The Sailor in the Wardrobe

by Hugo Hamilton

  This time they didn’t care what language I screamed in. One of the nurses said it would be over soon, but it went on for ever. They put the needle in again and again, until I was hoarse from crying. Eventually I felt their hands go soft and I knew they were letting me go. I heard the nurse saying that I was a free man. They brought me back to the ward and there was a piece of cake left on the bed along with a note from my mother, saying she was sorry that she missed me.

  Then I was back watching the man smoking in his bed and not saying much, listening to more summer holidays for hours and hours, waiting for the results. They didn’t find any Meningitis and I was afraid they would have to do more tests. When my mother came to visit me again the next time, she stayed sitting on my bed for as long as she could. I begged her not to go and she stayed until the very last minute, until well after the bell rang and all the other visitors were gone.

  ‘Mein Schatz,’ she said. ‘You’ll be home soon.’

  They found no evidence of Meningitis. It was like being declared innocent and my father came to collect me. He brought a bag with my clothes and it felt strange to be wearing shoes again. He was smiling a lot and speaking to me in Irish, saying I would notice a few changes in the house. I was like an emigrant returning home, dying to see if anything was still the same.

  Everything was different. The house looked smaller than it did before. The street we live on seemed to have moved a bit further in from the sea and our back garden looked like it was squashed. The grass had grown. There were leaves on all the trees. My mother was wearing her navy blue dress with a white collar and I was like a visitor who had never been to our house before. Bríd and Ita were dressed up as nurses. Maria showed me the new washing machine, and the new green paint on the back door. Franz said the bees had swarmed while I was in hospital and nobody was at home to catch them or bring them back, so they got away. He said he came home from school one day and saw a big cloud of bees moving out over the gardens and over the roofs of the houses, so he ran up the road after them to see where they were going, until they went out of sight over the chestnut trees, across the railway tracks, and he couldn’t keep up with them any more. At dinner, Ciarán wanted to sit next to me. Everybody was looking at me and I was glad we were all in the same country again.

  When the time came to execute Eichmann, they had to discuss what to do with his body afterwards. The court decided that he should be executed by hanging, but there were no instructions given about what to do with the remains. They didn’t want to burn the corpse in a crematorium, because that would have been too similar to what happened to his victims in Auschwitz. Neither did they want to bury him in Jerusalem, because they were afraid that his evil bones might contaminate the earth. It was never revealed and nobody knows what they finally did with Eichmann’s body, whether he remained on Israeli soil or whether he was secretly flown out to some other country like nuclear waste. Perhaps he has now gone to the same place as all his victims. There is no grave and no resting place and it looks like he’s become invisible again.

  After that I tried to put all the things that happened to me out of my mind. I became the expert at forgetting. I developed a bad memory. I trained myself to go for weeks without remembering anything at all, but then it would come back again through my spine. There was an ache left over from the operation that wouldn’t go away. I could still feel it following me around even when I sat down or leaned back against a chair. If anyone touched me I would jump with the sensation of the needle going into my spine again. At night, I had to sleep with my back to the wall. In school I sat at the back of the class. On the bus, too, always the back seat. I even started walking home sideways, like a crab, with my back to the side of the buildings as much as possible. I kept looking around all the time to make sure there was nobody after me, whispering or laughing behind my back.

  One day at the harbour, I was in charge, standing at the door of the shed when these girls came up asking questions. Everybody was gone out fishing and I was left to look after the place on my own, leaning against the side of the door just like Dan Turley does all the time. I was the boss and one of the girls came right up and stared into my face, chewing gum.

  ‘How much is your mackerel?’ she asked.

  I knew she wasn’t serious about buying fish, because the other girls started killing themselves laughing. They were falling around the place, sitting down on the trellis, saying lots of other crude things about mackerel and asking how big they were. I didn’t answer them. All I could do was smile.

  ‘How much is it for a trip round the island?’ she asked, and I could smell the sweetness of the chewing gum in her mouth, she was up that close to my face.

  When they got no answer, they started having a big conversation among themselves, putting words into my mouth. They asked if it mattered how many were in the boat and one of them said I wouldn’t mind as long as they didn’t all sit on top of me at the same time. They wanted to know if it would be a big boat and the others said, big as you like. They asked if I would show them the goats on the island and they answered themselves and said I would catch one of the goats for them so they could ride him around the island all afternoon.

  ‘Don’t mind them,’ the girl with the chewing gum said. ‘Seriously? How much is it for the four of us out to the island?’

  I wanted to laugh out loud and have something funny to say back to them. I thought of picking up a mackerel and holding it up to their faces for a laugh, to see what they would say then. But I couldn’t do it. I was afraid they would discover who I was. I kept leaning against the shed with my shoulder stuck to the door frame. I felt the pain starting up like a big weight on my spine, as if I was lying face-down with a concrete block on the small of my back. I know that if you say nothing, people will put words in your mouth. They kept guessing what was in my head. They came past me into the shed and walked around examining things.

  ‘You can’t go in there,’ I said.

  ‘Did you hear that? He can talk.’

