The Sailor in the Wardrobe

by Hugo Hamilton

  I didn’t want to go anywhere. I didn’t want to get back on the bike again because I had cycled so much that I was tired and wanted to stay in one place for the rest of my life. I felt the weakness, like an ache in my legs. I was paralysed and wanted to be left there. I didn’t care if it rained or got dark, I was ready to give myself up and surrender. I must have fallen asleep for a moment, because I heard my brother’s voice calling me and saying we should move on before it got too late. I woke up and didn’t even know where I was or what time it was or where I was in history. I opened my eyes and saw nothing but the sky and the clouds in front of me, moving at great speed away out into the sea.

  ‘Come on,’ Franz said. ‘We want to get back to Middleton before dark.’

  I got back on the bike with stiff legs. I was thankful that we were going downhill, off the headland for once. We stopped and turned around one last time to look at the view. It was unforgettable, with only the birds and the sheep and the Atlantic ocean spreading out like a big flat mirror.

  On the night before Tante Käthe goes back home to Germany, Onkel Ted comes out to the house and my mother has baked another cake. Onkel Ted tells Tante Käthe that Stefan would soon be back, please God. We would all pray for him, and it would not be long before he would be in touch again. Onkel Ted was able to speak calmly and trust in the future. He’s good at speaking German and even when Tante Käthe says she’s afraid of what’s happening in Northern Ireland and all the car bombs that are starting to go off, he listens to her and lets her talk out her worst nightmares. She’s afraid of war and bombing coming back. She’s afraid Stefan might have gone up there by mistake and that something has happened to him, like the German nightmare factory. She can’t believe that the violence in the North will not spread all over the country and that Stefan will not be caught up in it.

  But then Onkel Ted’s calmness spreads all around the house and even the worst fears start floating away like music. Everyone becomes weightless when he speaks. He tells her that history is being repaired in Ireland, and that even though the troubles have broken out in Northern Ireland, it doesn’t mean we are all at war again. He tells her the story about Tante Roseleen, when she was a small girl and there was an ambush around the creamery where she lived near Cork, in a place called Kilumney. It was the Black and Tans on one side and the IRA on the other. The family had fled from the house but when they came back, there were bullet holes in the walls. The bullet holes were never filled in or plastered over, so when Tante Roseleen was growing up and playing outside the creamery, she used to hide sweets in them.

  ‘Sweets in the bullet holes,’ Onkel Ted says.

  It’s what children do with the history of their country and all the bad things that have happened in the past. All over Europe, there must be children doing the same thing. Wherever there are bullet holes and bomb damage, there will also be children filling the holes up again, sticking their fingers in or putting in little stones, hiding their sweets and making up stories around them. I can see my mother and Tante Käthe both smiling with tears in their eyes, because the story of the bullet holes is so sad and happy at the same time, because children forget the real damage that was done and start repairing things with their imagination.

  Eighteen

  The harbour is quiet. For a moment it’s like a silent movie and there’s not even the sound of a distant engine to be heard. The world has stalled briefly and all that’s left are the tiny, insignificant harbour sounds, like the water underneath the boats, the squeak of a tyre fender when it’s pushed up against the harbour wall, the creak of a rope being stretched to the limit, the little rattle and shake that it makes and the misty shower of water wrung out by the strain. The harbour goes into a daydream and all your faculties go to sleep.

  The sun is shining across the water and the reflection is so strong that you can hardly see without tears. Even closing your eyes is not enough and you have to turn away. The old people are down from the nursing home to spend the afternoon on the quay watching the boats. The nurses are with them, making sure their blankets are tucked in around them in their wheelchairs, making sure the brakes are on and they don’t roll away into the harbour without anyone noticing them gone. There is an old woman asleep with a kind of baker’s hat on her head and sunglasses gone sideways on her face. An old man in a wheelchair beside her who keeps his hand up as if he’s waving at somebody out at sea. There is a tall man who has to link arms with a nurse because he’s always trying to run away. The nurses told Packer once that he escaped from the retirement home one day and got the bus into town and it was nearly midnight before he was found sitting on the pavement in the city, drunk and singing. One night they caught him with his trousers on back to front, trying to break out through the window. The nurses bring flasks of tea and coffee, and distribute fairy cakes. They tell us how mean the nuns are with their tea bags and their allsorts biscuits. They tell us about the boy who was working in the kitchen and got a whole pan full of boiling chip oil over his face and hands, screaming as they carried him out into the ambulance. They tell us about the famous old people who are living there now and how they are forgotten by everyone, because time moves on and leaves all these people behind.

  Maybe this is how I know I’m only at the start of my life, because I see these old people at the harbour so often. They have the time to look back and re-examine everything they went through and try to correct all the wrong turns they made. I’m just trying to move forward and not think back about anything at all. I’m escaping from the past and want to have no memory, while they want to keep their memory as long as they can, wishing they could start again with a clean slate, like me, doing all the things they missed because they couldn’t recognize their own luck at the time. They say old people experience a second childhood, and maybe that’s when you become innocent at last, when you see all your own mistakes.

