both miscomputed the amount and drew up the sum in Irish pounds instead of dollars. When I mentioned it, he tore up the form and began again, with an air of exasperation and absent-mindedness, as though he had never done anything so practical as to rent a car before. There’s no charge for mileage, he said. He crossed out Mileage, and wrote in Fuel: $35, and added a line: Misc. Tax: $19. Finally, he asked whether I would like insurance. I wavered. My sense of the transaction somehow gave me no confidence in the quality, or even the fact of this insurance. I said, No, thank you, I am insured. Why, so are we, he said. This is just for the initial liability, eight hundred dollars. I would normally take this kind of insurance without question, but there was something makeshift about even the piece of paper, which he now held out to me as if it were a raffle ticket; and, in fact, I was insured, as a driver, for major accidents. So I signed the waiver of insurance, and the contract for the rental of the car.
Talk to them, the ambassador had said, they are a friendly people. Well, the hell they are. An occasional creature of great poetry and beauty; the others, suspicious, crafty, greedy, stubborn, incurious, stupid, devious, violent, and cruel. And, of course, that is what the history of the country is. Point, set, and match, as the American professor’s wife said, at dinner, at the Waltons’, on the night I concluded that I had to leave the country. On the night I drove and drove, and became ever more certain that I had missed my turnoff, in which case I was bound, not for Dublin at all, but for Tuam and for Shannon; or perhaps worse, lost entirely. So that I would drive, through this alternating sleet and mauve and breathless clarity till daylight, calling attention to myself at daylight, when what I needed was to catch the first flight of the morning out of Dublin. A flight on which I had no reservation, but on which I had been told, in response to an anonymous call the night before, there were still seats. Then, when I had stopped and turned around, there were those headlights coming toward me, the first car I had seen in more than twenty minutes; and I thought, Could the police have alerted one another, in every little town along the way, ever since I set out from the castle, dropping my key in the intense dark at Cihrbradàn, and could this be another of their agents, sent to follow me out of the station at Castlebar? Not so paranoid a thought as that, for many reasons; not least, because the police in this country must be accustomed to following nightriders of all descriptions, Protestants, Catholics, gunrunners, suppliers, enemies, members, betrayers of the IRA. And then, of course, I was following my teamster. But what grounds to trust him, after all? In extenuation; but why raise so defensively this matter of extenuation, since, so far, I have done nothing; I have only come this far.
“My dear,” the English publisher said, “we were in their dining room, looking out on their balcony, and the skyline of Beirut. With each course, the talk became more gruesome. ‘Tell them, Mina,’ the brother would say, ‘in what condition they left your fiancé, that night, on your doorstep. And about the note they enclosed, in the small box, with his hand.’ ‘Ah, but I will tell also,’ the girl would answer, ‘in what manner, and how quickly, we exacted our revenge,’ Mind you, we were eating. I looked at them, and I thought, This is la crème. La crème de la crème de la Phalange.”
The airport, I notice, is absolutely silent. A carnival silence, of crooks, muggers, embezzlers, terrorists, thugs, burglars, traitors, swindlers, rapists, but here I am on shaky ground. This is the age of crime, but it is not yet at this moment that I begin to be in the shade or the shadow of the wrong. I pick up my bags. The frail dark-haired man, key in hand, and carrying an umbrella, accompanies me out into the rain, and across the
Talk to them, the ambassador had said, they are a friendly people. Well, the hell they are. An occasional creature of great poetry and beauty; the others, suspicious, crafty, greedy, stubborn, incurious, stupid, devious, violent, and cruel. And, of course, that is what the history of the country is. Point, set, and match, as the American professor’s wife said, at dinner, at the Waltons’, on the night I concluded that I had to leave the country. On the night I drove and drove, and became ever more certain that I had missed my turnoff, in which case I was bound, not for Dublin at all, but for Tuam and for Shannon; or perhaps worse, lost entirely. So that I would drive, through this alternating sleet and mauve and breathless clarity till daylight, calling attention to myself at daylight, when what I needed was to catch the first flight of the morning out of Dublin. A flight on which I had no reservation, but on which I had been told, in response to an anonymous call the night before, there were still seats. Then, when I had stopped and turned around, there were those headlights coming toward me, the first car I had seen in more than twenty minutes; and I thought, Could the police have alerted one another, in every little town along the way, ever since I set out from the castle, dropping my key in the intense dark at Cihrbradàn, and could this be another of their agents, sent to follow me out of the station at Castlebar? Not so paranoid a thought as that, for many reasons; not least, because the police in this country must be accustomed to following nightriders of all descriptions, Protestants, Catholics, gunrunners, suppliers, enemies, members, betrayers of the IRA. And then, of course, I was following my teamster. But what grounds to trust him, after all? In extenuation; but why raise so defensively this matter of extenuation, since, so far, I have done nothing; I have only come this far.
“My dear,” the English publisher said, “we were in their dining room, looking out on their balcony, and the skyline of Beirut. With each course, the talk became more gruesome. ‘Tell them, Mina,’ the brother would say, ‘in what condition they left your fiancé, that night, on your doorstep. And about the note they enclosed, in the small box, with his hand.’ ‘Ah, but I will tell also,’ the girl would answer, ‘in what manner, and how quickly, we exacted our revenge,’ Mind you, we were eating. I looked at them, and I thought, This is la crème. La crème de la crème de la Phalange.”
The airport, I notice, is absolutely silent. A carnival silence, of crooks, muggers, embezzlers, terrorists, thugs, burglars, traitors, swindlers, rapists, but here I am on shaky ground. This is the age of crime, but it is not yet at this moment that I begin to be in the shade or the shadow of the wrong. I pick up my bags. The frail dark-haired man, key in hand, and carrying an umbrella, accompanies me out into the rain, and across the
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