  But I was a dead-mouth and they walked right in past me. They were taking over the place, touching everything. One of them lay down on Dan’s bunk. Others were trying on life jackets, modelling them and dancing around behind me to a song on the radio. They laughed at a calendar with a picture of the Alps that was three years out of date. They saw the spare oars tied up to the ceiling and asked what the white markers were for, playing football or what? They rang the brass bell on the wall. They put a lead weight onto the weighing scales and said it was very heavy. One of them started brushing her hair into a new ponytail and with the sunlight coming in through the window I saw a blond hair floating through the air on its way down to the floor.

  They went around saying everything was so dirty. Did I ever think of cleaning the window, for fuck sake. They wanted to know if anyone slept there at night and the others said how could you sleep with the smell of petrol and fish all over you and where was the fuckin’ toilet? They kept finding things like oarlocks and asking what the fuck was this for and what the fuck was that for. The others answered and said what the fuck do you think it’s for and they all fell around laughing again. They could do what they wanted. They could have taken the petrol out and set the place on fire. I thought of what Packer would have done, how he would have started making up some kind of situation out of it that he could later tell the lads about, offering them some of Dan’s pink Mikado biscuits maybe, as long as they didn’t mind a few mackerel scales on them as well. Maybe he would have sat down on the bunk with them and shown them Dan’s blue mug with years of brown tea-stain inside or cut up a mackerel in front of them until they said, Jesus, let me fuckin’ out of here. But I had no way of inventing a life around myself. I had the weakness and I could do nothing until they got bored at last and left of their own accord, laughing and smoking as they walked away up the pier.

  And then I could see Dan’s boat coming back into the harbour. There was a buzz of motorbikes and the harbour lads were all returning as well and
within minutes they were sitting outside the shed again with Packer talking.

  ‘Wait till you hear this,’ he said.

  He said he was about to tell us the most amazing story. He had just come back in from being out on the water with Dan. They had been pulling up the pots, when they suddenly came across a lobster that had rubber bands already tied around his claws. I’m not joking you, Packer kept saying. There was Dan, complaining about the lobster being less plentiful, and then they came across a lobster that had put his own rubber bands on as if he had given himself up.

  I felt the kick in the small of my back. I was waiting for them to turn around and accuse me of being responsible for the empty storage box. I was ready to put my hands up, but nobody mentioned the missing lobster and I began to feel that I was getting away with things at last. I wondered if this was the way life always turned out, that you got caught for the things you didn’t do and you got away with the things you should be guilty for, that guilt and innocence eventually balanced themselves out.

  Packer said Dan Turley guffawed like a seagull when he saw the lobster with the rubber band coming out of the pot. ‘Hooken bloody hell,’ he kept saying as he held the lobster in the air. He must have thought somebody had dived down and put the rubber bands on the lobster just to play a trick on him. He was mystified and dumbfounded, looking all around the bay, even away out over the sea across to England to find the culprit, cursing and muttering as if it was all part of the conspiracy against him and even the creatures under the sea were in on it. Dan lifting his white hat to scratch his head and staring at the lobster in his hand as if he had been given a toy without instructions. And then the lads were off again, laughing and holding on to the side of the shed, saying ‘hooken this’ and ‘hooken that’, while Dan was standing at the door with his blue mug in his hand, frowning.

  Seven

  At home, my father calls for another meeting in the front room. It’s a summit conference this time, with Onkel Ted present to make sure nobody gets up and starts hitting each other. There’s a big silence in the room and lots of tension, everybody afraid to speak first and the gap getting wider all the time until my father gets up to put on a record. I watch him taking the keys out of his pocket and opening the music cabinet. He picks out a record which then suddenly turns out to be the missing John Lennon single.

  ‘This is your record,’ he asks. ‘Isn’t that so?’

  I nod my head. I checked the bin a few times and wondered if he had disposed of it some other way, maybe burning it. Instead he kept it with his own collection, along with Bruckner and Verdi and Mendelssohn.

  ‘Zurück,’ he says, translating the words on the record.

  ‘Yes,’ I answer, and I can’t help thinking how stupid he makes it sound, as if he wants to kill the words.

  ‘Na Ciaróga,’ he calls the Beatles in Irish. ‘OK, let’s listen.’

  He does everything with the same care as always. No matter how much he might hate this music, he treats the record with great respect, dusting it off with a special cloth first, even putting on the dust glider before finally touching down the needle. Then he sits down and we listen to the Beatles together.

  ‘Get back to where you once belong, get back, Jojo.’

  I see my father looking around as if he can’t wait to get the record off his turntable in case it might ruin the needle. It’s clear that my mother has been trying to persuade him to do things her way, not with violence but through discussion and compromise. He even gets up to put on the reverse side with John Lennon singing ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, but the whole thing is more and more unbearable to listen to. The only person who seems to enjoy it is my mother, until my father gives her a sharp look and she has to stop tapping her foot. She remembers why the meeting was set up and that there is a serious side to all this. My father takes the record off because it’s just too much for him and he thinks the whole system is overheating.

