The Speckled People

by Hugo Hamilton

  The next day Ta Maria brought my mother to Krefeld, but you couldn’t buy anything that day. When they entered the shopping street they saw shoes thrown out on to the ground. The Germans would regret this one day, Ta Maria said. It was not so long ago that they were wearing newspapers around their feet. And now there were shoes lying everywhere on the ground and people stepping over them. You could smell the leather. For a moment it even looked like a shoe paradise where you could just pick them up and try them on. This was the city where my mother’s mother sang at the state opera house. Now people were stopping to look through the broken shop windows. A man with a clapper board was walking along the pavement advertising ladies’ stockings as if nothing had happened. It made no sense. Expensive shoes. Brand new. Some of the best quality. Some still in their boxes, or only half out, on display. Some other boxes trampled flat, and the thin, blue-grey paper that goes to wrap new shoes blowing up and down the street as if nobody cared, as if nobody needed footwear any more, as if they hated shoes.

  I couldn’t breathe very well. My shoulders were going up and down trying to get air. My mother stroked my head and listened to the howling in my chest. She prayed that I would get better. She smiled at me and said everything would soon be fine again, because her oldest sister Marianne was coming with her daughter Christiane. And Tante Marianne was very good at helping people breathe. She helped people in Salzburg when it was hard to breathe.

  For days and days my mother was cleaning the house. She polished the stairs and every piece of wood in the house was shining. She put fruit in a bowl on the table and baked a cake. Tante Marianne was going to get my room. It had no wallpaper any more, only pink plaster and some long cracks, but my mother said it looked clean and friendly, and that’s all that mattered. And as soon as Marianne walked in the front door, she would see the old oak trunk that came from their house on the Buttermarkt and think she was at home.

  My mother put on her blue suit with the big white collars. She put the big number 4711 on her wrists and wore the green Smaragd snake. We put on our best clothes, too, with no blue elbows, and kept looking out the window until Tante Marianne and Christiane arrived in a taxi with suitcases. Then my mother dropped her apron on the floor of the kitchen and ran all the way along the hallway smiling and crying at the same time. Tante Marianne was smiling and crying, too, as they embraced and stood back to look each other up and down.

  ‘Ja, ja, ja,’ they kept saying. And then, ‘Nein, nein, nein.’

  They could not believe their own eyes. They shook their heads and wiped their tears and embraced each other again. Ja, ja, ja, and nein, nein, nein, and ja, ja, ja, until Tante Marianne turned around to look at us. She knew our names from letters and photographs, but she had to kneel down and look at us properly, one at a time. She knew everything. She knew about Maria’s picture of my mother with the arms going all around the walls. She knew that I slapped the schoolteacher. And she knew about the mashed potato on the ceiling.

  My father carried in the suitcases and smiled at everyone. Christiane talked to us and Tante Marianne talked to my mother as if they couldn’t waste a minute. They went through each of the names one by one – Ta Maria, Elfriede, Adam, Lisalotte, Max, Minne and Wilhelm, and all the children, as if they had to travel around Germany in their heads until every question was asked and every story was told. My mother had to hear everything twice and clapped her hands around her face as if she could not believe what she heard.

  Tante Marianne brought new perfume into the house. Everyone wanted to be close to her all the time and sit beside her at the table. Maria followed her everywhere. My mother and Tante Marianne could not be separated either, because they kept talking, even when they were not in the same room. Even when Tante Marianne was upstairs and my mother was in the kitchen, they kept remembering things out loud, calling up and down the stairs as if they were at home again in the house on the Buttermarkt square. Tante Marianne called her Irmgard. We still called her Mutti, and it was like having two mothers in the house, because they had the same teeth and the same eyes and the same hair. They had the same words and the same way of laughing out loud until the tears came into their eyes. They had the same way of peeling an orange in strips along the side and the same trick of cutting the peel into the shape of teeth. Two mothers playing the monster with big orange teeth while my father was out getting coal for the boiler.

  ‘Vooo, vooo, vooo, vooo …,’ they both said. Then they started laughing so much that they couldn’t stop any more. Laughing and shaking, so that my father stopped pouring coal into the boiler to come and see what was happening.

  Tante Marianne’s suitcase was full of toys and books for everyone. There were lots of gummi bears and chocolates and biscuits that you would never get in the shops in Ireland. She brought a spirit level for my father, and a toy train for me and Franz. Some other presents were wrapped and put away immediately, for Christmas. There were biscuits to be eaten now and biscuits to be kept for later. One by one, Tante Marianne took things out with great care, explaining where they came from. We were allowed to read the Mecki books immediately, about a hedgehog who travelled all over the world in a hot air balloon with his crew – Charlie Penguin, and a cat called Kater Murr. Nobody in Ireland knows about Mecki, and they laugh at us because we don’t know who Red Riding Hood is and we don’t realise it’s the same as Rotkäpchen.

