Anne Korkeakivi - An Unexpected Guest

“I’m not saying you were bad men. I’m not saying I even understand any of it. But innocent people got hurt, on both sides, and that can never be right. There has to be a better way.”

“Not all wars can be fought around a conference table. You think we were risking our lives for a bit of craic?”

“Of course, I’m not saying that. But while very few things in the world are black and white,” she said, “maybe one or two things are. It can’t be right to kill innocent people. It can’t be right to go blowing up cars in the middle of the street on a Friday afternoon.”

He sighed. “Think what you want. I’m glad if it’s over. I’m not glad the British are still there, but I’m glad if there’s peace in the streets and bread on the tables. But remember this. You don’t get peace unless first you fight a war. And for the one man to be a peacemaker, the other has to have made the war. I don’t like those stories either. But we had our own stories.” He handed her the ring back. “Not enough, Clare. You keep your ring. You keep your guilt also. And I’ll keep mine.”

“Niall—”

“I deserve what I got, but not for what I tried to do. For the amateur way I went about doing it. And for involving an innocent American girl. I’m sorry for that, Clare. I am. Honest.”

“You aren’t hearing me, Niall. I am keeping my guilt. I know neither of us can change the past. But we can use it to do better tomorrow.”

The night air stirred, caressing her neck. A piece of paper glanced off her calf, vanished. Niall leaned against the door behind him and shook his head.

“I made a fecking hash of it, didn’t I?” he said. “But I paid the price, too, didn’t I? That’s the big laugh — I might as well have just gone straight to the R.U.C. myself, said I’d dropped the money in the Liffey, then after I got out of prison, told the lads the Brits took it off me. No one would have known about you, I would have done ten, fifteen years, been out in time to enjoy the benefits of the Good Friday Agreement. Not stuck in this hell of my own makin’.”

“So, you’re going home.”

He shrugged. “There’s my cousin.”

“Even without the money.”

“Feck the money. Feck it all, ” he said, stepping out of the gloom. He drew her to him, kissing her as though he were kissing right through her. There was nothing but that feeling, that feeling of him, spreading through her gut, her limbs, into her fingers, obliterating all the time that had passed between.

He released her, and she felt him drain from her body slowly; a shock, that iridescent glow that came at dusk as the light leveled and faded until all that was left was a glimmer, a silhouette. It spilled away, another life’s blood, into the night, into the Parisian gutter.

His eyes searched hers, and she remembered the first time she’d seen them. How startled she’d been by their color. So bright, so clear, like a winter day.

She shook her head.

He held her in his gaze. Finally, he nodded. “You always were a clever one,” he said, for the third time, the last time.

She put her ring back into his palm. She folded his fingers around it. “Have it taken apart. It will be worth a lot. It’ll give you a head start.”

He lifted the ring in his hand, not so differently than he’d lifted her hand so many years ago in her aunt’s steamy kitchen, as though it were not just an object or a small piece of a whole he’d just come upon but something that, thanks to the greatness of its fragile beauty, possessed an existence of its own. After so many years, his history, her history, their history, had all been rewritten. She would no longer try to forget Niall, but he would no longer haunt her.

They looked at each other one last time.

“You go that way,” he said. He pointed down the unlit street towards a beacon of light, a busier thoroughfare. “I’ll watch till you’re out of the darkness before I go the other way.

“Good-bye, Clare,” he said.

She forced herself to say it. “Good-bye, Niall.”

She would not look back.

They’d said good-bye now; the good-bye they hadn’t said in Dublin. She placed one foot ahead of the other until her steps took on an existence of their own. She listened to the rhythm of her heels on the pavement and allowed it to lead her through the narrow cobbled streets of the fourth arrondissement. They twisted and turned, and slowly they felt firmer and surer, and she knew she was going in the right direction. Now she was on the Rue de Rivoli, and the street widened and flattened out. The Ile de la Cité was a short way; she would walk there. How far she had come from yesterday morning, when she’d woken up to the feel of Edward’s reassuring hand on her shoulder and the alarming thought of moving to Dublin. How much had happened! But this was life: random. What she would do next might make moving to Dublin impossible again, but that was hardly her purpose. The thought of moving to Ireland no longer scared her. The only thing that scared her now was the possibility of repeating her mistakes — and then watching her child repeat them also.

La Tour St.-Jacques jutted up into the blackened sky before her, its jagged heights looking like the peaks of an ornate sand castle after being hit by a wave. She turned left onto the Rue St. Martin. Again, awakened pigeons fluttered up, blackened silhouettes less a shape than a movement. They cooed overhead and bobbed from one sill to another. They were the carrion birds of the inner city, hovering over the decay and discard of urban life. A window was drawn shut, and they flew up then relanded, settling back down to sleep.

She reached the Avenue Victoria. A sprawl of couples spilled out of a restaurant across the street from her. The restaurant front read The Green Linnet, written in spindly white lettering against a green background. Of course she would now come upon an Irish pub, on probably the only street in Paris named for an English monarch. Could this day become stranger? But it was no longer the same day, or day at all. It was past midnight, in those odd hours where night flirts with morning. The women teetered on spiked heels, reaching for cigarettes and their companions’ arms to support them. The men bantered loudly amongst themselves. One pulled out a lighter. How happy they looked. How vulnerable! A violent burst of nails in a London tube stop during the morning rush hour, an airplane shoved through an office wall. Who was to say that a bomb wouldn’t go off right here, right now? La Conciergerie’s majestic spires rose up in front of her. People had died here already; Marie Antoinette spent her last hours here before being carted off to La Concorde for beheading. The tiny gilt tube of lipstick, smooth black-leather wallet, shoe heels, forearms, calves, and ankles, hours spent loving, dreaming, arguing, plotting, fussing…exploded into millions of pieces splashing through the air. It took one moment: the wrong place at the wrong time and someone with a wrongheaded notion of justice. How insane. She’d secretly lived a lifetime in the shadow of this world, well before 9/11 occurred and checking under waiting-room seats for unclaimed luggage became a global habit. But all those years of thinking about what might have happened, what she might have helped make happen, had taught her something. Fear could be converted into a kind of terrorism of its own. She had to live in the world, for good or for bad. She had to be part of it.

The sight of the Seine interrupted her thoughts. There was a song to the way the water moved. It swayed like a woman’s body, nudging the banks of the Ile de la Cité, the lights of the Pont Notre-Dame burnishing her liquid flesh in gold. Reaching the Ile de la Cité, the small island at the center of Paris in whose soil a raggle-taggle group of Celtics known as the Parisii first jabbed their spears and unfurled their animal skins amongst the willows, thus founding what was arguably the most lovely city in the entire world, Clare had to stop a minute to take it in, to make a final assessment of herself and her surroundings, before surrendering herself to someone else’s description. She was Clare Siobhan Fennelly Moorhouse, forty-five years old, married with two teenage sons. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up in a suburb of false colonials with clapboard finishes. She was standing all alone on a bridge in the middle of the night in the middle of Paris, something she hadn’t done since she first visited the city as a college freshman. And the world before her eyes was beautiful.