A Mad and Wonderful Thing

by Mark Mulholland

  ‘It’s a big smoke,’ I say to Mila.

  ‘This is the second-largest city in Germany,’ Mila tells me. ‘Hamburg is both a city and a state. The city area is seven times bigger than Paris, and two-and-a-half times bigger than London. We have much green spaces here. Hamburg has two thousand three hundred bridges. That is more than Venice and Amsterdam if you put them together.’

  Somewhere in me, it registers that I enjoy her habit for relaying facts. We walk around the lake, and we take a terrace table at a waterside restaurant.

  ‘How about lunch?’ I ask, sliding the menu across the table. She has her hands clasped in her lap below the table. I lean across the table and take both her hands in mine, raise her hands to my lips, and kiss each of her open palms. She looks to me across the table with a face that is no longer half of anything, but all of something.

  After lunch, we wander around the district of Saint Nikolai, passing the Hopfenmarkt and the ruin of the Saint Nikolai church. ‘It is a memorial to war,’ Mila says. ‘It’s why we leave it such as this.’ I look at the bomb-damaged ruin, and then I look around to the German folk going about their business, and I think how this nation, this leading edge of our civilisation, did what they did just fifty years before. How could these people, who championed engineering, science, arts, and culture, load their neighbours onto trucks and trains, and drive them to be slaughtered? How could that possibly be?

  ‘Do you ever wonder, Mila, about what happened here? How did it happen?’

  ‘It was a bad time in history. We were controlled by mad people, crazy.’

  It is true in some way, I suppose. But it was not Hitler or Himmler or Goebbels who gathered their neighbours, who loaded those trains. It was bakers, cobblers, factory workers, teachers, musicians, and carpenters. How the fuck did that happen?

  We cross to Alte Deichstraße, and wander on to Speicherstadt, past vendors of rectangular pizza slices, and stalls of sandwiches topped with cold-smoked and pickled fish. We take a city commuter bus to Landungsbrucken on the River Elbe, and hold each other as we look out across the vast harbour. Below us, tourists are boarding the barges of Große Hafenrundfahrt and Fleetfahrt for harbour and canal boat-tours. I wonder how it is possible to organise so many ships, freight containers, and people. We take the bus back into the city and find a bar, the Anno 1905, across from the Holsten brewery, where we sit for hours drinking glasses of Lübzer Pils, Holsten Pils, and Franziskaner Hefeweissbier.

  In the late evening we leave the bar and head towards Saint Pauli. Busloads of elderly tourists pass us, and crowds meander outside theatres showing Cats, Phantom of the Opera, and The Little Shop of Horrors. We slow as we read the billboards, and then we push on with the crowd into the Reeperbahn. The streets here simmer with the curious and the intent. It’s as Mam says: people are strange. People travel for an assortment of motivations, and find their own fold of comfort in odd places. Among the restaurants, bars, and clubs, we pass window displays of sex-shops and brothels. Ushers entice, bargain, and plead outside strip-clubs. Girls and boys proposition passers-by for trade. We walk through the Reeperbahn like two spinsters at a wedding, inhaling every scene and occurrence. When I briefly stop to gawp into a shop window, I am separated from Mila.

  A girl approaches me. She is good looking, her blonde hair is tied in a Grecian braid, her pretty face and clear skin show above the pulled collar of an American college jacket, and her arctic-blue eyes lock and hold me to her. I think she is simply being friendly and saying hello, but she is selling sex. I am embarrassed by the revelation, and quickly apologise and walk away. Homeless tramps and addicts, slumped on the pavement edge, beg with polystyrene cups offered for alms. I watch as passers-by not just ignore them, but fail to see them. I look for Mila and find her.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I say, and we walk back toward the city centre. We find a bar, and later we find a club, where we stay and dance until morning. At four-thirty, we take a taxi to the Fischmarkt. As light rises over the harbour, we wander around the stalls — the freshly caught fish, the smoked eel, the imported fruit and vegetables, and the bric-a-brac. The bus tours that passed us on the way to the Reeperbahn the previous evening have reappeared, and the bleary-eyed curious join the crowds of all-nighters and the market traders. I hold Mila close to me as we make our way through the mob. Heavy men manhandle heavy, wide pans over hot burners, where pieces of potato are fried and served with egg. Through the morning air, the smell of hot fried potato entices our hungry bellies, and we order a portion each. As day brightens, we ride the U-Bahn home to Grosshansdorf.

