Dublin Palms

by Hugo Hamilton

  We got talking about London.

  They had both lived there for a while. John spoke about parties he had been to, he mentioned several poets and rock stars, famous artists. Audrey said she would love to be painted nude. John said he was at a party where a well-known beat poet turned up and took off his clothes, the only person sitting naked on the sofa, in winter.

  We were impressed.

  Helen talked about how she had lived in a tiny bedsit in Kensington where you could reach everything from your bed. She had once gone to visit the house where the American poet Sylvia Plath killed herself in a rage of self-doubt. There was a plaque on the wall, she said, to let people know that Yeats had once lived there, nothing about Sylvia Plath. There was a telephone box nearby, but it was hard to be sure it was the one the poet used to make the final call to her husband.

  She spoke about sitting in a café with her coat open, her black beret across the back of her head, some drops of rain like beads attached. She stared out the fogged-up window at the people of London with their umbrellas. In a copybook full of notes on her drama course, monologues and reported speech, she began reconstructing what Sylvia Plath might have put into her missing diary, the last one, the one that was burned – my love was a bite, you will dig up my bones and sell them off for souvenirs.

  Audrey and John were both older than us, over thirty, full of knowledge. Audrey spoke with expertise about Sylvia Plath and her English husband, the poet Ted Hughes. She said Plath was jealous of her husband’s fame as a poet long before he left her for another woman. She drove him to it, she was obsessed, it was artistic jealousy.

  Had she stayed alive, John said, she would have become a great novelist.

  My wooden mouth began to speak up. Why did Sylvia Plath hate her German father? Was she not allowed to love him? Afraid to be associated with him, his beekeeping knowledge, calling him Daddy in a cynical voice, placing him on trial for grotesque Nazi crimes he could never have committed because he had already gone to live in the USA. Was this her way of fitting in with the world gathering of poets? Disowning her own father? Disowning his history? Disowning herself? Did this love/hatred for her own father ultimately keep her locked out?

  The conversation turned back to jealousy. John said it was a primitive emotion – shows lack of courage.

  Foolish instinct, Audrey agreed.

  John said – good to remain open-minded. Why break your own heart?

  Audrey boasted quite openly that her marriage to John was based on a pact of non-jealousy. They allowed each other maximum freedom, she said. It was important to be receptive to new ideas. Free love. Their relationship was unrestricted. John listened with his legs apart while Audrey told us how he had gone ahead one evening, kissing another woman in the back of a taxi. Coming home from a party, he began snogging the woman while she was right there on the other side of him. She had nothing against it, only that the woman’s husband was a pure horror. It was not a fair exchange.

  My God, she said, his stomach was practically fermenting every time he opened his mouth.

  They smiled at each other.

  We said nothing. Our lives seemed so ordinary. Their lives seemed so cool, so confident, more like writers’ lives, full of inspiration and reckless ways of doing things for the sake of adventure.

  A week later, when the recording sessions came to an end, I brought the singer and the backing musicians to the pub on the corner. The money to pay for drinks in the native language was called welcoming. Drinking was done in little drops.

  They talked mostly about music. They said there was nothing like a traditional music session in full swing, it was an animal running, a buffalo, a stampede. The music was so vibrant it left you standing, it rocked you on your feet, it lifted you up by the armpits and held you dangling in the air, all you could do was yelp.

  They said there was a subtle hierarchy in the music. It broke out in a high-speed duel, then it calmed down again like a slow bicycle race, the last player to reach home was the best. All musicians admired each other and feared each other and stole from each other. They had a way of elevating and diminishing each other with humorous understatement. A nod was the safest way of showing appreciation. Praise was a delicate thing, it could easily be overdone, a word too much could turn it into a snub. They got into a debate about who was the best flute player in the country. They drew up a shortlist of celebrated names, minutely comparing the way each player performed a reel called the Bucks of Oranmore. They mentioned a flute player from Mayo and finally agreed that he was the most outstanding of them all. One of them over-agreed and went a bit further. Not only was the Mayo man the best in the country, he was also bald – he’s the best of the bald flute players.

  We laughed.

  They spoke about a well-known uilleann piper with a lung condition. The piper suffered from what was called chronic pulmonary obstruction. He was separated from his wife in London and had come back to live in a caravan outside Dublin. She sent his X-ray after him. A friend met him in a pub to pass on the bad news, handing him a large envelope with the name of the London hospital, do not bend. The piper ignored the message from his former wife. He put the envelope containing the X-ray aside on the bar counter. He was thin as a lead pencil. He had a soft nasal voice, a vast musical memory. His favourite drink was milk and whiskey. It was only much later in the evening that he finally took out the X-ray to have a look. He held it up to the smoky light above the bar and examined the ominous shadows like an accusation that followed him home. He paused for a moment and said – Ah look, they’re not my lungs at all.

  We laughed again.

  I laughed more than anyone else.

  How can you deny your own lungs?

