Lonely Planet - Jaywalking with the Irish

For Ireland, the morning sky was a strange canvas of blue peace, the day before the most fateful September 11 in history, and the world felt at once fresh and familiar as I entered the Turkish barber on Corks MacCurtain Street.

A swarthy fellow with a long black ponytail and hefty gold neck-chains motioned me into the chair. He tucked a bib under my chin and began clacking his scissors.

Whats your name? I asked companionably, looking out at the pedestrians ambling on the street named after a lord mayor who was shot dead by British irregulars eighty years earlier.

Ahmad, I am called. And you, you are not from here?

No. The States.

America? he asked, clipping and chopping with a vengeance.

Yes. And yourself?

I am from Iraq. Pause. Snip. His scissors suddenly flew into overdrive. We are at war.

Gulp. Being trapped in a foreign barbers chair before a hulking figure who deems you his blood enemy is not reassuring, especially when the man in charge has a variety of razors at his fingertips and is commencing blade work close to the jugular. Psychologists refer to the Stockholm syndrome when captives develop an inordinate desire to befriend those in control of their fate. I embraced it.

But we are not at war. It is our governments that are butting heads, and the Iraqi people dont exactly love Saddam Hussein either, do they? I tried, scarcely imagining what engines of destruction were wheeling forward at that moment.

Saddam a great man, Ahmad insisted, curling a length of string into a curious noose-like configuration.

I considered bolting out the door then and there with the bib hanging pathetically from my neck. But then, any rash movement could have proved terminal. So I instead meekly asked, Have you been here long?

Two years, he said, his fingers ominously tightening the looped string. I nodded, having just commenced a second one in the Irish bedevilment boot camp myself. Werent we merely fellow sojourners in the end?

Is your family still in Iraq?

Yes, my father a pilot, Ahmad fairly spat as he leaned over my straightjacketed self. Without warning, he cinched his miniature noose around a stray facial hair and yanked the ends with all his considerable might, sending the errant follicle flying in the general direction of Baghdad. It hurt.

Oh, he flies an airliner? I struggled for composure.

Whoosh went another hair.

No, a fighter jet. He is captain in Iraqi air force.

This was getting bad. Friends of my deceased fighter-pilot brother had probably lined Ahmads dad up in their sights more than once. Dim recollections of UN sanctions and jump-jet-enforced no-fly zones burst into my head. Better not mention the brother, I decided, as the Barber of Baghdad dipped a Q-Tip into a jar of oil. This he set on fire.

Do you like Ireland? I tried, then watched openmouthed as he drove the tiny torch into my ears, ostensibly to burn off more errant hair there, or maybe just to keep me in line for an official Baath Party stiletto knife tucked in his apron.

Ahmad, eyes going adamantine, had the look of a man gleefully at one with his work. It is far better than America.

At that point, I shut up. Happy to get out unmaimed, I in fact tipped Ahmad generously and limped off, nursing a head full of questions. Outside, the incongruous contrasts of Irish life lay rampant purveyors of tin whistles, curry and free poppadum, New Age potions, Baptist bible services, adult entertainment, country house heirlooms, and black stout stood side by side, while a pig farmer Id once met began his days lurch toward a dark den favored by local musicians and poets. Here lay the curious sweep of the Republics second-largest city or, more accurately, the biggest village in Ireland, about to be celebrated as the European Capital of Culture for 2005. But could it ever be home? The security implied by that humble term was poised to go up in flames. And, at least temporarily, countless American transplants on foreign shores were destined to lose their deepest bearings, whether in plumbing the Irish end of the rainbow, or any other Shangri-la the globe offers.

But at that naive moment, all I knew was that the simple act of getting a haircut had grown at once sinister and comic. Ahmad had seemed a pro. Knowing Cork as I do now, Id consider betting a tenner he was simply winding me up. But the story must begin at the start, with a fascination with Ireland that reached back through decades.