In the front room, Gearóid smiles and claps his hands together with a bang. He says my father is a man who does what he believes in, not just for money. He’s a real fighter who wrote articles for Aiséirí and made great speeches on O’Connell Street once. He says people will still throw their hats up in the air these days for a good speech. Ireland is far from being finished and there is a lot of de-Anglicisation still left to be done. My father says he loves his country as much as ever, but he has a different way of fighting now, through his children. From now on he’s going to use his own children as weapons, he says, because children are stronger than armies, stronger than speeches or articles or any number of letters to the government. One child is worth more than a thousand guns and bombs, he says.
‘You’re the lifeblood,’ Gearóid says to my mother in Irish. He says the Irish language is dying, day by day. It’s choking to death slowly with everybody speaking English on the radio and in the government. But he means the opposite, like in the films. He holds his fist up in the air and says the language is not dead at all, and there’s a few shakes left in the animal yet, as long as there is one family like us in the country. Even if Irish is not our mother tongue and we speak German, too, we are still more Irish than many others. Teaghlach lán-ghaelach, he calls us, a full-Irish fireside. Then he has to leave again. He doesn’t stay for tea because he has to go to visit some more families and deliver the paper to them, too. We stand at the door and watch him getting into the car. We hear the car starting with a big growl and then we wave goodbye, the full-Irish family on the doorstep.
Afterwards, my father tells us about the time he made a speech in Dublin, with thousands of people looking up at him. He can still hear the sound of them cheering every time he walks up O’Connell Street. It’s something you never forget, something you carry with you, like the sound of the sea in your ears. He takes off his glasses and starts making a speech at the dinner table. His face looks very different, like a different man in the house, a man I’ve never seen before. There are two red marks, one on each side of his nose. His eyes look smaller and darker, and his voice gets harder and stronger, like the radio. It looks as if he has never seen us before either, as if he’s surprised to be here in this house. And he talks so fast that he has a little white blob of spit on his bottom lip. Every time Gearóid comes to the house he’s like this afterwards. Happy and proud one minute, sad and angry the next, because not everybody in Ireland is doing what he told them to do.
He tells us about the time he went all over the country on his motorbike, frightening the cows as he drove past. He saw cows shaking their heads to try to get rid of the noise, like a bad dream. He tells us about a time when the police tried to stop one of the articles he wrote. They came to the offices of Aiséirí and said they would close down the paper, but Gearóid wasn’t afraid of them. They weren’t afraid of going to prison for what they believed, even if the whole country was against them. So they printed the paper with the article in it, because you have to do what’s right, he says. My mother nods, because she’s thinking of the time when Onkel Gerd refused to be a Nazi. I want to be proud of my father, too, so I asked him what was in the article and why they tried to stop it, but he wouldn’t say. My mother doesn’t know either, so we all wait for him to tell us.
‘Explain it to them,’ she says.
It’s not something he wants to talk about. I know it’s all in the wardrobe upstairs, but I’m not allowed to go near anything. I know there are piles of old newspapers and things from the time he made those speeches, hidden away in boxes. So I ask him again, why the police tried to close down the newspaper. But then he slams his fist down on the table and all the cups and spoons jump in the air. Maria shivers.
‘I won’t be interrogated by my own family,’ he said. Then he walked away to the front room and slammed the door. My mother sits with us for a long time and tells us her stories about Germany instead. She doesn’t mind being interrogated. And sometimes she says things that we don’t understand. She looks far away and says we will be putting our parents on trial one day and asking what they did.
‘You are the fathers and mother now,’ she says. ‘And we are the children.’
She is starting to clear the dishes without thinking. She’s not even looking at what she’s doing. It doesn’t make sense stacking up plates and unstacking them again. I know she’s thinking right back to when she was a girl in Kempen. She says things were different when she was small in Germany and my father was small in Ireland. We will soon be adults, she says, and they will be the children. We will grow up and look back at all the things they did in their lives, like trying to sell crucifixes and party hats and sweets. We will go over the secrets, too, that are hidden in the wardrobe.
‘You’ll say we’re children and we didn’t know any better.’
Then she starts clearing the dishes all over again, stacking up the plates and collecting the knives and forks. We start asking her more questions. I want to know if she’s Irish or German now.
‘What country do you love?’ Franz asks.
‘Ireland,’ she says, because that’s where she’s living now and that’s where the postman brings her letters and where her children are going to school. But what about Germany? And then she says she loves Germany, too, very much, because that’s where she was born and went to school herself and where she remembers the postman coming to the door.
‘You can’t love two countries,’ I said. ‘That’s impossible.’
‘Why not?’
‘What if they start fighting against each other?’
‘I don’t just love one of my children,’ she says. ‘I still love all my children, even when they start fighting.’
In school, they teach us to love our own country. They sing a song about the British going home. The máistir takes out a tuning fork and taps it on his desk. It rings, and when he stands the fork up on the wood it makes a long note. We hum the note and sing about the British getting out of Ireland.
