Then I heard my father speaking right beside me. I got a fright because I thought he was coming to get me, but he was just asking for the Evening Press. He didn’t know I was there at all. I looked up and saw him standing beside me, putting the money into the man’s hand. I knew it was my father’s soft Cork accent. It was my father’s briefcase and I even knew what was inside – his flask and his rain mac and his book on Stalingrad, with the train ticket halfway through to show how much he had left to read.
‘Vati,’ I said. ‘It’s me.’
I waited for him to look down, but he didn’t see me. He was thinking of all the things he had not finished yet and all the things he was still going to do when he got the time. He put the paper under his arm and walked away. I wanted to run after him as if he was my father. I wanted to tug him by the sleeve of his coat. I wanted him to talk to me about things like films or football. But he didn’t know anything about that. And, anyway, I would have to pretend he was my friend and go all the way home on the train with him. We would have to talk Irish together, as if there was no other language in the world. Everybody would look at us. They would know that we were homeless and had nowhere to go, because we lost the language war. They would know that we were still locked in the wardrobe and didn’t know any better.
I didn’t move. I didn’t run after him. I knew I was doing the same thing as he had done to his own father, the sailor. I stood still and heard the brakes of the buses screeching. I saw the people in a long queue waiting. I saw the windows of the buses steamed up and the places where people rubbed a circle clear to look out. I heard the man shouting ‘Herald-ah-Press’ and the echo still coming back across the street over the traffic. I watched my father walking away towards the train station like one of the ordinary people of Dublin. I watched his limp and his briefcase swinging, as if I had never seen him before in my life.
Twenty-seven
One day a man put a bomb in a briefcase and went out to work, like my father. He looked at his watch because he had an important meeting to go to and he wanted to be there on time. It was a hot day and he brought a clean shirt with him as well. Before the meeting, he asked everybody to wait a few minutes so he could change his shirt first. They told him to hurry up and waited outside while he went into a room and clicked open the briefcase with the bomb inside instead of his lunch and his flask. He took out the shirt and started getting the bomb ready straightaway. It was two bombs really, but he could only fix the fuse on one of them, because he had been injured in the war and only had one arm, like Mr Smyth in the vegetable shop. He could only see with one eye, too, because there was a patch over the other one, but he was not afraid to die and he took out a small set of pliers and did his best. Everybody knows how long it takes to change your shirt, even if you only have one arm. He was taking so long that somebody came to the door to ask what was keeping him and then his hand started shaking, so he decided, in the end, that one of the bombs would be more than enough. He changed his shirt quickly and came out again with the briefcase in his hand. The empty sleeve of the missing arm was tucked into the pocket of his jacket, like Mr Smyth. He didn’t have to shake hands with anyone and nobody knew what he was thinking either, because he was like Onkel Ted and not afraid of silence. They didn’t know that there was a bomb inside the briefcase for Germany, and when he got to the meeting where they were all standing around a table and looking at the map of the world, he gave the briefcase to another man and told him to put it as close to Hitler as possible. Then he walked away and heard the explosion right behind him. He thought Hitler was dead and everybody was free again, but that was a big mistake because, after all that trouble, Hitler wasn’t even hurt and came out with only a bit of dust on his uniform.
‘Make sure of it,’ my mother says. ‘For God’s sake, don’t just walk away and leave it to somebody else.’
The man who planted the bomb was arrested in Berlin very shortly afterwards. His name was Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and he was immediately taken out into a square to be executed by firing squad, along with some of the people who were on his side. Later on, his brother and all his friends were arrested, too, and put on trial for planning a puppet show against Hitler. They were put to death in a very cruel way and their children were taken away and given new names so they would forget who they were. One of the boys wrote his real name on the inside of his lederhosen, but they were all sent to a special school so that they would grow up as Nazis, and none of the puppets would ever try and speak against Hitler again.
Afterwards, Hitler went on the radio to tell everyone in the world that he was alive and still had two eyes and two ears and two of everything. In case there was a mistake and some people might not have heard the radio, they collected everyone together in halls and theatres and schools to tell them that Hitler never felt better. My mother says that she was on a platform waiting for a train when she heard the news that he was not dead yet and the war was still on. Her sister Marianne was working in Salzburg and had to go to a big meeting in the opera house to be told what happened, as if they were about to hear some music. When everybody was sitting down in their seats and all the coughing and whispering stopped, an SS man came out on stage to make a speech. He said there was some bad news. Somebody had betrayed Germany and tried to kill Hitler with a bomb. But there was nothing to worry about, he said, because Hitler was still alive and could never be killed, not even by a bomb in the same room. Then Marianne stood up.
‘Leider,’ she said out loud for everyone to hear. ‘What a pity.’
The audience turned around to look at her standing up with her arms folded against the Nazis. Everybody in the whole opera house was waiting for her to be taken away and maybe even executed immediately. But then at the last minute, an older woman she had never seen before stood up beside her and spoke very calmly.
