The Speckled People

by Hugo Hamilton

  My father is gone and our house is very quiet. The tall man came to take the bees away one day and there’s nothing on the roof of the breakfast room now. My father’s bee hat and his bee gloves are in the greenhouse. All the things in the house that belong to him are still there. Nothing has changed. His books are on the desk with a train ticket halfway through to let you know how much he has left to read. His tools are there in the Kinderzimmer and there is a dining-room cabinet waiting to be finished. Everybody is afraid to touch anything. Upstairs, his shirts and his Sunday suit are hanging in the wardrobe. I can walk out of the house now any time I like and go down to the seafront. There’s nobody telling me what to do any more and what language to speak in. But sometimes I still think he’s going to burst in the door any minute. I think he’s back in the house and I can hear his voice full of anger.

  You can inherit things like that. It’s like a stone in your hand. I’m afraid that I’ll have a limp like him. I’m afraid I might start sticking the tip of my tongue out the side of my mouth when I’m fixing something. I know I have to be different. I have to listen to different music and read different books. I have to pretend that I had no father. I have to go swimming a lot and dive underwater and stay down there as long as I can. I have to learn to hold my breath as long as I can and live underwater where there’s no language.

  I know they’re still after me. One day when I was swimming on my own, they found me pretending that I was not a Nazi or an Irish speaker who was dying. They knew it was Eichmann gone swimming and diving underwater. There was a big gang this time and I couldn’t run away. There was nobody else around either to save me. No gardener. No old man swimming with pink skin as if the water was not cold. It was Sunday morning with the bells ringing and rain coming. They started throwing stones at me, every time I came up for air. So then I had to come out of the water and they put me on trial.

  I stood in the shed where you change. But I couldn’t get dressed because they started kicking my clothes around. They laughed and asked me questions I couldn’t answer. One of them had a knife and said he had ways of making me talk. They stood around, punching and kicking me to see if I was guilty or not.

  I knew that was the reason why my mother came to Ireland in the first place. One day in the front room she told me that after the war she got a job in Wiesbaden with the American army. She worked in the de-nazification courts, she said, where they examined people to see if they were really Nazis or not. Before they could start working again and behaving like normal decent people, some of the Germans had to be put on trial and asked lots of questions to see what they had been up to in the war and if they had helped the Nazis. She had to make all the notes of what people said and then type them up afterwards. It was a good job and everybody said she was so lucky. Maybe she would even meet an American and get married. But one day, there was an old man before the court, a gynaecologist. He said he had no time for Hitler because he was only helping women with babies getting born. He said he didn’t care if babies were German or not, they were all good babies to him. But they didn’t believe him. In the end, a Jewish woman came home to Germany from England to speak up for him. She said he was always very friendly to her and that he helped her when it was difficult to have a baby. That should have settled everything, but afterwards when my mother was typing everything up, they came and asked her to change the words around. They wanted the Jewish woman to say he was always very angry and that he only wanted Nazi babies. But my mother couldn’t. So then she wrote a letter to say that she would not work there any more. Everybody said she was mad giving up a great job like that with a flat in Wiesbaden and American food when everybody in Germany was hungry. But she could only think of the old gynaecologist sitting in court very quietly and not even trying to defend himself. He said he liked German music and German books, but that didn’t make him hate other people. He was one of the last good men in Germany and they were trying to turn him into a Nazi.

  She left her job and went away, on a pilgrimage to Ireland.

  My mother says there are enough guilty people and we don’t need to invent them. There are enough murderers left in the world today and we don’t need to make up Nazis that didn’t exist. And there’s no point in turning the Nazis into big film stars either, because then everybody will be blind to all the other things that are going on now.

  There’s no point in telling any of that to the gang at the seafront. There’s no point in saying that they’re kicking the wrong person and that I’m not really Eichmann, that I was brought up to live against the Nazis and I don’t want to kill anyone. There’s no point in telling them that they’re making a mistake and they don’t know any better.

  I had no cigarettes and no chewing gum to give them either, so then I thought the best thing was to try to be funny and Irish like everyone else. I tried to put on the slow grin that Nazis have in films. I stood up and shouted: ‘Sieg Heil, Donner Messer Splitten, Himmel Blitzen.’ Some of them laughed a bit, but they didn’t want me to start being their friend. They stood around, trying to decide how they would execute me. All I could do was stand under the shed and wait. There was a pool of water around my feet and I felt the cold stone under my heels. I tried to stop myself from shivering. There was rust on the blue railings and green seaweed on the rocks. There was a mist on the sea and the water was licking the steps, going up two steps and back down one, down two steps and back up three like a song. The seagulls were standing around on the rocks, just watching and listening, only one of them occasionally lifting his wings and screeching as if he was the judge.

