Julia, she shouted.
Bogdanov didn’t buy it. He said she could scream as much as she liked, nobody would hear her above the noise of the pig farm next door. He took her phone and forced her to walk back to one of the outhouses. Not the barn with the swing but the stable where the horses had once been kept. The roof had partially fallen in and the doors were off the hinges. He pushed her inside, into a corner where she collided with a metal hoop once used to tie horses.
He emptied the contents of her bag on the ground and the mutilated page fell open, showing the swastika. This made him laugh out loud. He opened the leather pouch and found the blue pen inside. It was a great disappointment. He had expected a better reward for his supremacy, some treasure, perhaps, instead of this broken and worthless personal artefact. He threw the pen on the ground with disdain and turned towards Lena as though she represented more immediate value to him than the contents of the pouch.
It was initially unclear who intervened at that point. Could it be possible, I wondered, that Armin had found the strength to stand up and run to her defence? It came as a double surprise to discover that it was Mike after all who stood there holding the half-length potato fork in his hand, an apparition in answer to her call.
How did he know Lena was there?
What made him come looking for her? Was it love? Devotion, jealousy, control, obsession, possession, that single-minded male attachment, whatever it is that makes a person think they own another person and not wish to let them out of sight even for a minute? He loved her so badly that he engaged his considerable IT expertise to find out that she was not going to join him on his planned Operation Happiness to Transylvania, that his marriage was in doubt and things might be falling apart. He tracked her to this location with the intention of confronting her. He was behind her all the way, following her footsteps in the form of a dot on screen. Guiding himself to the farm with the assistance of a digital copy of the hand-drawn map she had once sent to his phone.
If only he had been there to discover the item hidden under the sundial with her. He had forfeited the chance of being the finder of this inheritance from the past and was now making up for it by stepping in to rescue her at the most crucial time. He heard the single gunshot echoing through the forest, wrapping itself in high frequency around the trees. He heard her voice calling. He heard the sound of a metal ring clanging. It took him a while to navigate his way around the empty farm buildings, but he eventually came across the half-length fork and ran with it back through the open barn door, managing to avoid the swing on his way. He stood for an agonizing moment in the central yard like a contestant in a live reality show, facing a multitude of options, spinning around to guess which direction to take. He almost ran the wrong way and turned back at the last minute on a hunch, arriving at the entrance to the derelict stables with only seconds left to spare. Without a further thought, he swung the fork through the air and struck Bogdanov across the side of the face, releasing a sustained musical note that rang out like the opening strain at a concert. Bogdanov turned with an expression of rage and made a counterattacking movement, but the fork struck a second note, followed by a soundless stab that drove him back against a disused horse trough.
Everything paused.
Lena stood without moving and looked into Mike’s eyes as though she was more shocked by his sudden presence than by everything that had just taken place. He rushed forward and threw his arms around her.
Are you OK?
Behind them, Bogdanov was attempting to sit up and fight another day. Staring with incomprehension at the sight of blood leaking from his shoulder. He clutched at the source of the pain and sank back against the trough, too exhausted to do any more than sleep.
Mike gathered up the pen and the leather pouch and placed them in Lena’s bag. He even had the presence of mind to pick me up, finally realizing how much I meant to her. He saw the trajectory of the bullet going through the text. The wounded book in his hands made him aware of how close he had come to being the ultimate recipient of that bullet. The pagination of holes aligned themselves into a high-velocity tunnel that left behind the shape of hatred. It was part of my life story now. The death of a reader. The murder of a man who had once entered my pages and made me human.
A sense of relief must have brought a million conflicting questions as Lena felt Mike’s arm around her shoulder. She heard the security in his voice as he led her out into the open, and maybe she began to wonder about his unexpected appearance in this remote place, his technological omniscience, that extraordinary skill of surveillance with which he had managed to turn up so late and so punctual, placing her into that helpless role of a rescued person.
She broke free and ran back to the oak tree where Armin lay at the edge of the path, unprotected, one arm stretched into the weeds. She kneeled by his side and held his hand. He was no longer alive, but she continued speaking to him as though he were. She cried and said she was sorry – it was her fault for bringing him out to this place where he was so exposed. She spoke about the different ways in which she would remember him. She would stay close to his sister. They would remain best friends.
Armin, she said. Are you cold?
She took her jacket off and laid it across his chest. She rubbed his hand. She held his face.
Standing beside her and holding her bag, Mike began phoning the emergency services. He thought of the practicalities, giving the precise coordinates. He told them not to take the road to the pig farm but the next one after that. There was no sign, the entrance to the farm was obscured by some laurel trees, he told them, but they would see the apple orchard and the red-brick gateposts. Once they got to the yard, they needed to keep going all the way to the stables with the sunken roof, there was a man injured and another man dead by the oak tree. He would be standing on the path to guide them.
Lena flattened some of the weeds and cleared a space for herself to sit down. She took Armin’s head onto her lap and began rocking back and forth, humming and saying his name over and over again. His body temperature was gradually dropping to match the earth beneath him, but he seemed still to be listening while Lena was singing.
Mike stood watching as though part of himself lay dead there under the oak tree with a bullet in his back. He became a spectator looking at himself lying motionless in the grass, staring at the sky. He turned into the person he saw before him, the dead man, the murdered man, the man slipping into the past tense, the person in her heart he had once been. The man with whom she sat dreaming under a stone wall one afternoon in the west of Ireland as they sheltered from the rain and the wind in a hollow scratched out by sheep. The man who stood with her in front of a painting by Georg Baselitz at the Tate Gallery in London and said – you can do that. The man with whom she spoke about having a family and who now stood listening as she was calling a child into life with a wordless lullaby.
