The Grass is Greener

I knew I had crossed the border when my mobile buzzed in my pocket.

“Welcome to IRELAND,” the text message read, “You’re on O2 Travel. Data costs £1.99 a day.” The message went on detailing my new mobile charges. I looked out the window and saw nothing but a very unimpressive hill and some farmland.

Hannah looked over at me. She had been napping, until my mobile woke her up. “We’re in Ireland,” I told her.

“Oh.” She pulled out her mobile and saw that she had the same message. The little line at the top of our phone, which usually read UK, now read IRE. Where was the boundary, the checkpoint, the large sign that read WELCOME TO THE REPUBLIC OF IRELAND?

“The grass isn’t greener,” I said.

“Of course it is. Have you compared it to Michigan grass lately?”

“No,” I said, “It’s not greener than it is in Belfast.”

“What?”

The first week that we were here, Hannah, Mehgan and I watched a Northern Irish movie called Mickybo and Me, which was about the Troubles in Belfast. The two main characters, Mickybo and Jonjo, run away from home and end up in South. When they express their surprise, the policeman escorting them home laughs and says, “Haven’t you noticed, the grass is greener here?”

The grass was not greener. If anything, the scenery was worse.

Hannah and I perked up a bit then, expecting to see Dublin soon, but ended up dozing off again until we arrived at the Guinness Storehouse around eleven. Hannah was very excited. “I’m living every male American’s dream!” she said as she took pictures of everything in sight, poking me when she saw signs that talked about the Egyptians and their views of alcohol (I believe they discovered that yeast ferments things. But the Mesopotamians were the ones to invent beer. I think.). I spent most of my time sniffing the air, trying to figure out what hop smells like. The air smelled like warm barley, which was comforting, and the bars smelled like coffee instead of alcohol. We climbed to the top of the storehouse, where there was a panoramic view of Dublin. I could see cathedrals and Trinity College, and numerous other buildings that meant nothing to me. A few of the people in our groups stood nearby, drinking Guinness from glass pints, shamrocks glistening on the foam. One of the boys, Patrick, ended up drinking two and a half pints, and when he told Cosmin he was feeling unsteady, Cosmin cuffed him on the head.

“Idiot. When you go to lunch, yeah, buy milk, okay? Milk evens it all out.” 

When we left the storehouse, we ate a hurried lunch at a tourist pub, which played only Irish ballads on the radio. Patrick ordered a glass of milk and steadily sipped away at it. I raised my eyebrows and told him it was very admirable that he could drink two and a half pints in an hour and only be a wee bit unsteady. Actually, I thought it was admirable that he could drink two whole glasses of a beverage that smelt of coffee. We finished our food, and then Hannah and I were off to my main destination: Oscar Wilde’s childhood home.

I had looked the address up online, and Cosmin had given us a little map of Dublin, and I had found the street quite easily. However, I was not sure exactly where I was, so Hannah and I rerouted to the front of Trinity College, which was to be our home base for all operations, and found a little map.

The square was in chaos when we arrived. About twenty men were hanging out in, on, and around the Ambercrombie & Fitch store, all dressed in blue shirts and red jackets, and they were waving and cheering for no apparent reason at all. “I wonder if they’re getting paid for this?” Hannah asked. “The models, I mean.” Lying in the middle of the sidewalk, in a blue sleeping bag, was a man who had to be protesting something. And then the crowds—all over were people, on the streets selling things, walking before the green man appeared on the crosswalks, jabbing into me with their elbows. Hannah and I fought our way to the map, which was right in front of the man in the sleeping bag and a chalk message. As I stood there trying to figure out where I stood in relation to No 1 Marrion Square, the man yelled at me.

“Hey, hey, you. You’re on my drawing. Get off.”

