Little Things Like This is the first book by Irish author Claire Keegan (b. 1968) translated into Greek (Metaihmio, 2022). Its legend is based on a long history of violence, exploitation, abuse and death of thousands of girls and women in the now infamous Magdalene Laundry, a horrific work of women’s loners. We do not know the exact number of girls who died there. Peter Mullan’s 2002 film The Magdalene Sisters (in Greek, titled “Daughters of Shame”) made this anointing known throughout the world. The last Magdaleni laundry was closed in 1996.

What could be a more appropriate topic than exposing the cruelty and perversity of the nuns and priests of the Catholic Church, the cruelty of the fathers of these girls, who considered them a disgrace and kicked them out of the house, the whole society that they knew and kept silent? And what better reason to suddenly bring up such important topics as “patriarchal society and gender violence” or “sexuality and Christianity”? However, the Keegan oligographer will not go down this path of moral complaints or universal concerns. As good a writer as he is, he knows that when a topic is shocking in itself, you have to find more oblique and circumstantial ways to approach it, even if a documented complaint has already been made by journalists, historians, and commissions of inquiry. Keegan’s novella is not about Magdalen’s Laundries – Laundries exist before the story (in the dedication) and after it ends (in “Note to the Text”) – a novella about Bill Furlong, a small-time wood and charcoal merchant, married and father of five daughters, in the small town of New York. Ross, where on its hill, across the Kurgan River, rises – in every sense of the word – a monastery with its laundry. He is a workaholic, his children pester him with letters, his wife is dignified and determined to protect her family and survive in life, which almost always leads to poverty. Bill doesn’t know who his father is. His mother became pregnant at sixteen, the family cut off all ties with her, but she did not take the road to Magdalen’s Laundry, as many girls found themselves in her position, because the Protestant widow for whom she worked as a servant she kept her and took care of her, as she had taken care of Bill himself when his mother died and he was only twelve years old. At school, he will endure the cruelty of his classmates.

A short story about Bill Furlong, a small wood and coal dealer, married and father of five girls.

We are now in 1985, Christmas is approaching, the cold has set in, and Bill has a lot of work to do. Although everything seemed to be going well, Bill did not sleep well, “he felt embarrassed, without knowing why” (p. 22), “I felt something[θ]drown him” (p. 37). Once, when he was carrying coal to the monastery, the girl begged him to take her away. Bill refuses because he has a wife and children (p. 53) – and the girl has no one! On Sunday, Christmas Eve, she will again go to the convent to order and meet another girl, Sarah, who gave birth three months ago, but her child was taken away by the nuns to be given (that is, sold) for adoption. She, too, had her hair cut—an age-old form of punishment and ostracism for women—and locked in a coal shed, a shadow, next to her excrement. Little Sarah also begs Bill to take her with him, but he is afraid and refuses. Second refusal. He will return home so that the whole family can go to church. Bill, after what he saw in the monastery and after what he did not do, stubbornly refuses to take communion (p. 88), seizing on himself, on this collier, on that theological truth that communion is not an unconditional ritual habit. The moral countdown has already begun, so he is unhappy with the happiness of his home. How can you be happy with your children when you saw Sarah? This is precisely the starting point of every act of kindness and love, in the discomfort of one’s own happiness when others suffer.

The next day, on Christmas Eve, after he had finished his business and bought the patent leather his wife desired, his steps would bring him back to the convent, take him where he wanted to take Sarah home. He covers her with his coat and they walk around town together, he with a lacquered box and she barefoot. Bill is not a saint or a hero, Bill is afraid, afraid of his wife’s reaction, afraid of the power of the nuns, afraid of society’s attitude. Bill is torn, one part of himself caring for his family (a tin box in one hand), and the other with a voice of kindness (in the other hand, Sarah, albeit barefoot). However, he is able to decide on kindness because he, too, once received kindness from Mrs. Wilson, a Protestant, from Ned, her farmhand (who may also be his father), and even from an unknown young woman who offered tea to open frozen castle. Bill knows well what awaits him from now on. But he left the worst behind! He left behind a shame that he would have carried for the rest of his life if he had not dared to help Sarah. “Whatever he has to suffer from now on, it will certainly be less than the girl next to him has already endured, and he may never come close to it” (p. 120).