Pitch Dark by RENATA ADLER Page B

and stars precise and perfect overhead. It was cold. The car’s radiator did not work. And there I was, speeding along the road, I hoped, toward Dublin, from a place called Cihrbradàn. I had no clear plan, but I thought I had at most ten hours to be gone.
    Beside the road, invisible, the fields, the long stone walls. On the road, few cars, three perhaps an hour, all of them coming toward me. Nobody following, then, no one in pursuit. And yet, as I passed through the small, dark, widely separated towns, I wondered whether my headlights and engine were noticed, whether a policeman, perhaps, or some sleepy but eager informer, had picked up the receiver, and called the next town. Phones ringing, then from town to town, not even for me necessarily. What lawful errand, after all, could send a cheap, small rented car out on a Southern Irish road, at this speed, in this weather, at this hour? Except that, with any luck, it no longer gave much sign of being a rented car. That afternoon, in broad daylight, I had peeled its rental sticker off. In fact, though I did not know at what precise moment I had crossed over into crime, that removal must have marked a turning point. On the one hand, they, they could say that it proved guilt or at least criminal intent. I, on the other hand, I could make what I had begun to think of as the argument of What kind of fool do you take me for. I mean, do you take me for such a fool as to remove a rental sticker in broad daylight when what I have in mind is a furtive escape. The argument, I knew, hardly ever worked, in politics, or criminal law, or private life—and yet, in my case there was no criminal record, and so little evidence. It made no sense for me to be doing what I seemed to be doing, in view of what little I had done. I might prevail. Sleet came down. It was pitch dark. Rarely, every twenty or thirty miles, there was a light, a single lighted window, in a house. With, behind it, a poet, a wakeful mother, a worker on the night shift, a terrorist, with a clock, and caps, and fuse? What I had felt for days was fear. Alternating with a sort of double suspicion: that the fear was groundless. Now, as the sky became clear again, I felt what every vandal must feel as he races through the night: dawning exhilaration. Out there, Orion, darkness, the incredible unseen beauty of the Irish countryside. If not real joy, at least a waning trepidation. Then, within an hour, I had reason to think I had missed my turnoff at Castlebar.
    I stopped. I pulled over on the left. Driving on the left had been so much of the problem until then. I got out and, in the dark, under the headlights, I looked at a map of Ireland. There was no sign, no mention whatever, of a tiny intersection I had just passed. The words on the roadside marker, R.9 Lockarnagh, did not appear on the map at all. But I concluded, from the time passed and the mileage, that I had, in fact, missed the turnoff. So I turned, and raced back in the direction I had been coming from. A car, now, coming toward me, lowered his headlights and went by. But I could not make out his license plates, or even the color or contours of his car. I had to assume he could not make mine out, either. He had arrived too late to see me stop and turn around. If he had been following me, then, he was going the wrong way. Miles passed, more miles. The road no longer looked familiar. What were the odds, I thought, what were the odds that my mother’s daughter, the descendant of my ancestors, should be lost like this, late one night in Ireland, fearing what was after all the law, under this sickle moon? Well, I’d been with Yemenite servants and the wives of nuclear physicists in a bomb shelter in Rehovoth, with Ibo tribesmen at a military installation in a nameless town. As much as this is the age of crime, after all, this is the century of dislocation. Not just for journalists or refugees; for everyone. I was by no means the first in my family to have reason to fear the