Tom Murphy Chapter 4

Now at every possible moment, I was absent from the Murphys' and a visitor at the Rosenblums'. Soon Gustav was always at my side, and Maria a little behind us. I had thought Maria might be jealous of my new status with her brother. But she appeared not to mind.

My first question when I saw Gustav again was:

Are you still waiting for the Messiah?

Gustav flushed.
We enlightened Jews don't hold that religious thinking anymore.

I saw he was angry and left that issue alone. I soon found out Gustav found Messiahs with the opportunism and speed other people found hot dinners. Each Messiah would be an idealization of himself and his predicaments.

My second question was:

Why does Maria move the way she does?

Maria's limbs seemed most of the time to have assumed a life of their own. It was as if they were dancing to the fiddles of tiny elves. She never just walked like the rest of us. She moved with the flow of a boat on water. Gustav said nothing.
As soon as we were alone, he said,

Maria is a spastic. Many people suffer in our country. Mummy was sick from lack of food, and Maria wouldn't come out of Mummy's belly

Every evening, Gustav and I, with Maria in tow, went for long walks. Those walks rescued us all from beneath the feet of our care-worn and tedious elders. Gustav was full of his opera. As we walked through the dusky streets, he conjured up with his voice and hands images of the opera.

One Friday evening, he suddenly said to me.

Tomorrow, we will make an excursion up the river.

He glanced up at the bush clad hills that ringed the city.

There must be some sanctuary where Maria and I can practice my opera.
We will all bring provisions.

In the faint light of early morning, I waited patiently outside the gate of the big house. I was beginning to despair when Maria suddenly appeared, dragging by the arm a bleary-eyed grumbling Gustav.

Gustav has never been good at getting up in the morning,
said Maria apologetically.

Maria was carrying a walking stick. They both sported brightly coloured clothing that glittered in the pale light. With my braces, dungarees and cloth cap, I had never felt such a clod.

We followed the river as it snaked through the deserted city, and then arched into the bush hills. Gustav, striding in front, never glanced sideways at the scenic views. I could see he was entirely preoccupied with himself, and the problems of his opera. But Maria hopped and twittered like a small inquisitive bird. Each new moment of discovery made her eyes and her smile open up as if she too was an awakening bud.

While Gustav whistled soundlessly, she whispered to me.

Gustav is like the God Wodin.
He has only a single eye to see the pictures inside his own head.
I am like Persephone.
I see a special living person inside every piece of nature.

Maria suddenly fell down on her back and gazed upwards into the foliage of a giant totara tree.

Greetings great King, you thrust your head into the sky, and the bush wilts and dies around you from your mighty appetite.
Soon your great weight will crash you, then the bush insects and fern will be feeding off you.

Maria giggled, rolled over on to her stomach, rubbed the earth, and grunted.

I felt oddly uneasy. I had only before seen pigs and dogs roll in the earth like that.

Get up Maria and don't be disgusting,
said her brother sharply.

Maria meekly got up.

Gustav suddenly stopped, and climbed up a high rock that overhung the river. He put his arm down and pulled us up alongside him. We all sat puffed, and gazed down bewitched at the majestic and gently flowing river beneath us. Above our heads high up into the sky, the bush rippled its dense green foliage and disdained us miserable insects.
An unseen bird sharply broke the silence.

Where have all its friends gone?

asked both Rosenblums, as if the question had struck them simultaneously and was the most important in the universe.
I had no answer and the question startled me.

We ate our lunch of sandwiches and pies. Then Gustav took out from his knapsack his opera papers. My heart leapt when these two suddenly stood on top of the rock and began to sing. They seemed to be singing several different melodies at the same time in an unsettling slow flat pace. They were shyly looking at me as their lithe bodies and arms swayed to the sounds. Even Maria's body seemed to have gained harmony. Then cold shivers ran down my back and my eyes watered when Gustav's liquid voice took air like a released sky lark. Then as suddenly they stopped. Poor me, tongue tied, stared stupefied.

That is the chorus of the children of Israel praying to the Lord to deliver them from King Eglon of the Moabites, said Gustav.

I applauded. They sat down beside me, and Gustav continued to tell me the story of the opera.

Ehud was the most despised of men because he was a left hander in a right handed world. Because he was the weakest, the Israelites sent him to deliver to the Moabite King the Israelites' tribute. Ehud enters into the King's royal chamber. When the King rises to receive the tribute, Ehud seizes his dagger and plunges it into the royal belly. But he is so cack-handed, and the King so fat, he can't pull it out.

Gustav gesticulated with greater and greater excitement and his eyes shone gleefully.