  The shadow singer began talking about America. About the great blues singers he had met, all the train songs he had learned from them. The blues were inside us all, he said. It was the same foot tapping in every country. The Irish brought their culture with them, it got mixed up with African American roots, French roots, German roots, it was part of the anatomy of America, the music goes across the world and comes back home again.

  He took a small harmonica from his back pocket. He rubbed it against the front of his jacket. He placed it up to his lips and blew a mouthful of shuffled notes. The pub went silent. With the instrument held in his fingers and the light overhead flashing off the steel casing, he sang a train song. His chest filled up without losing a word, nowhere could I find where he inhaled. It was hard to believe the power in his lungs without amplification, he had us standing with our backs to the wall.

  He left the harmonica behind on the bar counter. I brought it with me. I was keeping it for him.

  When I got home, Helen was sitting with her knees up in the armchair. Spread out on the table was a series of photographs. They were printed in large format, black-and-white, done professionally with white borders. Moody, natural light, out of focus wallpaper, the edges of a plant maybe. In some of the photographs, she was wearing black leggings, the V-neck of her T-shirt revealed a spray of freckles. In other photographs she was wearing a white blouse, staring out the window. The light was coming through the fabric.

  I looked into her eyes.

  She had told me in advance that she was getting the photos done. It was not like me to go against her, only to encourage her. I didn’t want her freedom to be my weakness. I didn’t want her to be trapped in a foreign country like my mother was, not allowed to have friends, having to call my father in the office to make every decision in life, describing what a good pair of shoes looked like and why they were worth two pairs of bad shoes.

  I gathered the photographs and put them away in a large envelope. I could not bear to look at them, the silvery silence around her shoulders. I wanted to erase the room in which they were taken.

  I had no language for these things between us.

  My wooden mouth started saying things I did not wan
t to believe. She was there all afternoon. The photographer kept circling around her with his camera. He took off his tweed jacket. His voice filled the room. He lit up a joint and passed it to her. He began to describe each detail of her body with great precision, her neck, her shoulders, the shape of her knees, he spoke of her freckles, her weightless hands, her mouth, her lips, he spoke of the sweet breath under her arms.

  I saw her with a surge of longing. I thought I would pass out. I thought I would piss without warning. My stomach was empty, my vision was blurred, I felt sick. I wanted to pick her up and crush her against me. Was it love? Was it desire? Was it pride? Was it dispossession? Some illusion of ownership? My mind was gone hard with naked body parts. A cubist mess of open mouths and spaces between legs and clothes lying around.

  My teeth were screaming.

  With the best will in the world, the dentist had been wasting his time. The trouble with my teeth had nothing to do with my teeth. It was never my teeth. My teeth were being falsely accused. I was holding them responsible for the consortium of languages trying to cross my lips all at once and getting nothing said. The mismatch, the misconstrued, the naturally occurring blasphemies, the last-minute retractions, the trapdoor between the words. My teeth were being blamed for all that was unspoken. For the river of emotion that never reached the room. For all the deepest meaningful things I wanted to express but which were trapped in a parallel medium. It was like blaming light particles for the silence, like time being held to account for emptiness, my teeth were innocent bystanders. They did not cause the glass breaking absence of words. By not charging me for his work, the dentist was disclaiming all responsibility for the silence, louder than ever, breaking out with such deafening force.

  I walked out the door. This is what I had been doing since the age of nine, walking away from my father and his language wars, walking away from my mother and her burning cities. I turned right, past the furniture auction rooms. I came to the redbrick terraced house. The lights were still on, the room upstairs with the embossed sword design in the wallpaper, the painting of lions, the chessboard laid out.

  Don’t ruin us, I shouted at the windows.

  My glass mouth was back. I continued up the hill, walking away from myself.

  Where did all this doubt come from?

  Did it come from my father? The doubt of nations. The jealousy of flags and memorials and trenches and stolen lands and lost wars and languages in flight. Love divided into parcels of territory. Love with borders. Love with fortified defences and checkpoints and barbed wire and watchtowers and walls ten-foot high. All the hurt minds of time, all that restless ethnic grievance since the start of civilisation frothing inside my head.

  Or did it come from my mother?

  Did she pass on to me the feeling of coming home and never arriving? The memory of places left behind. Her need to go back and pick up the past. Her instinct for imagining the worst? Thinking through every mistake in advance, revising every mistake behind her, unable to return.

  I remembered her once getting ready to leave, packing her suitcase, telling us that she was going home, it was all a mistake. My father made her life so difficult. She sat down and told me that when she first arrived in Ireland off the boat early one morning, she stood in the empty hallway not sure if she was going to stay. She was already married, already expecting her first baby. She was afraid to take off her coat. My father had to persuade her to stay by saying there was nothing left in Germany only ruined cities. She was just a bit homesick, he told her. He kept her from going with German music rising all the way up to the roof. She agreed to stay for one night because she had nowhere else to go. In a dream that night, she heard her first baby boy speaking her language – please, don’t go.

