The Curragh, 17 November 1939
The irony was that Art had passed along this same winding Kildare road three weeks ago, handcuffed and being driven towards Dublin by the Civic Guards on the day after his return from visiting London. Now, Free State soldiers were bringing him back, past the same stooped figures harvesting turf on the bog who had leaned on their long-handled loys back then to regard him like an escaped lunatic. In truth, Art knew that he must have appeared insane, both out on the bog when he preached until the Civic Guards came and the next morning in court when it took four Civic Guards to carry him from the dock. One garda knew about the colleague Art had punched in Crumlin last year because he mentioned him by name, swinging a boot at Art as they hurled him into the cell below the court.
The prison warders in Mountjoy had cleaned the blood off his face in a kindly fashion. They were mainly the offspring of peasants, fond of regulations, wary of the city and not overly intelligent. Art had caused them no trouble during previous incarcerations because he recognised that they were merely doing their job in the same way as he was doing his. They might not have understood that his duty was to ferment revolution, but they recognised him as no ordinary criminal. Life in Mountjoy Jail had a structure that he had liked and the food was better than in Moscow. He knew little about the Curragh except that it was an army base which, until recently, had been served by a tribe of wrens – prostitutes living in makeshift holes on the bog, their hard lives shortened by the odium of local people and diseases carried by the troops.
De Valera’s Diehard Republican followers had been interned here during the Civil War. And now – fattened by power – de Valera was repeating the medicine. Art was unsure how this new camp was run, but at least it would contain a body of politically active men whom he might convert. Ordinarily he would have felt a surge of excitement at this challenge, similar to that which Cousin George had described in letters from Africa when, finding himself with a dwindling Irish congregation, he emigrated there as a missionary. But Art had been rattled this morning by Eva’s appearance outside Mountjoy. He knew that his family was seeking answers. Eva and Maud and Thomas held him responsible and had him condemned. He could cope with this if only Brendan would stop staring at him in dreams. Art asked nobody to follow him, but even when he walked into the desert his family had still insisted on walking behind him.
Yet if he was not his brother’s keeper, why had he visited London last month? Uncertainty had gnawed at him as he watched the Spanish Republic fall and the Trotskyite POUM scum attack the good communists in Barcelona so that the fascists could storm the city. Rumours about Brendan were circulating and last month Art had travelled to London convinced that somebody in the British Communist Party must know about his brother. He had not recognised the sour-faced woman with cropped hair whom he was eventually allowed to see in party headquarters, until something about her features recalled the General Strike and he said her name aloud – Ruth Davis. Agitated, the woman had walked to the window, dragging one foot behind her, when he mentioned Brendan.
‘Volunteers keep returning from Spain,’ she said. ‘Some seem to think we owe them something instead of recognising that we did them a favour in allowing them the privilege of fighting against fascism. They come looking for handouts like we were a relief agency. Your brother did not enlist through this office, so he is not our administrative problem.’
Thirteen years had altered her character, though Art knew that she could recall bandaging Art’s head while Brendan stood in her kitchen as a runaway schoolboy. Had thirteen years utterly changed him too or was his problem an inability to change? At that moment there had been so many memories that Art wanted to talk to her about. But when Ruth turned, he realised that he could say nothing, because she was aware of how Art knew that she had left Brendan for a renegade aristocratic comrade who abandoned her to suffer at the hands of a quack abortionist.
Ruth had promised to make enquiries and arrange for a letter from Art to be delivered to Georgi Polevoy in Moscow. Art had spent the next week sleeping in a shelter for the homeless and attending political gatherings. The bitter talk of many Spanish veterans angered him, with their inability to grasp the larger picture. But Spain was being forgotten as London prepared for war, with air raid sirens and the giddiness of people caught between terror and excitement.
A week later he had returned to party headquarters. At first Ruth would not see him, but six hours later when he still refused to leave, she relented and summoned him in. Her manner was curt. Their encounter lasted a few seconds. She had torn up his letter to Polevoy and although Art should be reported to Moscow for trying to communicate with a counter-revolutionary, on this one occasion she would not do so. Thankfully she had discovered in time that Georgi Polevoy was arrested as a fascist spy after his return from Spain. His trial was reported in Pravda, along with the names of large numbers of fellow traitors whom he also named as involved in a spy ring in Spain. Ruth had refused to answer any more questions and harried Art from her office as if he were contaminated.
With a jolt, the army truck reached the gates of the Curragh camp. Art looked up at a line of tin huts behind two rows of barbed wire. Men stood about, watching the new arrivals. The young IRA man from Wexford had spent the entire journey discussing horse racing with the solders, ignoring Art. To be incarcerated was lonely and to be imprisoned among reactionary monolithic nationalists was to be doubly alone. But just now Art welcomed the lines of barbed wire because he felt like a penitent, needing to atone. That was why he had provoked the court after his latest arrest, why he had screamed his allegiance loudly despite there being nobody left to hear. Because if Georgi Polevoy was a traitor then Art was lost for having trusted him and Brendan had probably been betrayed by him too. Everything Georgi had said about his brother denouncing him was untrue. A wedge had been deliberately driven between the brothers, when Art should have trusted his instincts. Despite all his labours here for the Party and his reports sent back to Moscow, perhaps nobody in the NKVD cared or remembered him. His name might be removed from all records, his wife declared unmarried. The only hope was that with Georgi arrested, the Party might realise its past mistakes. Art could be sure of nothing, except that he must keep faith with the Party because the fate of no individual could stand in the way of the great push forward.
The truck passed through the cordon of barbed wire and the first two soldiers jumped down as an orderly appeared from a hut with a list of names. Murray Bolger sprang onto the ground, stomping his feet with the cold. The orderly looked at his list and then at him.
‘What are you?’
‘IRA.’
‘Are you?’ He looked at Art who had dismounted and was staring at the barbed wire, resisting an irrational urge to run his fingers over the knotted strands as if, at a human touch, they might blossom into flower.
‘Guilty,’ Art replied. ‘I’m guilty.’