Twenty-four
Then it was the time of the bees.
My father had been preparing for a long time, talking to other beekeepers on the phone and planning everything like a new business. He worked out how much he would have to spend on one side of the page and how much the bees would pay him back with honey on the other. He bought a jungle hat with a wire cage around his face and leather gloves that reached all the way up his arms, past his elbows. He bought the hives and the frames and a smoke gun where you could put in a piece of rolled-up sackcloth on fire and shoot smoke out through the spout to calm the bees down. Everything else was free. The bees would fly out from the roof of the breakfast room from morning till night and nobody could stop them collecting pollen.
On the evening they arrived, my mother got out her special tablecloth, as if the bees were coming to tea like relations from Germany or west Cork. It was like having a party because she put flowers on the table for them and bought lemonade, too. From now on we knew we would never be the same as any other family, because we had friends who were bees and everybody on our street thought the bees were sitting at the table with us eating bread and jam. We even said a special prayer for them, and when the bell rang we all jumped up from the table together and ran to the front door. There was a tall man standing there with a straw skep in his hand. He smiled and spoke to my father in Irish. Then they both went up the stairs and through my bedroom, and we watched from the room above as my father stepped out the window on to the roof of the breakfast room with the cage around his head.
My mother had a picture in the diary of a man named John Glenn who was dressed like a beekeeper. He was the first man to go into orbit, but then he lost his balance in the bath one day and broke his middle ear and stayed in orbit for the rest of his life after that. My father looked like he was in space for ever when he came out in his overalls and his long gloves and with his heavy boots on. The tall man said there was no need to shoot smoke because the bees were very happy to come to our house. He banged the skep and threw them all out on a board where they marched into the new hive with their white tails up in the air.
My mother and father are not afraid to be different. Other families are getting a car and a TV and we want those things as well, but we’re German and Irish and have bees as friends. They say we’re lucky to be so different because bees were better for the world and better for us. Most other children don’t even know the difference between a bee and a wasp. The TV kills your imagination and makes you stupid. But I know the other boys are not stupid, they just don’t care if there’s a difference between a wasp and a bee. They don’t care about the famine either. They don’t care about coffin ships and they don’t care about concentration camps.
All they care is whether we can fight. They call us Hitler and Eichmann and they want to see if we can fight like Germans. They want to hear us saying aaargh and uuumph like they do in comics and films. We try and run away. One day when they came after us, I ran one way and Franz ran a different way. I got home first through the football field, back along the lanes and in the back door. I didn’t know where Franz was. He came home later and stood at the front door with blood on his face and blood on his shirt.
‘Mein Schatz, what happened?’ my mother asked.
There was nothing we could do about it. She could not tell us to stop being German, so she brought Franz into the kitchen and began to clean up the blood on his face. She got some chocolate out of the press to make things better. She said it was good that we didn’t fight back because we are not the fist people. We are the word people and one day we will win them over. One day the silent negative will win them all over.
When my father came home he was very angry, because nobody is allowed to hit Franz except him. He examined the shirt with the blood on it and said he could not let it go. I thought it was great because he was going to pay them back for what they did to Franz. Maybe he would get the boys who did it and make them kneel down to ask God how many lashes. He put his cap back on again and went straight down the road to one of the small houses and my mother tried to hold him back by the elbow at the last minute to make sure that he would stay friendly.
‘I’m not going down with fists,’ my father said.
Instead, he took the bloody shirt and brought Franz with him. When they got to the house and rang the bell, a woman answered the door and pretended that they had come to the wrong house. It was a funny thing to say, because the boy who hit Franz was hiding behind the banisters right beside her. My father smiled and said he didn’t come with fists, but he wasn’t leaving until somebody listened to him making a speech. So the man of the house had to come out in his slippers and his sleeves rolled up and a tattoo of an anchor on his arm. He was very tall, almost twice the size of my father. He had twice as many children as my father and their house was not even half the size of ours. He was tired and he had a stubble on his face, and it looked like he had no time to listen to speeches from people in bigger houses. The television was on in the front room and he was missing half the football match. My father didn’t care how big the man was or how small his house was or if he watched TV all day. He wasn’t looking for revenge. He just held up the shirt with the blood on it and let the tall man look down at it for a long time.