  I watch Packer and Dan Turley coming back from fishing. Packer ties the rope against the ladder, then climbs up with the lobster box while Dan scoops out the water from the bottom of the boat. Tyrone is there as well, getting ready to go out fishing. Dan and Tyrone ignoring one another as if they didn’t even exist, pretending to be so busy that they are actually blind and cannot see.

  There has been a development in the past few days that has turned the harbour into a courtroom again. The missing boat was recovered by the harbour boys, out on the far side of the island. It was undamaged, left to bob up and down with no heavy wind or big swells that might have lashed it against the rocks. Dan Turley is grateful for getting it back, but there were clues left behind that have strengthened all his suspicions. An empty bottle of whiskey was found in the boat, which, they said, pointed the finger straight at Tyrone. Also, who else would have known how to find a way off the island once the stolen boat was abandoned out there?

  Tyrone has been found guilty in silence. Everyone is staring at him, executing him with their eyes, though there’s no proof at all that he’s done anything and nobody can come out and say it to him directly. It seems almost better that way, because we can judge him privately, among ourselves, without the confrontation. It gives Dan the upper hand, morally. He can point the finger as much as he likes and Tyrone cannot defend himself. Tyrone is forever bad, while Dan is forever good. A fair trial would ruin all that. And then I do something to bring everything out into the open. Because Tyrone is the enemy of Dan Turley, I pick up a dead crab from one of the boxes on the pier and throw it down into the harbour. I have no intention of hitting anyone with it and only generally throw it in the direction of Tyrone. But that has always been my problem. It’s just like the trouble with the fireman at Halloween. My aim is so good that the crab bends on the breeze and flies like a big accusation through the silent air and drops right down into Tyrone’s boat, landing at his feet. The dead crab stands for all the unspoken words flying around the harbour. I move away, back towards the shed to make sure nobody suspects me. I can hear Tyrone muttering, looking all around to see what bast
ard threw it. He wants to defend his good name. Then he looks across at Dan Turley who has noticed nothing and remains totally unaware of the flying crab.

  Tyrone pushes himself off the moorings and sculls his way past some of the other boats without starting the engine yet. He lifts his oar up to push off the harbour wall, giving the boat enough momentum to cruise silently out towards the harbour mouth. As he comes to where Dan is bailing out the dirty fishy water, he brings the oar around through the air as if he wants to decapitate him. He’s taking the law into his own hands and I see the oar swinging, but Dan crouches down to pick something up from the bottom of the boat and it misses him. Tyrone places the oar back into his boat and starts the engine. Nothing has happened and the world carries on as before. Tyrone bends down to throw out the rotten crab, while Dan climbs the ladder up onto the quay. They ignore each other and the whole thing is beginning to look like an optical illusion. I know I threw the crab and I saw Tyrone swinging the killer oar, but maybe my eyes were deceiving me, otherwise the old people and the nurses sitting around would have noticed it too. I could have just dreamed it all. I could have miscalculated the distances in the glare of the sun. From where I stand on the pier, it may have looked like Tyrone was trying to kill Dan, whereas in fact he might have been miles away, well out of reach. Suddenly I don’t trust my eyes any more and wonder if I have started making my own nightmares now.

  But then Packer comes up to the shed and places the lobster box on the ground in front of me, looking at me with big open eyes.

  ‘Did you see that?’ he asks.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did you not see Tyrone with the oar? Tried to kill Dan, I swear. He was only that much away, only inches away from killing him.’

  Of course I had seen it, but I thought I had imagined it. I knew what was happening at the harbour and how things would come to a head one day soon, but maybe I could not believe it until I was told by Packer.

  ‘You should have seen him swinging the oar. Jesus.’

  I told him the sun was so bright that I could see nothing.

  ‘There’s something happening here,’ Packer said. ‘This is not over yet.’

  At last, I could begin to believe what I had seen myself, what I had caused myself, only because Packer was now saying it. It was invented through his words. When Dan came up the ladder and walked back towards the shed, he seemed not to be too concerned about it.

  ‘We saw that,’ Packer said to him.

  Dan didn’t reply. He just turned around and watched Tyrone making his way out to sea, bouncing on the waves, standing up straight in the back of the boat with his hand on the engine. It was Tyrone’s trademark and you could recognize his silhouette anywhere by the way he stood up in the boat unlike anyone else. Dan had a rule that you should never stand up in the boat, because that is the most common way of asking to be drowned. The slightest gust or wave from the ferry could jolt the boat and you’re gone over. There was no point in being a hero at sea. And now he was watching Tyrone standing up in the boat like he was on skis with a cigarette in his mouth and a bottle of whiskey in his pocket.

  ‘He could have killed you,’ Packer said, but it was not clear at all whether Dan had really noticed how close he had come to being hit. Was he living in an optical illusion, trying not to see reality? Voluntary blindness. Maybe it was nothing more than the usual animosity and Packer was only exaggerating like he sometimes does, making it part of the big story that he is inventing around the harbour.