  She loved Ireland. She loved us with all her heart. She loved all those things that made no sense, the words out of place, her history mixed up with ours, her language mushed in with the shadow language and some prohibited words borrowed from the street. She loved the sea, it was like being on holidays, but she found it hard to adapt. She once tried to make friends with the country by sending a cake to West Cork, but my father refused to take it with him – did his relatives not like cake?

  Did she marry him to make up for something in the past? His limp? His birth deformity balancing up her own failures? His weakness giving space to her kindness?

  My father must have feared her doubt. The power it had over him. The power he had over her when she didn’t leave. Did he worry a lifetime that she might change her mind, his raging energy, the damp and confused country he belonged to? Is that what made him so tough and impatient, one soft foot and one hard foot, so eager to remake Ireland more like Germany, letting his West Cork accent disappear in her language? Did he devote his life to an impossible goal, turning himself into the German man of her expectations, putting on Mahler, planting apple trees, making wooden toys, paying enormous excise duty on goods imported from Germany. Limping like a man after war, carrying wrought iron Christmas tree stands under his arm that nobody could afford to buy?

  Everything to keep her from leaving.

  His love, his wild-hearted plans fell short in a temper, knowing that he was unable to replace what she missed most – her father, her mother, her sisters, the house on the market square. He did his best to recreate her country inside the house, we were her citizens, we knew the map of her town better than our own, we knew the way to her bakery. She sat with her back to the window in the top room listening to us speaking German, the direction of the afternoon sunlight lined up with her memory, throwing an oblong box across the wooden floor. It allowed her to imagine being at home, children playing around the fountain at the centre of the market square.

  And the bells.

  More than anything, the evening bells bursting into every corner of the room, under the beds and into the wardrobe, down the stairs into the kitchen, liquid bells filling up the house until she could hear nothing at all, the sound of steel took away her voice.

  I thought of her singing her favourite song. The song she was not allowed to sing while my father was alive, because it was in English, his forbidden language. The song about flowers in your hair and gentle people waiting there. She had no problem using the term love-in. Her accent was like a passenger ship going straight from Hamburg to San Francisco.

  Stay or leave.

  The decision she had to make every day of her life.

  Late one night, she told me what happened. What I already half knew as a child, what we saw in her eyes, what she had tried to tell me a couple of times before. While I was helping her up the stairs, before Greta came and put her to bed, she stopped on the landing by the copper etching of her town with the spire of the church gone grey. She told me what she had never told anyone before, none of her sisters, none of her children, not my father, not even in confession, only to her diary.

  She is alone in Düsseldorf with no friends, nobody to talk to, living in an apartment block where people keep to themselves. They have sons at war, they talk about where to get food, they have pictures of Hitler in their living rooms. They admire her boss when he comes to visit, she hears him coming up the stairs, he has the authority to force himself into her room. Her objections will not be taken seriously. The neighbours smile, they shrug and make crude hand signals, they enjoy the covert story of an older, married man in a suit, calling to see a young woman alone at night, holding flowers.

  He sits down and tells her she has lovely hair, he praises her modern clothes, he would like to see her smile.

  The flowers in the room are toxic. She can do nothing to stop him, he is too strong, he is a member of the Nazi party and she is not. He says it is a time of sacrifice. He talks about the war, what bravery the men have shown in Stalingrad, locked in the cauldron, giving up their lives so the Reich can endure. He talks about the greatness of the Nazi empire, the endless bleeding borders. Her beauty has become part of that battl
e, he tells her, it is her womanhood the men have been defending with their hands and feet frozen black, faces wrapped in thin scarves stuffed with newspapers, shivering out the last Christmas of their lives, writing letters that never reach home. It is her duty to smile for Germany, for the fallen comrades in Stalingrad, for the glory and survival of their race.

  She refuses to give her smile.

  How can she decline, he says, she has such an ability to make people happy, why not light up the room? Look at the flowers, do they refuse to smile? Once again, she shakes her head, keeping her expression of happiness contained, her face remains full of fear. Raising his voice, he commands her to be joyful. He steps across the room and puts his hands on her face to extract a smile, with his fingers he pulls her lips apart to show her teeth.

  Next morning, she is forced to face him in the office, he asks her where the smile is gone, but she cannot find it, she has already unlearned it.

  Some months later, she stands in front of him once more in the office to let him know that she is expecting a baby. There is nobody else she can turn to but the man who has overpowered her. He says he is glad she has come to him, he appreciates her loyalty, he takes it as a show of love. He tells her not to speak to anyone else, to trust only in him, he has a way of dealing with this situation.

  She has her coat on, waiting in the small upstairs room in Düsseldorf with the air-raid sirens howling in the streets. A deep sound of aircraft humming, followed by anti-aircraft guns, followed by whistling, the ground shaking, every sound measured to see how close it has come. Everyone else has gone to the air-raid shelters. The lights are out across the city. She waits with the sounds of falling bombs around her, until her boss comes to the door with a small case in his hand, no more than a round pouch with a handle.