My Traitor by Sorj Chalandon

Author:Sorj Chalandon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2022-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

Vol. Jim O’Leary

1937–1981

2nd bat

Belfast Brigade Óglaigh na hÉireann

Killed in action

R.I.P.

I wanted to pray. I realized that I no longer knew how. I simply imagined that he was there, sitting down on the stone with one knee clasped in his hands. I whispered for him. To you, Jim O’Leary, who died at fourty-four years of age on 6 November 1981. To you, volunteer of the Belfast Brigade of the Irish Republican Army, who died in active service. To you, my friend. To you, the big lad in the rain, who advised me to open my violin case one Sunday in April 1975, before welcoming a lost Frenchman into your house. To you, the elegant man who never spoke to me about your fight. Never. Who kept silent about your way of making war.

I looked up at the sky. It looked turbulent, too big, all out of storms. It was raining even harder. When I went back over to Tyrone, he took off his cap and put it on my head, smiling.

—You need one of these, he said.

I stayed in his house from then on. In Jack’s bedroom. After Jim’s death, Cathy had left Belfast. She went back to live in Dublin, at her parents’ house. She could no longer abide anything to do with the war. Anything to do with violence, suffering and symbols. She could no longer bear to hear her husband’s name cheered in the clubs. She was like a tired, old, grey woman. She had lost her husband and her son. She was hurt. She was defeated. I was told she drank. I do not know if she is still alive. I never saw her again.

Tyrone Meehan had organized everything. Him and me, just us. A two-man tent, sleeping bags, a gas heater, a borrowed car and two raincoats. We left Belfast in the morning. The sky to the west was full and heavy. There were no enemy patrols, no jeeps. We drove along Lough Foyle and passed through Derry before going over the border into Donegal, his homeland. He whistled away to himself as he drove. I looked at Ireland through the window. The grey sea. I was moved and proud. It was a trip for no real reason. We were just returning to his birthplace to buy me a cap.

—You’ll have to break it in, otherwise it’ll look rare, said Tyrone.

He let go of the wheel to show me the edge of the peak that he wore low over his eyes.

—You see?

I said I did. I thought it didn’t really matter. I felt good. He was still whistling away. I was looking at the moors, the blue-stained sheep, the turf bogs, the clouds hanging low. On the radio was the news of a British patrol that had been targeted in the Catholic ghetto of Ardoyne; nobody had been injured. Tyrone turned it down. He opened his window.

—Can you smell that?

—What?

—Our country.

It was the heavy, damp, threatening, earthy smell of sodden skies and ocean wrath. I looked at Tyrone.

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