The Speckled People (10 page)

De Vesci Terrace, Albert Road, Silchester Road, Neptune Terrace, Nerano Road, Sorrento Road. He had them all changed into Irish, one by one. Royal Terrace became Ascal Ríoga, because money and profit were not everything, he said. On Sundays we walked everywhere to make sure that we covered them all. He told us about the great Irish poets and scholars who once lived in Munster where he came from, among them his own grandfather who was known as Tadhg Ó Donnabháin Dall, or Ted O’Donovan Blind. When the names of people and places all over Ireland were changed into English, all those poets and Irish speakers lost their way and suddenly found themselves in a foreign land. He told us how they all went blind overnight, stumbling around in the dark with no language. And now it was time to change the names back to Irish so the people knew where they were going again.

Then my mother was sick and had to stay in bed. We were allowed to go up to her room for a while and talk to her. Maria stroked her arm and I was the doctor. Until the real Dr Sheehan arrived and we had to wait outside the door. We could hear her crying because the baby had stopped playing football. It was still inside her tummy but it would not come out alive. I knew she was crying for other things,
too, because Germany was so far away, because nobody in Ireland wanted party hats, and because she had no name any more, and no face and no feet in Ireland. Onkel Ted came and made the sign of the cross. There were shadows around her eyes when we were allowed back into the room, but she was trying to smile and she put her arms around us and said she was rich because she had three children.

Downstairs in the kitchen, my father tried to bake a cake. He wanted to help and make everything better again, so he put on the apron and mixed the ingredients the way my mother told him to. Now and again he sent us back up the stairs to ask her what to do next and my mother smiled and sent us back down again to tell him to switch on the oven. He did everything he was told, step by step. He held his hands up in the air, quietly counting to ten with cake mixture on his fingers, repeating all the German instructions from above in his Cork accent. And when he was finished he put the cake in the oven and there was a smell of baking all over the house and everyone went around on tiptoes. But when it came out it was all wrong. There was a frown on his forehead and he blinked quickly when he saw the cake had sunk down in the middle. My mother didn’t laugh. She said it was fine. He had done his best, but there were some things that could not be translated into Irish.

There’s a man who comes to our house to see my father. His name is Gearóid and he’s not very tall, but he smiles a lot and has a strong voice, like the radio. In the hallway, he shakes my hand with both of his and then pats me on the shoulder and looks into my eyes in a very friendly way, because he likes hearing Irish. He is my father’s friend and when he comes to visit everything in the house changes. Everything is translated into Irish – the tables, the chairs, the curtains, even the teacups and saucers turn Irish. The music on the radio has to be Irish. We have to go and play and be happy and not fight in Irish. My mother has to sit down in the front room and listen, even though she doesn’t understand a word. There’s not much laughing either, or drinking cognac, only Gearóid and my father talking and foaming at the mouth about all the things that are not finished yet in Ireland.

Gearóid has a car, a blue Volkswagen full of newspapers on the back seat written in Irish and English. The newspaper is called
Aiséirí
, which is the Irish for resurrection, and there is a photograph of corporation men taking down an old English street sign and putting up a new bilingual one, with the Irish on top and the English below in second place. There’s an article in the paper, too, about my father and a letter from Mullingar. One day at work, my father
refused to answer a letter because it was addressed to John Hamilton. He kept sending it back because that was not his name. He told them there was nobody by the name of John Hamilton working at the Electricity Supply Board in Dublin. He pretended there had been a big mistake and the letter was for somebody in a different organisation, maybe even in a different country, at the electricity board in England or America or South Africa maybe. There was a lot of trouble with this letter going back and forth for weeks and weeks, because the people of Mullingar had to wait all that time for their electricity masts to be repaired. My father didn’t care if the whole country was left in darkness. And in the end, the people of Mullingar got their electricity back only when they learned to respect his proper name. But then the boss at the ESB refused to give my father promotion because the Irish language was bad for business.

In the front room, Gearóid smiles and claps his hands together with a bang. He says my father is a man who does what he believes in, not just for money. He’s a real fighter who wrote articles for
Aiséirí
and made great speeches on O’Connell Street once. He says people will still throw their hats up in the air these days for a good speech. Ireland is far from being finished and there is a lot of de-Anglicisation still left to be done. My father says he loves his country as much as ever, but he has a different way of fighting now, through his children. From now on he’s going to use his own children as weapons, he says, because children are stronger than armies, stronger than speeches or articles or any number of letters to the government. One child is worth more than a thousand guns and bombs, he says.