She raised her head and stared away across the flat landscape. She stopped singing and spoke quietly to the line of trees on the horizon, not so much adding a child to the world but replacing one.
He was born in Grozny, she said. He told me that he could remember his mother once going out to buy bread. She hid the loaf under her coat, but another woman followed them and tried to steal it from her. There was a fight over the bread in the street and his mother had to let go. After he became an orphan and was brought to Germany and grew up with a family in Frankfurt, he used to ask his adoptive mother every morning – are we going to eat tonight? She would smile and say – yes, of course. Then he went off to school happy.
A new breeze came across the fields. The forest began to sway and the wind inhaled through the trees with all its strength. The oak leaves made the sound of tinfoil as they rolled along the path. The crow sounded bigger unseen. Three solid calls in a row. Followed by one more separate caw. Then a big silence. Then two more.
Author’s Note
The idea of the boo
k rescued from the Nazi book-burning in 1933 comes from a true story related to me by Henning Horn in Magdeburg. His account of the banned book kept hidden by his family through the years of the Third Reich brought to mind the famous connection drawn between books and human beings by the German Jewish writer Heinrich Heine – wherever they burn books, they will end up burning human beings. Those words are written on a plaque at the site of the book-burning on Bebelplatz in Berlin, where people once stood around to watch the outlawed books being incinerated and where they now stand looking down through a glass floor showing an underground room full of empty white bookshelves to remember that event. The words continue to resonate a century later, not only because they warn us about censorship and human rights abuses, but also because they can be turned around by a single act of courage to be read as – wherever they save a book from burning, they will end up saving human beings.
The lives of Joseph Roth and his wife Friederike Roth have been drawn from various biographies and essay collections, including the work of David Bronsen, Wilhelm von Sternburg, Michael Bienert, Soma Morgenstern, Géza von Cziffra, Irmgard Keun, Volker Weidermann, Michael Hofmann and Claudio Magris, among others. Details on Friederike’s illness are taken from the case notes of psychiatric hospitals at Rekawinkel and Steinhof, now housed in the public archives of the city of Vienna. Translations from Roth’s work and other documents are my own. Details on the Second Chechen War are taken from the work of the murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. The concept of the wounded book in this novel was inspired by the German artist Christiane Wartenberg and taken from an exhibition of her work which was shown by the Haus der Brandenburgisch-Preussischen Geschichte in Potsdam in May 2019.
I would like to thank Tessa Hadley, Roddy Doyle, Sebastian Barry, Colum McCann, John Banville, Eimear McBride, Neil Jordan and Sinéad Gleeson for their generous words of encouragement. I thank my editor, Nicholas Pearson at 4th Estate, HarperCollins, for his great support since the publication of The Speckled People. Thanks to my German editors, Grusche Juncker and Regina Kammerer at Luchterhand, Random House, for giving life to this book in my mother’s language. In particular I want to thank my agents, Peter Straus in London and Petra Eggers in Berlin. Also to Stephen Edwards and Cathy King. And warmest gratitude to Reagan Arthur at Knopf. Thanks to Hans-Christian Oeser for his wise comments at an early stage and also to Joe Joyce, Terence Heron and Tim Norton for their valuable insight on certain questions that came up during the writing. Many thanks to Silvia Crompton, Marigold Atkey and all the team at 4th Estate. I appreciate the support of the Arts Council of Ireland – mo mhíle buíochas.
Mostly it’s all thanks to Mary Rose Doorly.
I keep in mind the struggle of Joseph Roth in the 1930s, when he was cut off from his reading public after his books were banned in Nazi Germany. I think of the publishers in exile who kept faith with him when he was fighting for his life as a writer. I think of the great friendship of his fellow writer Stefan Zweig, who kept him on his feet when he became destitute. Writing was his only way of being alive, Roth said of himself. It was his survival, his refuge, his identity, his only true sense of belonging in a world from which he had been expelled. I like to imagine that Joseph Roth would be happy to hold this book in his hands today and that we could raise a glass together in his favourite restaurant in Paris, where the waitress kept his manuscripts safe from the Nazis. His work and his life stand as a witness to history. Even if the rescue of one book was never enough to save the life of Friederike Roth from the fire, I hope that she has now been given a safe place in our memory.
I am also aware that a hundred years ago, as a star reporter for the Frankfurter Zeitung, Joseph Roth went on a journey through the industrial heartland of the Ruhr Valley and described the cities being joined together by smoke. And perhaps this is the ultimate proof of optimism and change, that a century later an abandoned steel-making plant covering a vast area of land near the city of Duisburg has become one of Europe’s greatest rewilding projects. With the help of volunteers, nature has been steadily reclaiming the spaces between those rusted towers and elevators and iron-ore silos with trees and wildflowers and insect life. People come at weekends to walk and cycle for many kilometres through this strange parkland. The derelict shapes cast abstract shadows. The sun going down turns the metal parts bright orange. The wind can sometimes produce the most haunting range of musical notes. Yes – like a barrel organ.
Also by Hugo Hamilton
Surrogate City
The Last Shot
The Love Test
Dublin Where the Palm Trees Grow
Headbanger
Sad Bastard
The Speckled People
The Sailor in the Wardrobe
Disguise
Hand in the Fire
Every Single Minute
Dublin Palms
PLAYS
The Speckled People (adaptation)
The Mariner
Every Single Minute (adaptation)
About the Author
Hugo Hamilton is the author of nine novels, a collection of short stories, three stage plays and two memoirs, including the bestselling The Speckled People, the story of his German–Irish childhood in Dublin, where he was prohibited by his revolutionary father from speaking English. His work has won international awards, including the French Prix Femina étranger, the Italian premio Giuseppe Berto and the DAAD scholarship in Berlin. He is a member of Aosdána and lives in Berlin.
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