  ‘I shall come to you, Irish boy,’ she says, before she falls asleep on my shoulder in the train. ‘I shall come to you.’

  In Grosshansdorf, I leave a tired girl at her uncle’s house, where I kiss her face and her pouting soft pink lips. I return to my room, and I lie on my bed and think again on the Nazi thing. How did it happen? How could a thing like that happen? I don’t know the answer. I guess that, like it or not, this is who we are. But I do know one thing. The only way to stop a Nazi was to shoot him. That’s how the battle played out. It took bullets and guns and bombs to stop them. All the peace-talking didn’t work — only war saved the rest of us. As sleep comes, I wonder, What am I doing? Where am I going? I wonder … but I am too tired.

  My summer in Hamburg passes, and it is now mid-August. Throughout my days here, I think again and again on how tyranny and massacre happen. And I think on why, at times, some people don’t fight. I wonder why this happens, even when sometimes the number of the oppressed is many and the oppressor is few. Why the obedience? Is it fear? Sure, oppressors, generally speaking, have the weapons. But why be afraid of getting killed, when you’re going to die anyway? I don’t understand it. I try to figure it out, but I don’t find an answer. Why, at the very end, as they walked in neat, ordered lines to their death, didn’t the Jews throw themselves at their guards? Why not fight? What was there to lose? Why didn’t slaves rise against their masters? Okay, some did. But they were the few. And why didn’t the starving Irish of the famine fight for food from their English landowners? Why didn’t they just fight, whatever the risk or cost? I would. I’d fight. I’d have to, because I couldn’t take some bastard chaining me, starving me, or ordering me into a neat line to kill me. I’d throw myself against it. If we don’t do that, then what are we? Isn’t it more than just a right to fight? Isn’t it a duty? But so many people don’t. And perhaps it isn’t fear at all, but desperate hope — a hope that no matter how bad things are, they remain somehow better than they could be, and that there is yet a chance for a reprieve and survival. Isn’t that mad? Isn’t hope a fucker?

  These weeks here with Mila have been a blessing, but my teaching contract is finished and I am leaving. Stefan, a taxi driver, collects me from the residence. Mila stands on the grass, feeding the remnants from my cupboard to the birds. Stefan puts my two bags into the car as I kiss Mila goodbye and we hold each other. I tell her I shall come again to visit her. She tells me, again, that she will come to me.

  It was Stefan who collected me when I first arrived in Hamburg and who gave me a German lesson as we drove to Grosshansdorf. Most of the time I had no idea what he was talking about, but he didn’t give a damn, because he kept the flow going for the whole trip. ‘Well, Stefan’, I said then, laughing, feeling confident and philosophical, and thinking anyway that he didn’t understand me. ‘Life is just all-out madness, absolute all-out madness.’

  As we return to the airport he asks, ‘So, mein irische Freund? Deutschland, gut?’

  ‘Sehr gut, Stefan,’ I answer, and I quote a verse of a drinking song that I learned in the pub in Ahrensburg. ‘Aber, alles hat ein Ende; nur die Wurst hat zvei.’ — ‘But everything has an end; only the sausage has two.’ He takes up the tune immediately, and we motor towards the airport, laughing and singing loudly to the road.

  ‘Und …?’ Stefan asks as we lift th
e bags out of the rear of the car, indicating where we came from with his head.

  I nod and say nothing.

  ‘Die Liebe?’ he laughs, patting me on the shoulder. ‘Love: just all-out madness.’

  Line of sight

  I AM CROUCHED BEHIND THE GRAVEYARD OF CROSSMAGLEN. IT IS LATE August, and in the clear light of evening I have a line of sight down to the village square. I’ve had misses since Cora died. I shouldn’t have tried so hard; I know that. I took risks. Delaney said it was too soon, that I wasn’t right, that the planning wasn’t great. But what about focus and all that stuff, I told him, and, anyhow, wasn’t it all good practice? So I went ahead.