  I’m glad when it’s over. I’m waiting for him to give his speech about how bad music is like bad food, like chewing gum rotting your teeth, like alcoholism, like taking drugs. I know he feels betrayed, because there’s no defence against music. Music is free to travel anywhere across the sea and you can’t stop it coming into Ireland and going out again of its own free will. He says I am allowing myself to be corrupted and he wants to remind me of all the good things which we have been concentrating on in our family. He says you have to be careful with music and who I allow myself to be influenced by. My mother says the music is quite nice, but she’s heard about how the Beatles have created mass hysteria in young people. We’ve all seen it on TV, girls screaming and fainting when the Beatles arrived in Dublin. My mother says it reminds her of the way girls were screaming and fainting for Hitler, and she doesn’t want me to become brainwashed like that.

  ‘We don’t want you to become a Mitläufer, a run-along,’ she says.

  She says it’s the worst thing that can happen to you, because it makes you powerless in your legs and you can only run in the same direction as everyone else. It’s what happened to the Germans and she remembers how they all became Mitläufer under Hitler, with the same thoughts in their heads and the same look in their eyes. My father says it’s what happened to the Irish as well, when they started speaking English and were forced to run along after the British. Now we’ve all just become run-alongs after America, with the same dreams and the same music, and my mother says if you become a run-along, then you don’t have much choice. My father and mother both know how hard it is to go in the opposite direction and there are many things in this world they will never run along with. That’s why they got married and had an Irish-German family with lederhosen and Aran sweaters, so that we would not be afraid of being different.

  When John F. Kennedy arrived on a visit in Ireland, I didn’t want to be brainwashed or become a run-along, so I was the only person who didn’t go up to the corner house to watch him on TV. I didn’t want to be like everyone else, blindly following the leader like they did in Germany under the Nazis. Even though John F. Kennedy was Irish and Catholic and my mother and father liked him for standing up to the Communists who had no religion, I didn’t want to be one of John F. Kennedy’s followers with American flags and green flags waving at him. When he was assassinated in Dallas one day, I was shocked like everyone else to see the pictures on the front of all the newspapers. I watched my mother pasting those pictures of the motorcade into her diary, but I knew I was not one of his followers because she had already taught me how to be different to everyone else. According to my mother and father, it’s alright to be a run-along after John F. Kennedy, or the Pope, or God, or any of the saints, but not somebody like John Lennon.

  I don’t want to be a follower of John Lennon either, I like his music, that’s all. My mother says I have to be careful that I don’t get the weakness and lose control of my emotions. Onkel Ted says it’s hard to imagine music doing any harm or killing anyone and John Lennon is not mobilizing any armies. My father says John Lennon is an invader and it’s more like a cultural war. I wonder what he has planned for the record in the end, whether he’s going to break it in his hands in front of me or take it out one day and place it on the garden fire where it will melt down over the top of the weeds a bit like one of the early Beatles haircuts. But this time he’s obviously agreed to deal with this matter calmly. My mother has begun to change him and wants him to do things in the German way. She keeps saying that Stefan is coming to visit us soon and we’re all going to behave in a very different way from now on.

  My father replaces John Lennon in the sleeve and takes out Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. He does all the usual things to keep the dust from interfering with the singing and then her voice comes through the room as if she was standing in the corner and you can actually see her chest lifting up every time she takes in a breath. I can see my mother becoming weightless, floating up above the chair with the music. Onkel Ted as well, all of them floating around the room with the ornaments and vases risi
ng up from the mantelpiece. My father keeps looking at me with a big smile on his face now, because he knows I like Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and I can never deny that. When the record is finished, he stores it away again and turns towards me.

  ‘Now tell me,’ he says. ‘Which one do you think is better?’

  ‘You can’t expect him to give a free answer,’ my mother says.

  Onkel Ted is there and nobody would dream of losing their temper or disagreeing with each other. My mother wants to put an end to the door-slamming war between me and my father and maybe we should take all the doors off the hinges for a while so we’ll get used to the idea that they are not there to make noise with. She starts talking about Stefan again because she can see trouble around the corner.

  ‘Stefan is coming,’ she said, but my father holds his hand up to stop her talking.

  ‘Honestly,’ he asks me once more. ‘With your hand on your heart, which do you think is the better music?’

  Onkel Ted says it’s hard to make a choice between apples and pears if you like them both. My mother tries to make a joke and says it’s a pity we can’t hear them both singing together at the same time, doing harmonies.

  ‘What is your choice?’ my father demands.

  I don’t want to barricade myself behind any song. I don’t want to think of music as war, but I still feel I have to defend John Lennon, because it’s my generation and I want to belong to new music that my father doesn’t listen to.

  ‘He’s half Irish,’ I say. ‘His mother is Irish.’

  My father doesn’t know what to say to that. He knows I’m trying to give the wrong answer again and searches for some hidden meaning to see if I’m deliberately insulting him.

  ‘Stefan is coming,’ my mother said. ‘Let’s be happy.’

  ‘John Lennon,’ I continue. ‘He’s an Irish singer actually. I know the songs are in English, but he’s really singing in the Irish language underneath.’