The Speckled People (11 page)

At home, my mother says we have started doing strange things again. When it was nearly dinner time, she told us to put the bowl of mashed potato on the table. My father was talking to her in the kitchen and she was listening and cooking at the same time, so I carried the mashed potato up to the room where we play and took the lid off. With the spoon, I threw a bit of the mash at the wall. It stayed there and we looked at it for a while. I threw another spoonful at the ceiling and it stuck as well. It made a strange sound each time, like a click. It made a different shape each time, too, sometimes like a little cloud, sometimes with a spike pointing downwards.

Maria said she was going to run and tell on me. But I told her that we had to make a sacrifice. I closed the door and said it was our duty to do this for Ireland. We had to make as many shapes as we could. Franz took lumps out with his hand and together we tried to cover the whole ceiling. Sometimes a lump came unstuck and fell down again and Maria screamed. We laughed and threw more and more of it up, until it was all gone and the whole room was covered. My mother came in and saw the glass bowl, empty on the floor. She said we were going out of our
minds. My father rushed into the room and looked at bits of mashed potato on the ceiling and said they would never come off. They would be there for ever. We were in real trouble. But my mother wouldn’t let him hit us. Instead of getting angry, she said you couldn’t punish a thing like that because it happened only once in a lifetime. My father was still frowning, but then she put her arm around him and said it didn’t matter going without mashed potato for one day. She said they were lucky to have children with such imagination. She smiled and said you had to have an imagination to do something as mad as that.

I was sick again. The dogs were howling in my chest. At breakfast time I could not even eat the porridge. I looked at the ring of milk around the rim and smelled the warm steam coming up into my face, but my eyes were blurry and I couldn’t breathe. My father said I was trying not to go to school. He was a schoolteacher once and he knew when people were making things up, he said, and if I was really sick I wouldn’t have to prove it. But when it was time to go to school, my legs were soft and I couldn’t walk. I heard Franz say that my face was white, so then my mother and father had to help me up the stairs, one either side. And halfway up my head dropped down on the step in front of me and I felt the cold wood on my forehead. I heard the sound of buzzing in my ears and the sound of my mother calling me from far away. Then I fell asleep.

When I woke up again my father was gone. Only my mother was there sitting on the stairs waiting for me to come back. She asked me if I was ready to go on and then she helped me the rest of the way up to bed. She stayed with me and sat on the bed repairing a jumper, pulling a blue woollen thread across the elbow. Some boys in school had leather elbows, but we had dark blue elbows. She told me stories to make the howling go away. So I lay there watching her, and sometimes I fell asleep and woke up
again later, only to see that she was still mending the same spot and telling the same story, as if no time was going by.

She told me about the time there was a big fire in Kempen. She was afraid of fire, she said, because her sister Lisalotte’s hair once caught fire on a candle. When you see something like that happening with your own two eyes, when you see it happen to somebody else it’s much worse and you remember it more than when it happens to yourself. She can’t forget the time people came to set fire to the synagogue and she hopes I never have to witness something like that with my own two eyes. That was the time Germany was sick and took a long time to get better.

My mother had to leave school early and go to work. Onkel Gerd had no more money once he lost his job as lord mayor. She got a job in the Kempen registry office and had to learn typing and filing names in alphabetical order. She remembers people coming in to find out if their grandfathers or grandmothers had ever been Jewish. She remembers how happy one old woman was, how she had tears in her eyes and put her hand on her heart when she found out that she was one of the lucky ones. Other people were not so lucky. Every day, they came to make sure they were not Jewish. Every day, Ta Maria wondered if the Catholics would be next. It wasn’t long afterwards that the Nazis closed down the convent in Mühlhausen and wrote dirty words all over the classrooms.

My mother had long plaits at that time, down to her waist, like two dark ropes. But Ta Maria said it was time to cut them. It was time to grow up and look like an adult. So one day she stopped being a girl. She asked the hairdresser to give her the Olympia Roll, because that’s what all the
women were wearing in the films, but, by then, her hair had already been cut too short and she had to wait for it to grow again. She says it’s funny how you can get so upset about something like that, how important those things can be and how you can sometimes cry more about little things than all the big things put together. She had to wear a hat and Ta Maria promised to go down to Krefeld with her and make up for it with new shoes.

My mother says she was at work when the trouble happened and saw nothing herself. She only heard about it later from her youngest sister Minne. But she smelled the smoke in the streets that afternoon. The synagogue was on fire and the fire brigade was standing by, doing nothing. Men in brown uniforms had gone around to the Jewish houses and Minne saw them going by with red batons. She said the curtains were flapping out through the broken windows and there were books lying on the pavement. Somebody’s private letters were flying around in the street like litter and there were children walking around the town with black and white ivory keys that belonged to a piano.