  I tried to talk to them. I tried to tell them my story but there was no point. I asked them did they not trust me? But they just laughed. And there was no point in trying to be innocent. My mother says you can only be innocent if you admit the guilt. You can only grow up if you accept the shame.

  Then they started the execution. One of them kicked me so hard that I had to bend over. There was a black pain spreading up into my stomach and I thought I was going to get sick. I couldn’t stop the foggy dew in my eyes, but I tried to look up as if Germans didn’t feel any pain. One of them punched me in the face and I saw blood on my towel. I knew that they were learning to hate and that you’re allowed to hate Germans. They wanted me to surrender.

  I looked up to show that I was not afraid to be silent. And then I saw the dog. I nearly forgot about the execution when I saw the dog behind them, the dog that barks all day until he’s hoarse. I couldn’t believe it at first and I had to wipe my eyes to make sure. The dog with no name was coming down to bark at the sea as if nothing was wrong and he never drowned.

  ‘Jaysus, what the Jaysus,’ I said. ‘It’s the dog.’

  They looked around as if I was trying to play a trick on them and get away. They said all the Germans were gone mad because I was calling the dog over to save my life.

  ‘It’s the dog with no name,’ I said again.

  He didn’t drown after all. He must have rescued himself. He must have got up the steps and shook the water off his back and forgotten it even happened, because he came right over to where we all were standing in the courtroom by the sea. The courtroom in the forty-foot gentlemen’s bathing place. He started sniffing around my clothes and socks scattered on the ground. He came right over and sniffed at me, too. He didn’t blame me for anything and I was able to pet him as if we were friends for life. I heard them laughing and saying that the Kraut has lost it completely now. I heard them saying they were going to execute me even more after that for being so stupid, but I didn’t care and they could say it until they were hoarse and had no voice any more, because the dog was alive and I didn’t kill him.

  ‘Jaysus, what the Jaysus,’ I kept saying. ‘Jaysus what the Jaysus of a bully belly Jaysus.’

  There was nothing they could do to hurt me now. So I picked up one of my shoes and threw it into the sea. It was the only thing I could think of doing, because I grew up being good at saying the opposite and giving the wrong ans
wers. I was not afraid any more. Laugh at yourself and the world laughs with you. Execute yourself and nobody can touch you. I heard them say that I was out of my mind and the Nazis were mental. So I picked up the other shoe and threw it out as well, and then the dog with no name ran after it and started barking. My shoes were floating on top of the water and there was nothing they could do. They didn’t know how to execute me any more. They couldn’t touch me because the dog was alive and barking. He was trying to go down the steps and get my shoes back, barking and barking as if he never drowned.

  On the way home I walked along the wall with the dog behind me. My shoes were squeaking all the way. There were white salt marks where they were already beginning to dry. The sun was starting to come through the mist and it was not going to rain after all. I looked back and saw the sun coming out. The water was so white and so full of bouncing light that I could see nothing at all. It made me want to close my eyes and sneeze. When I looked into the shadows under the trees it was so dark that I could see nothing there either. When you’re small you know nothing. I know the sea is like a piece of silver paper in the sun. I can see people walking along the seafront with ice-cream cones. I can hear the bells and I’m not afraid any more of being German or Irish, or anywhere in between. Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it’s not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you’ve been to. I’m not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don’t have to be like anyone else. I’m walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.

  Thirty

  We’re trying to go home now. We’re still trying to find our way home, but sometimes it’s hard to know where that is any more. My mother went back to Germany one more time after my father died, just to visit everyone there and see where she grew up. But she was lost. She couldn’t recognise anything. Now she wants to find a place in Ireland that she can remember. She says we’re going on a trip to find things. She makes a big cake and we pack our bags with sandwiches and rain macs and get up early in the morning for the bus. We travel around the country to see places she went to before she got married, when she came over to Ireland on a pilgrimage, when Ireland was a holy country, full of priests and donkeys with crosses on their backs.

  We came to a town where there was a carnival, with lots of people and loudspeakers playing music on the main street. There were vans selling things and a stall where you could throw wooden rings around a bottle of whiskey and win it. You could smell sweet things like candy floss and sometimes a mixture of things like chips and vinegar and diesel from the trucks. We went on the big wheel and I saw my mother and Ciarán getting smaller, waving at us below on the ground. We sat down on a bench outside the town to have the last bit of cake, with the music from the carnival still coming up and down on the wind. Then it’s great to see my mother laughing and laughing, because I threw an apple at her and she caught it. And when it was time to move on and she was trying to get up from the bench, we pushed her back down until she was laughing and laughing so much with tears in her eyes. How do we know if she’s happy or sad? It was getting late and she started looking for the place she remembered. She wanted to find the house that she stayed in once when she was a pilgrim after the war, coming back from Station Island.