  Everything in our house was German again. Around the table every evening, all the stories were German. Tante Marianne’s daughter Christiane had plaits tied up over her head and she wore a dirndl like in fairy tales. Maria got a dirndl as well. Tante Marianne said it was lovely to see Franz and me wearing lederhosen and Irish sweaters, German below and Irish on top. She said it was remarkable that we could speak three languages. My mother told her how we sometimes got things wrong and how Maria came home one day and said: Ich kann es nicht believen, which is a mixed up German and English way of saying: I can’t believe it. Tante Marianne said our German was different, softer, more like the old days. And she wanted to hear some Irish spoken, so we said a prayer and she said it sounded different too, not a bit like English.

  I wanted Tante Marianne to stay in our house for ever. I went with her down to the seafront. I showed her all the street signs that had been changed into Irish. I showed her where the doctor lives and where the shops are. I told her that when you pass by the shoemaker’s shop you get an echo, because when you shout in, the shoemaker shouts back without looking up. She laughed and said it was just like something her father would do. People stopped to speak to her. The man in the fish shop recognised her immediately and said: ‘You must be the sister.’ He talked to her for a long time and Tante Marianne had to explain that she was from Germany, too, but that she was now living in Austria, in Salzburg.

  ‘Salzburg,’ he said. ‘I know the place you’re talking about.’

  We went with her on the bus to Glendalough to see the round tower. We had tea and cakes in a hotel and helped her stick stamps on lots of postcards. She said Ireland was so beautiful. She envied my mother living in a country where the people were so friendly and spoke English all the time. But my father didn’t like her saying that. He tried to stop himself being angry at the table that night. He didn’t want to make any trouble while there was a visitor in the house, but there was something Tante Marianne didn’t understand yet about Ireland, something that had to be explained.

  ‘One day, the man in the fish shop will speak his own language,’ he said.

  Tante Marianne said there was nothing wrong with speaking English. But my father shook his head. He said we were the new Irish children and soon the whole country would be speaking Irish in the shops. He said children were the strongest weapons, stronger than armies. But then Tante Marianne had an argument with my father. She said all the things that my mother can’t say. She said it was wrong to use children in war. She kept her arm around Maria all the time as if she was going to protect her for the rest of her life.

  ‘In G
ermany,’ she said, ‘they used the children, too.’

  That was the only argument in our house while she was there. On the last evening, before she was going away, she showed us a photograph of the house where she lived in Austria. It was a house with a small wooden fence outside, near the castle on the hill called the Mönchberg. One day we would go and visit her. And then they talked about all the other well-known visitors that came to stay there every summer. People like Oskar Kokoschka, the famous painter. People like Ernst Rathenau, whose cousin Walther was assassinated by the Nazis in Berlin. My mother looked at the photograph and said it was a good place to breathe in deeply. She said you could look out the window and see the castle above you every morning, as if it had just grown out of the rock overnight.

  When Tante Marianne was gone home again, Christiane stayed with us so that she could go to school in Ireland and learn English. My mother told me the story of going to visit her sister Marianne in the snow. It was during the war, when nobody had much food. My mother took a train all the way to Salzburg and walked up the Mönchberg in winter with a bucket of sauerkraut, because Marianne had nothing. She says she remembers the thick snow all around and the silence. Tante Marianne was always very strong, even though sad things happened in her life and her husband Angelo never came back from the war. My mother and Marianne met Angelo on the same day, when they were out in the country one time, on holiday. And afterwards Angelo sent a parcel to each of them with the exact same gift inside, a book by Thomas Mann. But it was Marianne who married him while the war was still on. They married by proxy, my mother says. One day Marianne sat in the house in Salzburg with a picture of Angelo and a glass of wine in front of her, while Angelo sat around with his friends in Split and a picture of Marianne in front of him. They got married miles and miles apart. And that’s why they’re still so close, even though she heard nothing more and no more letters came home. She waited and waited, but he never came back from the war. And then one day, Marianne started up a guest house. And that’s why all the famous guests like Ernst Rathenau and Oskar Kokoschka are coming to stay in her house on the Mönchberg, because Marianne was kind to people with bad lungs who couldn’t breathe very well in Germany and now they’re being kind back to her.

  I was better again. The howling stopped. But there was trouble for us on the street. Everybody knew that we were German again. In the fish shop, the man leaned over the counter to look at us and say the word Achtung, as if all the people in Ireland were going to speak German from now on. Everybody in the shop turned around. He tried some more German words and I know he’s only joking, because he’s a nice man with a red face and who laughs so loud that it echoes around the fish shop. Other people are the same, they keep asking us to say things in German. But we’re afraid. I pretend I don’t know any German. I pretend I’m Irish and speak only English. But the boys outside the shops can see us wearing lederhosen, so they call us Nazis.

  ‘Donner und Blitzen,’ I hear them shout. With one arm up in the air they keep saying: ‘Sieg Heil.’

  I know they get all those words from reading comics in the barber shop. My mother says that’s all they know about Germany. My father says there’s always somebody laughing in Ireland. He doesn’t let comics into the house because they are in English and have Germans dying on every page.

