Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan

Ruth Gilligan

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781782398592
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782398585
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

The Irish bestseller about putting down roots in unfamiliar soil; about falling in love; and about how tradition and tales are born, nurtured and handed from one generation to the next. Rich in plot and full of characters that have been neglected by Irish literature. - Guardian At the start of the twentieth century, a young girl and her family emigrate from the continent in search of a better life in America, only to pitch up in Ireland by mistake. In 1958, a mute boy locked away in a mental institution outside of Dublin forms an unlikely friendship with a man consumed by the story of the love he lost nearly two decades earlier. And in present-day London, an Irish journalist is forced to confront her conflicting notions of identity and family when her Jewish boyfriend asks her to make a true leap of faith. Spanning generations and braiding together three unforgettable voices, Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan shows us what it means to belong, and how storytelling can redeem us all.

part one | In the beginning…

1901

What if, in the beginning, they arrived by sea and then, in the end, they left by sea too, each in their own way?

‘North.

‘South.

‘East.

‘West.

‘Never once looking back?

‘Because maybe that’s all a compass can really show – the different ways a family falls apart. The pull of magnets, and the push of other dreams.’

Ruth heard the sound of bone before she felt it. The crack was clean, just below the shrivel of her knuckle; her body lurched forward from where it sat on the bed to land on that single, snappable point.

‘Tateh!’ she cried out for her father next to her in the darkness. ‘TatehIthinkIhavebrokenmy— ’ the panic colliding all her words into one.

But the ship’s moan was so loud it drowned her out, its very own version of pain.

The prow buckled beneath the force of the crash, the impact rippling along the hull. The waves leapt acrobatic. The propeller paused mid-propel. While above, the Atlantic stars spelled out a Morse code of dots.

S-O-S

Save our souls

Sinking our ship

Below deck, the bunk beds were nearly wrenched free from their fixings, the wood already gnarled with splinters that seemed sharp enough to prick the darkness and bleed it out, like a bullock drained the kosher way. As it happened, the ship itself had been for cattle once, herds of beasts sailing off towards the foreign slaughterhouses, the white-pink sinews of their shoulders knotted tightly together, hooves ankle-deep in the muck-splattered straw.

But now the stench of it was back again – the cold, meaty waft of fear.

Because the boat had crashed. An almighty thud. Ruth wondered if it was an iceberg they had hit. Or maybe a whale – she could still remember that story from Cheder; still see the gulp of the ­Rabbi’s throat as he acted out the moment poor Jonah was swallowed. Whole. But of course, she knew that this here was a different story; a different tale with a full cast of characters – two passengers per bed and sixty beds in total sailing from Riga to America on a promise of could-bes, suddenly thrown forward with hands out to stop the fall and bones that snapped in two like pencils.

‘Tateh— ’

‘All right, Bubbeleh. All right, I am here.’

For a moment, Ruth forgot about the throb.

It was the first time her father had spoken in hours. In fact, he had been practically silent for days now, leaving her lonely there on the top bunk, nothing to play with and nothing to listen to except for other people’s prayers; other people’s vomit as it backwashed on the floor below – ten whole days of seasickness worth. Unless, of course, homesickness spews just the same.

Her finger seared again. Eight years without breaking a bone, and now this.

And it had been strangest of all, her father’s silence next to her, because at the beginning of the journey he had barely drawn breath, filling the below-deck shadows with the usual stream of his latest ideas:

‘What about a famous mural painter who is tortured by being forced to watch his creations get covered with layer after layer of white paint?’

‘Or a man and a woman who court via pigeon mail, until the woman falls in love with the pigeon instead?’

‘Or— ’

Until his wife had had enough – a lash of impatience from the bunk below. ‘Moshe!’ she cried. ‘Won’t you give us any peace?’

Even in the blackness Ruth could sense her father’s blush. ‘It’s all right, Tateh,’ she tried. ‘It is just too dark for stories. We… we cannot picture a thing.’

She had always wondered what her father did with his unused ideas – stones in his pockets, weighing him down, heavier even than the mounds of baggage they had managed to lug through the snow, across the Latvian border, up to Riga, down the port, along the gangplank to this – an entire existence condensed into a schleppable load. There were the stockings and the pans; the Kiddush candelabras; a compass wedged hard against a little leg making a NorthSouthEastWest bruise. And then of course there were Uncle Dovid’s letters sent back from America, nearly as sacred to the family now as the Torah scrolls themselves. In fact, probably even more so. Because the ancient words could only tell them their past.

In the beginning…

Whereas these letters told the story of their future.

‘Tell it again, Tateh,’ Esther had asked when they first set sail. ‘I want to hear it again.’ Ruth’s beautiful sister Esther commanding their father’s voice to repeat his brother’s words.

So he had done as he was told; had adjusted his window-thick glasses and filled the bloated belly of the boat with tales of all the things that awaited them across the Atlantic. He told them about Manhattan with its buildings that scraped the sky; about the flag lined with stripes and a fistful of stars; about the giant lady with a crown and a torch who welcomed the weary ships in.

And it was only a few more days until their own ship would arrive – two weeks at sea, they had been told. Despite her nausea, Ruth had been counting. And she had even used her compass to try to plot a map in her head, a bit like the one Tateh had had pinned to his attic wall, back where they had come from. It was a yellowed thing, with crosshatch lines for the ocean and a red dot for ‘New York’. Can you see it, Bubbeleh, can you? Only, the dot had been pointed to so many times that eventually it had disappeared, rubbed away by the poke of desperate fingertips, as if the place never existed at all.

And now her finger was broken.

She turned to ask her Tateh for a kiss; to feel the bush of his beard up against her. But suddenly he seemed busy with other things, the bash of the boat bringing him back to life. He clambered his way down from the bunk and reached up for Ruth to follow. Confused, she let herself be lifted, her hand stashed tight into her chest, before he took her other hand and led her on through the blackness, a wobble in her legs from the waves underneath. And soon there were other legs too, other hands and other wobbles as the rest of the passengers began to follow behind, the pied piper and the rats.

‘What’s happening?’ they whispered, half-terror half-delight. ‘Did somebody say… arrived?’

Ruth climbed the ladder to the deck as best she could, though she was clumsy in Esther’s old shoes, the buckles chafing stockings chafing goosepimple flesh. Once across the gangplank she felt the scuff of dry land beneath her; a breeze that was surprisingly warm. But a fresh batch of whispers had already started to spread, a new confusion doing the rounds.

‘Arrived? But— ’

‘Nu, America is early.’

Ruth checked the sky as if the answer to their questions might be there, but it was just as lightless out here as it was under the deck – the middle of the American night. She half-remembered how Tateh had mentioned something a...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Prologue
• part one | In the beginning…
• 1901
• April
• Friday
• part two | Names…
• 1911
• May
• Saturday
• part three | And he called…
• 1921
• June
• Sunday
• part four | In the desert…
• 1931
• July
• Monday
• part five | Words…
• 1941
• August
• Tuesday
• Epilogue
• About the Author
• Copyright Page