‘This is your own blood,’ my father said.
Then he recited pieces that he remembered off by heart from books he had read. He said it was time to fight for the rights of small people and small nations. He said the reason we were all on our knees was that others thought they were so great. He said it was no use fighting each other all the time because then Ireland would never have its own inventions and its own language.
The man with the tattoo started scratching his belly. He thought he was back at school. He had no idea why my father was coming down to his house to start reciting things from books and saying a few words, too, in Irish with a bloody shirt in his hand. Maybe he thought it was like a new religion or a new political party looking for money. Maybe he thought my father was a Communist. And that was even worse than being a Nazi, that was like the nuclear thing, when the air is full of red dots and everybody stays inside for the rest of their lives watching television. The man with the tattoo started looking down at the sour sallies that were growing beside his slippers at the door. Then my father said goodbye and insisted on shaking hands. He didn’t even mention the boy who hit Franz. He just left it at that. He even closed the gate after him, the gate that was never closed in its life before because the man with the tattoo and his whole family just left it open all the time and didn’t care how many dogs came into their garden to lift their leg and scratch the grass. As they walked away, my father told Franz not to look around.
‘Did you win them over?’ my mother asked.
‘They laughed,’ Franz said.
My mother said it didn’t matter because they were the fist people and you were right not to fight back, otherwise you would become just like them. My father didn’t even mind that they laughed and ignored his speech.
‘What matters,’ he said, ‘is that a small man was able to walk up to a big man and not be afraid.’
I knew it wasn’t over yet. I knew they would come looking for us again because I was Eichmann and I could do nothing about it. I wanted to be one of the fist people so that I could defend myself and not be afraid on the streets. From then on I wanted to be a real Nazi. I wanted to be so cruel and mean that they would be scared of me instead. In bed at night I thought of all the things I would do. I thought of bashing their heads against the wall. I thought of smashing a rock into some boy’s teeth. I would be famous all over the place. People would be afraid even to go swimming when I was out. I thought of them running away and hiding in doorways when they heard me coming, shivering at the sound of my name. Eichmann.
I started practising on my own. I learned how to do the evil smile. I learned to laugh like the Nazis do in films, slowly, while I was getting ready to torture somebody. I spoke English to myself in
a German accent. I kept saying things like ‘my friend’ and being so polite that people would be even more frightened when they realised that I was going to kill them. I stuck knives into puppets and grinned into the mirror. I threw rocks at cats. I practised torturing Franz and Maria. And one day, I even threw a chair at my mother and there was nothing she could do about it. So she left the chair there where it fell and said nobody else would ever pick it up again and it could stay there for a hundred years.
‘Why do you want to be one of the fist people?’ she asked.
‘It’s boring to be good,’ I said.
I wanted to be as bad as possible. When you’re bad you get a good feeling because people look shocked and worried and that makes you want to be even worse. If you’re good nobody looks at you.
‘I’m Eichmann,’ I said. ‘I’m going to kill people and laugh about it.’
She brought me into the front room and showed me a book where there was a picture of a boy in the street with his hands up in the air saying don’t shoot. She told me about a place called Auschwitz and how Eichmann was the man in charge of the trains for getting people there. She could remember Jewish people in Kempen. They were called ‘die Jüdchen: the little Jews’ because they lived in the small houses. She never saw any of them being taken away, but she said there was only one Jewish man who came back to Kempen after the war and he didn’t stay. He just came to look around once and then he left again and now there are no Jews in Kempen. She said they were our people. Our people died in concentration camps.