Onkel Gerd said they could not be part of this. You couldn’t watch something like that. People in Kempen blew their breath out slowly and thought how lucky they were not to be Jewish. That same evening, they all went to the big Catholic procession in the town where hundreds of people quietly passed through the Buttermarkt square with candles and torches, praying and singing hymns as if they needed to be especially close to God from then on.

The next day Ta Maria brought my mother to Krefeld, but you couldn’t buy anything that day. When they entered the shopping street they saw shoes thrown out on to the ground. The Germans would regret this one
day, Ta Maria said. It was not so long ago that they were wearing newspapers around their feet. And now there were shoes lying everywhere on the ground and people stepping over them. You could smell the leather. For a moment it even looked like a shoe paradise where you could just pick them up and try them on. This was the city where my mother’s mother sang at the state opera house. Now people were stopping to look through the broken shop windows. A man with a clapper board was walking along the pavement advertising ladies’ stockings as if nothing had happened. It made no sense. Expensive shoes. Brand new. Some of the best quality. Some still in their boxes, or only half out, on display. Some other boxes trampled flat, and the thin, blue-grey paper that goes to wrap new shoes blowing up and down the street as if nobody cared, as if nobody needed footwear any more, as if they hated shoes.

I couldn’t breathe very well. My shoulders were going up and down trying to get air. My mother stroked my head and listened to the howling in my chest. She prayed that I would get better. She smiled at me and said everything would soon be fine again, because her oldest sister Marianne was coming with her daughter Christiane. And Tante Marianne was very good at helping people breathe. She helped people in Salzburg when it was hard to breathe.

For days and days my mother was cleaning the house. She polished the stairs and every piece of wood in the house was shining. She put fruit in a bowl on the table and baked a cake. Tante Marianne was going to get my room. It had no wallpaper any more, only pink plaster and some long cracks, but my mother said it looked clean and friendly, and that’s all that mattered. And as soon as Marianne walked in the front door, she would see the old
oak trunk that came from their house on the Buttermarkt and think she was at home.

My mother put on her blue suit with the big white collars. She put the big number 4711 on her wrists and wore the green Smaragd snake. We put on our best clothes, too, with no blue elbows, and kept looking out the window until Tante Marianne and Christiane arrived in a taxi with suitcases. Then my mother dropped her apron on the floor of the kitchen and ran all the way along the hallway smiling and crying at the same time. Tante Marianne was smiling and crying, too, as they embraced and stood back to look each other up and down.

‘
Ja, ja, ja
,’ they kept saying. And then, ‘
Nein, nein, nein
.’

They could not believe their own eyes. They shook their heads and wiped their tears and embraced each other again.
Ja, ja, ja
, and
nein, nein, nein
, and
ja, ja, ja
, until Tante Marianne turned around to look at us. She knew our names from letters and photographs, but she had to kneel down and look at us properly, one at a time. She knew everything. She knew about Maria’s picture of my mother with the arms going all around the walls. She knew that I slapped the schoolteacher. And she knew about the mashed potato on the ceiling.

My father carried in the suitcases and smiled at everyone. Christiane talked to us and Tante Marianne talked to my mother as if they couldn’t waste a minute. They went through each of the names one by one – Ta Maria, Elfriede, Adam, Lisalotte, Max, Minne and Wilhelm, and all the children, as if they had to travel around Germany in their heads until every question was asked and every story was told. My mother had to hear everything twice and clapped her hands around her face as if she could not believe what she heard.

Tante Marianne brought new perfume into the house. Everyone wanted to be close to her all the time and sit beside her at the table. Maria followed her everywhere. My mother and Tante Marianne could not be separated either, because they kept talking, even when they were not in the same room. Even when Tante Marianne was upstairs and my mother was in the kitchen, they kept remembering things out loud, calling up and down the stairs as if they were at home again in the house on the Buttermarkt square. Tante Marianne called her Irmgard. We still called her Mutti, and it was like having two mothers in the house, because they had the same teeth and the same eyes and the same hair. They had the same words and the same way of laughing out loud until the tears came into their eyes. They had the same way of peeling an orange in strips along the side and the same trick of cutting the peel into the shape of teeth. Two mothers playing the monster with big orange teeth while my father was out getting coal for the boiler.

‘Vooo, vooo, vooo, vooo …,’ they both said. Then they started laughing so much that they couldn’t stop any more. Laughing and shaking, so that my father stopped pouring coal into the boiler to come and see what was happening.

