Pêr. He was Breton. He came from Plouarzel, which he spelt Plouarzhel. He taught English. He hated England because he loved Ireland.

While I worked, Pêr would talk. He talked and talked and talked. He would make grand, lively gestures, much too big for my silence. Sometimes, he would go to the window and look warily out at my street, as if he were afraid of being followed. He was a nice young man, and a bad violinist. In fact, I don’t think he was interested in music. He was not attracted to notes, but to identity. He thought belonging, not harmony. Pêr was in love with the Irish and the violin made him feel close to them. To find a place between them, squashed onto the end of a bench, to mix his music with the music of pubs. In Derry, he was ‘the Breton with the violin’.

‘If you throw a stone through a pub window, you’ll injure two poets and three musicians’, says the Irish proverb. And Pêr was looking for those injuries. Because Pêr’s Ireland was not mine. Not yet. My Ireland was The Quiet Man, The Purple Taxi, the Emerald Isle, Aran jumpers, whiskey, the Éire of our crosswords. It was like a glossy picture. It was green grass, red-haired Maureens, stone walls, thatched roofs and Georgian doors. It was happy, laughing, smoky, black with porter and white with sheep wandering round winding roads. My Ireland – I had been there three times – was Dublin, Galway, Clifden, Lisdoonvarna, Aran. An Ireland that was musical, maritime, agricultural, welcoming, spiritual, poor yet proud, tranquil.

—Do you not know the North? Pêr asked me that November morning in 1974.

I replied that I didn’t.

—Then you don’t know Ireland, smiled the Breton.

And then he opened his case.

I was leaning over a violin. I was sanding down the upper nut. A slow and silent moment, just before I apply my linen oilcloth.

—Can you have a look at this? It sounds raw. I think it has come unstuck.

I took the Breton’s instrument. I shook it upside down to release the dust and hair that had accumulated there. I knocked on the belly with my index finger. It made a noise. An appalling echo. As though something was moving on the inside.

—Perhaps, I said.

But no. Nothing. I had made a mistake. Pêr played his instrument proudly. His fingers touched the fingerboard so hard he almost bruised the ebony. Pulled from its mortise, the hair fluttered on the bow. He did not play, he fought. The wood of his violin bore the hallmarks of battle. Scrapes on the belly, injuries on the ribs, snicks on the pegs, dented nose, the back grated with anger. And a loose chin rest.

—It’s the chin rest, I said.

That was all. Nothing more. Loosened by the strength of time, it was wandering over the wood, adulterating the sound.

I tightened the chin rest and got up. With one hand I swept away the sawdust that had fallen onto my knees. I tapped my tuning fork off the side of the workbench. And then I stroked the four strings one after the other. Nothing else was wrong. There was that beautiful tune. I asked Pêr to play. He pulled a sceptical face. He rubbed his hands, pressed his instrument against a green cloth and looked at the ground. Then he breathed in. He banged out a few violent notes. A gavotte from the Bas-Léon. His feet tapping on the ground, his mouth in a grimace and his eyes closed. It was a war tune. Another world, suddenly. The Breton armies pitted against the Montparnasse battlements.

—It’s still not right, he said, handing it back to me.

I asked him to leave it with me until that evening. I would loosen it a little and remove a small shaving from the sound post. Nothing, just a grain of spruce peeled off with a penknife to show that something had been done.

Pêr was tired. I had repeatedly told him that tiredness spoils the sound of an instrument. That the ear does not capture the same impressions after a sleepless night, five beers or a long day of silence. Pêr said that might be the case, but still. He said I would have to take a better look.

—Can I leave my case?

—On the table over there.

He opened it and put his cloth in it. On the inside, the Breton had made his own lining from threadbare velvet in the colours of the Irish flag. The green, white and orange that made such an impression in the pubs. When he played, he left his case open alongside him. Inside the lid, he had stuck a black-and-white photo of a man in a shirt and waistcoat with a slightly receding hairline, thick eyebrows and a heavy moustache. It looked as though the man was smiling. He was wearing a round-collared shirt.

—Let me introduce you to James Connolly, said Pêr, lifting the case up to eye level.

—A violinist? I asked.

Pêr laughed.

—He could have been but he wasn’t. He was an Irish patriot. He was shot in 1916 by the British after the Easter Rising. He had taken over the General Post Office in Dublin with his men and made it the headquarters. And it all went arwy.

I just caught a glimpse of his face before the Breton closed the lid of his case and left the room.

So I began to sand down the nut, slowly, leisurely, in the newfound silence, before taking up the Breton’s violin. I inserted a retriever through the f-holes, and removed the small sound post by wetting it against the tip of my lips. Spruce needs to be damp to work on. A flick of the penknife, nothing more, would do it. It was just a shaving, a fragment of nothing. Then I rubbed a little chalk onto the injury before putting the cylinder of wood back into place, to the left of the bass bar, scarcely higher than it had been.