Read Online Irish Journal by Heinrich Böll - Free Book Online Page B

the last two miles of Europe lying between you and America. Wild, the perfect setting for a witches’ sabbath, covered with bog and heather, rises the most westerly of Europe’s mountains, a sheer drop of two thousand feet on the ocean side; facing you on its slope in the dark green of the bog, a paler, cultivated square patch with a large gray house: this is where Captain Boycott lived, the man for whom the inhabitants invented boycotting: this is where the world was given a new word; a few hundred yards above this house, the remains of a crashed airplane—American pilots, a fraction of a second too early, had thought they had reached the open sea, the smooth surface between them and their native land: Europe’s last cliff, the last jag of that continent, was their doom.
    Azure spreads over the sea, in varying layers, varying shades; wrapped in this azure are green islands, looking like great patches of bog, black ones, jagged, rearing up out of the ocean like stumps of teeth.…
    Finally (or unfortunately—I am not sure which) the priests have finished or broken off their school reminiscences, they have also arrived to look at the feast promised by the poster: Ann Blyth. The rosy shells are dimmed, the racket in the cheap seats dies away, this whole classless society sinks into silent anticipation, while, honeyed, colored, and wide-screened, the film begins. Now and again one of the four- or three-year-old children begins to bawl when pistols bang too realistically, or blood, looking too genuine, flows from the hero’s forehead, or dark-red drops even appear on the heroine’s neck: Oh, must this lovely neck be pierced? It isn’t permanently pierced, don’t worry; a piece of chocolate quickly stuffed into the mouth of the bawling child, and pain and chocolate melt away in the darkness. At the end of the film one has that feeling unknown since childhood—of having eaten too much chocolate, indulged in too many sweets: Oh that painful precious heartburn from intensely enjoyed forbidden pleasures! After so muchsaccharine a spicy preview: black and white, gambling hell—hard thin women, ugly bold heroes, more of the inevitable pistol shots, more chocolate stuffed into the mouth of the three-year-old. A program of generous dimensions; it lasts three hours, and here too, when the rosy shells begin to glow again, the doors are opened, on people’s faces what is always to be seen on people’s faces at the end of a movie: a slight embarrassment, disguised by a smile; one is a little ashamed of the emotion one has involuntarily invested. The beautiful creature from the fashion magazine climbs into her great car, enormous blood-red tail lights, glowing like lumps of peat, move away toward the hotel—the peat cutter plods wearily off to his cottage; silent grown-ups, while the children, twittering, laughing, scattering far into the night, repeat to each other the story of the film.
    It is past midnight, the light from Clare Island lighthouse has been shining across for some time, the blue silhouettes of the mountains are deep black, a few yellow lights far off in the bog; Grandma is waiting there, or Mother, or the husband or wife, to be told what they are going to see for themselves in a day or two, and they will sit by the fire till two, three in the morning, for—when God made time, He made plenty of it.
    Donkeys bray in the warm summer night, passing on their abstract song, that crazy noise as of badly oiled door hinges, rusty pumps—incomprehensible signals, magnificent and too abstract to sound credible, an expression of limitless pain and yet resignation. Cyclists whir by like bats on unlit wire steeds, until finally only the quiet peaceful footsteps of the pedestrians fill the night.

9
THOUGHTS ON IRISH RAIN
    The rain here is absolute, magnificent, and frightening. To call this rain bad weather is as inappropriate as to call scorching sunshine fine weather.
    You can call this rain bad weather, but it is not. It