I am an optimist like my mother, so I keep thinking of Stefan alive, walking through the fields in the West of Ireland, kicking a tuft of grass into the air and scoring a goal between two gorse bushes, following a cattle trail and stepping through the gaps in the stone walls. Stefan, the inward man, on the run from his father, inventing a new identity for himself so that he will be given refuge. I call him the Playboy of the Western World, because he’s made up a story for himself, a story where he can go underground and disappear. I know he’s come to the big Irish mirror, the sight of the Atlantic ocean, where everybody sees their own reflection.
Tante Käthe hardly eats any of the sandwiches or the cakes that my mother makes. She sits forward in her chair when the Gardai arrive, as if she will have to stand up at any minute and go with them. They speak slowly to her in English to make sure that she understands. They accept a photograph of Stefan that she has brought with her and they agree that it might be a good idea, in time, to place a few posters in the shops and petrol stations around the country, but it’s hard to know where. They ask if Stefan was of an unhappy disposition. Was there anything that he might be running away from. They explain that they are still actively pursuing the disappearance, but there is little more they can do. It makes no sense to broadcast any further missing person messages on the radio and there is nothing to be gained from starting a full-scale search, because nobody would know where to look first. When the Gardai leave again, my mother and Tante Käthe both come out of the front room as if Stefan’s disappearance has brought back all the other tragedies of Germany, all the hurt and longing which they have had to suppress all these years since they last met in Mainz.
To cheer everyone up, my mother talks about how safe Ireland is and how she was able to cycle around on her pilgrimage without ever being bothered or being afraid of anyone. Ireland was like a fairy tale when she arrived first. Tante Käthe remembers all the letters that my mother sent back, how you could leave your belongings on a rock while going for a swim and nobody would take them. It was a religious country, full of people who stopped to bless themselves as they passed by a church. My mother wants Tante Käthe to see the place for herself so that she will be less worried. They both take the bus into the city to have coffee in Bewleys, to look at the stained-glass windows and the three-tiered trays of cakes on each table. My mother comes back and imitates the way that the waitress in her apron says ‘Did you have any cakes, Madam?’ with a small pinched mouth. My father becomes a tour guide again and offers to drive them down to Glendalough to see the round tower and I think they want Tante Käthe to be glad that her son is missing in Ireland, not somewhere else.
‘He doesn’t understand the sea,’ Tante Käthe says.
Everyone knows that Stefan is a strong swimmer, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be tricked into swimming somewhere that looks calm, but which has dangerous currents that can tow even the best athlete in the world out to sea. My mother always told us to find some local person and inform them we were intending to go for a swim, because you could never tell what the conditions were like around the west coast. I always thought it was funny to go up to somebody and say we were going for a swim, because they might look at me in a strange way and say: Good for you. And good luck to you. Now she tells Tante Käthe that she gave Stefan the same warning and that surely means he is careful and that everyone from Spanish Point all the way up to Bundoran knows about every time Stefan has gone for a swim.
‘The Atlantic. It’s not like a big swimming pool,’ Tante Käthe says, and you can see her imagining things that have not happened yet. She has the same nightmare factory that my mother has, from the war and the bombing. They are both still in the pre-calamity moment, thinking of bombs in mid-air that have not fallen yet, of murders that have not happened, of pre-drowning stillness when the sun is going down and gives the sea a peaceful look that cannot be trusted. Even though my mother has been living in Ireland for a long time and has got used to the Irish truth, she still can’t help thinking that no matter how many good things have happened in the meantime, something bad is on its way in the end.
