Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Scenes from a Foreign Country

2022; Philosophy Documentation Center; Volume: 26; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nhr.2022.0044

1534-5815

Carlo Gébler,

Irish and British Studies

Scenes from a Foreign Country Carlo Gébler (bio) Some things that have happened a long time ago and which one reencounters from time to time when they pop up before the mind's eye, one has no difficulty believing were, if not exactly what happened, certainly a version, and hopefully a good-enough version. But not everything that happened a long time ago is like that. Some things when reencountered have a mystery to them. They baffle. They puzzle. One sees them with one's inner eye. And then one scratches one's head. Did it … really happen? That summer night in Belfast is one such event. I know it happened (notes were scribbled), yet it remains for me, despite all proof of its veracity, totally improbable, ridiculously fabular, utterly fictional. "Really," I hear myself saying, "a soldier smashed his way into the house where you lived, dashed upstairs, woke you, woke E. in the bedroom beside yours, and then hustled you down to the street, where you met your neighbors, who were also fleeing, and together you all went to Ulster Hall, where you had sandwiches and tea, and then later, in a flat where you'd taken refuge and that reeked of paint and turps, you heard the controlled explosion and remembered some of the sounds of your suburban childhood. Really? That really happened? Are you sure?" Well, the truth is I can't be sure. Though it happened, it seems like a dream, a bad dream of course, and I have never been able to shake off that idea. Perhaps that's all part of the coping strategy. If it was all just a figment, there was never any danger. ________ in 1989 i went with my wife and children to County Fermanagh in Northern Ireland to write a book about the Troubles in the countryside, a subject that had been much less written about than what was happening in the cities, Belfast and Derry. We moved into a flat in the nursery of an old plantation house on the shores of Lough Erne a few miles outside Enniskillen, with slanting eaves and curious windows through which we could see the garden below and the [End Page 8] lake beyond. We'd been there about a year when someone from the Beeb rang and explained, in a nice broadcasting voice (patient, reasonable, mollifying, but also simultaneously communicating I should be bloody grateful that as august a body as the BBC had deigned to get in touch because they wanted to put me on the airwaves) that Sam McAughtry, the writer, was making a series for BBC Radio Northern Ireland—title: "Northern Counties"; subject: the six counties of Ulster—and he wanted to come and record something with me for the Fermanagh program, seeing as I and the family had relocated there, an odd move, the speaker said, as typically the direction of travel was away from rather than into Northern Ireland. How could I turn down a request that pandered so pleasingly to my idea of myself as a maverick, always going against the grain, always doing the unusual, nay, the countercultural? So of course I said yes, of course. The day of the interview, John and Lois, owners of the house at the top of which we lived, provided their sitting room. Good idea. Really lovely views through the huge sash windows. Round lunchtime Sam McAughtry arrived—in person, physically compact, like a nut; in manner, fastidious, precise, genial (an old-fashioned gent)—lugging a tape recorder and a box of microphones. We set ourselves up, McAughtry with his back to the windows and myself facing them, with a view of falling ground, shimmering lake water, thickly leafed trees on the opposite faraway shore, and, arching above everything, a great Irish sky filled with clouds like great balls of toile. The brown recording tape threaded in place, the "On" switch was clicked. The reels began to turn, the brown tape silent and mesmerizing, snaking through the steel blocks of the recording mechanism. My interlocutor asked his questions. I replied. The talk flowed (I think) until, with a click of a heavy Bakelite switch, the machine...