5 When you and I were first in love we drove to the borders of Connacht2 and entered a wood there.
Look down you said: this was once a famine road.
I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
10 rough-cast stone had disappeared into as you told me in the second winter of their ordeal, in
1847, when the crop3 had failed twice, Relief Committees gave 15 the starving Irish such roads to build.
Where they died, there the road ended
and ends still and when I take down the map of this island, it is never so I can say here is
20 the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor an ingenious design which persuades a curve
3. Irish poet and singer (1779?1852). 3. Of potatoes, staple diet of Irish peasants in the 1. Mapmaking. 19th century. Over a million people died in the 2. Western province of Ireland. Irish Famine of 1845?49.
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285 0 / EAVAN BOLAND
into a plane, but to tell myself again that
25 the line which says woodland and cries hunger and gives out among sweet pine and cypress, and finds no horizon
will not be there.
1994
The Dolls Museum in Dublin
The wounds are terrible. The paint is old. The cracks along the lips and on the cheeks cannot be fixed. The cotton lawn1 is soiled. The arms are ivory dissolved to wax.
5 Recall the Quadrille.2 Hum the waltz. Promenade on the yacht-club terraces. Put back the lamps in their copper holders, the carriage wheels on the cobbled quays.
And recreate Easter in Dublin.3
io Booted officers. Their mistresses. Sunlight criss-crossing College Green. Steam hissing from the flanks of horses.
Here they are. Cradled and cleaned, held close in the arms of their owners. 15 Their cold hands clasped by warm hands, their faces memorized like perfect manners.
The altars are mannerly with linen. The lilies are whiter than surplices.4 The candles are burning and warning:
20 Rejoice, they whisper. After sacrifice.
Horse-chestnuts hold up their candles. The Green is vivid with parasols. Sunlight is pastel and windless. The bar of the Shelbourne5 is full.
25 Laughter and gossip on the terraces. Rumour and alarm at the barracks. The Empire is summoning its officers. The carriages are turning: they are turning back.
1. Usually fine linen, but also, as here, fine cotton. Dublin and an Irish Republic was proclaimed from 2. A square dance and the music for it. the General Post Office. See W. B. Yeats's 'Easter, 3. What became known as the 'Easter Rising' 1916' (p. 2031). began on Easter Monday, 1916, when over sixteen 4. White linen vestments worn over cassocks. hundred Irish Nationalists seized key points in 5. Large Dublin hotel.
.
TH E LOS T LAN D / 285 1 30Past children walking with governesses, Looking down, cossetting their dolls, then looking up as the carriage passes, the shadow chilling them. Twilight falls. 35It is twilight in the dolls' museum. Shadows remain on the parchment-coloured waists, are bruises on the stitched cotton clothes, are hidden in the dimples on the wrists. 40The eyes are wide. They cannot address the helplessness which has lingered in the airless peace of each glass case: to have survived. To have been stronger than a moment. To be the hostages ignorance takes from time and ornament from destiny. Both. To be the present of the past. To infer the difference with a terrible stare. But not feel it. And not know it. 1994 The Lost Land I have two daughters. They are all I ever wanted from the earth. Or almost all. I also wanted one piece of ground: 5 One city trapped by hills. One urban river. An island in its element. So I could say mine. My own. And mean it. Now they are grown up and far away 10 and memory itself has become an emigrant, wandering in a place where love dissembles itself as landscape: 15Where the hills are the colours of a child's eyes, where my children are distances, horizons: At night, on the edge of sleep,
.
285 2 / SALMAN RUSHDIE
I can see the shore of Dublin Bay. 20 Its rocky sweep and its granite pier.
Is this, I say how they must have seen it, backing out on the mailboat at twilight,
shadows falling
25 on everything they had to leave?
And would love forever?
And then
I imagine myself at the landward rail of that boat 30 searching for the last sight of a hand.
