Emerald Magic_ Great Tales of Irish Fantasy - Andrew M. Greeley [14]
LEPRECHAUNS STILL HAVE SOME ACCESS TO GOLD, or at least to gold cards: we flew out on Swiss at lunchtime the next day, the direct flight to Zürich. That evening, about five,we were on the ground, and nothing would satisfy the Eldest but that we go straight to the grave, immediately.
I’d been in Switzerland once or twice, and I was against it. “I’m not sure you should do that,” I said. “The Swiss are very big on not going into places after they’re officially closed . . .”
The Eldest gave me a look.
As a result we immediately took the feeder train from the airport to the main station, and the Number 6 tram from the main station tram depot to the Zürichbergstrasse.At Zürichbergstrasse 129 are the gates to Fluntern Cemetery. We got out and found the place locked and apparently deserted behind its high granite walls; but there was a little iron-barred postern gate that was open—or at least, it opened to the Eldest Leprechaun.We went in.
The cemetery is beautifully kept, and we headed around and up several curving pathways, climbing, for the cemetery is built against the slope of the Zürichberg mountain that leans above the city. Finally, we found the spot.Under a stand of trees, in a sort of semicircular bay, were some tasteful plantings, a bronze of Joyce sitting on a rock and admiring the view, a plaque in the ground saying who was buried there, with dates of birth and death, and a stern sign in German, French, and Italian saying WALKING ON THE GRAVE IS FORBIDDEN.
The other leprechauns took off their hats. Once more the Eldest raised his arms and spoke that long, solemn invocation in Irish. All around us, the wind in the aspens and birches fell quiet. And suddenly there were three men standing there; or the ghosts of three men.
One was tall, one was short, and one was of middle height. They were all wearing clothes from the turn of the twentieth-century—loose trousers held up over white shirts with suspenders. They looked at us in some confusion.
“Where is James Joyce?” said the Eldest Leprechaun.
“He’s dead,” said the shortest of the three.
The Eldest Leprechaun rolled his eyes. “I mean,where is he now?”
“He is not here,” said the middle-sized figure.“He is risen.”
The tallest of them checked his watch. “And being that it’s the time that it is,” he said, “why would he still be here at all? He’s in the pub.”
The leprechauns looked at each other.
“We should have known,” one of them said.
“Pelikanstrasse?” the Eldest said to the three shadowy figures.
“That’s the one.”
“Thanking you,” said the Eldest, and we went straight back out of the cemetery to catch the tram back down the hill.
At Pelikanstrasse is one of the bigger complexes of one of the bigger Swiss banks. There, in a little plaza by Bahnhofstrasse, you see a number of granite doorways, all leading nowhere; and past them the street curves down into what seems at first a nondescript arc of shop windows and office doorways.
“Those three guys—”
“They’re something from Finnegans Wake,” said the leprechaun who was walking next to me, behind the Eldest. “Three guys always turn up together with the initials H, C, and E.Never got into that one, too obscure, don’t ask me for the details. But the pub’s in there too, and in Ulysses . . .”
He told me how once upon a time, the bar had been the Antique Bar in the first Jury’s Hotel, in Dame Street. There, at a corner table, a little man in round-framed glasses and a slouch hat could often have been seen sitting in front of a red wine and a gorgonzola sandwich, when he could afford them, relaxing in the dim pub-misted afternoon sunlight, while other languages, other universes, roiled and teemed in his brain.
“But someone had a brain seizure,” the leprechaun said. “Jury’s sold off their old property in Dame Street and