Read Online The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Edna O’Brien
Ads: Link
following – we will both go to the local guard, in his house, and explain everything.’
‘Is that Plodder Pat? He’s more interested in the bungalow he’s building than in the law … You think I’m a sucker.’
‘On the contrary, I congratulate you. You saw a potentially dangerous situation, you stopped your car and you gave me a grilling.’
‘To tell you the truth, I was going to a funeral … I almost didn’t stop.’
‘Is it a relative?’
‘It’s a second cousin. It was sudden … he was serving petrol from his own petrol pump, talking to the guy, and he keeled over … Dead.’ At the word he blesses himself.
They then talk of family ties, blood knots, the necessity of mourning and the folly of taking life for granted. The danger has passed. The guard says he had to do what he did, for the sake of the children, as children are sacrosanct to him.
‘The things I’ve seen, ’twould break hearts,’ he says.
Deliberating for a moment, he decides to go, but not before saying that maybe his mother could do with some of that quantum energy stuff for her arthritis. He is told that she would be given special treatment.
*
Dr Vlad takes the swim in his secret cove that night, a swim he had promised himself to wash away the day’s provocations. Afterwards, he lies on the bank and drifts into a sleep: Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of … then falls fast asleep. Soon he is dreaming of the long ago, his mother’s polenta cake, the ice-green rivers that roared down from the gorges, the children in the wood, their voices calling to one another, the chanterelles that they broke and wolfed down, along with the young pup of a guard, licking his biro to squeeze another word out. Suddenly, into the dream there walks his old friend K, not in his usual tweed jacket with the leather elbow patches, but all in black, altered through death.
‘Brother,’ he says, wagging a finger. ‘That was a near thing today, you must have been shitting your pants,’ and uninvited, he sits, and begins to talk.
Townspeople soon followed to eavesdrop – Young Dara, Fidelma, the draper’s wife, the nun with the big thighs and the crabbed sisters. He is paralysed, helpless to send them away, in what he knows to be a dream, yet he cannot haul himself out of it, his limbs are inert. There is K jabbering away and he who was once master is now on the rack. I am undone he says, but his words are also clogged up within the dream.
‘That siege’, K began, ‘broke many hearts but not ours, in our fortress in the hills. We could hear the constant rat-tat-tat of the mortars and sniper fire, eliminating the scum down in the city . One thousand, three hundred and fifty-nine days and nights of it. The human spirit is indomitable. Such were the sentiments of outsiders who nevertheless could not imagine the carnage, rotting bodies, rotting garbage, dogs roaming wild and a few stalwarts creeping along the alleys to scavenge for bread. Since then they had a celebration, a way of remembering, red chairs erected in our beloved city, your jewel as you called it. Yes, eleven thousand, five hundred and forty-one red chairs in commemoration of the fallen. It is said that tourists only began to cry when they came upon the six hundred and forty-three little red chairs of dead children. Yes, the living, the mangled, the scarified, with the crazed responsibility of remembering everything, everything. The evening we were told of the market massacre we drank a toast, we drank many toasts. No song without suffering, as you said. What a gruesome sight it must have been down below, quite surreal, limbs, arms, heads, torsos, all mixed in with potatoes, cabbages, onions and kohlrabi. A conglomerate. You insisted to the outside world that those dead bodies were mannequins and corpses from wars long past, planted there by our enemies. The waitresses were invited to drink with us. They had thehots for you, with your thick, black, glossy hair and your voice so deep
‘Is that Plodder Pat? He’s more interested in the bungalow he’s building than in the law … You think I’m a sucker.’
‘On the contrary, I congratulate you. You saw a potentially dangerous situation, you stopped your car and you gave me a grilling.’
‘To tell you the truth, I was going to a funeral … I almost didn’t stop.’
‘Is it a relative?’
‘It’s a second cousin. It was sudden … he was serving petrol from his own petrol pump, talking to the guy, and he keeled over … Dead.’ At the word he blesses himself.
They then talk of family ties, blood knots, the necessity of mourning and the folly of taking life for granted. The danger has passed. The guard says he had to do what he did, for the sake of the children, as children are sacrosanct to him.
‘The things I’ve seen, ’twould break hearts,’ he says.
Deliberating for a moment, he decides to go, but not before saying that maybe his mother could do with some of that quantum energy stuff for her arthritis. He is told that she would be given special treatment.
*
Dr Vlad takes the swim in his secret cove that night, a swim he had promised himself to wash away the day’s provocations. Afterwards, he lies on the bank and drifts into a sleep: Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of … then falls fast asleep. Soon he is dreaming of the long ago, his mother’s polenta cake, the ice-green rivers that roared down from the gorges, the children in the wood, their voices calling to one another, the chanterelles that they broke and wolfed down, along with the young pup of a guard, licking his biro to squeeze another word out. Suddenly, into the dream there walks his old friend K, not in his usual tweed jacket with the leather elbow patches, but all in black, altered through death.
‘Brother,’ he says, wagging a finger. ‘That was a near thing today, you must have been shitting your pants,’ and uninvited, he sits, and begins to talk.
Townspeople soon followed to eavesdrop – Young Dara, Fidelma, the draper’s wife, the nun with the big thighs and the crabbed sisters. He is paralysed, helpless to send them away, in what he knows to be a dream, yet he cannot haul himself out of it, his limbs are inert. There is K jabbering away and he who was once master is now on the rack. I am undone he says, but his words are also clogged up within the dream.
‘That siege’, K began, ‘broke many hearts but not ours, in our fortress in the hills. We could hear the constant rat-tat-tat of the mortars and sniper fire, eliminating the scum down in the city . One thousand, three hundred and fifty-nine days and nights of it. The human spirit is indomitable. Such were the sentiments of outsiders who nevertheless could not imagine the carnage, rotting bodies, rotting garbage, dogs roaming wild and a few stalwarts creeping along the alleys to scavenge for bread. Since then they had a celebration, a way of remembering, red chairs erected in our beloved city, your jewel as you called it. Yes, eleven thousand, five hundred and forty-one red chairs in commemoration of the fallen. It is said that tourists only began to cry when they came upon the six hundred and forty-three little red chairs of dead children. Yes, the living, the mangled, the scarified, with the crazed responsibility of remembering everything, everything. The evening we were told of the market massacre we drank a toast, we drank many toasts. No song without suffering, as you said. What a gruesome sight it must have been down below, quite surreal, limbs, arms, heads, torsos, all mixed in with potatoes, cabbages, onions and kohlrabi. A conglomerate. You insisted to the outside world that those dead bodies were mannequins and corpses from wars long past, planted there by our enemies. The waitresses were invited to drink with us. They had thehots for you, with your thick, black, glossy hair and your voice so deep
Similar Books