Tante Marianne’s suitcase was full of toys and books for everyone. There were lots of gummi bears and chocolates and biscuits that you would never get in the shops in Ireland. She brought a spirit level for my father, and a toy train for me and Franz. Some other presents were wrapped and put away immediately, for Christmas. There were biscuits to be eaten now and biscuits to be kept for later. One by one, Tante Marianne took things out with great care, explaining where they came from. We were allowed to read the
Mecki
books immediately, about a hedgehog who travelled all over the world in a hot air balloon with
his crew – Charlie Penguin, and a cat called Kater Murr. Nobody in Ireland knows about Mecki, and they laugh at us because we don’t know who Red Riding Hood is and we don’t realise it’s the same as Rotkäpchen.

Everything in our house was German again. Around the table every evening, all the stories were German. Tante Marianne’s daughter Christiane had plaits tied up over her head and she wore a dirndl like in fairy tales. Maria got a dirndl as well. Tante Marianne said it was lovely to see Franz and me wearing lederhosen and Irish sweaters, German below and Irish on top. She said it was remarkable that we could speak three languages. My mother told her how we sometimes got things wrong and how Maria came home one day and said:
Ich kann es nicht believen
, which is a mixed up German and English way of saying: I can’t believe it. Tante Marianne said our German was different, softer, more like the old days. And she wanted to hear some Irish spoken, so we said a prayer and she said it sounded different too, not a bit like English.

I wanted Tante Marianne to stay in our house for ever. I went with her down to the seafront. I showed her all the street signs that had been changed into Irish. I showed her where the doctor lives and where the shops are. I told her that when you pass by the shoemaker’s shop you get an echo, because when you shout in, the shoemaker shouts back without looking up. She laughed and said it was just like something her father would do. People stopped to speak to her. The man in the fish shop recognised her immediately and said: ‘You must be the sister.’ He talked to her for a long time and Tante Marianne had to explain that she was from Germany, too, but that she was now living in Austria, in Salzburg.

‘Salzburg,’ he said. ‘I know the place you’re talking about.’

We went with her on the bus to Glendalough to see the round tower. We had tea and cakes in a hotel and helped her stick stamps on lots of postcards. She said Ireland was so beautiful. She envied my mother living in a country where the people were so friendly and spoke English all the time. But my father didn’t like her saying that. He tried to stop himself being angry at the table that night. He didn’t want to make any trouble while there was a visitor in the house, but there was something Tante Marianne didn’t understand yet about Ireland, something that had to be explained.

‘One day, the man in the fish shop will speak his own language,’ he said.

Tante Marianne said there was nothing wrong with speaking English. But my father shook his head. He said we were the new Irish children and soon the whole country would be speaking Irish in the shops. He said children were the strongest weapons, stronger than armies. But then Tante Marianne had an argument with my father. She said all the things that my mother can’t say. She said it was wrong to use children in war. She kept her arm around Maria all the time as if she was going to protect her for the rest of her life.

‘In Germany,’ she said, ‘they used the children, too.’

That was the only argument in our house while she was there. On the last evening, before she was going away, she showed us a photograph of the house where she lived in Austria. It was a house with a small wooden fence outside, near the castle on the hill called the Mönchberg. One day we would go and visit her. And then they talked about all the other well-known visitors that came to stay there every summer. People like Oskar Kokoschka, the famous
painter. People like Ernst Rathenau, whose cousin Walther was assassinated by the Nazis in Berlin. My mother looked at the photograph and said it was a good place to breathe in deeply. She said you could look out the window and see the castle above you every morning, as if it had just grown out of the rock overnight.

When Tante Marianne was gone home again, Christiane stayed with us so that she could go to school in Ireland and learn English. My mother told me the story of going to visit her sister Marianne in the snow. It was during the war, when nobody had much food. My mother took a train all the way to Salzburg and walked up the Mönchberg in winter with a bucket of sauerkraut, because Marianne had nothing. She says she remembers the thick snow all around and the silence. Tante Marianne was always very strong, even though sad things happened in her life and her husband Angelo never came back from the war. My mother and Marianne met Angelo on the same day, when they were out in the country one time, on holiday. And afterwards Angelo sent a parcel to each of them with the exact same gift inside, a book by Thomas Mann. But it was Marianne who married him while the war was still on. They married by proxy, my mother says. One day Marianne sat in the house in Salzburg with a picture of Angelo and a glass of wine in front of her, while Angelo sat around with his friends in Split and a picture of Marianne in front of him. They got married miles and miles apart. And that’s why they’re still so close, even though she heard nothing more and no more letters came home. She waited and waited, but he never came back from the war. And then one day, Marianne started up a guest house. And that’s why all the famous guests like Ernst Rathenau and Oskar Kokoschka are coming to stay in her house on the Mönchberg, because
Marianne was kind to people with bad lungs who couldn’t breathe very well in Germany and now they’re being kind back to her.