Irish Journal by Heinrich Böll Read Free Book Online Page B

readily. For a few minutes the road would remain empty, when the car had just passed through a slightly larger village, and then the drops began collecting again: Irish schoolchildren, jostling and chasing each other, often enterprisingly dressed, in variegated bits and pieces, but all of them, even those who were not merry, were at least relaxed; they often traipse for miles like that through the rain, and home again through the rain, carrying their hurlingsticks, their books held together by a strap. For over a hundred miles the car drove through Irish schoolchildren, and although it was raining, and many of them were barefoot, most of them poorly dressed, almost all of them seemed cheerful.
    It had seemed blasphemous when someone once said to me in Germany: The road belongs to the automobile. In Ireland I was often tempted to say: The road belongs to the cow. Indeed, cows are sent as freely to pasture as children to school: they fill the road with their herds, turn round haughtily when you blow your horn, and the driver has a chance here to show a sense of humor, behave calmly, and test his skill. He drives carefully right up to the herd, timidly forces his way into the condescendingly formed passage and, the minute he has reached the leading cow and overtaken it, he can step on the gas and count himself lucky to have escaped a danger—and what is more exciting, what better stimulus is there for human gratitude, than danger averted? So the Irish driver remains a creature to whom gratitude is not foreign; he must constantly fight for his life, his rights, and his speed: against schoolchildren and cows. He would never be able to coin a snobbish slogan such as: The road belongs to the automobile. Ireland is a long way from deciding who the road belongs to. And how beautiful these roads are: walls, walls, trees, walls and hedges; the stones of Irish walls would be enough to build the tower of Babel, but Irish ruins are proof that it would be useless to begin such a building. In any event, these beautiful roads do not belong to the automobile; they belong to whoever happens to occupy them and whoever allows those desiring passage to prove their skill. Some roads belong to the donkey: donkeys playing truant from school, there are plenty of those in Ireland; they nibble away at the hedges, mournfully contemplate the countryside—turning their rumps toward the passing car. Whatever else, the road does not belong to the automobile.
    Much contentment, much merriment among the cows, the donkeys, and the schoolchildren, came our way betweenDublin and Limerick, and who, thinking of Limericks, could approach Limerick without picturing a cheerful town? Where the roads had been dominated by cheerful schoolchildren, complacent cows, pensive donkeys, now suddenly they were empty. The children seemed to have reached school, the cows their pasture, and the donkeys seemed to have been called to order. Dark clouds came up from the Atlantic—and the streets of Limerick were dark and empty. Only the milk bottles in the doorways were white, almost too white, and the seagulls splintering the gray of the sky, clouds of white plump gulls, splinters of white that for a second or two joined to form a great patch of white. Moss shimmered green on ancient walls from the eighth, ninth, and all subsequent centuries, and the walls of the twentieth century were hardly distinguishable from those of the eighth—they too were moss-covered, they too were ruined. In butcher shops gleamed whitish-red sides of beef, and the preschool children of Limerick showed their originality here: hanging on to pigs’ trotters, to oxtails, they swung to and fro between the hunks of meat: grinning pale faces. Irish children are very inventive; but are these the only inhabitants of this town?
    We parked the car near the cathedral and strolled slowly through the dismal street. The gray Shannon rushed along under old bridges: this river was too big, too wide, too wild for this