1968: Outside a bakery, an old beggar, small, discreet. I give him 3 or 4 lei.
He takes off his hat, respectfully, and thanks me for a long while. Why, I don’t know – the memory of my father, the physical resemblance (small and stooping) – his gesture – so polite, the shame of being saluted by an old man for a few lei, the onslaught of images of prison in my memory, revelatory of the human condition’s wretchedness – but I burst out crying in the middle of the street, like a madman.
I found myself one Saturday in a basement chanting an Indian song, stamping my feet in a circle of eight women: “We circle around; we circle around the boundaries of the earth!” I banged a tambourine against my thigh and hoped no one noticed it was not in rhythm. This was a one-day course called Finding Your Voice, and it was not yet halfway done.
Alice, a tall woman in a cheesecloth skirt, sat cross-legged beside me. She had the unnerving habit of grinning for no reason. She held her toes in her hands and rocked slightly from side to side.
“So, what is a shaman?” I asked. I’d overheard Alice talking about this before the class.
She told me about her religion. I’d liked to say I remembered what she said. I was too busy watching her eyes roll back in their sockets. It was something about healing, energy, and the ever-present spirit world.
1935: All those – scholars or ordinary folk – who are satisfied to accept, as answers to the big questions man asks about his purpose in the world, about the universe and life, about suffering and injustice, phrases like: the universe has and will always exist, life is a natural phenomenon, chance created everything, thought is the superior form of human consciousness, prove how very undemanding they are. These kinds of answers are stereotypical simplifications, and they’re the equivalent of: when you’re talking to me, you should shut up.
On the contrary, nothing is natural and everything is surprising and wondrous. Evolution is a mystery and a miracle. The questions that our conscience asks are mysteries. Nature and its implacable laws are a miracle. From all sides, mysteries besiege and assail us, uninterrupted and more persistent than cosmic rays. And not even stupidity or indifference can constitute a strong enough magnetic field to protect us from them, the same way the earth’s magnetic field slightly amortizes the shock of cosmic mesons. Angst (or exaltation) will inevitably jolt every soul, even the most obtuse; in a prison cell, on the sick bed, at the moment of death, or all of a sudden on the street. Every event is anti-destiny. Every work of art is anti-nature. Every decision is anti-nothingness. To love somebody is a mystery of faith. Love and forgiveness are not natural. Natural is the second principle of thermodynamics.
Shestov: the evolution of the universe is not in the least natural; it would be natural if there were absolutely nothing – no universe, no evolution.
It was Friday. Little Robbie and I were on our way back from the local Palestinian corner store. We’d already drunk a case of beer, so we were getting more. Little Robbie was a five-foot tall youth from Ballymun in Dublin. He was nineteen, and he had the temperament of a pit bull. I saw him drag a thirty-eight-year-old man in circles around the floor by the hair in a bar downtown. The man had tried to steal Robbie’s bar change.
As we walked down the street to the house at 8th and Nun, we were stopped by a black kid and an older black man who was drinking from a bottle wrapped in a creased brown bag. The kid approached us while the older guy stayed back. He gazed off in the distance like an old-timey sea captain, and fidgeted with the bottle cap, rolling it between the pink fingertips of his brown hand.
“You want some crack?” said the kid.
He was about seventeen, with a slight ‘fro and an eyebrow-thin goatee. I looked at Little Robbie. He nodded and grinned. ‘Just a twenty,’ I thought. ‘It will make the beers go down better.’
“Show us what you got,” I said to the kid.
He pulled a miniature plastic baggie from his pocket containing what looked like broken-off pieces of tooth.
7 March 1960: I didn’t know. I had lived like an idiot, like a beast, like a blind man. In prison, toward dusk, I found what kindness was, heroism, dignity. Big words! Empty words! Big and empty words for traitors and informers: big and priceless words and full of meaning when you feel their coolness in the depths of fire and you can taste their experimental charm. Believe what you wish, I have no right to speak of absolute values, I only know one thing: that these big words and the qualities they represent were more precious in prison than shoelaces, thread, a piece of paper, or any forbidden object that could make its owner happy.
H.C. Wells in The Research Magnificent: two big forces: fear and aristocracy. Now I understand him. Fear must be defeated. In this world there is one thing, only one: courage. And the secret is to behave aristocratically. Only gentleness and kindness have grace.
I’m starting to realise that only character matters. Political convictions, philosophical opinions, social origins, religious faith, are nothing more than accidents: only character remains after all the filtrations produced by years of prison – or of life – after all the wear and fatigue.
I moved to Edinburgh, in January of 2004, because I was in love. It was the first and only time I have been.
I moved in with my girlfriend, of over three years, into a pretty, three-bedroom listed house in a well-to-do area called Shandon.
In October, my girlfriend left me. This is something that happens everyday to someone somewhere. At the time I was working on a number of projects dotted all over Fife. I had to make site visits to clapped-out old mining towns like Burntisland, Prestonpans and Buckhaven. While up there I would visit areas of local interest, mostly churches and graveyards.
The strange thing about being dumped is that you are being told by someone whose opinion you still value that you are not good enough. It is difficult to reconcile. When I was told that she had, at one stage during our relationship, been screwing the landlord, a professional rugby player, I started to drink.
Anna had an abortion for an inveterate rebel from the middle-classes called Stephen, whose face I saw broken in a street brawl. He came toward me with soft fists on twirling arms – like he’d fallen out of a boat and couldn’t swim – but I stepped aside, and he was hit by a flying traffic cone. His head went right into the hole, but not cleanly, it had to slightly twist to fit. That’s how our lives collided.
Copperfields was my pub, a bar like any other that admitted those permanently exiled from every other premises in town. It was a shabby run down functional place. Anna ran the show. She was a young earth mother who knew the dodges and the dodgers. She would cut my hair for a fiver – she could do a mean-to-bitching flat top, fashionable a decade or two before in America; but this was a forlorn drug-ridden outpost in the West Midlands of England.
3 – 4 January 1960: “I don’t think it will be too long,” father says. “They’ll probably give you eight years. I’ll make sure to leave you money with Gica or another relative; the money from the sale of the radio, the cooker, the gas cylinder, the books – to have some money when you get out.” (He has no idea they confiscate the property of political prisoners.)
Monday morning I find myself calm. I wash, I shave, I dress, I check my little suitcase (full of rags). I wasn’t allowed to cry even once during the last three days. Father, who imposed the ban, didn’t cry either.
When I’m ready, I say goodbye. I’m very dejected. Father, however – in his pyjamas, small, chubby, cheerful – is all smiles and gives me last-minute advice, like a coach before a game; fast, without pausing for breath, like a man at a train station who wants to tell you everything, but only begins to speak when the train is pulling away.
“Did they tell you not to let me die like a dog? Well, if it’s like that, I’m not going to die at all. I’ll wait for you. Don’t you make a fool out of me,” he says. “Don’t be a gutless Jew, and don’t shit your pants.”
He kisses me vigorously, he takes me to the door, stands up straight and gives me a military salute.
“Go,” he says.
I climb down the stairs at normal pace, without looking back. I come out the apartment block. There are omens, signs: on the street – at first utterly deserted, even though it’s not early – a single person suddenly appears from around the corner; an MAI officer. I shiver.