Ó ró sé do bheatha ’bhaile …
It’s a funny song and very polite. It says to the British that we hope they’ll keep healthy and have a good trip home. When you sing this song you feel strong. You sit in your desk with all the other boys singing around you at the same time and feel strong in your tummy, right up to your heart, because it’s about losing and winning.
The master says Irish history is like a hurling match in Croke Park with his team, County Mayo, losing for a long time, right up until the end of the match when they start coming back and win the game at the last minute. He says that’s the best way to win, to lose first. He tells us the story of a man named Cromwell who was winning and sent the Irish to Connaught or Hell. But they made one big mistake, leaving lots of dead people in Ireland to keep talking in the graveyard. The fools, the fools, he says, because then the Easter Rising happened and there was lots of fighting and dying and the British had to go home, even if they didn’t want to. Then the game was over and the British flag had to be taken down in Dublin Castle. Michael Collins arrived late and kept the viceroy waiting, but he said the British had kept him waiting for eight hundred years so a few minutes wouldn’t make much difference. The master taps the tuning fork and we sing again. Even when we’re not singing the song in our class, you still hear it coming from another class somewhere else down the corridor.
My brother gets in trouble because he writes with his left hand and the master wants everyone in Ireland to write with the same hand. Franz can only eat with his left hand and write with his left hand. He’s a ciotóg, the master says. My mother has to go into school and tell the master that Onkel Ted was a a ciotóg, too, and now he’s a Jesuit. But that makes no difference and the master ties Franz’s hand behind his back to make sure he can only write with his right hand. All that comes out on the page is a scribble. I want to help him, because the master laughs and says it looks like a snail has crossed the page with ink.
I know what it’s like to lose, because I’m Irish
and I’m German. My mother says we shouldn’t be afraid of losing. Winning makes people mean. It’s good that the Irish are not losing any more. It’s good to love your country and to be patriotic, but that doesn’t mean you have to kill people who belong to other countries. Because that’s what the Germans did under the Nazis. They tried to win everything and ended up losing everything. Like a hurling match? Yes, she says slowly, like a very brutal hurling match.
The master says I’m a dreamer and that’s worse than being a ciotóg. He says I’m always disappearing off to some other place. He wishes he could tie my head down, but that isn’t possible, because no matter what happens, you’re still free to go anywhere you like inside your own head. You can travel faster than the speed of light to any place you want in the universe, but now it’s time to be here in the glorious Republic of Ireland, he says. He bangs his stick on the desk and asks me what blasted country I’m in at all. Germany? So then he has to come down to my desk and drag me back home to Ireland by the ear. The only way that he can stop me from emigrating again is to tie my head down with a poem after school. I have to stay behind and learn a big poem about a priest who was hanged long ago in the town of Ballinrobe where the master comes from in Mayo. We sit in the classroom alone when everyone else has gone home and learn all the verses about the priest being hung, drawn and quartered because he spoke against the British. I can see that the master has hair growing in his ears, like grass. I think of blood on the grass in Ballinrobe.
There are gangs in the school. At lunchtime, they fight each other in the yard and it’s all about winning and losing. One of the gangs is called the cavalry and they are looking for Indians to kill. When you’re in a gang, you feel strong in your tummy. You run and shout and everyone else is afraid. But they don’t want me any more because I’m a dreamer, so it’s best to stand with my back against the wall and make sure they don’t get my brother. One day, I saw them running through the yard and they punched a boy right in the stomach. The boy was eating lunch and when they hit him, he dropped his sandwiches and opened his mouth. There was no sound, only a piece of sandwich that came out and dropped on the ground, too. He stayed like that for a long time, leaning forward with his mouth wide open and a dribble coming down. I could tell they were jam sandwiches because the white bread was coloured pink. I thought of his mother making them and now they were wasted. Somebody came and picked them up but he didn’t want to eat any more, only cry. Then you could hear his voice coming out loud, like a high screech with lots of pain.
Back in class, the master said there would be no more gangs. The boy who was hit by the cavalry had gone home and the master made a big speech about the potato famine in Ireland. He said the people had green mouths because grass was all that was left to eat. He said it was a disgrace to hit anyone in the stomach while they were eating. I looked out and saw the sandwiches still lying on the ground. The yard was empty. I stared at the seagulls screeching and fighting over the jam sandwiches.
And then the master bangs the desk again, as if he wants the stick to be a tuning fork and give a long humming note. He says he’s fed up with me dreaming and not knowing what country I’m in, so now there’s trouble and I feel like going to the toilet quickly. He’s going to punish me, but not with the stick, and not with a poem about Ballinrobe or a song about the famine. Instead he’s going to send me over to the girls’ school and that’s the worst punishment of all, to go over there with ribbons in your hair. He takes me by the ear and we travel at the speed of light over to the girl country. I sit at the back of the class and see the girls looking around and giggling, until it’s time to go home.
