The Speckled People

by Hugo Hamilton

  It was thanks to the man with one arm and one eye who put the bomb in a briefcase. The bad bomb was good for one thing at least. It started a guest house on the Mönchberg where there never had been one before. It was strange that nobody had thought of it already, my mother says. It didn’t start as a big business, not like a big hotel. Just one guest at a time, or two at the most. They could stay up there and breathe in deeply and pretend that there was no war on at all.

  Tante Marianne didn’t have to think about it for long, my mother says. She went home and got the place ready. And some days later, the first of the guests arrived, a Jewish woman who had no name and no face and no address. She didn’t stay for long, only two or three days at a time, and then she moved on again to another house somewhere else.

  My mother says you can’t boast about things like that. You can say it to yourself. You can be proud that somebody had courage. But you can’t go around telling the whole world your aunt helped to harbour Jewish people and made a safe haven out of her house on the Mönchberg. You have to remember all the people who were not saved, too. You have to remember all the voices speaking from the graves. I want to tell everybody that I had an aunt who was not afraid to lose and stood up against the killing. I want to run out and tell the whole world that she helped people to breathe in Germany.

  ‘Maybe they won’t believe me,’ I say.

  My mother says you know when something is true sometimes by the way nobody is boasting about it. Nobody is trying to turn it into a big story on the radio and asking people to clap. You know it’s true that Tante Marianne kept the silent negative in her head until she could do something about it, because nobody is talking about it much. Because it’s not written about in any newspaper.

  The first Jewish woman to visit the guest house was not killed by the Nazis and went to America after the war. She never came back. But she told people what a wonderful guest house she stayed in on the Mönchberg. And later on, when other Jewish people like Ernst Rathenau started coming back from America after the war, they went straight to the Mönchberg on their holidays, as if there was no other place in the whole of Austria that had clean air. They came back to the guest house again and again, year after year, and they brought other famous people with them who were also against the Nazis, like the painter Oskar Kokoschka and the sculptor Giacomo Manzú and the singer Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. You know it’s true because why else would a Jewish man named Ernst Rathenau bring friends like that all the way up to the Mönchberg just for the air. And why would Ernst Rathenau, the cousin of Walther Rathenau who was assassinated by the Nazis before the war even started, come back from America and go straight up to visit a German woman who had lost her husband in the war? Marianne never heard from her husband Angelo again, but she had one daughter named Christiane. Ernst Rathenau even paid for Christiane to go all the way through university and become a doctor. Because Tante Marianne once did a favour to Jewish people and now they were paying her back.

  My mother says you can only really be brave if you know you will lose. And the silent negative is not like any other silence either, because one day you will say what you’re thinking out loud with your arms folded, like Marianne. You can’t be afraid of saying the opposite, even if you look like a fool and everybody thinks you’re in the wrong country, speaking the wrong language. Everybody thought the man with the bomb in the briefcase was an idiot and they only wanted to laugh at him. And Tante Marianne must have looked like a fool standing up in the opera house in Salzburg, trying to get herself killed and saying what a pity Hitler wasn’t dead yet. My mother remembers the steam from the trains like fog on the platform. She remembers the sound of the whistle echoing through the station. She remembers seeing people crying all over Germany. She shows me the photographs of cities in Germany that were bombed. She heard once of a woman carrying her dead child with her in a suitcase. Sometimes you can’t think of anything else but the people you know. Sometimes people are afraid to look any further than their own family. That’s when you have to be brave.

  When the winter came, my mother was told to go to Hamburg, to join a big camp full of women. From there they were sent mostly to the east to fight with the German troops. People were saying that it made no sense to go to the east because the war was lost already. Some people got a chance to go home one more time to say goodbye to their family as if they were never going to come back. My mother got letters from Tante Marianne asking for food and she wrote back to say that she would do her best. But it was nearly impossible to find anything, unless you were with the army going out to the war. My mother managed to get a bucket full of sauerkraut and instead of going back home to Kempen, she decided to try to get to Salzburg instead. She asked for a ticket to a different town called Kempten which sounds the same, and isn’t in the Rhineland at all, but somewhere in Bavaria. She carried the last bucket of sauerkraut with her all the way and it was snowing heavily when she arrived to deliver it.