I ducked off of the chalk message and took a moment to read it more closely, but gave up. Other feet had already smudged it, and it was a long, winding message. After another moment Hannah and I figured out that Marrion Square was basically a straight shot once we found Nassou Road, which, fortunately for us, was very close by. We slipped as well as we could through the crowd and headed towards Oscar Wilde’s home, looking up at the street signs, which all had Gaelic terms on them, and looking in at the displays of store windows.  The South is on the Euro, which meant nothing to me, but the prices startled me. One display we passed had a hat that could have been mine for 59 euro.  One store sold furs, and this was interesting only because standing in front of the store was a large stand of silent protesters, holding up signs about a fox (or something similar—I didn’t get a chance to look closely) that was being slaughtered to make someone’s coat. How Cruella DeVil, I thought, as the crowd tugged me along. (“At least they’re not throwing paint,” Hannah said darkly.) I soon learned to stop looking in the windows, but found only depressing things looking back at me. There was a plaque commemorating three people who had died in a car bomb, and another homeless man, with a cardboard sign at his feet asking for money to pay for a hostel.

Hannah was the first one to find the statue. I was looking at the map, planning our next moves, and knew that, while we were in Marrion Square, we still needed to find his house. “Rebekah,” she said, “there he is.” 

And, across the street, there he was. Oscar Wilde, carved out of stone, lounging in the park. “You found him!” I cried, and I had to keep myself from running across the crosswalk to get to him. When we finally made it to the park, Hannah looked at him through the black iron bars.

“How do we get in there?” she asked, but I was already walking towards the park entrance.

“Come on, Hannah, this way!” I said, and I ducked into the park, passing the trees and the children going to play on the swings. And there, overlooking his house, was Oscar Wilde. There were also two black statues, on which people had written Wilde quotes.

I had always seen this statue in pictures, and thought it was a poor likeness of Wilde. In real life, I was too happy to be there to worry about the way the artist had sculpted his face. I kept reaching out and touching his shoe and the rock he lay on, trying to convince myself it was real.

“So, where is his house?” Hannah asked, and I pointed across the road.

“There,” I said simply. 

 We left the park, and then navigated our way across the road. The crosswalks make a ticking sound like a videogame in play, and it alarmed me. Soon, though, I was standing in front of Oscar Wilde’s childhood home, standing where he had once stood.

Oscar Wilde was not born in this house (he was born in a different house down the road, which now belongs to Trinity College, I believe) but this was the one in which he had grown up. This was where he lived with his mother, Speranza, whom he adored, and his brother and sister. This was where he lived when his father endured his own scandal, and where he lived when his sister Isolde died. This was where he had attempted his first poems.

The internet had told me that I should be allowed inside, but the sign in front of the house told me that this would no longer be the case. This saddened me, but I was glad just to be standing there, and know that Oscar had walked these streets before me. This was where he had begun—and, even if he had later pretended to be a pure British man, once he had been Irish, and proud of it.

Giddy, Hannah and I made our way back to Trinity College, passing the Abercrombie & Fitch boys, who waved at Hannah. Now that my literary excursion was at an end, it was Hannah’s turn to pick a stop, and she chose the wax museum that (we hoped) was referenced in one of her favorite book series, Skulduggery Pleasant. I had been to Madame Toussand’s before, in New York City, but the wax museum was smaller. Most of the figures were kept in little cells, so that only four people could really fit in each room. We visited Queen Elizabeth I and some ancient Druids, and then brushed up again on the history of the Troubles. Each time I saw a wax figure commemorating someone from Ulster, I swelled with pride and wanted to turn to the others in the room and say, See that? That man’s from Ulster. That’s where I live!

For Halloween, they had two rooms with creepy mannequins, like Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster, and Hannibal Lector. Both Frankenstein’s monster and Hannibal moved, and Hannah got the Dickens scared out of her each time. We moved on from there to the children’s room and the celebrities, and then back to the streets of Dublin.

We wound through Trinity College, and Hannah wanted to see the Book of Kell, which is a medieval manuscript. I had never heard of it before, but we went, and managed to catch it just before it closed. The manuscripts were very interesting, but the part that I liked best was the library.

