I like that, she says.
Some of the art is not worth the price of a dinner.
I could leave behind a couple of words, she says.
Some of the art is worth a million dinners.
A million asparagus soups.
They tell her that a lot of famous people have come to the restaurant over the years for dinner. A lot of words have been overheard and found their way into the newspapers. A lot of words are forgotten and only the art on the walls is left when all the people who had their dinner are gone.
You can’t eat art, she says.
They stand up when she stands up. That’s the way I remember it. I’m narrowing down the conversations and the small talk around the edges. They talked for a while about somebody’s father being her lecturer in university. There was probably a lot more said than that, but you would have to ask the others, I was not paying enough attention. I can only remember her asking herself, or asking me, why asparagus soup would make you want to cry.
I send Manfred a text giving him plenty of time to come over, whenever he’s ready. He sends me back a text to say that he is always ready. I only meant it as an expression, whenever you’re ready, but he thought I meant it literally, when are you ever ready? I am here, he says. I am here always. Waiting for you and your mother, he says. Then I look out the window and see that he’s been there all along, parked right outside, waiting for us.
As they’re standing around and she’s getting back into the wheelchair, they don’t start talking to each other, ignoring her, looking to see what time it is and what they’re going back to. Nobody wants to say goodbye to her. It’s something they have forgotten how to do. As if there are no words for it and they cannot imagine not ever seeing her again. They wait while she’s being shown around the restaurant to look at the art, without pointing at anything in particular or bothering people who might be having their dinner right next to it. The staff are smiling. Staff, I don’t think she would have called them staff. The waiters are smiling and shaking her hand and saying they look forward to seeing her again.
And then I get a phone call from the Adlon, letting me know they have the tickets for Don Carlo. I want to tell them we don’t need them. She’s doing fine. I want to let them know that she’s dying and she’s not up to it. I’m trying to protect her from her family. I don’t think it’s a good idea for her to go back to see that same story again, re-enacted in front of her.
Three hundred and fifty euros each, the last tickets available.
We’ll take them, she says. I’ll never be here again.
So I get back to the man at the hotel reception to tell him we’ll go for it. Two tickets only. So now I’ve booked them and we have to go.
31
I met her father once. Way back, long before I knew her. I had this job for a short while as a copy boy with the newspaper that he wrote for in Dublin. It was my duty to deliver bits of paper from one desk to another and make tea for people, get sandwiches and biscuits and buttered rock buns, sometimes a burger, sometimes a kebab. The journalists were always using their pens to stir the tea and leaving the teabags on the table, staining an old newspaper.
Her father was rarely seen in his office, only occasionally when he came back late in the evening to write his column. He was standing at the top of the stairs one day on his way out, that’s how I remember it, just as I was going up. I had no dealings with him. I didn’t talk to him. I didn’t shake his hand. I’m not in a position to say what he was like as a father. I can’t even say that I met him, properly, only that he stood in front of me and smiled as if he wanted to talk to me. I remember him wearing a carnation in his lapel, like he was coming from a wedding. Or maybe he just made Dublin look like there was always somebody getting married.
He was in no hurry. He looked me in the eyes and I felt he knew me for some reason, but it was only that I knew him. He was checking to see if I was somebody. Anybody. He gave me a chance to say who I was and where I was from and who my mother and father were and what school I went to, if I was related to anyone in public life. He waited to see if I had anything to reveal, that is, if I knew anything interesting about anyone at all that was worth remembering, anything worth passing on or publishing in a newspaper column. He said good evening to me, but I forgot how to speak. I didn’t have the words put together in the right order in my head. I couldn’t get the sentence I was hoping to say off the ground. I wanted to tell him everything I knew, but I didn’t know what that was yet.
To my mind, he looked OK. I liked him. My first impression was all I had to go by and that gave me no reason to believe otherwise. He seemed like a good enough father from the outside. He had silver hair and his eyes were clear. His chest was out. His shoulders were square. He wore a light-coloured suit, his shoes were polished and he looked very solid, like he never needed help from anyone, like he never missed a bus or got caught in the rain, like he never found the shops closed and nowhere to get milk, all those ordinary things that people had to think about seemed to be far from his mind. He looked trouble-free. Like he never lost his temper and he never had a bad word to say about anyone, somebody who was liked by everyone, with no guilt and nothing to answer for. He looked welcoming, like he shook hands with people a lot, like he remembered everybody’s name.
He gave me the impression that he wanted to have a conversation with me and I could come back to him once I had something to remember. He took his time passing me by and I turned around at the top of the stairs. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs for a moment to check the carnation in his jacket. And by the time I got the words right in my head he was already gone.
I said good evening to the smile that was left behind.
