Maribor
In the summer of 2001, shortly after my fifty-sixth birthday, Ignac invited me to accompany him to Ljubljana for a literary festival. Usually his wife, Rebecca, went with him on publicity tours but having given birth to twin girls only a few months earlier—their second set of twins following a pair of boys born only fourteen months before—she didn’t want to leave Dublin and so he asked me along instead.
“He’s very anxious about it,” Rebecca told me when she wheeled the enormous two-level buggy into Dáil éireann one morning, appearing a little dazed to see sunlight again. Collapsing into a chair opposite me, she looked as if she could fall asleep for weeks if given the chance. “I think he regrets having accepted the invitation at all.” One of the babies on the upper level promptly threw up all over one of the babies on the lower, leaving a parliamentary secretary glaring over at us with disapproval as a round of raucous crying ensued, mostly from Rebecca herself.
“Why would he be anxious?” I asked her when they were cleaned up again. “He’s attended hundreds of book festivals over the years. He must be comfortable with them at this stage.”
“Yes, but it’ll be his first time back in Slovenia since he left.”
“Since he was sent away, you mean.”
“Do I?”
“Well, that’s what happened, isn’t it?”
She shrugged her shoulders and looked away. “It’s complicated,” she said.
I frowned, uncertain what she meant. Ignac had always said that his grandmother had dispatched him to his father in Amsterdam immediately after his mother’s death, saying that she had no interest in raising another child. And that, as far as I understood it, was what had happened.
“I’m worried that he’ll find it upsetting,” she continued. “He’s quieter than he normally is. And he’s not sleeping.”
“Are any of you sleeping?” I asked, glancing down at the babies.
“Well, no. Now that you mention it, I think I last had a full night’s sleep in March. I’m hoping to have one again next year at some point if I’m lucky. I just think it might be a difficult trip, that’s all. He’s so famous over there.”
“He’s famous everywhere.”
“I know, but—”
“Look, why don’t I take care of the kids for a few days?” I suggested. “And you go to Slovenia with Ignac?”
“Seriously?” she said. “You want to take care of four babies for five days?”
“Well, not really, no. But I’ll do it. How difficult can it be?”
She laughed and shook her head. “Oh, not difficult at all! It’s a total breeze!”
“Come on, I can do it! And you look like you could do with a break anyway.”
“Why?” she asked, her eyes opening wide in dismay. “Do I look awful? I do, don’t I? I must look like one of those women. You know those women? Who look awful all the time? Do I look like one of them?”
“You look as gorgeous as ever,” I told her, which was true, because despite how tired she might have felt, and regardless of how many babies she popped out, Rebecca always looked amazing.
“I feel like that old woman from Titanic,” she said, resting her head on her hands. “Only less fuckable. The way my body looks right now, Mother Teresa would beat me in a swimsuit competition.”
“I’m sure Ignac doesn’t think that,” I said, trying to dismiss this image from my mind.
“I hope he does,” she said. “If he comes near me with that thing again, I’ll cut it off with scissors. Four babies in a year and a half is enough. Anyway, no, as much as I’d like to just run away and leave you to it, it wouldn’t be possible.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because I think I might be better at breastfeeding than you.”
“Oh yes,” I said. “All right. Good point.”
And so it was settled and I boarded a plane, finding myself swept up in the chaos of Slovenia’s best-known expatriate returning to the country of his birth for the first time in more than two decades. To my astonishment, photographers were gathered at the airport in anticipation of his arrival, along with television news crews, each of whom thrust microphones into Ignac’s face as they roared incomprehensible questions at him once we appeared through the Arrivals door. The hordes of children waiting were so deep and noisy that we might have been a boy-band coming to town. By now, of course, the eighth volume of the Floriak Ansen series had been published, so the enthusiasm was understandable, and Ignac, to his credit, spent more than an hour at the airport signing books while I sat with a cup of coffee before we traveled by limousine to the city center for a champagne-fueled meeting with his publisher in advance of a sold-out evening event at a local theater.
Throughout her entire writing career Maude had given a public reading on only one occasion, and although that disastrous night is well documented in Alice’s biography,* she wasn’t actually present to witness it, but I was. It had taken place in a bookshop in the center of Dublin to a packed audience of literally tens of people and as a culture journalist from the Sunday Press introduced Maude, listing the titles of her various novels to date, my adoptive mother sat quietly in a corner, dressed entirely in black, lighting one cigarette after another and rolling her eyes at every supposed compliment he paid her. (She would give any male writer a run for his money, was one of his choice lines. Along with: She writes wonderful sentences but has even better legs. Not to mention: How she manages to write her novels while taking care of a husband and child is a mystery to me. I hope she’s not neglecting her duties!) When he was finished, she stood up, marched over to the microphone and with absolutely no preamble began reading from Chapter One of Amongst Angels, which had been published to universal indifference a few months earlier. Perhaps she had never attended a literary event before or perhaps she simply misunderstood the nature of public readings, for having completed the first chapter, which seemed to take an interminable forty minutes, the audience burst into applause and she glared out at them and told them to Shut up, for Christ’s sake, I’m not finished, before launching into the second. And then the third. Only when the last audience member shuffled out of the bookshop more than two hours later did she stop reading, slam the book shut and, taking me by the hand, storm out, hailing a taxi for Dartmouth Square.
“What a complete waste of my time,” she complained as we drove through the traffic for home. “If they didn’t like my work, why on earth did they come along to hear me?”