The library had two stories, and it opened so that you could see the upstairs and the great wood ceiling curve over our heads. In the center of the aisle, where once must have been the student’s carrels, were now museum-like cases of other manuscripts, with first editions of Poe and illustrations and other books. At the end of each bookshelf was a white bust of a famous author: Shakespeare, Milton, Homer; others were philosophers, like Plato and Socrates. All of the books were handsomely bound, most small enough to fit in my hand; the others as large as my encyclopedias back home. Each bookshelf had, in gold letters, a letter of the alphabet: a, aa, b, bb, and so on all the way down. Narrow little ladders served to help you to the top shelves, but ropes blocked us off from both books and ladders.

It was like being in Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, or Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I could easily imagine myself at Oxford being bullied by a beadle, or studying dark, discomforting vampiric tales. I pulled out my own pen and started trying to write down all of the details, because photography was forbidden, but a voice was calling over our heads, telling us that it was closing, we had to leave…

Hannah and I found ourselves back on the grounds of Trinity College, geeked out to the max. We had each done something related to some of our favourite authors, we had viewed an ancient manuscript, and we had found ourselves in an old library—one that, perhaps, Oscar Wilde had been in when he was a student at Trinity himself.

There was not much time to do anything else, and I was out of my mind with excitement, so Hannah proposed going to the nearby Centra to buy a sandwich for our dinner. She only had a few euros left at this point, but we went. Along the way we passed the homeless guy with the blue sleeping bag, who had moved locations. He was on his hands and knees writing with his chalk again, and when I came out of the Centra a few minutes later it read: “Once I had a job and a house, just like you.”

The sight of it made me miss our homeless people back in Belfast, especially the weather-beaten one who likes to sit in front of the David Keir building.  He never speaks to us, and he never has any words written to describe his plight. He merely smiles widely at me and nods when I wish him a good morning, and the closest he comes to begging is jiggling the pence in his cup. He was a polite man who never asked for anything, and so he received. (Many of the natives seem to know him very well; he talks to them.) The homeless in Dublin seemed bitter and angry and wanted everyone to know. Blue Sleeping Bag guy annoyed me. This is probably not very nice—I’ve never been homeless, and I don’t know what they go through, but I can’t imagine myself in a situation where I was friendless and jobless and penniless. (At least, not in America. I can easily imagine myself huddling under a tree in a foreign country.) But all of Dublin had this kind of feel to me—people yelling, without being heard. One of the songs from Les Miserable started to whisper inside of my head: At the end of the day, you get nothing for nothing, and that’s all you can say for the life of the poor, and the righteous hurry past, they can’t hear the little ones crying…

I tried to shake off the feeling. Hannah and I went back to Trinity College to wait for the others, and looked around at posters. A lot of Dracula-themed events were being promoted for Halloween, as Bram Stoker was also born in Dublin.

“You really can’t do Dublin in a day,” Hannah sighed. We wandered around Trinity some more, taking in all of the buildings and statues. They were all old, and reminded me of something I would see in a Jane Austen movie.

“I think,” I said slowly, “that Oscar would have seen the same view when he lived here.”

“Yeah,” Hannah agreed, “but I don’t think there was a Tourism Centre here when he was alive.”

I laughed.

Cosmin arrived then with some of the other students, and he started talking about the history of Trinity College. It is now a Catholic College, but it was once Anglican, and used for English students who wanted to study in Ireland. The way Cosmin told it, Queen’s University Belfast is to Trinity College is to Oxford is to Harvard. I preened again.

We left just before six. It was already getting dark when we left. The British change their clocks tomorrow; I will be able to sleep in an extra hour, for which my body will be grateful. I tried to sleep on the bus, but it was impossible, and I just kept replaying the day in my head. I stood where Oscar Wilde once stood, I kept thinking. I can’t believe it. I’m going to have to do this again—I’ll go to his private school, in Northern Ireland, I’ll map out his American tour, visit every single city he visited, I’ll go to Reading Gaol and I’ll visit his grave in Paris.

I could write a book. Just like Tom Reiss did, travelling the world over to research Alex Dumas—only, I’d be writing a biography of Oscar Wilde!

I thought again about Blue Sleeping Bag Man, sleeping on the colds streets of Dublin. Wasn’t there anyplace he could go? Couldn’t the government help him? Why did he have money for chalk, but not food, or shelter?