At home, my mother says we have started doing strange things again. When it was nearly dinner time, she told us to put the bowl of mashed potato on the table. My father was talking to her in the kitchen and she was listening and cooking at the same time, so I carried the mashed potato up to the room where we play and took the lid off. With the spoon, I threw a bit of the mash at the wall. It stayed there and we looked at it for a while. I threw another spoonful at the ceiling and it stuck as well. It made a strange sound each time, like a click. It made a different shape each time, too, sometimes like a little cloud, sometimes with a spike pointing downwards.
Maria said she was going to run and tell on me. But I told her that we had to make a sacrifice. I closed the door and said it was our duty to do this for Ireland. We had to make as many shapes as we could. Franz took lumps out with his hand and together we tried to cover the whole ceiling. Sometimes a lump came unstuck and fell down again and Maria screamed. We laughed and threw more and more of it up, until it was all gone and the whole room was covered. My mother came in and saw the glass bowl, empty on the floor. She said we were going out of our minds. My father rushed into the room and looked at bits of mashed potato on the ceiling and said they would never come off. They would be there for ever. We were in real trouble. But my mother wouldn’t let him hit us. Instead of getting angry, she said you couldn’t punish a thing like that because it happened only once in a lifetime. My father was still frowning, but then she put her arm around him and said it didn’t matter going without mashed potato for one day. She said they were lucky to have children with such imagination. She smiled and said you had to have an imagination to do something as mad as that.
Fifteen
I was sick again. The dogs were howling in my chest. At breakfast time I could not even eat the porridge. I looked at the ring of milk around the rim and smelled the warm steam coming up into my face, but my eyes were blurry and I couldn’t breathe. My father said I was trying not to go to school. He was a schoolteacher once and he knew when people were making things up, he said, and if I was really sick I wouldn’t have to prove it. But when it was time to go to school, my legs were soft and I couldn’t walk. I heard Franz say that my face was white, so then my mother and father had to help me up the stairs, one either side. And halfway up my head dropped down on the step in front of me and I felt the cold wood on my forehead. I heard the sound of buzzing in my ears and the sound of my mother calling me from far away. Then I fell asleep.
When I woke up again my father was gone. Only my mother was there sitting on the stairs waiting for me to come back. She asked me if I was ready to go on and then she helped me the rest of the way up to bed. She stayed with me and sat on the bed repairing a jumper, pulling a blue woollen thread across the elbow. Some boys in school had leather elbows, but we had dark blue elbows. She told me stories to make the howling go away. So I lay there watching her, and sometimes I fell asleep and woke up again later, only to see that she was still mending the same spot and telling the same story, as if no time was going by.
She told me about the time there was a big fire in Kempen. She was afraid of fire, she said, because her sister Lisalotte’s hair once caught fire on a candle. When you see something like that happening with your own two eyes, when you see it happen to somebody else it’s much worse and you remember it more than when it happens to yourself. She can’t forget the time people came to set fire to the synagogue and she hopes I never have to witness something like that with my own two eyes. That was the time Germany was sick and took a long time to get better.
My mother had to leave school early and go to work. Onkel Gerd had no more money once he lost his job as lord mayor. She got a job in the Kempen registry office and had to learn typing and filing names in alphabetical order. She remembers people coming in to find out if their grandfathers or grandmothers had ever been Jewish. She remembers how happy one old woman was, how she had tears in her eyes and put her hand on her heart when she found out that she was one of the lucky ones. Other people were not so lucky. Every day, they came to make sure they were not Jewish. Every day, Ta Maria wondered if the Catholics would be next. It wasn’t long afterwards that the Nazis closed down the convent in Mühlhausen and wrote dirty words all over the classrooms.
My mother had long plaits at that time, down to her waist, like two dark ropes. But Ta Maria said it
was time to cut them. It was time to grow up and look like an adult. So one day she stopped being a girl. She asked the hairdresser to give her the Olympia Roll, because that’s what all the women were wearing in the films, but, by then, her hair had already been cut too short and she had to wait for it to grow again. She says it’s funny how you can get so upset about something like that, how important those things can be and how you can sometimes cry more about little things than all the big things put together. She had to wear a hat and Ta Maria promised to go down to Krefeld with her and make up for it with new shoes.
My mother says she was at work when the trouble happened and saw nothing herself. She only heard about it later from her youngest sister Minne. But she smelled the smoke in the streets that afternoon. The synagogue was on fire and the fire brigade was standing by, doing nothing. Men in brown uniforms had gone around to the Jewish houses and Minne saw them going by with red batons. She said the curtains were flapping out through the broken windows and there were books lying on the pavement. Somebody’s private letters were flying around in the street like litter and there were children walking around the town with black and white ivory keys that belonged to a piano.
Onkel Gerd said they could not be part of this. You couldn’t watch something like that. People in Kempen blew their breath out slowly and thought how lucky they were not to be Jewish. That same evening, they all went to the big Catholic procession in the town where hundreds of people quietly passed through the Buttermarkt square with candles and torches, praying and singing hymns as if they needed to be especially close to God from then on.
The Speckled People Page 11
