Niall Williams - Boy and Man

I am no longer a boy.
I am a man. Almost.
And I am here.

The sun shone. The Master went to the top of the hill and flew the kite. There was brisk wind and it took only a few sharp tugs and the twin cords tightened and the yellow and red sail took flight. At first it danced drunkenly. It swooped, as though the earth and not the air was its element, and the Master waved both hands above his head like the conductor of an invisible orchestra and the kite rose sharply into the blue. He unspooled the lines and kept his gaze focused on the thing that moved further and further from him but was yet connected. The wind pulled the cords tight but the line that was drawn from kite to man was curved into the distance, and a movement of the Masters hands took moments to travel to the sail in the sky. Soon it was small and almost freed. So far up, it achieved a serene grace, its colours dissolved, its line invisible to any that might have looked up and noticed it from the winding roads below the hill.

It was April, the countryside thereabouts already in bloom. Over stone walls, yellow gorse blossom was draped. Bare branches of the thorn trees were spiked with white flower. The day itself was blue and mild. Spring had come softly to the west of Ireland and it was warmer even than the springs in the memory of old people. The first grass of the year was crisp and had made a dry whispering as the Master had climbed up through it.

Now he flew the kite. A short man over sixty with a tuft of white hair, he had only just come back into the world. Much of it he had forgotten. He knew because he had been told that he had been in a car crash. He knew because he had been told that he had been thought dead and then took breath and lived inside the quiet of a coma more than a year. So too he was told he had once been a Master at a primary school at the edge of the village. He had a wife and onetime a daughter who were both dead now. He had lived with a boy, his grandson, but the boy had run off. To such telling the Master had listened without comment, as though it told of another. He blinked and sat quiet, his blue eyes seeking in the fire any semblance of himself in the tale. But the life just spoken of did not seem his own. Some details a red cup in his kitchen, a bottle of Powers whisky half empty, some books, David Copperfield, a dog-eared copy of TheConfessions of Saint Augustine, a pair of shoes with the laces tied and the heels broken down, the worn tweed of a jacket such things seemed to speak of him and his earlier life, but even these seemed obscure. He had the feeling that he did not belong in the world, that perhaps he was meant to have died, and had somehow missed his exit. Now he was left in this After-place. The couple who cared for him, Ben Dack and his wife Josie, were the only ones to whom he felt any connection, but even that seemed tenuous. Who were these people and why were they caring for him? He didnt remember them. They were not his relations. Why should they have brought him into their own house? For the Master the world was a jumble of things without meaning. Was that red cup important in some way, that boys jumper, that old book? These objects from the past, how did they matter if he couldnt remember them? And if he had come back to life, as they said, what kind of life was it? The country too seemed barely recognizable to him. There were familiarities, brand-names, place-names, but Ireland itself as it passed across the screen of the evening news seemed another country, and he a foreigner in it. To neither the past nor the present was he connected.

The kite lay against the sky. It sat in the wind unmoving, and on the grassy hill below it the man was intent on the lines that rose upward. Time was nothing to him. His morning and afternoon would be divided by the arrival of hunger, when he would tie the lines to his leg and sit to tea-flask and sandwiches. He had no purpose or plan other than to remain there flying the kite. And while he did, a silent figure on the hill beneath a perfect blue sky, he was forgotten by the world he had forgotten. While the hours passed, the kite moved only little. Once it arrived in the high it held still and the Master did not indulge in any tricks, no stunts of flying. He simply watched the twin cords, looked up along the angle, tested the tautness of the lines, and waited; as if for answers he fished the heavens.

The sun shone on Jerzy Maski, lifting blocks and laying them to make rise the wall to the second floor of a new house on the outskirts of the town of Ennis. He had come from Poland a month earlier. Within two days he had a job, and was one of a crew of twenty-three that came like a dawn army in dusty cars and vans to build an estate of seventy-six houses. He was twenty-one years of age. He was fair-haired and strong, and liked to sing when he was drunk in the evenings when the eight other men in the house he shared spoke of Poland. They knew they were in the country only temporarily. They knew that after this estate there would be another, and more after that, but one day they would be told there was nothing more to build in that country. And the knowledge of that made easier the absence of Poland for Jerzy Maski. His English was poor and these people were different. This month had been his first away from Jaslo in southern Podkarpackie not far from the Carpathian Mountains. He did not mind the work, and while he was lifting the blocks and tapping them into place, while the walls were rising about him, he could forget the thing he felt most strongly. He could hide in work the feeling to which he would never confess: that if he paused long enough there would rise in his heart an unbearable longing to have his mothers hands hold his face.

From the upper level of scaffolding, he saw a lorry bounce over the deeply potholed entrance to the estate and his uncle Laslo called up to him to come unload. He descended the ladder swiftly and his uncle smiled at his nimbleness and strength, nodded consent to an inner argument and led the way out through the doorless hall.

Laslo was in his late fifties and compensated for his baldness with an outrageous moustache. He smoked sixty cigarettes a day, wheezed all of his breath and joked that hell would be no difficulty because so much of him was smoke already. Smoke and these boots, he would say, these will do me in hell.

They crossed the packed dirt of Eden Crescent, the semicircle of walled but unroofed houses, the way randomly stacked with deliveries, pipes, rolls of insulation, white aeroboards, plastic sheeting torn open and flapping in the breeze.

The lorry driver had already climbed down. What a day. What a day what a day what a day. Cripes yes. Warmer than July, eh? he said, and clapped and rubbed his hands together. A short man with a ball of belly, he was red-faced and beaming. Island in the sun men, am I right?

They looked at him.

What is he saying? Jerzy asked under his breath.

I have no idea. Smile at him and nod.

And point is. Point exactly is, the world, the sun, and the layer between. Thats the point. Are we getting nearer? says Mickey Cotter. Nearer what says I? Nearer to heaven or to hell, says Mickey. Thats a point. By jingo yes. Heaven, says Ben Dack. Choose heaven. But what a day what a day. Twenty-three degrees. Two three. Dear Lord thank you very much. Go raibh mile maith agat if youre tuned in in the Irish, eh?

The two Poles nodded away, and Ben Dack took this for encouragement. He clapped his hands again and said, Youre doing some job with this country, men. Some job, indeed. When this countrys finished boy oh boy says he.

Laslo nodded, Ben nodded back. When in turn Ben looked at him, Jerzy nodded too, and then the three of them considered for a time the half-circle of house shells. Somehow a cigarette had appeared on Laslos lip and, hands behind his back like a general, he surveyed the field and through the thicket of his moustache softly leaked the smoke.