  I have spent two weeks preparing for this location. I have been back and forward from gun to target three times — twice on a bicycle, and once walking with a stick and dressed in an old coat and cap. The day I walked, I borrowed a dog from the county pound in Meath, and returned it the next morning to another in Dublin. I have yet to be stopped when on a bicycle or when walking a dog. A dog can be fierce useful for unearthing any SAS units dug in and hiding; so, oddly enough, can the curiosity of cattle — a grouped long stare is a warning, and I am careful to monitor bovine behaviour. I abandoned a shoot last month when a herd of Holstein dairy cows paid long attention to a briar patch below an ash tree in a distant ditch. And I am careful, too, not to let my own location be recognised by inquisitive livestock.

  I scope the pavement at the Northern Bank. Delaney had a volunteer meander there today, and I know I have a clear shot. I am ready.

  There is no hunting like the hunting of man. So says my friend Mister Hemingway. These words revisit me, and I have to chase them away and rid my mind of everything other than the senses.

  I have the gun set and the scope fixed — ‘Dope the scope’, the American called it. I have one shot. I have allowed for the elevation and bullet drop. I have allowed for the temperature and humidity. I have calculated for spin drift. I know the range, and today the gods are with me and the wind is low. What breeze there is, I have allowed for. So far I have had eight shots — all misses — and nine aborts. Today I will take the shot, and I will not miss.

  I practise my routine. Safety off. Deep breath. Let half out. Hold. Crosshair. Crosshair. Squeeze the trigger.

  Four soldiers approach the bank through the village square. Soldiers one and two move in and out and through the reticle. I count them through. I put the spotting scope down and look through the scope on the rifle. The eye that was damaged in the fall is my left. I scope with my right. How lucky was that? Soldier three passes through. I am fixed on the corner of the wall. I wait on the last soldier. I know he will pause, and I am aiming to where that pause will be. I relax my breathing as soldier four enters, the scope moving right to left towards the crosshairs. I begin to exhale a slow breath. I count him across the mil dots of the horizontal: four, and three, and two, and … He goes down on his haunches to cover the rest of the patrol as they step onto the road to check a lorry. I breathe in. I adjust. I let him settle for two seconds, and I put the crosshairs on his folded body. I exhale another slow breath. I squeeze the trigger. Boomph! I absorb the short recoil of the Barrett, allowing my shoulder to be beaten back an inch to dampen the punch. I remain low on the gun, and I keep watch in the scope. I watch the shockwave through the air. I see pink spray. I see soldier four pop and splatter onto the Northern Bank’s wall.

  Mila

  IN THE EARLY MORNING, I DRIVE HOME TO ENNIS, AND EVERY HOUR THE radio news tells of the soldier killed in Crossmaglen. I go in by the rear door. Bella is in the kitchen.

  ‘Hello, stranger,’ she says, her back to me as she prepares breakfast on the counter.

  ‘A cup of tea and two slices will do lovely,’ I say, passing behind her and tapping her arse.

  ‘You have a visitor.’

  I stop.

  ‘She arrived at the door yesterday, all flustered, the poor thing. I let her in to your room. This is for her — you can take it up.’ She turns and faces me. ‘She’s very pretty. And young, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes,’ I answer. ‘She’s very pretty.’ What can I say?

  I take the tea and toast, and knock on the door of my own room before I enter. The room is dim, with a soft diffusion of light that filters from the curtained windows. She moves in my bed.

  ‘Hello, German girl,’ I say, making space for the breakfast on the bedside locker.

  ‘Irish boy,’ she says, and I see anxiety fall away from her as she sees me. ‘I told you I would come.’

  I lift her hair from her face and kiss her soft, pink lips.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Here, Bella has sent this up to you.’

  ‘She’s nice, isn’t she?’

  I sit on the edge of the bed and watch her eat. When she finishes, I kick off my trainers and climb in beside her. She rises from the bed and walks to the corner between the two windows. She faces the wall and, slowly, piece by piece, she removes her clothing: the socks that she wore all night, the loose top, the pyjama bottoms, the white bra. She turns to face me. In the gentle dust of morning shadow, she stands before me. Her skin is dappled with light that seeps from the curtain edge. In shades of grey, beauty is cast in the corner of my bedroom. Nothing that exists in the universe, nothing, is as beautiful as woman. I look on her tall frame — her head held high, her dark hair, her neck, her shoulders, her arms, her breasts, her belly, her long legs. I leave the bed and go to her and touch her. I kiss her face. I kiss her neck, her breasts, and I kneel down as I kiss her warm belly, her legs, her thighs. With her hands sliding by her sides, she pushes the white knickers down, stepping from them as I push her against the wall.