My mother asks me to tell Tante Käthe about my trip to the Aran Islands and how safe it was there. She takes out the diary and shows off all the postcards that Franz and I sent home when we went on a cycling trip around Ireland alone. She wants us to tell the whole journey, how we cycled down to visit our relatives in West Cork one summer and stayed in youth hostels along the way, how we sent a postcard home every morning, just like my mother did, sending daily letters home to Kempen when she arrived in Ireland first. She points out the map and the route we followed in red pencil, with little green flags in all the places where we stopped. There are notes in the diary on all the distances we travelled, including the mileage we travelled one day when we took a wrong turn and had to come all the way back again. The distances were all added up and the total mileage was written at the bottom of the page, underlined and followed with exclamation marks to show how impressive our journey was.
We told Tante Käthe about the most beautiful sight of all, the Rock of Cashel, how you come cycling around the bend and the ruins of this monastery just come into view as if you’re the first person to discover it. We told her how we had sent Stefan down that road to Tipperary to find it for himself. We described how we cycled against the wind along the road from Urlingford, how Franz was always ahead because he was a stronger cyclist and never lost his energy, how I was always behind because I had the weakness and wanted to lie down by the side of the road, until Franz came back to encourage me and the energy returned to my legs when we came around a bend and saw the stone monastery clustered on the top of the rock. I forgot my weakness and cycled urgently back in time, as if I remembered it, as if I had been here before, hundreds of years ago.
Tante Käthe listens to every detail, how we prepared for the journey, how my father discussed the route with us, just like he did with Stefan, pointing out all the towns on the map that were of interest to us. My father didn’t say much about the town of Leap where he was born and brought up with his brother Ted, but he told us where our relatives were living in Tipperary Town and Middleton and Skibbereen. He sat down with us and told us how he cycled from Dublin to Leap to see his mother while he was a student and could not afford the train. I heard him talking about his own life for once, without looking into the future. I heard him telling us about the time he went swimming once near Glandore and his brother, Onkel Ted, had to rescue him when he got into difficulty. He told us how he remembered seeing British soldiers along the road. He remembered hearing about an officer in the Auxiliaries, the Black and Tans, who was thrown out of the pub in Glandore for being so drunk and abusive and came back with a hand grenade which he threw onto the roof of the pub, but it rolled back down again and exploded right beside him, and he was killed by his own rage. He remembered hearing gunfire in the hills behind Leap. He told us how he saw Michael Collins stopping to visit friends in Leap, right across the street from where they lived, on the afternoon before he drove on to Béal na Bláth where he was killed.
We sat in the front room on the evening before we started the journey and it was strange to think of my father as a boy in short trousers. My mother made sandwiches and cake that would last us about four days at least. It was long before I started earning my own money at the harbour and my father calculated the amount we would need per day, the amount he used when he cycled all the way down to West Cork as a student. Then he added a shilling on top to make sure we would not go short. Franz was in charge of the money and he wanted to spend as little as possible, to bring back as much as we could so that my father would be impressed and would allow us to go on another journey because we knew how to live on nothing.
The night before we left on that big journey, he told us a story that he wanted us to keep with us for the rest of our lives. It was the story of the landlord and his fiery carriage.
In the towns of Leap and Glandore and Union Hall and Skibbereen, all a
round that area of West Cork, there was a story going around for a long time about a landlord whose carriage was seen passing by, on fire. It was like an Irish nightmare that kept coming back whenever it was getting dark or when there was a storm coming and the trees were beginning to sway in the wind. Children were afraid of seeing it and the people around West Cork could not put the fiery carriage out of their minds because it went back a long way in Irish history and was passed down through generations. Stories were the only way of remembering things, and they would often tell this one of how they looked up suddenly to see the flaming carriage speeding across the side of a hill at dusk. Some said they caught a glimpse of the flames in the woods, crackling and throwing off sparks. The sound of hoofs would come past them along the road without warning, and they would look up to see the flaming carriage rushing away across the lonely landscape towards the coast. The horses would be seen charging into the sea to try and put an end to it, but nothing could extinguish the flames, just as nothing could extinguish a story that came from the truth. Each time it went away, it always came back again with the landlord trapped inside his burning carriage, sitting in the back, staring with his dark, guilty eyes out through the flames at the people he had treated with such cruelty.