When I read her book years later, I could not believe this was the same man I had seen passing me on the stairs. His smile made me think that he had a lovely family and I could only imagine that if I had had a father like that myself, my problems would be over. He seemed full of calmness. Like he had no anger in him. Like he owned a yacht or an American car or maybe that he knew how to fly a plane. Maybe he could have been an actor in a movie at some point, or that he was good with cards and knew lots of tricks and stories that he could entertain people with.
I didn’t want to believe that he murdered his own son.
She said her father was just like the King in Don Carlo and he killed her brother.
Not that I’m arguing with her memory, but I still think of her father well. I thought she was exaggerating. And you know something, I never told her that I met him. I didn’t want to bring it up. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that he didn’t look as bad as he was.
What am I saying? This is what I’m saying. At the end of her first book she said she could forgive her parents. And then, at the end of the second book she says her parents are murderers and she could never forgive them. So I was only thinking it would not be all that difficult to persuade her to go back to the first version again, that’s all.
I think forgiveness is a bit overrated. They keep going on about it nowadays. Open up. Forgive the past. Especially things you can do nothing about. Things you cannot possibly change at this point, like where you entered your life. You have to forgive yourself, that’s what they say. They have a new way of speaking about all these things, like they never raise their voices and nobody ever loses their temper any more in Ireland. You hear them on the radio now with that suave voice, the new spiritual, she calls it.
She was not letting anybody off the hook, especially now.
Nothing will ever change if you go all soft, Liam. You can’t look back all soggy with nostalgia, she said, everything is all right, nobody meant any harm, sure let’s all forget about it and be nice and enjoy our lives. She could not take the dishonesty of it, like people going back to Mass, people saying they miss the way things were under Communism.
I’m not changing my story, she said.
It must have been around the same time, when I saw her father on the stairs, that sh
e came back from London to live in Dublin again. It could have been the same evening for all I know. Her father found out where she was living and went to see her, just turned up at the door. She had come back to Ireland to say all the things that were unsaid. All the things that Irish people didn’t know how to say about themselves yet, so many things that needed to be confronted out loud. Everything inside the family had always been kept inside the family, that was the rule up to that time, with no outside interference. It was none of anyone’s business outside the front door, only the priest and God. Things were bad enough economically without bringing private, social matters out into the open, and she came back to Dublin to take the roof off the family. She was walking straight into all the houses in Ireland that were still keeping their secrets.
Her father was furious with her. He heard what people were saying around the city. He was furious at her curly hair and the freedom of speech she was allowing herself. He didn’t think a woman could be so much like him, least of all his own daughter, drinking like her mother and sleeping around like her father. Maybe he was afraid of her revealing things about him, killing his own son. That whole Don Carlo thing going on inside the family.
It wasn’t time yet for the rhythm of honesty.
Her father was standing in her flat, she said. It was nothing more than a bedroom with a kitchen in it. All she could do was smile at him, because she was paying her own rent and her own electricity bills and that made him even more furious, her independence. She was not a helpless woman. All he could do was shout. And she kept smiling. He said she would be nobody without him, if he hadn’t sold his car and borrowed another car to get her into boarding school and save her from married men. What made him most angry was that she was pretending not to be his daughter any more, even though everyone knew who she was. No matter how famous he was, he had no power over her any longer. He threatened her. She never felt so much alone with a man before as with her own father. And the only way that he could think of losing his temper was to kick something. He kicked the cupboard underneath the sink. The door of the cupboard opened with the force of it. The bin fell out, spilling the contents across the room. They both stared at what he had done and she wrote it all down in her memory, her collection. He walked out and left the tea leaves scattered on the floor behind him.
32
They’ve installed a hydraulic lift out in the open, outside the Pergamon Museum. Getting Úna up the steps would have been impossible, even for myself and Manfred together. Manfred wheels her onto the ramp and secures the wheelchair to make it safe, then closes the gate. She’s smiling like a child, she loves it. As if she’s at a funfair, going up slowly with the magnificent building behind her, all those large windows, the canal around the front and the overhead trains going by in the distance.
The Pergamon Altar is great. I know the Nazis loved it, she says, let’s not forget that. But that doesn’t stop you admiring the sheer size of it, like a city inside a huge room. It makes you feel small and powerless. The altar with the wide marble steps and the temple at the top is only a tiny fragment of the city, you can check that on the scale model. And around the walls are these marble carvings showing what people were up to in those days.
Figures of semi-naked men and women. Some peaceful scenes, women bathing, children playing, men carrying fruit. And war. Plenty of war. Arms and legs missing, never found or reattached by archaeologists. Horses with missing heads. Chariots. People in rage. People in agony. A lion biting into the leg of a man, all that kind of thing.
There was an echo around the hall, I remember. Groups of people with blue earphones on, listening to the history being replayed as they walked around. People sitting on the marble steps talking, calling each other. And children. A small girl shouting, testing the echo. I could not find out where the child’s voice was actually coming from. I checked all the children there, so in the end, I thought it might have been a child in one of the sculptures. From the past. A child of Pergamon still echoing around the room.