My mobile, once again, informed me when I had returned to Northern Ireland. I pulled it out to check the time and the little IRE strip that had been at the top was replaced with UK. I smiled.

What were the differences, I then asked, between the South and the North? The architecture was the same, although the names were different. The South had Gaelic words everywhere. The North did not. The North named everything after Queen Victoria. The South did not—at least, that I saw. But the signs looked the same, the roads the same. They both shopped at Tesco and Centra and Spar, and ate the same crisps for lunch. But their accents were different. In the North, they talk fast and light, and in the South, it was deep and harsh. When I said this to Hannah she objected and said, “You didn’t really talk to anyone,” but that was the impression I got, just the same. The Dubliners stayed to themselves. When we stepped into a bookstore for a quick look-around we weren’t even greeted. When we go to No Alibis, David, the owner, always asks us if we want a cup of tea or coffee.

As I stared out of the window, looking at passing cities lit up in the night, I wondered what would happen if Northern Ireland ever did leave the UK. Would they join the Republic, or are their differences too large now to be overcome? They sound different, act different; their governments are different, their values are different. How would Northern Ireland do on their own? But then, I reminded myself, I am only a visitor here. I have been here only a month. And I may never live to see the outcome of Northern Ireland.

In the dark, a brown sign appeared. Belfast, it read, and then gave a set of numbers, kilometres or something similar, telling me how far away it was. Above it was its Gaelic name. Bael Feirste. Mouth of the Sandy Ford. Even after all of this time, I realised, someone still thinks of Belfast as the mouth of the sandy ford. Even though there is no more sandy ford, as the waters have changed and construction has changed the landscape, and the British bastardisation of the Gaelic reigns supreme on maps, someone still calls Belfast bael feirste. And while I believe the grass is greener in Northern Ireland, that sign gave me hope, that it will all turn out right in the end.

The Centre of the World

On Sunday afternoon, Victoria wanted to go to Filthy McNasty’s pub for a free lunch.

The name itself was off putting, and as Sunday has become my official day of rest, the only day where I am guaranteed, if not sleep, a day of reading my homework, the idea was not tempting. But, as girls are pack animals, on Sunday afternoon I was dragged to Dublin Street, sulking, and thinking about my half-finished essay lying in wait on my computer.

Filthy McNasty’s is…filthy. The air smells of alcohol, and everything is dark and unsettling, but as we stepped inside a woman behind the bar said, “Through those doors there,” and we saw a door painted an unusual shade of green, a bit darker than sea green, which read The Secret Garden. This led us to a second, classier bar, where we met a girl named Tuesday who is in our English classes.

When Victoria and Hannah had eaten, and I had gotten over my sulking fit, we went to Saint George’s Market. Down the road from City Hall, it is really a large garage sale that runs on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. It hosts some of my favorite craftmakers, like Kawaii Candy Couture, who makes some of the most darling earrings and necklaces, all based off of books. When we went she had a matching set of blue teacup earrings and bracelet, which I wanted so much; but I’m running low on funds, and had to look away. We did end up buying a display cake though that was going for 5 pound, and made plans to eat it later.

Sunday ritual includes two things for certain: That Hannah and I will go to 10.30 Mass, and that at 9.00 we will watch Downton Abbey, usually with Mel or Fiona, a Chinese girl and a Northern Irish native, respectively. And so at 8.40 I was setting up in the common room with plates, bowls, and spoons, texting Victoria to come and meet us for cake and Downton, and trying to be as pleasant and accommodating as possible to make up for my disagreeableness that afternoon. (I had finished writing my essay, which really improved my mood.) Hannah and Fiona arrived, and Victoria texted me back that she would be Skyping her family, so to have cake without her.

After Downton, I knew that Interview with a Vampire would be on, and I asked Fiona and Hannah to watch it with me. Fiona had to go do homework, but Hannah agreed, and we opened our box of cake. It was chocolate, with some red icing on top; in the spirit of Halloween it was supposed to be a Murdered Cake. “You’ll love Interview,” I told Hannah, “I’ve read the book, and it was pretty good, and I love the movie.”