‘You’re the lifeblood,’ Gearóid says to my mother in Irish. He says the Irish language is dying, day by day. It’s
choking to death slowly with everybody speaking English on the radio and in the government. But he means the opposite, like in the films. He holds his fist up in the air and says the language is not dead at all, and there’s a few shakes left in the animal yet, as long as there is one family like us in the country. Even if Irish is not our mother tongue and we speak German, too, we are still more Irish than many others.
Teaghlach lán-ghaelach
, he calls us, a full-Irish fireside. Then he has to leave again. He doesn’t stay for tea because he has to go to visit some more families and deliver the paper to them, too. We stand at the door and watch him getting into the car. We hear the car starting with a big growl and then we wave goodbye, the full-Irish family on the doorstep.

Afterwards, my father tells us about the time he made a speech in Dublin, with thousands of people looking up at him. He can still hear the sound of them cheering every time he walks up O’Connell Street. It’s something you never forget, something you carry with you, like the sound of the sea in your ears. He takes off his glasses and starts making a speech at the dinner table. His face looks very different, like a different man in the house, a man I’ve never seen before. There are two red marks, one on each side of his nose. His eyes look smaller and darker, and his voice gets harder and stronger, like the radio. It looks as if he has never seen us before either, as if he’s surprised to be here in this house. And he talks so fast that he has a little white blob of spit on his bottom lip. Every time Gearóid comes to the house he’s like this afterwards. Happy and proud one minute, sad and angry the next, because not everybody in Ireland is doing what he told them to do.

He tells us about the time he went all over the country on his motorbike, frightening the cows as he drove past. He
saw cows shaking their heads to try to get rid of the noise, like a bad dream. He tells us about a time when the police tried to stop one of the articles he wrote. They came to the offices of
Aiséirí
and said they would close down the paper, but Gearóid wasn’t afraid of them. They weren’t afraid of going to prison for what they believed, even if the whole country was against them. So they printed the paper with the article in it, because you have to do what’s right, he says. My mother nods, because she’s thinking of the time when Onkel Gerd refused to be a Nazi. I want to be proud of my father, too, so I asked him what was in the article and why they tried to stop it, but he wouldn’t say. My mother doesn’t know either, so we all wait for him to tell us.

‘Explain it to them,’ she says.

It’s not something he wants to talk about. I know it’s all in the wardrobe upstairs, but I’m not allowed to go near anything. I know there are piles of old newspapers and things from the time he made those speeches, hidden away in boxes. So I ask him again, why the police tried to close down the newspaper. But then he slams his fist down on the table and all the cups and spoons jump in the air. Maria shivers.

‘I won’t be interrogated by my own family,’ he said. Then he walked away to the front room and slammed the door. My mother sits with us for a long time and tells us her stories about Germany instead. She doesn’t mind being interrogated. And sometimes she says things that we don’t understand. She looks far away and says we will be putting our parents on trial one day and asking what they did.

‘You are the fathers and mother now,’ she says. ‘And we are the children.’

She is starting to clear the dishes without thinking. She’s not even looking at what she’s doing. It doesn’t make sense
stacking up plates and unstacking them again. I know she’s thinking right back to when she was a girl in Kempen. She says things were different when she was small in Germany and my father was small in Ireland. We will soon be adults, she says, and they will be the children. We will grow up and look back at all the things they did in their lives, like trying to sell crucifixes and party hats and sweets. We will go over the secrets, too, that are hidden in the wardrobe.

‘You’ll say we’re children and we didn’t know any better.’

Then she starts clearing the dishes all over again, stacking up the plates and collecting the knives and forks. We start asking her more questions. I want to know if she’s Irish or German now.

‘What country do you love?’ Franz asks.

‘Ireland,’ she says, because that’s where she’s living now and that’s where the postman brings her letters and where her children are going to school. But what about Germany? And then she says she loves Germany, too, very much, because that’s where she was born and went to school herself and where she remembers the postman coming to the door.

‘You can’t love two countries,’ I said. ‘That’s impossible.’

‘Why not?’

‘What if they start fighting against each other?’

‘I don’t just love one of my children,’ she says. ‘I still love all my children, even when they start fighting.’

In school, they teach us to love our own country. They sing a song about the British going home. The
máistir
takes out a tuning fork and taps it on his desk. It rings, and when he stands the fork up on the wood it makes a long note. We hum the note and sing about the British getting out of Ireland.

Ó ró sé do bheatha ’bhaile …

It’s a funny song and very polite. It says to the British that we hope they’ll keep healthy and have a good trip home. When you sing this song you feel strong. You sit in your desk with all the other boys singing around you at the same time and feel strong in your tummy, right up to your heart, because it’s about losing and winning.