‘Ja, leider,’ the woman said. ‘Yes, what a pity such a thing can happen.’
Then everybody thought it was just a mistake. Maybe Marianne wasn’t a woman against Hitler with her arms folded, but a woman so much for Hitler that she was not afraid to stand up and say it out loud. Before Marianne could say anything more, before she could say that she really wished Hitler had been killed by the bomb and that his two of everything had been blown to bits, the woman pulled her back down quickly into the seat and told her to stop trying to get herself killed.
My mother says it’s hard to tell that story, even it it’s true. Nobody will believe it any more, because lots of people made up things like that after the war. Everybody wanted to prove they were against the Nazis and never said a word against Jewish people in their lives and even saved lots of them from being killed. If all the stories were true, then how come Hitler was alive for so long and there weren’t more Jewish people found all over Germany when the war was over. People who are guilty usually point the finger. It’s the people who really were against the Nazis who don’t want to boast about it. Most of the people who were against the Nazis disappeared and can’t speak for themselves.
In the book she got from Onkel Ted about Eichmann, there is a story about a German man who helped the Jews in Poland. He gave them guns against his own country, against Germany. When the Nazis found out what he was doing, they killed him straightaway. And afterwards he was forgotten by everybody because what he did was not enough to stop what happened in the end. He might as well not have bothered. Nobody wanted to know. All the books and films are about the bad people, my mother says, not the good people. It was the same with the man who changed his shirt and brought the bomb in a briefcase to meet Hitler. He was forgotten and he might as well not have bothered either, because so many people were murdered by the Nazis that it’s hard to think of anything else. He was not very good at making a bomb, because he was not very good at hating people. And it’s hard to start boasting about somebody who was not very good at killing Hitler or giving away guns against the Nazis or standing up with your arms crossed and saying it was a pity Hitler wasn’t dead.
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sp; There was fog everywhere outside that day. I looked out the window of my mother and father’s bedroom and I thought it was like net curtains hanging down. The fog was waving a little. I could hardly see the houses across the street. I was listening to my mother and I didn’t know what country I was in any more. She was feeding the new baby on the bed, my small brother, Ciarán. When there was nothing more to say and she was finished telling about the bomb for Germany, we just listened to the foghorn for a long time and said nothing. Ciarán was smiling and shaking his head from side to side, trying to make himself dizzy and drunk. Ita and Bríd were playing with him and sometimes copying the voice of the foghorn until Ciarán laughed. Mrs Robinson pulled back her net curtains and looked out across the street at me and I waved, but she couldn’t see through the fog. She lets us watch the television in her house sometimes and I know what her house smells like. Everybody’s house has a different smell and some smells make you feel lonely and other smells make you feel like you’re at home. Miss Tarleton’s house smells like a greenhouse and boiling cabbage, and Miss Hosford’s house smells like a chemist. Mrs McSweeney’s house smells like toffee and shoe polish. The Miss Doyles’ flat upstairs always smells of beans on toast. The Miss Ryans’ house smells like washing and ironing and a bit of liquorice mixed in, and Miss Brown’s house smells like the mixture of soap and cigarette smoke and the smell you get at the back of the radio when it’s been on for a while. I don’t know what makes the smell of each house so different, but our house smells of being happy and afraid. Our friend Noel’s house smells like nobody ever gets angry because his father is a doctor and his mother never raises her voice and they have a dog. Tante Roseleen’s house smells of red lemonade and the place where Onkel Ted lives smells like a different country, like the house with the yellow door and the custard, the place where you always feel homesick.
My mother said we would go down to find the foghorn when she was ready. We waited outside and you could not see the end of the street, only up to number six. She cleaned all the crumbs and bits of mushy biscuits out from the bottom of the pram and when she came out Ciarán was sitting up with a serious face and a hat on over his ears that has a big furry bobble on top. We walked down to the sea with Ita and Bríd holding on to the pram as if they were driving it. The cars and the buses had their lights on, even though it was daytime, and sometimes you could only see the yellow lights like a ghost coming through the fog. Everybody was travelling so slowly that you thought they were afraid of where they were going and what they might find in the fog.
It was like a new fog country where everybody was quiet and saying nothing. There were no more far away countries like Germany or England or America, because you could not even look out across the sea. There were no waves at all and the ceiling was very low. It was like a small room with net curtains. Like a bathroom with the bath filling up and seagulls floating on top and the mirror steamed up and funny voices echoing around you. When we looked back we could not even see the road or the cars or any houses either. Nothing was moving. Not even a piece of paper. The trees were pretending to be dead and the foghorn kept saying the same word all the time.
‘Rooooooom …’ You could hear the word very clearly now. The same word all the time, as if it had only one word to say.
‘Rooooooom,’ we shouted back. ‘Room the rooooooom.’