  ‘It must be here,’ she said again and again.

  We walked for a long time and she kept seeing lots of thing that she remembered, like stone walls and fields full of cows. Sometimes the cows stopped chewing to look at us as if they were surprised to see us in Ireland, so far away from home. It was the summer and we kept walking to keep ahead of the flies. We passed a house with a dog barking. One time, my mother spoke to a man to ask directions and we knew we were on the right road again. We just had to walk around another corner and find a gate where you could see the mountains, my mother said, with the sun going down like holy pictures. She wanted to speak to the woman of the house again where she stayed and the rain was praying the rosary all night. But we never found it. The night came up right behind us. We searched until it got dark and the colour was gone from the land and we could not see a thing any more. You could only smell the hay and the cow dung. It was so dark that you could only see with your nose, my mother said. Maybe she got the wrong road or the wrong mountains in the distance. She said Ireland had changed a bit. Or else it only existed in your imagination.

  ‘Maybe I dreamed it,’ she said.

  We could see the lights of the next town in the distance. My mother took out a cigarette because she was free to smoke after my father died. We stood on the road and watched her face lighting up with the match. We smelled the new smoke in the clean air and waited. She said she didn’t know where to go from here. We were lost, but she laughed and it didn’t matter.

  About the Author

  HUGO HAMILTON has published five novels, a collection of short stories, and this memoir The Speckled People. He was born and lives in Dublin.

  Praise

  ‘Donner und Blitzen! What the Jaysus! A memoir of warmth and wisdom. And at last a good – if flawed – Irish father. A beautiful German mother. And not too much rain. It is tender and profound and, best of all, tells the truth. I loved it.’

  PATRICK McCABE

  ‘It is hard to believe that this year will produce many books as memorable or moving as this.’

  ROY FOSTER, THE TIMES

  ‘A work of art.’

  JAMES LASDUN, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

  ‘Hugo Hamilton’s memoir is a prize – delicate, achingly well-observed and wonderfully moving. It combines the intensity of childhood experience with the clarity of adult reflection, dealing honestly with the pains and joys of language and the burden of homelessness.’

  A.L.KENNEDY

  ‘The Speckled People stands head and shoulders above the ruck of memoirs pouring out of Ireland. It is an accomplished work of art and a strange tale brilliantly told.’

  KATHERINE A. POWERS, BOSTON GLOBE

  The prose is lyrical, poetic, but rarely self-conscious… It is beautifully done and full of the smack of painful truth. It is one of those books that enlarges and humanises the tiniest of worlds, that universalises particulars, yet is unique.’

  TOM ADAIR, SCOTSMAN

  The Speckled People is a masterful piece of work – timely, inventive, provocative and perfectly weighted. Long after reading it, I can still hear its music. Don’t be surprised if it becomes a classic.’

  COLUM MCCANN

  An astonishing account, both delicate and strong, of great issues of twentieth-century Europe, modern Ireland, and family everywhere, as they were felt within the heart and mind of a growing boy.’

  NUALA O’FAOLAIN

  ‘An astonishing achievement, clearly a landmark in Irish non-fiction; and I cannot shake the conviction that for many years to come it will be seen as a masterpiece.’

  TREVOR BUTTERWORTH, WASHINGTON POST

  ‘The Speckled People is poetic in its language and construction, lyrical in so many of its descriptions. It is a story full of several different kinds of passion with a real tragedy at its heart. The pain is all there, but so is its antidote.’

  MARGARET FORSTER

  Also by the Author

  The Sailor in the Wardrobe

  Surrogate City

  The Last Shot

  The Love Test

  Headbanger

  Sad Bastard

  Copyright

  The author would like to thank Colm Tóibín and Eileen Ahearn for their generous help and encouragement with The Speckled People. Many thanks also to Colum McCann, Joseph O’Connor, Seán Ó Riain, Hans Christian Oeser, Gerald Dawe, Leo Lecours and John Smallwood. The author also wishes to acknowledge the financial assistance of Aosdána and The Arts Council in Dublin, as well as the financial support and hospitality of DAAD in Berlin and Künstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf in Brandenburg.

  Harpe
r Press

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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  Hammersmith

  London W6 8JB

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  This edition published by Harper Perennial 2012

  Paperback edition first published in 2004

  First published in Great Britain in 2003 by

  Fourth Estate

  Copyright © Hugo Hamilton 2003

  The right of Hugo Hamilton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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