The master says Irish history is like a hurling match in Croke Park with his team, County Mayo, losing for a long time, right up until the end of the match when they start coming back and win the game at the last minute. He says that’s the best way to win, to lose first. He tells us the story of a man named Cromwell who was winning and sent the Irish to Connaught or Hell. But they made one big mistake, leaving lots of dead people in Ireland to keep talking in the graveyard. The fools, the fools, he says, because then the Easter Rising happened and there was lots of fighting and dying and the British had to go home, even if they didn’t want to. Then the game was over and the British flag had to be taken down in Dublin Castle. Michael Collins arrived late and kept the viceroy waiting, but he said the British had kept him waiting for eight hundred years so a few minutes wouldn’t make much difference. The master taps the tuning fork and we sing again. Even when we’re not singing the song in our class, you still hear it coming from another class somewhere else down the corridor.

My brother gets in trouble because he writes with his left hand and the master wants everyone in Ireland to write with the same hand. Franz can only eat with his left hand and write with his left hand. He’s a
ciotóg
, the master says. My mother has to go into school and tell the master that
Onkel Ted was a a
ciotóg
, too, and now he’s a Jesuit. But that makes no difference and the master ties Franz’s hand behind his back to make sure he can only write with his right hand. All that comes out on the page is a scribble. I want to help him, because the master laughs and says it looks like a snail has crossed the page with ink.

I know what it’s like to lose, because I’m Irish and I’m German. My mother says we shouldn’t be afraid of losing. Winning makes people mean. It’s good that the Irish are not losing any more. It’s good to love your country and to be patriotic, but that doesn’t mean you have to kill people who belong to other countries. Because that’s what the Germans did under the Nazis. They tried to win everything and ended up losing everything. Like a hurling match? Yes, she says slowly, like a very brutal hurling match.

The master says I’m a dreamer and that’s worse than being a
ciotóg
. He says I’m always disappearing off to some other place. He wishes he could tie my head down, but that isn’t possible, because no matter what happens, you’re still free to go anywhere you like inside your own head. You can travel faster than the speed of light to any place you want in the universe, but now it’s time to be here in the glorious Republic of Ireland, he says. He bangs his stick on the desk and asks me what blasted country I’m in at all. Germany? So then he has to come down to my desk and drag me back home to Ireland by the ear. The only way that he can stop me from emigrating again is to tie my head down with a poem after school. I have to stay behind and learn a big poem about a priest who was hanged long ago in the town of Ballinrobe where the master comes from in Mayo. We sit in the classroom alone when everyone else has gone home and learn all the verses about the priest being hung, drawn and quartered because he spoke against the British.
I can see that the master has hair growing in his ears, like grass. I think of blood on the grass in Ballinrobe.

There are gangs in the school. At lunchtime, they fight each other in the yard and it’s all about winning and losing. One of the gangs is called the cavalry and they are looking for Indians to kill. When you’re in a gang, you feel strong in your tummy. You run and shout and everyone else is afraid. But they don’t want me any more because I’m a dreamer, so it’s best to stand with my back against the wall and make sure they don’t get my brother. One day, I saw them running through the yard and they punched a boy right in the stomach. The boy was eating lunch and when they hit him, he dropped his sandwiches and opened his mouth. There was no sound, only a piece of sandwich that came out and dropped on the ground, too. He stayed like that for a long time, leaning forward with his mouth wide open and a dribble coming down. I could tell they were jam sandwiches because the white bread was coloured pink. I thought of his mother making them and now they were wasted. Somebody came and picked them up but he didn’t want to eat any more, only cry. Then you could hear his voice coming out loud, like a high screech with lots of pain.

Back in class, the master said there would be no more gangs. The boy who was hit by the cavalry had gone home and the master made a big speech about the potato famine in Ireland. He said the people had green mouths because grass was all that was left to eat. He said it was a disgrace to hit anyone in the stomach while they were eating. I looked out and saw the sandwiches still lying on the ground. The yard was empty. I stared at the seagulls screeching and fighting over the jam sandwiches.

And then the master bangs the desk again, as if he wants
the stick to be a tuning fork and give a long humming note. He says he’s fed up with me dreaming and not knowing what country I’m in, so now there’s trouble and I feel like going to the toilet quickly. He’s going to punish me, but not with the stick, and not with a poem about Ballinrobe or a song about the famine. Instead he’s going to send me over to the girls’ school and that’s the worst punishment of all, to go over there with ribbons in your hair. He takes me by the ear and we travel at the speed of light over to the girl country. I sit at the back of the class and see the girls looking around and giggling, until it’s time to go home.