The proprietress of my favourite Dublin vegetarian restaurant once mentioned that she, like I, had lived for a time on Norfolk Street in the Central Square neighbourhood of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Situated a mile east of better-known Harvard Square, Central Square in the 1970s was still, in that distinctively American way, a haven for immigrants, entrepreneurs and bohemian radicals, writes Anthony Glavin.
My dilapidated red-brick tenement boasted families from Guatemala, Greece and Puerto Rico, while Haitians, Panamanians and Jamaicans lived further up the street. The barber a few doors down spoke Italian, while our corner shop routinely stocked mangoes, plantain and yucca along with less exotic fare.
Such diversity is not, in many ways, that different from Ireland today, but it was certainly not to be found in the Ireland I first came to in 1974. In any event, before departing America, I handed the key to my Norfolk Street flat over to my elder brother, who brought in a first-generation Neapolitan to help pay the rent, even if it was only $80 a month. The Neapolitan in turn invited in the Lebanese bodyguard of a Beirut millionaire who was convalescing after an eye operation at a Boston hospital. Not long after, a Korean professor of American literature, studying as a Fulbright scholar at Harvard, rounded out their ranks.
It was, according to my brother, a lively time. As it happened, the Neapolitan was seeing a young Egyptian woman, who fell out with the Lebanese bodyguard, holder of a black belt in Taekwando. Fortunately, their worst row involved nothing worse than a shower of mutual invective, followed by one of my geranium pots being hurled - with no great accuracy or, for that matter, intent to harm - from one of our first-floor windows on to the street below.
When I returned from Ireland a year later to reclaim my digs, I found scattered throughout the flat occasional traces of these temporary tenants: something scribbled in Arabic lettering on a doorjamb, or the odd packet of dried-up pasta popping up here and there. One evening a few weeks later the Korean scholar called by to collect some clothes he'd left behind. Such memory lapses were not unusual, according to my brother, who had found his flatmate the apotheosis of the "absent-minded professor", with scorched kitchen pots being his particular legacy.
Anyhow, I made us a pot of that very same tea, and in the course of our conversation, learned that my caller had been the first to translate the American novelist John Updike into Korean. Our shared regard for things literary proved a bond of sorts, and on a subsequent visit the professor played a tape of a meeting he had with Updike in a Cambridge restaurant. On another occasion, this time involving a supper of sorts, I spoke about what I felt was the authoritarian nature of the Korean government of the day. My guest demurred somewhat, remarking how the chanting protesters on his university campus occasionally impeded serious scholarship.
One bitter March night the professor arrived with a short story he was translating into English for what would be the first American anthology of Korean short stories, to be published under his editorship, and with which he thought I might be able to help. I don't remember anything about the story itself, but I can still clearly recall his delight at my explication of the sexual connotations of the verb "to die" in Elizabethan times - while I, for my part, was edified to discover that dog was considered a delicacy in his part of the world.
As we continued to labour over the nuances of translation, we gradually became aware of a hubbub outside on Norfolk Street and eventually realised that the large, yellow, clapboarded tenement next door was in flames. Standing in amazement at the window, we could feel the heat from the fire through the pane despite the frosty night. When a fireman shortly after knocked on the door to ask us to vacate our own building, we abandoned the manuscript and went down to the street.
Fortunately the blaze was brought under control as we stood amid a crowd of onlookers, including an African-American neighbour from next door, whom I overheard telling another neighbour how she had been seated in front of her TV with her dinner when the fire broke out. "And I'm still hungry!" she lamented.
It all seemed of a piece to me: my Korean scholar friend, the manuscript, flashing red lights and fire engines. Yet when I told the story to an acquaintance a few days later, she responded: "Surely there was no connection between the fire and your absent-minded professor?" I thought for a moment, before replying that I supposed there wasn't - except, perhaps, on some metaphysical level.
That June his Fulbright fellowship at Harvard finished and the professor flew home. We corresponded for a time, and then, as generally happens with acquaintances of this kind, we fell out of touch. However, whenever I read of political demonstrations in Seoul, I have a vision of my old acquaintance from Norfolk Street, poring over John Updike's latest novel, while protesting students chant for reforms beneath his cloistered study.