The Pull of the Stars(2)
South of Nelson’s Pillar, the brakes ground and squealed, and we came to a halt. I looked back at the charred carapace of the post office, one of half a dozen spots where the rebels had holed up for their six-day Rising. A pointless and perverse exercise. Hadn’t Westminster been on the brink of granting home rule for Ireland before the outbreak of world war had postponed the matter? I’d no particular objection to being governed from Dublin rather than London if it could come about by peaceful means. But gunfire in these streets in ’16 hadn’t brought home rule an inch closer, had it? Only given most of us reason to hate those few who’d shed blood in our names.
Farther down the road, where firms such as the bookshop where I used to buy Tim’s comics had been razed by British shellfire during that brief rebellion, there was no sign of any rebuilding yet. Some side streets remained barricaded with felled trees and barbed wire. I supposed concrete, tar, asphalt, and wood were all unaffordable as long as the war lasted.
Delia Garrett, I thought. Ita Noonan.
Don’t.
Eileen Devine, the barrow woman. Her flu had turned to pneumonia—all yesterday she’d coughed up greenish-red, and her temperature was a kite jerking up and down.
Stop it, Julia.
I tried not to dwell on my patients between shifts since it wasn’t as if I could do a thing for them until I was back on the ward.
On a fence, specifics of a variety concert with CANCELLED stamped diagonally across them; an advertisement for the All-Ireland Hurling Finals, POSTPONED FOR THE DURATION pasted on it. So many shops shuttered now due to staff being laid low by the grippe, and offices with blinds drawn down or regretful notices nailed up. Many of the firms that were still open looked deserted to me, on the verge of failing for lack of custom. Dublin was a great mouth holed with missing teeth.
A waft of eucalyptus. The man to my left on the tram bench was pressing a soaked handkerchief over his nose and mouth. Some wore it on their scarves or coats these days. I used to like the woody fragrance before it came to mean fear. Not that I had any reason to shrink from a stranger’s sneeze, being immune now to this season’s awful strain of flu; there was a certain relief to having had my dose already.
A man’s explosive cough on the bench behind me. Then another. Hack, hack, a tree being axed with too small a blade. The mass of bodies leaned away. That ambiguous sound could be the start of the flu or a convalescent’s lingering symptom; it could signify the harmless common cold or be a nervous tic, caught like a yawn just by thinking about it. But at the moment this whole city was inclined to assume the worst, and no wonder.
Three hearses in a row outside an undertaker’s, the horses already in harness for the morning’s first burials. Two aproned men shouldered a load of pale planks down the lane to the back—for building more coffins, I realised.
The streetlamps were dimming now as day came. The tram rattled past an overloaded motor launch that looked tilted, askew; I saw two men kick at the rear axle. A dozen passengers in mourning wear still sat pressed together on its benches, as if stubbornness might get them to the funeral mass on time. But the driver, despairing, let her forehead rest on the steering wheel.
The man sitting jammed against my right elbow trained a little torch on his newspaper. I never had a paper in the house anymore for fear of upsetting Tim. Some mornings I brought a book to read, but last week the library had recalled them all for quarantine.
The date at the top reminded me that it was Halloween. The front page was offering hot lemonade, I noticed, and life insurance, and Cinna-Mint, the Germicidal Throat Tablet. So many ex-votos sprinkled among the small ads: Sincere thanks to the Sacred Heart and the Holy Souls for our family’s recovery. The man turned the page, but his newspaper was blank inside, a great rectangle of dirty white. He let out a grunt of irritation.
A man’s voice from the other side of him: Power shortages—they must have had to leave off printing halfway.
A woman behind us said, Sure aren’t the gasmen doing their best to keep the works up and running, half staffed?
My neighbour flipped to the back page instead. I tried not to register the headlines in the veer of his shaky beam: Naval Mutiny Against the Kaiser. Diplomatic Negotiations at the Highest Level. People thought the Central Powers couldn’t possibly hold out much longer against the Allies. But then, they’d been saying as much for years.
Half this news was made up, I reminded myself. Or slanted to boost morale, or at least censored to keep it from falling any further. For instance, our papers had stopped including the Roll of Honor—soldiers lost in the various theatres of war. Irishmen who’d signed up for the sake of king and empire, or the just cause of defending small nations, or for want of a job, or for a taste of adventure, or—like my brother—because a mate was going. I’d studied the roll daily for any mention of Tim during the almost three years he’d been posted abroad. (Gallipoli, Salonika, Palestine—the place-names still made me shudder.) Every week the columns had crawled another inch across the newspaper under headings with the ring of categories in a macabre parlor game: Missing; Prisoner in Enemy Hands; Wounded; Wounded—Shell Shock; Died of Wounds; and Killed in Action. Photographs, sometimes. Identifying details; appeals for information. But last year, casualties had grown too many and paper too scarce, so it had been decided that the list should from that point on be made public only for those who could pay for it as a threepenny weekly.