I wonder what it’s like for my cousins in Germany and if they still have to think about it every day like me. Is anyone calling them Nazis on the street? Here I have to be careful where I walk, because if they catch me then I’ll go on trial and they’ll execute me.
‘I don’t want to be German,’ I said.
She had tears in her eyes and said the Germans would never be able to go home again. Germans are not allowed to be children. They’re not allowed to sing children’s songs or tell fairy tales. They cannot be themselves. That’s why Germans want to be Irish or Scottish or American. That’s why they love Irish music and American music, because that gives them a place to go home to and be homesick for.
‘It’s like a birthmark,’ she said.
It was time for us to go down to the sea and look at the waves, because she had to carry on with her work. She stood at the door to watch us going across the street until we disappeared around the corner. I knew I was in the luckiest place in the world with the sea close by. The sun was shining and you could smell the dust in the air. There were tar bubbles on the road and further along you could see a shimmer, as if the ground was rising up in the heat. Some of the shops had canopies that were flapping in the breeze. The boats were out on the bay and there was a haze over the harbour. We went swimming, Noel, Franz and I. We dived under the water for as long as possible. I knew I could stop breathing longer than anyone else. I could stay down there until my lungs nearly burst. I was the champion at not breathing and not speaking. I could hear the voices around the pool, but they were muffled and far away. Down there it was blue and calm, like being inside a cool drink.
Sometimes the bees come into my room at night. They go after the light because they think it’s daytime and they want to get as close to the sun as possible. They go mad and whirl around the light until they crash into the bulb in the middle of the room and fall down. Then they pick themselves up and start again, whirling around and getting more and more excited and impatient, until you switch off the light and they move to the window instead. Then they buzz up and down the window for ages trying to get out to the light in the street, until they get so tired they drop down on the floor and crawl around in circles. They always go in circles when they’re dying, as if they’re trying to make themselves dizzy. You can’t let them out, and I have to sleep with my head covered up in case they come over and sting me in the middle of the night.
I know it’s the smallest things that hurt most because I got stung in the garden one day when I put my hand down on a bee in the grass. He had been hit by a drop of rain and was going mad in circles. When I put my hand down he stung me and after that nobody wanted to play on the grass any more. My father says that stings are good for you and we’ll never get rheumatism. If you want to reduce the pain, he says, you should take the sting out quickly to stop the poison going in. He explained that a bee sting is very different from a wasp sting, because a bee has a hook at the end of it and he showed it to us once under the microscope. He says we’ll soon get used to bee stings and won’t even feel them. And my mother says we shouldn’t howl so much every time a bee stings us because the neighbours will think we’re being tortured to death.
Sometimes when I’m inside the house I hear somebody screaming outside and I know it’s a bee sting. Maria or Ita or Franz, everybody has a different scream. And sometimes they scream before they’re even stung. If a bee goes near them they start shouting and running inside, as if they’re going to die. It’s not even the bee’s fault. They fly out over the garden and come back with pouches so full of pollen, like heavy suitcases. And when the wind suddenly blows around the corner at the back of the house, they get pushed back down into the garden and find it difficult to pick themselves up again. Sometimes the wind blows them into somebody’s hair and it’s not their fault because they just want to get back up and carry the pollen home to the hive. Then they get tangled up in hair. You hear Maria or Ita screaming and running into the house even though the bee hasn’t stung yet and is only trapped and buzzing like mad, trying to get back out.
One day it happened to my mother and we invented a way of stopping the bee from stinging. My mother came running inside and shouting that there was a bee in her hair. She held her hair right to try and stop it from getting closer to her head. The bee was probably lashing out and stinging everything it could touch because it was trapped in a prison of hair, like a spider’s web with no chance of getting out alive. But as long as it didn’t get close to the skin, then there was still a chance of stopping it from stinging. She told me to get a tea towel and put it on the place where the bee was. I could feel the buzzing under my fingers and I pressed hard until the buzzing went up to a high pitch, like a motorbike far away. Then I pressed even harder until I felt a crack under the towel and the bee was dead. Nobody said anything about it afterwards, in case my father would get angry that we were killing all his bees. After that I was the expert at stopping stings. I was the sting stopper.