  Nobody wanted to go back to the war. My mother says she wanted to stay on the Mönchberg and hide until it was all over. She thought of staying and helping Marianne, because she was expecting her baby and had a husband in the war and a mother-in-law who was ill. But then she would only have to eat some of the sauerkraut that she had brought and that would make no sense any more. Marianne would be worse off. So at least, my mother says, she helped her with the washing before she left. She got all the clothes and the sheets together and boiled up lots of hot water. There was enough soap and starch to do it properly, and because it was so cold outside they dried everything inside. My mother hoped it would all take longer. She hoped it would take so long that somebody would say on the radio that the war was over. When the sheets were dry, my mother helped to iron them until they were like new. She laughed and helped Marianne to fold them together, taking one corner in each hand and dancing towards the middle like Irish dancing. The smell of the laundry made my mother think that she was a little girl again. She didn’t want the dancing with the sheets to stop. It was only when it was over and all the washing was finished that my mother realised how many sheets there were. She counted them in her head and thought, there were too many just for three women.

  ‘Are you thinking of starting a guest house?’ she asked, but that was a joke and Marianne didn’t know how to answer. They didn’t know how to talk about it. Everybody was afraid to say anything that didn’t have to do with things like washing and ironing. And then it was time for my mother to leave. They looked at each other for a long time and said ja, ja, ja and nein, nein, nein, until my mother put on her coat and stepped out into the snow.

  The walk down the Mönchberg was harder than the walk up, she says. It was icy and you had to hold on to the fence sometimes to make sure you didn’t slip and break your teeth. At the station, the guards checked her papers and she was in trouble because she was very late and should have been in Hamburg ages ago. She was told to take the next train to Nuremberg, but there she was arrested and taken into a police station. They accused her of not following orders like everyone else in Germany. They asked lots of questions and she said she was just trying to bring some food to her sister who had a husband in the war and mother-in-law who was sick. They didn’t believe her. They didn’t think she looked eager enough to go back to the war. They said she was a deserter. Fahnenflucht, they called it, running away from the flag. They put her on a train to the east and locked the carriage door. They didn’t tell her where she was going, but she knew it was to the east, that’s all. She was locked in the carriage with a young soldier who was not much older than fourteen, my mother says, and he was chained to the seat by his ankles.

  The fog is starting to disappear, but the foghorn keeps going just in case. It has begun to rain a bit, just a few drops on the window. It’s dark now, but it’s clear enough to see across the gardens to the next street. From my bedroom I can see the light and the branches in front of it. There is a bit of a breeze and the branches are dancing across the wall behind me and across my
face, too. If anyone saw me, they would think there was something wrong with me. They would see spots all over my face from the raindrops on the glass. They would see a speckled face and say that I was diseased. Nobody would want to touch me. The foghorn is still going, but it sounds more tired, as if it’s been saying the same word all day and now it’s getting fed up with it. In my room I have some books that my mother gave me and that Onkel Ted gave her. I have some books about Irish history and some magazines that my father gave me, too, about geography, with stories about people in other countries like South Africa and Tibet that are still not free. Sometimes I read them and sometimes I just look at the pictures because I don’t like any more words. I just want the one word from the foghorn to go to sleep with. ‘Roooooom …’

  I looked at the books and noticed that the picture of the man who put the bomb in a briefcase for Germany looked a bit like the picture of the man who started the Easter Rising for Ireland. I had to bend the books a little bit, but when I put the pictures together they looked alike. And they were facing each other, as if they were talking. Patrick Pearse was looking to the right and Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg was looking to the left. They seemed not to be even surprised to be in the same room together. Patrick was saying to Claus that he thought he was in Germany. Claus looked back over and said he was only here in Ireland for a short visit. There was a lot of trouble in Germany and he wanted to know if anyone in Ireland could help. He heard that the Irish were good at saying the opposite. And Patrick Pearse said he was having a lot of trouble with the British at the moment, and the only thing to do was to make a sacrifice. You can’t be afraid of looking stupid.

