The Sailor in the Wardrobe

by Hugo Hamilton

  My father shakes his head. ‘It won’t work,’ he says. ‘I’ve been up there. I’ve tried talking to them.’

  He slaps his hand on his forehead and begins to make another speech. He says the Nationalists in Northern Ireland have tried everything. They tried capitulation, just like the Jewish people tried being soft and submissive in Germany and it didn’t work there either. Now it’s my father who starts putting Irish history through the German sieve. He always has to have the last word and says the Irish have to make their own noise. We have to make ourselves heard with our own language, our songs and poetry and stories, because that’s the only way to stop yourself from being drowned out and becoming extinct. You have to keep staying alive in your own language.

  Day by day, things are getting worse up there with car bombs going off in the streets. My mother finds it hard to understand why. She cuts out a picture from the newspaper of a wrecked street and puts it into the diary along with all the other nightmares. You could see buildings almost completely destroyed, the windows blown out, curtains hanging out and injured people being brought away. At night in black and white, under the flash of cameras, the blood looks black and the faces very pale. People look dazed and half asleep as they walk away with their hair full of white dust. My mother says she saw lots of things like this before with her own eyes and it reminds her of Germany during the bombing of the cities. She takes in a sharp breath and shakes her head.

  ‘Schon wieder,’ she says. ‘Not again.’

  She says it makes her sick. She saw this kind of thing during the war when she was bringing soup to Mainz. She knew the city when it was so beautiful. The next time she saw it she could hardly believe it was the same place. She kept losing her way. She said that some parts of the city just looked like open ground, with piles of rubble. Many of the buildings were cut down to half their size, with furniture and beds hidden underneath the debris. Some houses still had one or two walls left standing and you could see pictures hanging on their hooks and curtains untouched as if nothing had happened. She heard of people being killed by those falling walls, long after the bombing was over. You could see the horizon where a street had disappeared. Some of the houses left standing were black and burned out and still smoking. People were talking about phosphor as if it was some kind of disease that had spread across the city. They were saying that some of the people were not recognizable, they were so badly burned. People burned alive in the cellars like rags, holding on to each other, with cups and jugs lying beside them intact. One boy rescued his family from the inferno by breaking into a disused synagogue and finding a safe place in the basement. The survivors hurried away out to the country with some of their most precious belongings on carts. Nobody knew who was alive and who had fled. People were crying everywhere and calling each other. People digging through the rubble for their relatives even days after the bombing, calling out names and listening for an answer, covered in white dust. There were signs left up in chalk handwriting to let people know where the occupants could be found. In one of the streets there was a mass funeral, with lots of bodies lying out in a line, and my mother says she could hardly make the sign of the cross. She says she saw her own hand coming up in front of her eyes, shaking so much that she felt like an old woman.

  Every time a bomb goes off on the street in Northern Ireland, I can see the look of fear in my mother’s eyes. My father too, because that’s not his way of fighting for survival.

  ‘It’s what they called moral bombing during the war,’ my father says. ‘The IRA are taking lessons from Churchill and Truman. Bombing cities. Bombing the vulnerable people and the children.’

  ‘It’s all the same nightmare factory,’ my mother says.

  And then it’s time to change the subject. Pointing the finger doesn’t make you innocent, she says, as she takes out a German board game called ‘Mensch ärgere dich nicht’ which means: ‘Don’t let it get to you, man.’ It’s raining outside. There is no point in going down to the harbour, so I agree to play chess with my father. My mother puts on a lamp. There is music playing on the radio. She even takes out the bottle of cognac and pours a small glass for her and for my father, because she wants everything to be without resentment. She brings out a box of chocolates hidden in the press in the front room and it’s all chocolates and cognac smells and silence and Maria saying ‘Oh no’ when her luck runs out and she has to go back to the beginning. We’re all great winners and losers and everybody keeps playing and concentrating. The only noise you can hear is the rain outside and the sound of Bríd as she keeps breathing up and down. My mother puts her arms around her and looks over at the chess board to see how things are going between me and my father.

  ‘Whose move is it?’ she asks.

  ‘It’s my move,’ I tell her.

  She admires the way we can play without speaking a word. My father taught me chess and I’ve only beaten him once, when he was still being polite, showing me my mistakes. For a long time we were courteous, warning each other about possible dangers. Mind your queen. Did you forget about your castle? It wasn’t about winning but more about learning and enjoying the great moves you could make. My father never wanted to win against me and I didn’t want to beat him either, so we kept avoiding the basic principle of chess. It was a kind of polite chess with no mean sneaky moves, no gambits. Now we’ve begun to take it seriously and don’t say a word. Even long after the others have stopped playing their board game, my father and I are still sitting across from each other, taking ages for each move.

  ‘Such concentration,’ my mother says. She admires the way we can become so involved in the one thing and leave all other thoughts behind. It looks like she wants to distract us, because she offers the chocolates one last time, taking off the cardboard sheet to reveal another full layer underneath. ‘Who would like a last chocolate, before they disappear?’