I immediately sympathised with poor Ehud. In my last day at Tech, I had tried to pull a blade out of a cabinet I was making in woodwork class. The blade's teeth had bent and jammed up inside the cabinet. It was a relief when the arrival of the headmaster saved me from the red faced fury of Mr Prentice.

Ehud locks the chamber doors and escapes through the porch gate. The Arab servants are too lazy and sleepy to notice their King has been murdered. The opera ends as Ehud blows his shofar, a ram's horn, and the Israelites swarm out of their tents and slay all the Moabites at the river Jordan.

Gustav's eyes glittered and he smiled sardonically at the blood-bath of the Moabites.
As an Irish boy, I found my sympathies immediately turning to their misfortunes.

We headed back to town as dusk settled over the river and bush. We were exhausted. Our hearts were overflowing with the joy of being young and sharing our new discoveries. We were silent and I tried to think where their singing voices were familiar to me. Echoes of the Latin chant of the priest at Mass when Mum was alive now rang inside my head. The chant of the priest recalled the sounds of the opera like a bell recalls a hollow drum when both are blown into by the same wind. The names Israelites and the river Jordan when spoken by Gustav brought different thoughts.

After Mum died, I no longer went to Mass. I was told one morning that Mum was dead. Dad weaved towards me, let out a gust of foul home-brew, and fainted at my feet.
As Dad was a policeman, vagrants came to the lock-up from every point of the compass for the joys of Mum's home cooking. Mum was thighs and an apron as big as a house. She was to flour and sugar what Dad was to home-brew. After she was gone, we moved from the country station into town. Dad sunk deeper and deeper into the home-brew.

One evening, the priest came to our house to enquire about the communion of us children. Dad met him in the hallway in his sergeant's uniform, his buttons vigorously polished. We children always knew when Dad was going out to arrest someone when he polished his buttons and washed his bicycle. Before Father O'Donnell had a chance to say a word about us, Dad had given him a well practised policeman's shove out the door. The priest fled with the words ringing in his ears–

Thank you for your interest, Father. I come from a priest-infested land. If my children want to follow the old faith, they can make up their own minds.

My brother Pat was the only one to continue to attend Mass and bible class. This was when the lady in the flash car and fur coat came in. One Sunday morning, I was walking down our street and kicking a can. Not having to go to Mass and Sunday school had been a great liberation from stiff white collars, pinching shoes, and the obsessive need to scratch in forbidden places. This flash car drove up. This lady put her head out the window, and gave me a dopey smile. I would soon be familiar with that dopey smile, in a hundred grown-up faces to the creaking mooing sounds of a hallelujah organ. I hurriedly stopped kicking the can.

Would you like to come to hear the words of a man of God? asked the lady.

I immediately guessed by those strange words that she was a Prod. Our neighbourhood lay under the shadow of the Roman Catholic cathedral and school. Its people were of the old faith.

As the Prody children who invaded our neighbourhood never ceased to tell us, we were–

Cathlick dogs who stink like frogs and doan eat meat on Fridays.

I felt immediately ashamed that I was not at Mass, and embarrassed by my raggedly hand‑me‑down clothes. Then I noticed the car was full of other urchin children that I recognised from the neighbourhood. I hesitated. She spoke of buns and lolly scrambles.

When I suggested I would run home and put on my Sunday best, she said,

Hop in!

She took us to a strange house filled with strange kind people with those dopey smiles.

Inside the strange house, there was a creaky organ and a man in a suit on a small stand. He talked about God and seemed to froth at the mouth in his excitement about our Saviour. Most strange of all, I could not find any crucifix or figures of Jesus and the Saints. I secretly thought his frothing was a poor substitute. Then everyone got up with their prayer books from their seats. They began to moo to the creaky organ. A woman began to scream.

That Prody experience took up every Sunday morning when I was not occupied elsewhere. I found a secluded spot where I could safely wait for the lady in the flash car. The drive there and back in her car was always the most looked forward to event. I did this for several years until my not coming and the lady not turning up grew into permanency.

None of my family ever knew about it. Other kids knew, but that was one of those things you never breathed about to an adult. Dad would have accosted the lady and torn her to pieces. Dad's good humour reached to atheism but never to Prody poachers.

When I thought of the Israelites and the river Jordan in Gustav's opera, those strange Prody meetings sprung to mind.

In my mind's landscape, there was left from the Prods a parched land where men in long beards and cloaks, and women with bowed covered heads gave their lives to an angry vengeful God.

They were, I now knew, Gustav's Israelites, and the same river Jordan ran through and gave sustenance and hope. Now I saw these Israelites were men and women of flesh and bone.
They were as real to Gustav and Maria as Dad's Irish heroes were to him and me