  The next morning, we pack a picnic into the Renault and drive north from Ennis into the patchwork limestone of the Burren. At Mullaghmore Mountain, we leave the small road and park the car. I take the picnic and a blanket from the back seat, and we walk to the mountain over fissured ground. We stop and sit by a lake under the mountain, the still water clear in the cradle of the grey-white stone.

  ‘It’s like we are on the moon,’ Mila says.

  ‘It is that,’ I agree. Around us is one hundred square miles of rock.

  We picnic on the blanket by the water, as two mute swans watch us from beside a reed bed.

  ‘I wonder, will they eat bread?’ she asks. She rises and walks towards them, and throws pieces of bread that float on the clear water, but she has to retreat before the swans approach. We drink hot coffee that I pour from a Thermos, and I tell her we are sitting on the bed of a sea.

  ‘That was a long time ago?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes, hundreds of millions of years. It could drive a man mad just to think about it.’

  After the picnic, we drive through the village of Kilfenora and on to the small town of Lisdoonvarna. I explain how every year people come here to a matchmaking festival: men looking for a wife; women looking for a husband.

  ‘Why don’t they try the pub, or the supermarket?’ she asks, and as she asks she gives me that look — that look she gave me on the first day — and I see her again in that aisle among the Brötchen, Knödel, and Schinkenwurst, the German girl, almost as tall as I am, but young, her face with all the fullness of innocence.

  Leaving Lisdoonvarna, we take the coast road north to the village of Ballyvaughan. The road meanders along the jutted Burren coast, with the Atlantic Ocean on our west and the grey-white rock on our east. At Ballyvaughan, we take the inland country road back to Lisdoonvarna, and from there we drive out to the ocean’s edge at Doolin, where ferries take tourists to the Aran Islands. We park the Renault on the verge of the road and we walk along the pier. The wind is blowing, and below us the sea crashes onto the shore. We find a pub at the top of the pier, and we order bowls of hot chowder and brown bread. A lone teenage girl plays a fiddle in the front bar. A coach-load of tourists arrives, and they
gather around her. The girl stops playing and begins to sing. I walk to the front bar, where I stand watching her. She sits with her fiddle held to her chest like a little girl holding a favourite doll, and her long, orange-red hair falls down by her white face. I stare at her mouth as the words leave it. The tourists applaud as she finishes, and she puts the fiddle down on the seating and walks to me.

  ‘Hello,’ she says.

  I realise I have been staring at her. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘That song …’

  ‘That’s okay. Some songs do that.’

  ‘It reminded me of someone.’

  ‘So I see.’ She pauses. ‘I’m Aoife.’

  ‘Aoife …’ I reply, still confused by the place the song has taken me.

  ‘Aoife Jensen.’

  ‘Jensen?’ I look to her now, to the pale-blue eyes in the pale skin.

  ‘Yes, my father is from Denmark. Came here to West Clare on holiday, met my mother, made me, and stayed.’

  ‘A Norse and Irish mix,’ I say. ‘A powerful blend. Just like the old days.’

  ‘Yes,’ she laughs. ‘Just like the old days.’

  ‘I have to go,’ I say, glancing away. I take her white hand in mine. ‘Goodbye, Aoife Jensen. Tell your dad he made a beautiful girl.’

  We leave the pub in Doolin, return to the Renault parked along the verge of the small road, and drive south to the Cliffs of Moher. We walk out along a narrow path. It is evening, and the few remaining tourists are leaving. We reach the cliff’s edge and stand behind a slender wall of stone plinths. A wind is blowing. Below us, the blue-grey ocean pounds against rock. I look from the water to the girl. Her jacket billows in the wind, and her hair flies around her. In this place, the ocean has travelled from the American continent. That’s a long way, so the air itself has had the time and space to be rid of impurities. It arrives here clean, and I feel like I can breathe and gather all the shit in my head, and pack it into some shape I can get a hold of, and throw it up and away into the passing air rushing from sea to land; and just for a moment, I am renewed and free. I stand behind Mila, and hold her tightly as I kiss her head. We run back along the path to the car, relieved to get out of the wind, and we drive on along the ocean’s edge to where the coast softens to sand and grassy dunes at Lahinch. We stop at a small general-store for petrol and groceries, and then we drive home.