of the machinery. Since I've done little worse, or measurably better, in the days before or since then, I'm forced to admit that my legacy to the world may very wel be this one solitary thing that's with me now almost every breathing moment.
There are those of us who haven't yet told our stories, or refuse to tel them, and so we become them: we hide away inside the memory until we can no longer stand the shel or the shock—perhaps that's me, or perhaps I must tel it before it's forgotten or becomes, like everything else, something else.
Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it's stil impossible to land exactly where we took off. My mother was a nurse from Ireland, my father a dockworker from Slovakia. Mam hailed from a little seaside vil age in Donegal. She was forever tilted sideways by the notion that pain was inevitable, chance was cruel, and al human ingenuity should go towards the making of a good cup of tea. My father emigrated to Britain in the early years of the century when he changed his last name to Swann, but didn't alter his soul; in later years he described himself as a Communist, a pacifist, and a Catholic in no particular order.
Home from the docklands, he used to put a dark thumbprint on the bread in order that I would know where it came from.
From a young age I was hooked on the plot of my father's homeland. We sat together on crates in the coalshed searching the radio bands. In the laneway behind, my friends played footbal . My father spent hours trying to tune in to the long-wave broadcasts from Bratislava, Kosice, Prague, while the bal thumped against the wal . Only at odd moments did the weather al ow the radio a crackle from the beyond—we leaned forward and our heads touched. He wrote it down and later translated for me. At night, my prayers were in his native tongue.
When the Second World War struck, it didn't seem at al unusual that he took off to join the partisans in the Czechoslo-vakian mountains—he said he wanted to become a medic and that he'd carry stretchers, that wars were useless and God was democratic, and, with that in mind, he'd return shortly. He left me his wristwatch and a copy of Engels in the Slovak language. I found out, years later, that he had become an expert with dynamite; his specialty was blowing up bridges. The news that he had died in an ambush came in a two-line telegram. My mother wilted away. She took me on a trip back to Donegal for a week, but for whatever reason it was not the same place that she had left behind. “Nobody lives where they grew up anymore,” she said to me shortly before she died.
I was made a ward of the state and spent the last two of my school years with the Jesuits in Woolton, walking around the edges of rugby fields in a gray V-neck sweater.
What I recal of growing up: redbrick houses, rough stones from the worked-out pit, shaved shoulders of sunlight on street corners, dockside cranes, penny sweets, gul s, confessionals, brushing gray frost from the bicycle seat. It was not exactly violins I heard when I stuck my head out the train window and bid Liverpool goodbye. I'd missed the war—a measure of luck and youth and a dose of cowardice. I went south to London where I spent two years on a scholarship, studying Slovak. I ran with the Marxists and mouthed off on the soapboxes of Hyde Park, to little success. My work was published intermittently, but mostly I sat at a smal window that looked out beyond the half-open blinds at a dark wal and the faded edge of an Oval-tine advertisement.
I fel in love, briefly, with a beautiful young librarian, Cait-lin, from Cardiff. I bumped into her on a ladder, quite literal y, while she was shelving a book by Gramsci, but our politics didn't match and Caitlin sent me packing with a note that her life was too dul for revolution.
In my flat, the skyline became a shelf of books. I wrote long letters to novelists and playwrights in my old man's country, yet they seldom wrote back. I was fairly sure the letters were being censored in London, but every now and then a reply fel on the welcome mat and I brought it down to the local teashop where, amid the stains and the day-old cakes, I opened it.
The replies was always terse and clean and to the point: I burned them in the ashtray with the tip of a cigarette. But then in 1948, after a burst of ink-spattered correspondence, I was on my way to Czechoslovakia to translate for a literary journal run by the celebrated poet Martin Stransky, who wrote to say that he could wel do with a new set of legs—would it be possible, he asked, to bring a few bottles of Scotch whisky in my bags?
In Vienna the smal wooden huts of the Russian sector were warmed by single-bar electric heaters. The guards interrogated me over cups of black tea. I was passed from hut to hut and final y put on a train. At the Czechoslovakian border, some leftover fascist guards roughed me over, rifled through my suitcase, took the bottles, and threw me into a makeshift cel . My hands were tied and they beat the bottoms of my feet with sticks
rol ed in newspaper. I was accused of falsifying documents, but two weeks later the door opened to Martin Stransky who seemed, at first, just a shadow. He said my name, lifted me up, put his sleeve in a cold bucket of water, and cleaned my wounds. He was, against expectations, a smal man, tough and balding.
“Did you bring the booze?” he asked.
As a youngster he had been friends with my father in an il egal Socialist youth group, and now he ‘d come ful circle; he ‘d been instrumental in the Communist coup and was wel liked by those newly in power. He slapped my back, put his arm around me, and walked me beyond the tin-roofed sheds where he had already taken care of the last of my paperwork. The two guards who'd beaten me and taken the bottles were sitting handcuffed in the back of an open truck. One stared down at the truckbed but the other was moving his bloodshot eyes side to side.
“Oh, don't worry about them, Comrade,” Stransky said. “They'l be al right.”
He kept a tight grip on my arm and helped me towards a military train. The white headlamps burned and a brand-new Czechoslovakian flag fluttered from the roof. We took our seats and I felt buoyed by the shril whistle and the blast of steam. As the train chugged off, I caught a last glimpse of the handcuffed guards. Stransky laughed and slapped my knee.
“It's not so serious,” he said. “They'l have a day or two in lockup to recover from their hangovers, that's al .”
The train jolted forward and we passed through rows oftal forest and low cornfields towards Bratislava. Pylons. Chimneys. Red and white railway barriers.
From Hlvana Station, we walked along the tramtracks, down the hil towards the old town. It struck me as medieval, wiry, even quaint, but revolutionary posters were pasted on the wal s and thumping music rose from loudspeakers. I stil had a slight limp from my beating, but I skipped along in the light rain, carrying, of al things, a cardboard suitcase. Stransky chuckled when it opened up—a nightshirt fel out and a long sleeve trailed the cobblestones.
“A nightshirt?” he laughed. “Two weeks of political reeducation for you.”
He clapped his arm around me. In a vaulted beerhal , ful of drunks and hanging pottery, we clinked glasses for the Revolution and for what Stransky cal ed, as he looked out the window towards the street, other
