The lands around the house in Wiesbaden where the American officer and his family lived were guarded by soldiers and patrols in army jeeps. Every time my mother walked down the hill to the gate, her bag was searched, so she began to conceal food inside her clothes. She held a piece of cheese or meat under her cardigan. Sometimes she hung a small parcel of bread and left-over fat in a small piece of cheesecloth under her arm and walked past the checkpoint knowing that if she was caught, she would lose her job and have nothing.
One day, she had two bars of soap concealed in her stockings, at the back of her legs. She had to walk carefully to make sure the soldiers didn’t notice anything. As she walked past the checkpoint, the soldiers smiled and tried to talk to her. She knew they always looked at her legs when she continued on down the hill. She tried to walk as elegantly as possible, but then the bars of soap started slipping down inside her stockings and the soldiers must have thought German women had a funny way of going downhill. She couldn’t stop the soap slipping with her hands. Any minute, the soldiers would see two lumps sliding down around her ankles, so she put her foot up on a fence and started adjusting her stockings one by one, as if she was doing it deliberately for them. My mother says they must have imagined everything underneath her dress except the soap. Then she walked away, around the corner out of sight. After that the soldiers were friendly to her and even let her out without checking her bag. Every day, more food was being delivered to the house and every day, more and more was going back out again to feed people in Mainz.
At one time, when the officer and his family went back to America on their summer holidays, the soldiers on guard duty even allowed her to bring people into the house, to help her clean up. There was plenty of food left for three weeks, so my mother invited everybody she knew up to Wiesbaden as if it was her own place. They stayed overnight and slept in all the big beds. And when the food started running out, she decided to use up the last of it in one big party. Stefan’s mother and father came. Tante Elfriede and Onkel Adam were there as well. They all went through the rooms and lived for one evening as if they were rich Americans, putting on dresses and suits belonging to the officer and his wife, looking at themselves in the mirror and holding a fashion parade. They lit candles and had a big dinner in the dining room, with cigars from Cuba and French cognac. They put on swing music and danced around the living room. They even spoke in English to each other, my mother says, and they were laughing so much that they often had to hold on to the furniture. But then the party came to a sudden end when the family arrived back early and the house was thrown into a terrible chaos. A phone call came from the station in Wiesbaden to say that they were on their way.
The celebration turned to panic. They turned the music off and ran upstairs to put all the clothes back into the wardrobe. There was such confusion that my mother crashed head-first into her sister on the landing, and even then they could do nothing but hold on to the banisters and start laughing again until they suddenly remembered the trouble they were in. Onkel Adam went around opening all the windows in the house. The others carried things from the dining room into the kitchen, running. My mother says she has never seen the washing up being done so fast in her life. At the last minute, her secret guests all fled out the side door and my mother only had ten minutes to walk around the house closing all the windows again before the family arrived at the door in their big American car.
She doesn’t know how they could not have known there had been a party. They must have thought my mother was smoking cigars on her own just to keep a good atmosphere in the house. There was nothing out of place, except that there was not one piece of food left over and the officer’s wife said it was about time they got back. My mother was expecting trouble but the Americans were so friendly that when they finally left Germany, they begged her to come and live in their big house in Vermont. They would send her to university. They allowed her time to make up her mind, but she decided to stay close to her own family. They left the address in Vermont and told her that if she ever changed her mind, they would get her a ticket and a visa so she could start afresh in America.
It would have been a good life there. The Americans are very much like the Germans, she says. But then she would never have made it to Ireland. My father would have been an American and we would never have had to learn Irish. We would have been speckled people, but we would never have spoken any German, because it was a time when nobody wanted to be German and nobody wanted to hear German spoken on the street. Sometimes I think about how different our lives would have been with another father, an American father or an Irish father who spoke English to us. My mother imagines what it would have been like, that other life without my father, but she says you cannot regret things too much or you will find yourself going backwards in time and unable to move forward again.
The people in Mainz never forgot how my mother risked everything to keep bringing them food during the war and those famine years. The parents of her school friend Käthe wanted to give her some kind of gift when she finally decided to go away to Ireland. They had no money, and no belongings that could be sold on the black market. My mother didn’t want any payment for the help she gave, but Uncle Ulrich’s family was so grateful that they decided to give her an ancient book which had belonged to them for hundreds of years.
It was of no value. It could never be sold, nobody would have given even a loaf of bread for it at that time. They knew that my mother liked books, that it would be in good hands. My mother thought it was too precious for her to keep, but they forced her to take it, for all her kindness.
I’ve seen her holding the book in her hand, leafing through it as if it no longer belongs to her. I’ve seen her crying, maybe not because she might lose the book, but because what she did that time back in Wiesbaden has no value any more. Maybe that’s why she was so shocked that her cake was not accepted, because she remembers the time when people were starving and would have given anything for a piece of that cake. It was hard to believe that there was so much cake around now that people could refuse it. Hard to believe that a piece of cake could ever have been more valuable than a book from the time of Gutenberg. She would never dream of selling it and making money from it. It was one of the first printed books in the world, but that wasn’t the same as thinking it would make you rich overnight. When my mother talks about being rich, it’s not about money or houses and cars but always about having children and having an imagination, about listening to music and holding precious books in your hand.