I was trying to hype myself up. Saturday night Victoria had made me watch Storm Troopers with them, which is basically a story about how alien bugs kill everybody in very gruesome and dramatic ways, and I had had to find a Drink bucket to keep on hand, just in case I threw up my dinner. They had thought, at the time, that it was hilariously funny (I thought it was an ingenious use of a Drink bucket, which is usually used to carry alcohol home from the store—a bit like brown bags in the States). Now I wanted to show that I was perfectly all right with blood, thank you, and prove something.

The only problem is, either I have never seen Interview with a Vampire, or the one I have seen is edited.

There was a lot of blood, and nudity, and things I really had no idea were in this movie at all, and by the end of it Hannah and I were so disgusted and nauseous we had to throw the rest of our slices of cake away and give the rest to Victoria. (It had been stale anyway.) Our friend Mel had popped up halfway through, and so then we had to explain certain subtexts, which was really very complicated.

The next morning I had Anthropology and 18^th Century Literature, and I was restless throughout the whole of it. I had the feeling of wriggling with anticipation for something I couldn’t quite put a name to, and started doodling plans to visit the Globe Theatre in London with Tuesday’s help.

After class, Hannah said she wanted to go to No Alibis, our local bookstore, to see if her new Derek Landy book was in. So we went, and David, who owns the store stopped us as we were walking in and said, “Do you guys want to see a programme about Monte Cristo?”

This week, as well as next week I believe, is the Ulster Bank Festival at Queen’s. This means that, since Monday, there has been a talk every day by a famous artist or musician or writer; it also means that there is a giant gray space-tent in the middle of the Lanyon Building’s lawn. No Alibis has had posters for these events in the store windows, and one of them had been about the Count of Monte Cristo, which I had noticed and been interested in, because I have read the book and I adored it.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Great. We’re trying to fill up seats. I’ll give youse the phone number to call, and a code for free tickets.” And he whipped out a permanent marker and wrote the necessary information on a bookmark, which I took for safekeeping.

Hannah got her books, and we went to Starbucks for autumn-themed drinks, then meandered slowly to the School of English Social Space, where there was to be a party for exchange students later that evening. “Would you want to go?” I asked her, talking about Monte Cristo.

“Yeah. It’s free.”

Ever since I had seen workmen putting up The White Room (the gray space-tent) I had wanted to be in on the action. There is an entire booklet about the festival, but most of the events cost money, or are far away; the free ones are sandwiched in between, and for some reason I do not seem to be getting the e-mails everyone else gets about upcoming events. This talk was my chance to be a part of something, and I was desperate to go. We resolved to call the box office after the party.

The party was grand. Tuesday was there, and we got to chat with her and several other students, including a Spaniard named Ruben. He had his nose and ears pierced twice, and his tongue too, which made him look very interesting, but he was extremely nice and social when we started talking about languages and courses. When he found out I had taken two years of Spanish classes he started quizzing me, asking me to translate the things he said, and so I would reply back to him in mangled, terrible Spanish, Donde esta el bano, me llamo Rebekah, me gusta la playa, and he would nod. I felt as if I had passed a test. Ruben actually speaks at least three languages, and I was sufficiently awed. I can limp well enough in Spanish to say the things I really need (like directions to the bathroom and how to order food) but his grasp on English was astounding.

After the party we called the box office, but it had closed for the night, and the internet was being stubborn and refusing to cake our promo code, so we decided to try again in the morning.

Tuesdays are very probably my favorite day of the week. I get to sleep in, and at about noon I go to free lunch with Hannah. Today, however, the line was too long, and so we ended up eating at The House Pub instead.

The House Pub was nice, because it was classy and Victorian in an understated way; and because they had decorated the entire place for Halloween with fake cobwebs and a little skeleton dressed in a tuxedo, holding a rose. Hannah ordered cod, and I got a hamburger. I am pleased to say I ate the entire thing, even the bun (which is unusual for me—as my mum) and the hamburger itself, which does not sound impressive until I tell you that there were vegetables hidden inside the meat—and I became aware of it about halfway through eating it. Hannah applauded, and said I was growing up.