  Everyone is looking at the box of chocolates and I pick out a toffee that is going to keep me going for a long time. My father looks at the pictures of the sweets and the names of all the different shapes. He picks out a caramel delight and puts it into his mouth. He chews silently. I try to chew without any noise, but I have a struggle on my hands with the toffee which is like a big football in my mouth.

  ‘It’s still your move,’ my father reminds me.

  So then I concentrate as best I can. I glue the toffee up against the ceiling of my mouth, so that it’s plastered like a gum-shield against the palate. I can’t help sucking it, but at least I don’t have to chew it any more and make swallowing noises that are very irritating when you’re playing chess. My father is waiting and when I look at the board again, I make a quick decision. It’s only afterwards that I realize what a brilliant move it is, a bit of chess genius.

  My father is trapped. He’s going to lose his queen. He stares at the board, trying every possible move in his head to get out of it. I keep the toffee-shield stuck to the roof of my mouth. The whole room is silent, waiting for the end when he shakes hands with me and says I’m getting better all the time. There is no way out for him. He’s doomed. I imagine it from his side and check every possible move. I can feel a rush of excitement, knowing that I have beaten him at last. It’s not polite either to boast about your move while he’s still thinking, so I don’t say a word until he eventually looks up at me. He has a fierce look in his eyes, blinking behind his glasses, and I cannot help smiling a little because the whole thing was just a fluke.

  I want to help him. Maybe I should take back the move and allow him to protect himself a little better. He looks at the situation once more, but not for long. Then he puts his hand underneath the board and tips it over, before storming out of the room.

  ‘What’s going on now?’ my mother asks.

  She jumps up from the table. She wanted the evening to end on a good note. The chess pieces are rolling across the table. My sister Ita bends down to pick up the fallen black king from the floor, but my mother tells her to leave it there.

  ‘N
obody is to touch anything.’

  Everything is left there as it fell, with the chess board upside down and some of the pieces rocking back and forth, as if they were still alive and trying to get up to fight another day. My mother wants it all to stay like this, untouched, like a monument. My father had lost the ability to differentiate between a chess game and world events, as if everything is still a battle between black and white pieces. She goes up to the front room to tell him that chess is not war. She wants him to come back and not leave things as they are. She puts her arm around him, but he won’t be moved.

  The rest of us are left staring at the ruins of the game on the table for a long time, waiting. But then I decide to pick up the pieces myself. I want to make it easy for him to come back and set up the board again. I want to tell him we’ll start a new game and this time I’ll try not to be so mean and sneaky. The board is ready and I want him to come back, just to play and not think of winning or losing. I wait and listen to the rain, like the sound of wheels spinning outside the window. Dozens of them spinning and whirring on their axles without stopping. Wheelbarrows. Upturned bicycles freewheeling silently. Every wheel in the world rolling along the gutters and gurgling away into the drains. I wait and wait, but he doesn’t come and we never again play chess after that.

  It’s my mother who comes back and tells me a story so that I will understand my father. She wants me to think of him as a small boy living with his mother and his younger brother Ted in the village of Leap. His mother sent him out to get milk one evening when the moon was already out. The blue dusty light was falling across the street and made the houses look like cardboard fronts. Everything looked unreal in this soft white light. He carried an enamel canteen up the road to the farm and watched the woman milking for a while. The cows were restless and he watched the tail slapping into the bucket. He heard the woman speaking to the cow as she filled the canteen with warm frothy milk. He didn’t have to give her any money right away, because his mother always paid little bits off her bills in rotation. On the way home, the moon was so bright that my father fell and dropped the canteen of milk, because he was born with a limp and couldn’t trust himself walking.

  ‘The moon knocked me,’ he cried, when he got home.

  His mother rubbed his head and said there was no harm done. She cleaned the cut on his knee and said it was no use crying over it. She didn’t want him to think it was the limp that was to blame, so she went to the door and spoke to the moon, pointing up into the night sky. Stop trying to trick people into thinking it’s daytime. My father must have thought it was still his fault that there was no milk for the morning. And now he’s still trying to make up for it and put things right long after they’ve happened and cannot be changed any more. He’s repairing history, my mother says, trying to pick up the moonlight from the street.

  Thirteen

  There has been no news from Stefan. Weeks have gone by since he left our house and my mother is worried that he has not sent any more postcards. She received one card from a place called Kilfenora, saying thank you for all the small packages of barm brack which she had packed for him, but nothing after that. All she got was a letter from Tante Käthe, saying that she has heard nothing. They are very worried because Stefan is the kind of person who is brought up to be polite and keep in touch, but now something is preventing him from writing home.

  I can’t tell my mother about the conversation I had with Stefan, because she will be even more worried. I can’t tell her how he wants to run away from his father and Kilfenora isn’t even far enough away. I think of him in the West of Ireland somewhere finding another parcel of barm brack hidden in one of the secret side pockets of his rucksack. I know what that’s like, because Franz and myself went on a cycling holiday together one summer, down to West Cork, and my mother packed our bags as if we were going to war and we might find ourselves in a place where there was nothing to eat.