My father says he saw the carriage once when he was very small and he will never forget the look of horror in the landlord’s eyes, condemned for ever to burn in this travelling hell for his past injustice towards the people. My father never believed in legends. He never tried to scare us with ghost stories, only real facts. And there was something about this story that was based in fact, something more than just a bit of folklore from a time when people had no television, and these stories were the only way that facts could be transmitted and kept in your mind. He said it was a story like the Flying Dutchman, a story that some Irish composer would make into great, world-famous opera one day. I remember how, on the night before we cycled to West Cork, he opened the glass bookcase in the front room and said there was something he wanted to show us, something to do with this fiery carriage.
He took out a small, thin notebook with a black cover. It was very old and worn, with rounded corners and a few age spots. He wanted us to hold it in our hands, Franz first, then me. He pointed to the calendar at the back from the year 1892 and said it was a very valuable document, not like the book from Mainz that my mother has in the oak trunk, but valuable in a different way because it tells the story of Ireland, a story that should be kept safe and should never be taken out of the house because it might be lost. The writing inside belongs to my greatgrandfather, Taidhg Ó Donabhain Daill, Ted O Donovan Blind, the land surveyor who was not blind himself but descendant of a blind man, and decided at one point to start collecting all the names of places in the Irish language so that they wouldn’t disappear. My father showed us the lists of place names around West Cork where he grew up and says you could follow your way along the coastline by these names. Every inlet, every harbour, every cliff and every rock is written down in the old handwriting and we’re lucky he wrote with a lead pencil because that doesn’t fade like ink.
He’s shown me this book a number of times since then. There are names like Carraig Árd and the English translation beside it, High Rock. Carraig a’choiscéim, the rock of steps. The rock of two women. The rock of seals. Dead man’s rock. There’s even a rock called Carraig a’chaca, the rock of shit, which looks like a white skull because of the seagulls and cormorants. Some of the places have notes in English on distances and dangers around the coast. Descriptions of how the land looks like an elbow or a foot or goat’s udder, coves that look like a short thumb and forefinger going out into the sea. The distances between Sherkin Island and Cape Clear Island. My father reads out the words of his own grandfather: ‘No landing places south sides – the cliffs are too high. Strong currents. I had to stay in Cape Clear one time 10 days.’
The book also had a lot of proverbs that were collected by Ted O Donovan Blind along the way and my father reads out the very last.
‘Trí fithid bean nucht a chuirim chugat, agus mo bheannacht féin chomh maith. Three score naked women I send you, and my own blessing as well.’
He laughs and explains how the word in the Irish language for a naked woman sounds exactly the same as the word for blessing. He says you can explain this in German or in English, but there are some jokes that can only be laughed at in Irish.
My father lets us hold his ancient book, in the same way that my mother allows us to look through her ancient book. They want us to feel close to the time in the past when these books were printed or written. They want us to be witnesses. They want us to be time-travellers, living in the past, sometime in the nineteenth century in West Cork, or even further back in the seventeenth century in Mainz. They want us to keep all that history in our heads. But you can’t remember something that you have not seen with your own eyes. You can remember people talking about things that happened long ago, but you can’t remember things that you have not witnessed.
The last thing my father showed us from his little frail book was one particular name of a place along the coast, not far from where they lived. It’s called Toehead. It came from the Irish name Ceann Tuaithe, which means headland. Along the coast road out of Skibbereen, he explained, not far from Glandore, we would be coming across this headland which we would never forget because of the extraordinary view. There was nothing much out there now, he said, only sheep grazing. But there was a time around the great Irish famine when three hundred families were living on that headland. My father reads out the small note after the name.
Ceann Tuaithe – Toehead. Around 300 families lived here. All evicted. Barren place now.