I ran across the green park in front of the sea until my mother and all my brothers and sisters disappeared behind me. I heard them calling and I walked back slowly, like a ghost walking out of the fog. My mother looked different. I thought it was somebody else and I had come back to a different place. She had her back turned, looking out towards the sea, like somebody from a different country that I didn’t know the name of and couldn’t talk to. There was a ship coming in very slowly with the lights on. There was no wind and no language, and the only word left was the word ‘room’. She stood at the blue railings with the brown rust, like an ordinary German woman.
We walked on towards the harbour and the foghorn kept getting louder and louder. We saw the lighthouse coming closer, too, and the light coming around every few seconds to point the finger at us through the fog. My mother said it was like a man carrying a yellow lantern. Bríd was afraid to go any further, so my mother changed her mind and said it was just the lighthouse winking at us. We counted the time in between each word from the foghorn and in between each wink from the lighthouse. We came to the place where you can shout into a hole in the wall and hear the echo. ‘Jaysus, what the Jaysus,’ Franz shouted and everybody else had to do it after him in a line, except my mother. ‘Room the room and Jaysus what the Jaysus and down you bully belly,’ we shouted. We walked all the way out along the pier and my mother said we had to be careful not to walk straight off the end into the sea.
We came to the place where there was a granite monument for the lifeboat men who were drowned while trying to rescue people from a ship, not very far away from the land. My mother said it was very sad to think of them getting up on a stormy night and leaving the house and saying they would be back soon. We stood looking at the names of the men written up and thought of them going down into the dark water so close to home without saying goodbye to anyone. When we came to the place with the wind gauge on top, the cups were stuck and not even moving at all, just waiting for the wind to come back so it could start spinning again. Any of the boats we could see in the harbour were not moving very much either and the foghorn was talking so loud that we could not say a word any more. Bríd and Ita had their hands over their ears and we could not go any closer because Ciarán started crying. We sat down on a blue bench and my mother took out a bar of chocolate. There was nobody else on the pier. We were like the last family in Ireland, listening to the silver paper and waiting for the chocolate to be shared out.
If Hitler had been killed, then everybody would have said it was a good bomb, a bomb for Germany. Instead, they said the people who planned the puppet show against the Nazis were liars and betrayers. They were bad Germans who were not very good at hating people. It was a bad bomb, they said, a bomb against Germany and they might as well not have bothered, because nobody would even remember it. Sometimes a good bomb can be a bad bomb and sometimes a bad bomb can be a good bomb. But this was a useless bomb and everybody had to wait until all the good bombs started falling on Germany. Then the trains were on fire and the streets were full of people running. That was near the end of the black and white film that my mother was in. She had to work for the German army like her sister Marianne. Her other sisters didn’t have to, my mother says, because they already had children and Hitler didn’t want mothers fighting in the war. That was the time when all the good bombs were falling on the cities and people were burned alive in their sleep, to make sure they learned how to hate the Nazis.
After the bomb that didn’t even hurt Hitler, Marianne thought somebody was following her all the time. She was afraid that what she said in the opera house put her in trouble and that everybody knew she was against the Nazis. When she walked through the streets of Salzburg she sometimes had to look around and check to make sure that nobody was behind her. Sometimes they’re after you because they think you’re a Nazi and you feel guilty and you can’t trust yourself any more. And then one day on her way home from work, she found out who was after her. It was the woman who stood up in the opera house and stopped her from killing herself.
‘Leider,’ the woman said and smiled.
My mother says everybody was afraid to smile and afraid to speak about things that didn’t have to do with getting enough food and making sure that everybody in your family was safe from the bombs. The woman started talking about where to get butter and where to get eggs and how difficult it was to make a good cake these days. Marianne said it was impossible to get any meat at all. The woman was very friendly and asked her where she lived. Marianne told her that she lived on the Mönchberg, up high, the last house before the castle. So then the woman said how nice it must be to live up there on the m
ountain, away from everything, with clean air and no noise and plenty of tranquillity. They kept talking for a while, because nobody was afraid of talking about good air and bad lungs and living away from other people coughing.
‘It would be a great place for a guest house up there,’ the woman said.
Marianne said she had never dreamed of it. She was expecting a baby and working every day with the German army and looking after her mother-in-law, too, who was very old. She was not afraid of work, but her husband was away in the war and she didn’t know where she would get the food for the guests. And not only that, she didn’t think anyone could afford to go on holidays any more.
‘I know people with bad lungs,’ the woman said. ‘They would love it up there.’
‘It’s a long way up,’ Marianne said, ‘without a car.’
But that would even be doing them a favour, the woman said. It would be good for them to get the air even as they were walking up. And that’s how Tante Marianne got the idea to open a guest house, my mother says. That’s how people started coming to visit her from all over the place for clean air and tranquillity, that’s how she has a name for keeping one of the most beautiful guest houses in all of Austria today, a place that has a long waiting list and you would never hear about from the tourist board, only by word of mouth.
The Speckled People Page 23