  Then it’s time to talk about Christmas. Because Christmas is something German, too. My mother tells us that pink skies are a sign of the angels baking. The angels leave sweets on the stairs. My mother sings ‘Tannenbaum’ and then, as if she asked for it, the snow started falling. Thick flakes coming down silently and we hardly even noticed it. We ran into the street and looked up at the snow falling past the street light. One or two flakes fell on to my eyes and gave me white eyelashes. Franz opened his mouth and tried to eat some of the snow as it came down and he said it was like free ice pops. My mother came out and said we should all wash our faces. She scooped up the snow from the wall with her bare hands and rubbed it against her face. Wonderful, she said, and we all did the same after her, even my father, cleaning our faces with the new white snow.

  Sixteen

  It was a new snow country. It snowed right through the night and by Christmas morning, when I woke up and looked out the window, I could see Germany. Everything was covered over and swollen with snow. The roofs of the houses, the cars, the trees, the garden walls, even the rubbish bins were white and clean. On the way to Mass the street was like a silent room and Maria said the snow was talking under our feet. There was a lost glove which somebody had stuck on a spike in the railings so that the person who owned it could come back and find it again. But now it was covered in snow like a big white hand saying stop.

  I knew that snow was not just for children, because my mother said it turned everybody into a child, even my father. He didn’t want to let on that he was excited. He didn’t want to make snowballs or anything like that, but I could see that he was happy because when they got married at Christmas in Germany, they travelled all the way down along the Rhine together in the snow. Snow was something German, he said. Normally the winter was too mild in Ireland and the only snow that you would see was in pictures on biscuit tins, or else as cotton wool on the crib or as icing sugar on cakes. It was the Gulf Stream, he explained. He laughed and said that Ireland would rather belong to a different climate because people had started growing palm trees in their gardens. Guest houses along the coast were called Santa Maria and Stella Maris, and there were lots of streets like Vico Road and Sorrento Terrace that made you feel like you were in a warmer country. But on Christmas morning all the streets should have had German names because everything was wrapped in white, even the palm trees.

  The only thing different was the Christmas lights blinking on and off in the windows. I knew that my mother and father would never have fairy lights on the tree. Instead we had candles, because that’s what they did in Germany and my mother even had special candleholders that clipped on to the branches. We had hanging chocolate angels and lots of other things that had come in a big parcel from Germany. I knew that other children had Santa Claus and they knew what he was going to bring them. Sometimes people in the street would ask us what Santa was going to bring and we didn’t know. We never talked about that. One of the neighbours once brought us to see Santa in one of the shops, but I could see his brown fingers from smoking. He was coughing a lot and I saw him afterwards having a cup of tea with his beard off. I knew who he was, too, because I saw him coming out of the Eagle House another time and he wasn’t able to walk very well and had to hold on to the wall.

  We had Christkind instead and everything was a secret anyway until the very last minute. We were not even allowed into the front room for Advent, because some of the gifts were already laid out in the corner behind the sofa under a big brown sheet of paper. We were only allowed in to help with the Christmas tree, and once, when my mother had to leave the room to get something, I wanted to look under the brown sheet, but I was afraid the Christkind would take all the presents away again. My mother said it was not the gifts that would be taken away but the surprise, which was worse. I knew that other children were getting guns and cowboy suits, but we never got guns or swords or anything to do with fighting. Instead, we got a surprise, as well as something made by my father and something educational, like a microscope.

  It was hard to wait. We stood in a line in the hallway, the youngest first and the oldest last. My father was in the front room lighting all the candles and we could smell the matches. When everything was ready, he opened the door wide and the candles were reflected in his glasses. My mother started singing ‘Tannenbaum’ as we slowly walked into the room and found all the gifts and sweets laid out on the chairs. There was even a trail of sweets on the floor as if the Christkind had been in a hurry at the last minute. Then everything was a surprise. There were toys and games and books from Germany and I knew I was so lucky that we were German at Christmas. We kneeled down to say thank you, and then my father put on the
record of the Cologne Children’s Choir so that the whole house filled up with the bells of the Cologne Cathedral ringing out across the sea to Dublin. We might as well be in Kempen, my mother said, with the taste of Pretzel and Lebkuchen and marzipan potatoes rolled in cinnamon.

  Later on, we went out to play in the snow. We built a snowman in the front garden, and it was only when we saw other children on the street that we realised where we were. There were marks where they had scraped snow off the pavement or off the walls and you could see Ireland underneath. A car had skidded, too, and left two black streaks on the road. We went from one garden to the next looking for new untouched sheets of snow, where the ground was still under a dream. And when all the other children had disappeared inside for Christmas dinner, we went as far as the football field to see how deep the snow was there.

  But then we were ambushed by a gang of boys. We had never seen them before and it looked like they had been waiting for us. We were trapped in the lane and couldn’t get home again. Maria and I ran away into the field through an opening in the barbed-wire fence, but they chased after us. The others had already caught Franz and pushed him up against the wall, holding a stick across his neck. They twisted his arm up behind his back and made him walk towards the field where Maria and I were caught, too, near a line of tall eucalyptus trees. One of them was forcing snow up under Maria’s jacket and she was starting to cry.

  ‘Leave us alone,’ she said, but they just laughed.