The Music Lesson by Katharine Weber

ends, will be worth that hour.
    And no, I don’t know precisely how they did it, though I’m not naïve.
    I hope no one was hurt.
    I didn’t ask.

29th of January, cold and clear

    M ICKEY AND I stayed up all that night talking. I did not go into this blindly. He was right: The conversation did change my life.
    Mickey volunteered for the Provos when he was fifteen. It was something he says he always knew he would do, from the time he was a little boy. The Troubles, as they are called here—a simple term for a complex situation—were part of daily life, despite the tranquillity of West Cork. Every evening after the milking, his father would go up the road to the only pub with a television set, where he would gather with some of the men in the village to watch the news of the day’s bombings and shootings in the North and drink pints and talk politics.
    By age five, Mickey would accompany his father andsit on the bar, building houses with beer mats, eating packets of crisps, listening and watching and taking it all in. He was nourished on that hatred, on those obsessions with secrets and retribution.
    To sign up with the IRA, Mickey traveled to the North from Dublin, where he told his family he’d gone to spend the weekend with a friend he met at Gaeltacht in Donegal, the traditional summer school to which lots of Irish kids are sent to study Irish. (Based on Mickey’s reports, fluency and romance seem to develop in equal measure in those summer interludes.)
    His friend Eamonn O’Doherty was a handsome lad from Howth who had an easy way with all the girls and made people laugh with his brilliant imitations of the priests and nuns who taught them their classes. Mickey, who says he himself was a “pimply, stupid git,” looked up to him tremendously.
    Eamonn recruited Mickey into his section, which was made up of lads just like Mickey—passionate boys, raw patriots eager to give up their lives for a free and united Ireland, and eager for weapons more sophisticated than “beggars’ bullets”—rocks.
    “It’s a wonder I wasn’t killed three or four times over” is about all Mickey said about his first months as a volunteer, before changing the subject. That’s the extent of what he has told me, but I gather he was used as a donkey to carry bomb-making equipment and to plantbombs, and I’m fairly certain he had a hand in assembling them, as well.
    The reason I think so is because when we were at Pete’s, Mickey was strangely horrified when I offered him and Pete some traditional Christmas fruitcake, the kind that’s roofed with a marzipan slab of icing. It was late, and they were well into the Red Breast, which might account for Mickey’s unguarded reaction. He pushed away the plate, muttering that he loathes marzipan because it smells so much like gelignite, which, he added, gives him terrible headaches.
    His innocent face has always helped him to travel freely. Apparently, although he’s been active for ten years now, he’s never been arrested and might not even be on the list of known IRA activists.
    There is one more thing Mickey told me about those years: His friend Eamonn was killed beside him as they ran away from a Bogside volunteer action of some kind, probably a bombing organized by their Derry brigade. A British sniper got him. They were both seventeen years old.
    We didn’t have much time.
    We had ten days before the show closed in The Hague, perhaps another two or three before the paintings would start to leave Holland. Because it was the final venue, the show would no longer travel as one shipment,but instead, piecemeal, each painting would be returning to its home at the convenience of the lending institution. This would make our work simpler, with the right preparation.
    Starting that night and continuing into the days ahead, Mickey asked me a lot of very specific questions and I answered them to the best of my ability. Whenever I would say I didn’t know, he would persuade me to apply my