  At the dinner table she asks everybody to think hard and imagine where Stefan has gone to and why he hasn’t been in touch, even if only to say that he’s fine. He doesn’t have to wait for something awful to happen before he contacts us. I can see that she is trying not to worry prematurely, but she feels responsible for any German visitor who comes to Ireland and gets lost. So we’re all sitting around thinking of Stefan eating the last piece of barm brack somewhere, taking shelter from the wind and looking out over the Atlantic. Everybody is silently searching the cliffs and the beaches in their minds. I think of him trying to learn Irish so that he can disappear completely from view and become invisible like all the other Irish speakers in Ireland. I can see him pretending to be fully Irish, trying to get rid of every trace of his German accent, giving the woman in a bed and breakfast in Kilfenora a false name, and her saying to herself that he’s a bit too tidy in his bedroom to be really Irish. I can see him moving across the mountains and the bogs, going into a pub and just nodding like everyone else and saying as little as possible, maybe telling people that he’s from Northern Ireland, from Belfast, so they don’t think his accent is strange. I can imagine the men in the pub saying that he looks a bit like the great German footballer, Beckenbauer, God bless him, and Stefan saying he wishes he was, but that he’s got two left feet and one of them is facing backwards.

  So the letters are starting to go back and forth to Germany and everybody is wondering why Stefan is not in touch. After more crisis meetings and phone calls from Tante Käthe, they finally decide to call the Gardai.

  It’s the first time that we’ve seen anyone in uniform in our house since I was very small, when there was a fox in the kitchen and the Garda came to tell us it was not a fox at all but a rat. This time it’s two Gardai who arrive in a squad car. They are brought into the front room and even though my mother has asked them to sit down like any other guests, they remain standing at first. There is an older sergeant who is quite thin, and a younger, more heavy man making notes. Neighbours passing by on the street outside must be wondering what is going on, if somebody in our house has broken the law. My mother is afraid of policemen and immediately begins to talk, telling them lots of things about Stefan that are not really all that relevant, like the fact that he did very well at school and that he’s got no reason for not returning to Germany to study medicine. She is disappointed that they are not taking more notes and begins to tell other things, looking for something that they will find worthy of putting down.

  My father stands at the fireplace and says nothing for a while, then suddenly breaks in to condense a number of things my mother has been trying to say into a few neat words, like a synopsis. The Gardai keep looking at her and seem to think the whole thing has more to do with her, because she is German and they have come because of Stefan, a missing German tourist. My mother shows them the card which she got from Kilfenora and the sergeant passes it on to the younger officer who looks closely at the date on the postmark and takes a note of that.

  The sergeant asks what Stefan’s financial position was when he left our house and my mother says he must have run out of money by now, which is why they are so worried, because he hasn’t written home looking for any money either. My father adds that he lived on very little in his student days, but nobody can live on what Stefan had. The sergeant then tells my mother to sit down as if it’s his house and she is the guest. He explains that the Gardai will do their best to try and locate Stefan, but there is no reason to be alarmed at this early stage and they don’t want to refer to him as a missing person as yet. The Gardai in the West would be keeping an eye out, he said, and in the meantime, it would be no harm to have a description. So then the Garda with the notepad sits down on a straight-backed chair in order to take down the details.

  Everyone tries to remember what Stefan looks like and what he wore when he was leaving. My mother begins to say that Stefan is tall like his father. He’s got a friendly face and brown eyes, like his mother. My father knows what the Gardai are looking for, so he begins to give them a detailed description of Ste
fan’s rucksack, but then it is clear that he has never described anyone before in words like this and can’t even remember the colour of Stefan’s hair or jacket. They have to call Franz into the room, because he has the best memory in our house and can remember all kinds of dates and things that happened which everybody else wants to forget. He starts by saying that Stefan has thin legs and that he walks very fast, but the sergeant says he wants to confine it to appearances, so then Franz becomes nervous and can only remember that Stefan wore a grey jacket with a hood and blue jeans. The younger Garda says it’s exactly what they were looking for and reads back the description.

  ‘Tall, slim build, last seen wearing blue jeans and a grey, hooded anorak, carrying a green-and-white rucksack.’ As we listen to these words, it sounds like Stefan will never come back. It’s the description that nobody wants to hear, because it has taken all the life out of him and made him a missing person.

  I’m not able to add anything except that Stefan has a mole on his back, but I know that is of no value to the police. All I can think of while the Gardai are in the house is that I am a criminal. I go through all the crimes I have committed. I listen to them in the hallway and imagine them leading me away to the squad car outside. I can already see the crowd of neighbours gathered on the street watching them drive away and me turning around in the back seat to take one more look at the house where I grew up. I have a recurring dream of this moment and imagine my mother at the door crying, saying she will bring me cake when I’m in prison.