  They looked like brothers. Claus and Patrick. I sat up in bed and held the two photographs together. Claus was planning a puppet show against the Nazis and Patrick was planning a puppet show against the British. Claus knew that people might laugh at him in Germany and Patrick knew that people would surely laugh at him in Ireland. They both knew that people would say they might as well not have bothered. Patrick said that Ireland unfree shall never be at peace and Claus said long live the real Germany. Before they had to leave, they wondered if there was time to go for a walk down to the sea. Or maybe even a drink in the Eagle House. But they were in a hurry and there was no time to waste. They were not sure their plans would work either, because they were not very good at hating anyone yet. But they were not afraid to lose. They were not afraid of being put up against the wall and executed. And that’s what happened to both of them in the end in different countries for the same reason. They met for one last time in my room with the foghorn still going outside. They shook hands and said ‘Down you bully belly.’ They laughed because they were not afraid to be Irish and not afraid to be German. I told them that Tante Marianne was going to save Jewish people who could not breathe very well and that my father was going to help people who wanted to breathe in Irish. When they were gone and the light was out, I lay back and listened to the foghorn going on and on, saying the same word over and over again until it was hoarse and had no voice any more.

  Twenty-eight

  Everything keeps happening again. Now I’m going down to the seafront and holding my little brother Ciarán’s hand. We’re going to look at the sea and throw stones at the big bully waves. I help him to walk on the wall and hold his hand to make sure he doesn’t fall. He sings the same song that Franz sang when we were small and we didn’t know any better. He says good morning to everyone that we pass by in English and sings ‘walk on the wall, walk on the wall …’ I’m Ciarán’s big brother now, so I have to make sure he doesn’t fall off and break his nose.

  The dog is still there every day but he doesn’t bark as much any more. Sometimes he just sits on the steps and says nothing, as if he’s fed up fighting and he knows there’s no point in trying to stop the waves. He still keeps an eye on them and maybe he’s waiting for a big one, or waiting for somebody else to come and throw stones and then he’ll start again, barking as much as ever before. He still has no name and belongs to nobody and follows anyone who pretends to be his friend for life. So we decided that he would belong to us from now on. We clicked and he came after us. We had a dog now that would protect us and we gave him a name, Cú na mara, which is the Irish for seadog. But that was too long so we tried Wasserbeisser instead, water-biter. But that was even harder, so in the end we just called him nothing and said: ‘Here boy.’ Every time we looked back he was still there. Even when we went into a shop to buy chewing gum and an ice pop for Ciarán, he stayed outside and waited. But then we met a gang coming towards us.

  ‘Hey Eichmann,’ one of them shouted.

  They were not scared of the dog at all. They came across the street and asked if I had any cigarettes. I told them I didn’t smoke yet. They called me a Kraut and wanted the chewing gum instead. They started kicking me and Ciarán was crying. The dog said nothing, but there was a man working in a garden nearby who stood up and told them to stop.

  ‘Leave them alone,’ the man said. ‘Off you go about your business.’

  They didn’t have any business because they were the fist people. Instead, they tried to pretend that we were the best of friends. One of them put his arm around me and whispered into my ear.

  ‘Listen, Eichmann. We’re not finished with you.’

  Then they walked away, laughing and eating the chewing gum that I bought. One of them whistled and the dog followed them instead of us. The man in the garden saved us and we were lucky. We were free to go home now, but I knew that wasn’t the end. I know they’re still after me.

  Everything is happening again. My mother cuts out a picture from the newspapers of a man who set himself on fire because he couldn’t live in the wrong country. She puts it into her diary, as well as pictures of Russian tanks on the streets of Prague. She remembers Prague with German troops. A new war started in Vietnam and my mother was cutting out pictures of a new kind of bomb there. She also has a picture of a black man named Martin Luther King who was assassinated in America. Now they want civil rights in Northern Ireland, too, and she cuts out pictures of people with placards and blood running down their faces. Some people even had to leave their houses because they were in the wrong country and had no names and no faces any more. So now the diary is full of pictures of Russian troops in Czechoslovakia and British troops in Northern Ireland and American troops in Vietnam. My mother says it’s hard to believe how anyone thinks they can keep people quiet that way. Homesick people carry anger with them in their suitcases. And that’s the most dangerous thing in the world, suitcases full of helpless, homesick anger.