Will she give it away or not? One minute she fights back and says she will never let go of this book. She wants to know what right they have to demand such a thing or to claim that she was just keeping it safe for them in Ireland. She feels she has no right to keep it. All she did was help people and that’s not something for which you deserve payment. It brought its own rewards and she would be glad to do it again, any time, for nothing. But now she shuts her eyes as if the memory has no value any more, as if something that was still so recent in her own mind had been suddenly wiped away. She was beginning to think it never happened at all. Maybe the book has become so valuable in itself that it has wiped out all memory, all the laughter, all the joy of being alive after the war, all the innocence of that once-in-a-lifetime friendship.
She has thought of hiding it. She has thought of placing it in a vault, with a bank. But in the end it always goes back into the oak trunk with the heavy lid closed down again to keep the past inside.
I’ve heard my father talking to her late in the evening, saying he will never let anyone take it away from her, because it means as much to him at this stage. It was one of the first things that she showed to him when they met in Dublin after the war. He had lots of things to show her and places to bring her, like Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. She had stories to tell him about Germany and he had speeches to make about Ireland, but this book was the first thing that my mother could show him. He remembers leafing through it, knowing that he was holding some
thing that was very close to her heart. It was a sign that she trusted him. He said it was like the ancient books transcribed by the Irish monks, and praised the Germans for inventing printing. It was the only thing that she owned, apart from her clothes, something she had never given out of her hands to anyone before. It was the start of all their luck. It was the start of this Irish-German family and all the stories that we made up along the way. How could she give all that back?
Nine
My father has turned himself into a tour guide for Ireland. It’s his country and he’s proud to take some days off to show Stefan the most important things about Irish history. He’s a very careful driver, keeping both hands on the steering wheel and stopping the car whenever he needs to explain something that cannot be said while driving. He brings us to Kilmainham Jail. We stop outside the GPO on O’Connell Street. We drive to Glendalough to see the round tower. We stand on beaches throwing stones and holding back the waves, as if we’ve come on holidays from Germany and haven’t seen open spaces like this for a long time. We’re amazed to see sheep again. We drive into the mountains with the windows open and get the feeling of being lifted up by the landscape, by the emptiness. We stop for lunch and my mother takes out her basket with separate packages of sandwiches. She is still trying to find out what Stefan likes to eat instead of cake, but it remains a mystery to her. We sit in a field with a rug spread out on the grass and everybody laughs because Bríd has begun to chew sideways like the sheep. We go for a walk with grass stalks in our mouths and decapitate wild flowers. My father is not the kind of man who keeps a stem of grass between his lips. Even with his shirt open, he looks like he is thinking about something that still has to be done to improve Ireland, to keep this landscape from disappearing. We climb halfway up a mountain and look back at the small grey Opel Kadett parked like a toy car along the road. We see the houses and the small people of Ireland working in the fields below us. My father holds his arm stretched out in front of him and tells Stefan to look across the landscape with his eyes open, because there are certain things that can only be seen in the Irish language.
‘In English,’ my father says, ‘you can only see as far as the eye can see.’
On the way home he is looking for Echo Gate, driving up and down country roads for a long time saying it can’t possibly be gone away. My mother points at lots of gates and tells him to stop so we can shout over them to see if we can hear anything coming back, but he drives on with a determined look on his face until he finally comes to the right place and we all stand shouting across the gate towards the ruins of the monastery. The echo is very clear. We count how many seconds it takes for a word to come back. We shout in German, with the sun going down and the cows looking up, wondering what we’re saying. It’s a perfect echo each time, as if the fields know our language. A whole family shouting back at us with great excitement, as if they had been waiting there for centuries, and this is the first time somebody has come to the gate who understands them. Our voices have come out from under the mossy stones and start calling back, hoping we don’t leave again.
‘How are you all over there and how did you know we were coming?’ my father shouts in Irish. When the echo comes back, my mother says it must be Irish because who else would answer a question with another question? The sky changes in layers of yellow and purple and deep grey. We can see the dark outline of the ruins fading against the land. Stefan is barking like a dog. Ciarán climbs the gate and Maria stands beside him, singing a do-re-mi ladder of notes that stands up against the sky and we’re like a family laughing at ourselves in the mirror. Even when we get back into the car and drive away, my mother’s voice is still laughing around the ruins after it gets dark.