I went up the steps to the top of the altar and waved down at her from the temple. She smiled back at me. And maybe it was all that marble around us that made me think of her as part of the story of ancient Greece. Seeing her from a distance, sitting there waving at me, gave me the feeling that I was looking back over her life, like one of those archaeologists. All these questions I had not even thought of asking yet.
There were things I couldn’t let go. As a father myself. I felt I had to speak up for her father, out of his mouth. I got back down and pushed the wheelchair into the next room. It was quieter in there with lots of stone columns and assorted bits of anatomy in no human order, arms and heads and half men, like a puzzle waiting to be put back together. I found a place behind a pillar and decided to ask her what exactly happened to her brother. I wanted to know the truth, because I couldn’t imagine being murdered by my own father.
Úna, I said to her. Did your father really kill your brother?
Yes. He was murdered.
How?
They gave him his life.
Come on, Úna. That’s not murder.
My brother had a terrible life, she said.
That’s a serious accusation. Murder. I know people use the word all the time in a light-hearted way. But still and all, I said, calling your own father a murderer.
She looked astonished. She could not believe I would turn on her like this, in the Pergamon Museum of all places.
Listen, Liam. My father killed my brother when he sent him to London with no love in him.
Premeditated.
Liam. My brother had a hole in his chest where love went right through him. He had no protection, Liam, no defence. He had no way of forming a normal relationship with the world. You see him in a photograph before he went away and he looks great, very handsome, like he had everything going for him. Then you see him in another photograph some years later and he’s a wreck, like he’s lived a hundred lives. He never learned how to respect himself or find anyone else to respect him. Something destroyed him early on, in his childhood. I’m not going into all this here, Liam, but his father might as well have taken his life at birth because he sent him off with nothing. Nothing. Nothing. I swear to God, Liam.
I would hate my daughter calling me a murderer.
Don’t compare yourself to my father, she said.
I’m only saying, Úna. Your father was human, not somebody in an opera.
What?
Well, that was it. I thought she was trying to stand up out of the wheelchair and walk away. She shouted my name across the room so that everyone in that part of the museum suddenly turned to look at us.
Liam, she shouted. You have no right to question me. My father took my brother from me. I’m not going to forgive him for that, as long as I live.
The visitors at the museum were beginning to pay more attention to us than to the ancient artefacts. They were probably wondering what I had done to her. She was helpless, sitting in a wheelchair with her head bare from radiation, unable to escape from my questions.
My brother was too afraid, she said, too alone, too damaged to live a normal life. What do you call that, Liam? That’s murder. My mother and father took everything that belonged to us. They gave us our lives and they stole them back again. My father not only stole my brother, she said, he stole my children from me too. The children I could never have, Liam, because I was afraid they might end up like my brother. I was afraid of what I saw in his eyes. I was afraid of what my brother had seen happening when he was a child, what he could never talk about.
She was holding on to her anger.
Yes, she said. I am holding on to my anger. Because that’s all I have left. My family, my anger, my grudge. My family rage, whatever you want to call it, Liam. What you get from your father and mother. From your country. What you spend the rest of your life trying to escape from. Things that follow you. It’s what made me want to get even with the world, in my own words. It’s the artistic rage, Liam. Ev
ery writer has that rage, she said, otherwise they wouldn’t be writers, they’d be too special, too much apart from the rest of us. Without that rage they’d be too obsessed with genius, they’d sound just like priests, or cardinals, making a holy cult of themselves. They wouldn’t be good writers, they wouldn’t be human enough without their own little line of anger and guilt and grudge and envy and failure and desperately wanting to be loved more than anyone else in the world.
Don’t take that away from me, Liam.
I had to let it go. It felt too much like the final judgement, interrogating her about her father in a place like this. I turned the wheelchair around and pushed her towards the exit. It looked as though she was being removed like a noisy child.
I forgive nobody, she said.
It’s all right, Úna.
I wish them all the fires and ice of hell.
Calm down.
Beckett was right, she said. If only I had thought up those words myself. I wish them all an atrocious life. I wish them lots of delays, cancellations, no refunds. I hope there’s always somebody ahead of them in the queue. And in the life hereafter, she said, they can have an honoured name as far as I’m concerned.
Don’t start going like Beckett, I said.
Look what they did to him, she said. They named a bridge after him.
The Beckett Bridge.
It’s unforgivable.
That’s a beautiful bridge, I said.
It’s an atrocity, she said. A bridge over the river Liffey. He would freak out if he heard that. I’m serious, if he was still alive today, the poor man, he would put an end to it, right now, he would go no further. Not for another second. They waited until he was dead so he could not object to it himself, in person.
It’s like a musical instrument, I said.
Exactly, she said. A bridge in the shape of a harp. For Samuel Beckett, of all people. Think about it, Liam. A fucking bridge over the Liffey in the shape of an Irish harp.
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