My father told us there were stories going around that some people were driven off the cliffs. After the great famine in Ireland, the British government introduced a new policy which was intended to put an end to unproductive farming. It was a bit like the collectivization in Russia under Stalin, my father said. There was a lot of trouble in Ireland when people decided to stop paying their rent and were evicted by landlords. The Congested Districts Board was set up to alleviate poverty and bad living conditions. But there was also a policy of assisted emigration and land clearances. My father talked about evictions and a law called the Gregory Clause. He said the people of Toehead were evicted and Ted O Donovan Blind wrote down the name in his notebook so that it would not be forgotten. The story he heard as a boy was that evictions were carried out by gangs under police supervision. They would wreck the cottages to make sure they could not be re-inhabited. Some of the thatched cottages on the headland were set on fire. And that’s how the story of the landlord and his fiery carriage emerged, when the flames from the roofs of the cottages were carried by the wind and as the landlord passed by on the road to see that the job was done properly, his carriage caught fire and he was condemned for ever by the people to live in his travelling hell.
I remember my father telling me this story. But you cannot remember things that happened before you were born. I can only remember what I have seen for myself. I remember that we cycled all the way from Dublin, stopping at hostels and staying with relatives in Tipperary and Fermoy, right down to Skibbereen. I can remember finding a packet of cigarettes that somebody had dropped on the ground. We ate the last piece of cake outside a shop near Fermoy. We saw a truck that had crashed outside a public house on the road into Clonakilty. I can remember that it took six days for us to cycle to Cork City and it was raining when we got there. There was nobody we knew living in Leap, but we got off the bikes to look at the house where my father grew up. It was covered with ivy. When I got on the bike again, my trousers were stuck to my legs and it was almost impossible to cycle. It rained so hard that we could not even see where we were going and had to blink all the time to keep our eyes clear. We stayed in Skibbereen with Tante Eileen for a few day, our clothes and our rucksacks hanging in the kitchen over the stove to dry. I can remember her house with a crooked floor. The front of the house
had subsided because of years of flooding and the room was at an angle. I remember how it felt like being on a ship, tilted to one side. You could roll a penny down from one end to the other, towards the window.
It was only on the way back that we stopped at Toehead, but there was nothing much there. It’s just a piece of grassy land going out into the sea. Hard to believe that 300 families once lived here. There must have been so many people walking along the roads in those days. It must have been busy as a city, and now it was all emptiness. There was nothing at all on Toehead, only a few houses at the foot of the slope going up. Barren place now, I remembered reading in the black notebook. There was nothing else for us to remember. We went right out to the tip of the headland and stood looking out over the cliffs going down on each side of the headland. We saw seagulls diving down into the water. We saw lines of foam on top of the waves. Boats were going out fishing from the harbour at Union Hall. A man with a pitchfork on his shoulder was walking inland with his dog, as if he was the last person left alive. There was a strong wind up there because it was so exposed to the Atlantic. When you shouted, the wind just whipped the sound of it away out to sea and made you speechless. The noise of wind in my ears made it impossible to hear anything. At one point I thought I heard people shouting and crying. I thought I heard the sound of hoofs and looked up to see if it was the landlord in his fiery carriage, but I knew it was an illusion.
I had the weakness, like an ache in my legs, and lay down on the grass in a place that was sheltered from the wind. Franz stayed looking out across the sea while I lay on my back looking straight up at the sky and the small white clouds going by very fast above us, as if the land was moving under me. I was floating on my back, head-first inland. I wondered how much you could remember and where the line is drawn between memory and imagination. Could you remember things that you have not seen, could you re-imagine things that you were told and relive them as if they happened only yesterday? I knew that I was lying on the land where people had been evicted long ago before I was born. I could imagine them alive. I could imagine the smell of turf smoke drifting on the wind and I could imagine the sound of people talking in Irish all around Toehead. I closed my eyes and listened to the wind and the sound of the Irish language all around me like a blanket.
The Sailor in the Wardrobe Page 17