Twenty-five
After that we tried to be as Irish as possible.
There was a new baby in the house named Bríd. Onkel Ted came out specially to our church to say Mass in Irish and we were the altar boys, Franz and me. Some people coughed and walked out because they thought they were in the wrong country and couldn’t pray to God in Irish. But Onkel Ted carried on without even looking around once. He baptised Bríd and poured holy water over her head, and afterwards there was a big cake in our house with a Celtic spiral made of Smarties. It didn’t matter who walked out of the church with a bad cough because my father said Bríd was born and baptised now and those people would soon be outnumbered. My mother wanted to know why they were more afraid of the Irish language than they were of the bees, and Onkel Ted said maybe the sting is worse. Franz said Irish speakers don’t sting and then everybody laughed and ate the spiral cake.
Then we went back to Connemara for three months to be as Irish as possible. We got new caps and new rain macs and went on a train with a group of boys who were all going to live in a full-Irish fireside. We were going to school in the Gaeltacht and we would come back like native speakers. At the station, a photographer came to take a picture for the newspapers and my mother kept it in the diary. Franz and me and the other boys waving goodbye on the platform, because we would not see or speak to anyone in our family until we came home fully Irish.
Franz went to An Cheathrú Rua and I went to a new place called Béal an Daingin, but I was s
ick again and the howling started up in my chest every night. The people in the house were very nice to me, but sometimes I wanted to go home because I couldn’t breathe. I had lots of trouble with the dogs howling in my chest. The local doctor came and he said I would soon get over it. But I was coughing all the time and had to stay in bed. Then Bean an tí gave me cigarettes that were good for asthma. She bought a packet of Sweet Afton and put them beside my bed with a box of matches. She told me that if I felt short of breath I should light up a cigarette and smoke away like a good man, because that would help me to cough up all the bad stuff and not be afraid of the dark. Then I got better again and forgot that I was German and started learning how to live in Irish.
There was a boy named Peadar in the house who showed me how to get water and how to milk the cows. Bean an tí taught me how to find all the places where the hens laid eggs. I helped Fear an tí to stack turf against the side of the house and I learned how to say ‘go dtachtfaidh sé thú’ which is the Irish for I hope it chokes you. I learned how to turn English words into Irish and to say ‘mo bhicycle’ and ‘mo chuid biscuits’. I learned how to walk to school backwards to stop the hailstones stinging my legs. I watched men gathering seaweed and putting it on big lorries to be taken away to Galway and turned into cough medicine. I saw people laying out salted fish on the stone walls to dry them in the sun. I saw the tide going out every day as if it was never coming back, and I saw donkeys with their feet tied together to stop them running away and laughing at everybody.
There was a curly piece of brown sticky paper hanging in the middle of every room with dead flies stuck to it. There was a dog beside the fire who had his chin on the floor and his eyes closed and only lifted one ear to hear if anyone was coming. Every day a man named Cóilín came to visit and sit by the window. He was a cousin belonging to the woman of the house and he would look out at the road and tell them who was passing by. There was a radio in the house but there was no TV and no need for one, because the man at the window was the man who said the news. The woman of the house could carry on making the dinner and the man of the house could sit with his pipe by the fireside without looking up. That’s Joe Phait going west now with his new coat on, Cóilín would say. Here’s Nancy Seóige making her way back from the east now with biscuits for her sister. There were four different directions you could go – west, from the west, east and from the east. Sometimes they came in to visit and then the whole house was like a television programme, with the man at the window keeping everybody talking. Nancy Seóige came in to smoke a fag out of the wind and explain that the biscuits were for her sister, because she was ill in bed for a long time and the Sweet Afton were doing her no good any more. She came in from the east and when she finished her story she went back out to the west.
The Speckled People Page 20