  ‘Bastard,’ I heard Dan say through his teeth. ‘He’ll hooken drown one of these days.’

  At that moment, I realized how I had become part of the war myself. I was the person who had pushed things closet to the edge. All the sound came back to the harbour and the moment of illusion was gone. A half-dozen motorbikes arrived on the pier at once and everything turned back to normal. The nurses blew the exhaust fumes away from their patients. The girls hopped off the back of the bikes and straightened their clothes, their hair. Packer stored away the lobster in the box and Dan went inside into the shed to lie down and listen to the news. It seemed to be forgotten again, as if nobody had any memory of anything happening.

  Every evening after dinner, we started saying the rosary in our house for the safe return of Stefan. It was some time now since his mother had come to visit and there was still no sign of him. One evening after the rosary, I sat alone in my bedroom when my mother came in and stood at the window. She was starting to practise freedom and opened the window to smoke a cigarette, half outside the window and half inside. If my father came into the room, she could throw the cigarette away towards the beehives and pretend nothing was going on and that the smoke was some garden fire that was still smouldering somewhere at the back of the houses. To put us off cigarettes, my father once lit one and then blew the smoke through a white handkerchief so we could see the brown nicotine stain left behind.

  When my mother had finished her cigarette, she stayed at the window while it was starting to get dark. So then I asked her about Stefan’s father. I had been thinking about what he had told me very briefly about his father in the war, and now I was sorry I didn’t ask him any more questions, because he might not come back and I would never find out. At first, my mother didn’t want to talk about it. But there is always time for the truth in our house, she says, so she told me what she knew and what she had heard from Käthe.

  Stefan’s father had been studying as a chemist during the Nazi years, but sometime after Hitler started the war with Russia, he was taken into the army and was ordered to go east. They drove all night and all day, because the German army had gone far to the east, as far as the Ukraine. She remembers Stefan’s father saying how he could not believe that the land could be so flat for so long. He said the drivers of the tanks and the trucks were given special medication called Pervitin that would keep them awake and driving for days, but it then made them exhausted and aggressive. The same drugs that young people are now using for recreation. The Nazis had a factory for mind-altering drugs to keep the troops going. The soldiers were drinking a lot as well and often you could see them asleep in the back of the trucks, with spittle dripping down on their uniforms, not interested in where they were going or what the landscape looked like. Stefan’s father loved travelling and he was excited about going somewhere new and seeing the little villages in the Ukraine with wooden houses and cows tied up outside. Women with headscarves in the fields with their children working on the harvest.

  Stefan’s father didn’t see much of the fighting, although he did pass through villages that had been bombed or set on fire. He saw people being evicted from their houses and driven up the road in clusters, carrying their belongings. But the first indication that they had come close to the front was when they stopped at a makeshift barracks and he could hear the very distant sound of artillery fire. He must have been afraid and excited, my mother says, because she remembers that sound as well. It’s a sound where you keep wondering how far away it is and whether it’s coming closer or whether it’s going away. She says that sometimes you try and convince yourself that it’s moving further away when it’s actually coming towards you.

  The soldiers were getting drunk every night on the alcohol they had found in the small houses. Other soldiers said the real party was going on just east of the camp, and Stefan’s father believed what they said. He didn’t realize that the word ‘party’ meant killing. My mother doesn’t know exactly how this happened, but at one point, while Stefan’s father was patrolling through the forest close to the camp, he came across the killing himself. There had been gunshots earlier that morning, but it had become very quiet. When he came to the edge of the forest, he could see German soldiers and SS men out in the open. He saw women undressing and had no idea what this meant. Women of all ages with their children and grandchildren. A group of soldiers got the order to fire and the women and children began to fall backwards into a pit behind them. It took Stefan’s father a moment to realize what he was
witnessing. He ran away, back into the forest, and could not understand what he had seen. He knew it was wrong, but he didn’t know what to do about it.

  My mother says Stefan’s father got back to the camp and felt he would be arrested for what he had seen. He was afraid to speak to anyone about it. He felt that what he had witnessed was a crime and that he would be found guilty for speaking about it. He was afraid that he might be killed for knowing the facts. So he kept it to himself and even when others were hinting that there was something going on, he was terrified that if he uttered a word in public, he would pay for it.

  ‘He had the weakness,’ my mother says.

  I wondered if Onkel Ulrich might have thought it was an illusion or something he had fabricated in his own mind. Of course he knew it was a scene of horror, because he heard the sound of children screaming as he ran back into the forest. He didn’t know how his legs even carried him, because they were gone soft like jelly. He could still hear the sound of weeping years later, like a sound that would never die down, like some kind of tinnitus that came back every time he heard a baby crying. He was like the landlord in the fiery carriage, condemned to hearing the sound of weeping for eternity.

  I know what it’s like to have the weakness, to be powerless and have no way of doing anything to stop what’s happening. Maybe Stefan’s father is like me, waiting for somebody who would tell him what he had seen. People often don’t understand what they have witnessed until it has been made clear to them.