“I want to go to Build-A-Bear for my birthday,” I told her. I am never going to grow up.

“That is completely different.”

“How?”

She didn’t answer, so I quizzed her on what she wanted for her birthday. Hannah turns 21 on November 10, and I turn 20 on Thanksgiving. Because 21 is a big deal in America, I’m trying to throw her a great party, BUT SHE IS NOT BEING HELPFUL. However, chances are that we will be in Scotland for her actual birthday, which is kind of an epic celebration in itself.

After lunch I called the box office and then went to the library and worked on my novel and did some last-minute homework for Creative Writing. Ciaran went to New York this weekend, and so he “forgot” to send us our required readings, just for the pleasure of bragging—at least, that was my take on it, as I was jealous to the extreme.

We’ve started to move into poetry, which is distressing for me because I am not a poet and with a few exceptions do not even care to read poetry. Ciaran started us off simply, though, on the haiku, and the first thing he asked us was whether or not we researched it.

I had not. I looked through my notes and saw no indication that I was supposed to have looked it up. It didn’t matter. Haiku has been stuffed down my throat since 3^rd grade. If I didn’t know it by the back of my hand by now…I deserved to go back to elementary school. I closed my eyes and briefly ran through my memory, searching for scraps of poetry, and sure enough, I found at least four Basho poems I had memorised freshman year of high school for Mrs. Stubbs’ English class.

Ciaran had grilled the class when I opened my eyes again, and found himself satisfied with our knowledge. He gave us a very skewed version of the Haiku, and then told us not to worry about the 5-7-5 format, which seemed a wee bit too much like heresy to me, but I played with my pen and ignored it.

“I’m going to do something now,” he said then, “and you’ve all got to write a haiku about it.”

I panicked, and he pulled out a little black box from his briefcase, and put together a wooden flute. Oh, fudge, I’ve got to start writing.

He played a song, and I scribbled down these lines:

A wooden flute’s song

In a room full of students

Taking careful notes

Which is not class, but there you have it. Of course, just as I had written it he finished and gave us fifteen minutes to write, so I ended up writing four other poems out of boredom. The girl sitting next to me was struggling to write on the spot; she kept writing words down and then scratching them out.

Ciaran came back in the room, and he started going through the room, writing our poems down on the board and critiquing them. Some he deemed too flowery, and cut down so that there were only five words in it. Some he added to.

One of my favorite poems was by a boy named Aaron, and originally it went like this:

Among the branched trees

Men move in the undergrowth

The shrubs are trampled

When Ciaran got done it with, the poem read like this:

Among the trees

Men move

Trampling

Which is not a proper Haiku, not really, and Aaron’s really sensitive about his stuff, and I don’t think Ciaran’s quite caught on yet. I keep wanting to take Aaron out of the classroom and sitting him down and having a Writing Centre Tutor chat with him—not because he isn’t a brilliant writer, understand, but because he is, because he could be, but I don’t think Ciaran’s way of fixing our things resonates with him as well.

Next he moved on to Shannon’s piece, which was deeply philosophical, and he didn’t understand, and so by the time he got to me I was sweating. I read him the poem, and the first thing he did was laugh, and say, “Thank you, Bekah, for your pun.”

What?!?! What pun?!?!

“Does anyone see the pun?” No hands went up. “Song and notes. Like a song has notes! Clever, Bekah.”

Oh. That pun?

“Also, Bekah, thank you for your assonatical haiku. Where is the assonance in this poem, class?”

I didn’t know what assonance meant until five seconds ago.

The class threw out examples. Wooden=student. Wooden=flute. Room=full. Students=careful.

They have got to be making this up.

Ciaran stepped back and looked at it. “There’s not much wrong with it,” he said. “You’ve got the syllables down, ah woo-den flute’s song, da da da, good. Okay, Rebecca, you’re next.”

“Mine’s a bit of a letdown after that,” Rebecca confessed, and I looked at her like she was crazy.

