excerpt
Finn MacLir dragged his feet back into the dining room after seeing his guests off into the night. He paused in the doorway, raised his outspread hands to his face, and drew them down over his cheeks. “Padraig, I’m tired.”
He was a tall man, over six feet in height. His broad, beefy shoulders were more rounded now, his waist wider than in his younger days. As Padraig remembered him, he had always been a burly, muscular man, full of energy and vitality. Now, at seventy-five years of age, that energy and that vitality had begun to ebb away.
He approached the table unsteadily, lifted the wine decanter and tipped it to his glass. But only a drop or two dribbled out.
“So much for that,” he said. He thumped the decanter down again on the table, and a few knives and forks jumped on their plates. Finn turned to face his remaining guest.
“These are troubled times to be returning to Ireland, Padraig.”
“When are there not troubled times in Ireland?” Padraig said.
“Ay, when indeed?” Finn sank into his chair with a sigh. “The last election left us in a pretty mess, didn’t it? A real shipwreck.” He paused in thought for a moment, tapping the empty wine glass with his finger. “Ay, a real shipwreck. The old ship of state, the S.S. Ireland—remember her?—she ran aground on rocks during a mutiny. A rebel crew tried to take her over. We didn’t know it then, but it seems this rebel crew, this Sinn Fein, had a lot of support on board. The passengers have since voted them into positions of command. Seventy-three of them no less, with Eamon de Valera, one of the old mutineers, escaped from the cooler and appointed captain. It could only happen in Ireland.”
Finn MacLir stared at the empty wine glass, silent, serious, disillusioned. “And half a dozen of the old crew, all that’s left of our old Irish Parliamentary party, cast adrift on a raft in very stormy waters. They’re doomed, I fear. But the situation doesn’t look too good for any of them; or even for the ship itself. They’ve renamed her the S.S. Republic but they haven’t got her off…
Manolis Aligizakis 