  In school, some of the boys made an effigy of Nelson’s Pillar out of cardboard and blew it up on O’Connell Street with sodium chlorate and sugar. They made a little speech called ‘Up the Republic’. The fuse was coming out the door where you used to go up the winding stairs to look out over the city. They lit it and there was an explosion that knocked the toy soldier with the sword off the top and set the whole thing on fire. Everybody going home from work in Dublin thought things were happening again. On the radio you can hear a song about people with the foggy dew in their eyes and another song called ‘Up went Nelson’. On TV you can see a man in Northern Ireland foaming at the mouth about a spider inviting the fly into the parlour. You can see people marching with big drums that make so much noise none of the other puppets can speak. A boy at school told me that his mother came from Derry and she had her Holy Communion dress torn when she was a girl and never forgot it.

  Up in the north the Catholics are called Fenians and the Protestants are called Prods. The Fenians are afraid to be British and the Prods are afraid to be Irish because they can’t breathe very well in Ireland. People call each other names because they want to kill each other. People learn how to hate each other because they’re afraid of dying out. In school they call you a Jew if you don’t have any chewing gum to share. The British are called Brits and the Irish are called Paddies and the Germans are called Krauts and that’s w
orse than being either British or Irish, or both together. They still call us bloody Krauts even though we’re bloody Paddies. Sometimes they tell us to fuck off back to where we came from, but that doesn’t make any sense because we come from Ireland. One day they called Franz a fuckin’ Jew Nazi and held him against the railings of the Garden of Remembrance. He had no chewing gum, so they banged his head until it started bleeding. Brother Kinsella punished them all for it, including Franz who did nothing, and everybody was laughing about that for a long time, punishing the guilty and the innocent together. Brother Kinsella said it was the only way to stop things happening again, to hit the victims and the perpetrators equally.

  My friend at school has stopped being my friend. I like him. I like the way he looks and the way he talks. And sometimes I want to be him instead of myself. He never called me names, but one day he stopped talking to me. He just walks past me in school without a word. Maybe he’s punishing the innocent and the guilty, too, because he tells everybody that the Nazis turned people into soap and you can’t deny that. He won’t be my friend for life any more because he thinks I’m going to make chairs out of people’s bones and I can’t deny that either, even though I haven’t done it yet. I know I can’t have friends for life. It’s better to be on my own from now on, because they’ll find out sooner or later what I’ve done.

  At home my mother wants to stop things happening again. She says we’re not the fist people, so one day she took all the sticks from the greenhouse and broke them over her knee in the kitchen until they were all in bits and my father had nothing to hit us with any more. He was still able to smack the rubber gloves into your face and give you the foggy dew. And he was able to throw pots, too, because he always did the washing up. But he was not able to take me up the stairs and pray that he was doing the right thing for Ireland, so then I started arguing with him at the table until he was blinking and I could see myself twice in his glasses. I like giving the wrong answers. One day, my father said there was nothing outside infinity. He said the universe was like a cardboard box with God sitting outside surrounded by light, but I wanted to know if maybe God was sitting inside another cardboard box with the light on, and how could anyone be sure how many cardboard boxes there are? My mother says I was driving him mad with wrong answers. He knew there were no sticks left, but there was a bowl of Apfelkompot on the table instead. He looked at it for a minute. Then he picked it up and threw it over my head. It was still warm. I felt it running down my face into the collar of my shirt. But I was smiling, because I knew that my father was losing the language war. My mother cleared everything up and tried not to laugh. She said you had to have an imagination to throw Apfelkompot over somebody’s head and maybe she should make it more often if we liked it so much. But later on she told me never push people into a corner. She says there’s too much fighting in our house and how can Ireland ever be at peace if we go on like this.