It’s only Haiku. Something has to be wrong with it. I screwed up the order—Ciaran said he wanted me to set the place in the first line, then introduce a sound, and the last line would be the result of the sound…the first lines are switched. Aaron used the 5-7-5 system too. So did Shannon. Rebecca, don’t say things like that…

After class I hurried back to Elms and met Hannah to go to the book reading. The box office had told me we could buy our tickets there, and so we ran to the Great Hall, where there was a sign that read our programme had been moved to No Alibis. Luckily that wasn’t far, and we got there in time to talk to the woman selling tickets, give her our promotional code, and get in for free.

The bookshelves that are normally in the middle of the room were pushed against the walls, and there were chairs where they usually were. Hannah and I sat in front, and waited. I knew our author was American, but was confused by a British-sounding man who kept walking around as if this was his big night. The fact that he was dressed very nicely only confused me more. I pulled out my miniature moleskin and waited patiently. He turned out to be named Keith (I never caught his last name) and he is a History Professor at Queen’s University Belfast. He was working tonight as a sort of interviewer/interrogator of Tom Reiss, both asking him questions about his book, and trying to trick Tom into admitting he didn’t know an answer.

The event for the night was The Real Monte Cristo, which was a talk based off of American author Tom Reiss’ new book, The Black Count. That was all I knew at the time. Eventually everyone came into place, and sat down, and the talk began. 

 It was unusual to hear an American voice again, to hear Americanisms slipping into his everyday speech without hesitation. Today in class I said the phrase ballpark figure and it fell, flat, from my lips, as if some part of my brain had killed it just as it was making its way to sound. Wrong, my brain had said, and even as it hung there in the air I had wanted to stuff it back in my throat and say something else, anything else. Tom did not have that little editor tonight. He spoke the way that was natural to him, which caused confusion when Keith asked about Alexandre Dumas when he was “tiny.”

“Oh, he was never tiny, even as a child he was quite large—”

“Tiny, ah, I’m sorry, a child—”

“Oh, small. Small, tiny. Oh.”

“Yes. Small.”

Tom was a big man, with a five o’clock shadow and a pointed nose. He was very comfortable with us, using his chair as a prop for standing, and he used voices as he read aloud. Tom read one of the first chapters of his book, which begins how he began to research the author Alexandre Dumas, and how that led to his father, Alex Dumas, and how the search had taken him to France…Keith, meanwhile, sat pressed up, his legs underneath him. He had a copy of the book on his knee, with his notes on blank white paper above it and a pen poised in his hand. I, too, was scribbling down in my moleskine; I later remarked to Hannah that I must have looked like a reporter—or, at the very least, a very rude patron. 

 The entire thing was brilliant. David later said it was the best event of the festival so far—and, he assured us, he was not speaking out of any bias, even though No Alibis had hosted this particular programme. I loved it very much, but the recitation was scattered; I had to reach back into my mind and remember things I had forgotten. However, this also connected dots that had been hanging loosely in my brain, like constellations that made no particular shape. Tonight they suddenly blazed, and names I had not thought about in years reappeared, as vivid as ever.

Alexandre Dumas, famous for The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo based his works largely off of his father, Alex Dumas, who had died when Alexandre was only four. Alex was born in Haiti, to a black woman and a white count, but even though he was considered legitimate, he kept his mother’s name and cut himself off from his father. He joined the army and quickly became a general and a superb tactician.  He met Napoleon, but the two did not get along; he could not love Napoleon as Napoleon wanted to be adored. Tom kept mentioning Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Napoleon and Josephine, black racism; he kept me busy with remembering. I do not know when I have been so grateful that I am a reader as I was tonight.

It took Tom Reiss seven years to write his book, and he visited several countries; the ones I remembered were France and Egypt. “I think of it as sort of recovering someone’s life, leave no stone unturned,” he said at the end, “I felt this sort of debt to the Dumas family…get him [General Dumas] fully resurrected in some way.”

After his talk, the audience asked profound questions; if this book has changed how he looks at the world, how it compared to his last book, The Oriental, what place he enjoyed visiting the most (France) and the least (Egypt).

“If nothing else,” Keith laughed, “this book has brought you to the centre of the world, here.” 

We all laughed.