Each time we arrive home again, my father sits down to make notes on the trip, how many miles have been travelled and how much petrol was used. My father is not the kind of man who washes his car every weekend, but he is the kind of man who keeps a little notebook where he records every detail and tries to get as many miles per gallon as possible. He checks the pressure in the tyres before and after every journey, and at the end of the long trip back from Echo Gate, he lets the air out and replaces it with fresh air, until Stefan tells him very politely that it doesn’t make any sense and the quality of the air inside the tyre is not what matters. Stefan can say things to my father that we would be afraid to say, because he doesn’t like to be criticized by his own family.
I become a tour guide myself and take Stefan out fishing with Franz. Stefan cooks the mackerel we catch with a funny new Irish recipe given to him by Dan Turley, grilling the fish and sprinkling cornflakes on the top. At last, my mother finds something that Stefan likes to eat instead of cake and begins to bake barm brack. We play cards and chess and go to the field every day to play football. Stefan is so clever with his feet that other boys come to watch and join in because football needs no language. He can make the ball disappear from under their feet and they start calling him Beckenbauer. So it’s Eichmann and Beckenbauer and Hitler playing together in the football field until Stefan gets fed up with his new name.
I showed him the place where they found the body of a murdered woman. I brought him to the spot on the seafront where the body of Peggy Flynn was discovered. It was in the papers and everybody was talking about it for months in the shops. They said it was too nice a location for something like that to happen and now it was changed for ever, as if the landscape would never heal. They said it was terrible to think of her being found dead with her face down in the water and her hair waving around like seaweed, with crabs and sea-lice crawling over her. Some of them could not even utter the word murder and called it a tragedy, as if they wanted to restore her dignity. Special prayers were said at Mass on Sundays. The priest called it a shock to the core of the heart. It was un-Irish and they believed it was coming from somewhere else, from abroad, from places that had no religion, where people had no morality. They were worried that the murderer was never found and it frightened them to think it could be somebody normal walking around the streets of Dublin like anyone else.
Even long after the body was taken away and the Gardai had carried out all their investigations, they still kept people away from the scene. A squad car was parked there with two officers looking out towards the sea, as if they were expecting the perpetrator to come back and look for something he might have left behind or dropped accidentally.
I knew I was the murderer. I had not actually murdered Peggy Flynn, but how could I be sure I might not murder somebody in the future some time? I could not trust myself. When the squad car eventually disappeared from the seafront, I started going down every day like a perpetrator returning to the site of the crime. I stood there and knew exactly what it was like for the person who murdered her. He must have thought he got away with it and that he could return to the scene like any other normal person, but he was obsessed by her. Not a day went by without her name coming back to him. His own deed was like rat poison turning his stomach inside out. I stood looking out over the rocks where she was found, with the waves moving the seaweed backwards and forwards and the seagulls on the rocks keeping watch. I thought of her name, Peggy Flynn. I could hear her voice in my head, talking to me and asking me what the matter was. I thought of the way she looked, wearing a tweedy skirt, above the knees. I saw her laughing and making faces at her friends. I saw her getting off work and walking through the streets of Dublin where I go to school, waiting for a bus on Parnell Square, searching in her handbag and looking sideways at me, throwing her head back to get the hair out of her eyes. Again and again, throwing her head right back and smiling at me, before her hair slowly started dropping down over her forehead like a slow curtain in the cinema.
My mother said I should stop and not go down there any more. She gave me a book called Crime and Punishment, and I wondered if she got it from Onkel Ted, because after reading it, you can never believe in God again as long as you live. The book is about a student in Moscow who murders an old woman livi
ng alone in the same building. Reading it makes you think how easy it is to take somebody’s life. And maybe that’s why they gave me the book, because they want me to know that your crime stays with you for the rest of your days, like a partner who never leaves your side.
Up to the time I read that book, I thought murder was wrong because everybody said it was wrong. But then I started thinking about how morality was invented in the first place, way back in time, before there was anything like police and courts and the ten commandments. How did people decide that killing was wrong? They must have discovered that murder was impractical because dead people had relatives and friends who would come looking for revenge. It would keep going around in circles, people killing and punishing each other into infinity. Maybe that’s what a conscience is, I thought, imagining the consequences of your actions. Maybe that’s how compassion started in the first place, people imagining what other people felt and how you would feel if the same thing happened to one of your own people. I thought about all the people like Eichmann who had no feelings at all. But even people with no feelings and no conscience, they still had an ego. Every criminal wants to be loved and respected. Even if they don’t want forgiveness, they still want recognition. They don’t want to be forgotten, because the loneliness of being a murderer is too hard to live with.
At the end of the book there’s a good feeling because Raskolnikov sits on a pile of logs looking out at the river. It’s a wide river with nothing beyond it, only the steppe. He’s in prison in Siberia and he still has to serve seven years of his sentence, but he can see that at the end of those seven years, he will have paid for his crime. He’s happy because he hears the nomads singing on the far side of the river and he thinks time has moved on and his guilt has come to an end. He knows that forgiveness is coming and soon he will become a new person.
The Sailor in the Wardrobe Page 8
