The Speckled People (12 page)

I was better again. The howling stopped. But there was trouble for us on the street. Everybody knew that we were German again. In the fish shop, the man leaned over the counter to look at us and say the word
Achtung
, as if all the people in Ireland were going to speak German from now on. Everybody in the shop turned around. He tried some more German words and I know he’s only joking, because he’s a nice man with a red face and who laughs so loud that it echoes around the fish shop. Other people are the same, they keep asking us to say things in German. But we’re afraid. I pretend I don’t know any German. I pretend I’m Irish and speak only English. But the boys outside the shops can see us wearing lederhosen, so they call us Nazis.

‘
Donner und Blitzen
,’ I hear them shout. With one arm up in the air they keep saying: ‘
Sieg Heil
.’

I know they get all those words from reading comics in the barber shop. My mother says that’s all they know about Germany. My father says there’s always somebody laughing in Ireland. He doesn’t let comics into the house because they are in English and have Germans dying on every page.

Then it’s time to talk about Christmas. Because Christmas is something German, too. My mother tells us that pink skies are a sign of the angels baking. The angels leave sweets on the stairs. My mother sings ‘
Tannenbaum
’ and then, as if she asked for it, the snow started falling. Thick flakes coming down silently and we hardly even noticed it. We ran into the street and looked up at the snow falling past the street light. One or two flakes fell on to my eyes
and gave me white eyelashes. Franz opened his mouth and tried to eat some of the snow as it came down and he said it was like free ice pops. My mother came out and said we should all wash our faces. She scooped up the snow from the wall with her bare hands and rubbed it against her face. Wonderful, she said, and we all did the same after her, even my father, cleaning our faces with the new white snow.

It was a new snow country. It snowed right through the night and by Christmas morning, when I woke up and looked out the window, I could see Germany. Everything was covered over and swollen with snow. The roofs of the houses, the cars, the trees, the garden walls, even the rubbish bins were white and clean. On the way to Mass the street was like a silent room and Maria said the snow was talking under our feet. There was a lost glove which somebody had stuck on a spike in the railings so that the person who owned it could come back and find it again. But now it was covered in snow like a big white hand saying stop.

I knew that snow was not just for children, because my mother said it turned everybody into a child, even my father. He didn’t want to let on that he was excited. He didn’t want to make snowballs or anything like that, but I could see that he was happy because when they got married at Christmas in Germany, they travelled all the way down along the Rhine together in the snow. Snow was something German, he said. Normally the winter was too mild in Ireland and the only snow that you would see was in pictures on biscuit tins, or else as cotton wool on the crib or as icing sugar on cakes. It was the Gulf Stream, he explained. He laughed and said that Ireland would rather
belong to a different climate because people had started growing palm trees in their gardens. Guest houses along the coast were called Santa Maria and Stella Maris, and there were lots of streets like Vico Road and Sorrento Terrace that made you feel like you were in a warmer country. But on Christmas morning all the streets should have had German names because everything was wrapped in white, even the palm trees.

The only thing different was the Christmas lights blinking on and off in the windows. I knew that my mother and father would never have fairy lights on the tree. Instead we had candles, because that’s what they did in Germany and my mother even had special candleholders that clipped on to the branches. We had hanging chocolate angels and lots of other things that had come in a big parcel from Germany. I knew that other children had Santa Claus and they knew what he was going to bring them. Sometimes people in the street would ask us what Santa was going to bring and we didn’t know. We never talked about that. One of the neighbours once brought us to see Santa in one of the shops, but I could see his brown fingers from smoking. He was coughing a lot and I saw him afterwards having a cup of tea with his beard off. I knew who he was, too, because I saw him coming out of the Eagle House another time and he wasn’t able to walk very well and had to hold on to the wall.

We had Christkind instead and everything was a secret anyway until the very last minute. We were not even allowed into the front room for Advent, because some of the gifts were already laid out in the corner behind the sofa under a big brown sheet of paper. We were only allowed in to help with the Christmas tree, and once, when my mother had to leave the room to get something, I wanted to look
under the brown sheet, but I was afraid the Christkind would take all the presents away again. My mother said it was not the gifts that would be taken away but the surprise, which was worse. I knew that other children were getting guns and cowboy suits, but we never got guns or swords or anything to do with fighting. Instead, we got a surprise, as well as something made by my father and something educational, like a microscope.

It was hard to wait. We stood in a line in the hallway, the youngest first and the oldest last. My father was in the front room lighting all the candles and we could smell the matches. When everything was ready, he opened the door wide and the candles were reflected in his glasses. My mother started singing ‘
Tannenbaum
’ as we slowly walked into the room and found all the gifts and sweets laid out on the chairs. There was even a trail of sweets on the floor as if the Christkind had been in a hurry at the last minute. Then everything was a surprise. There were toys and games and books from Germany and I knew I was so lucky that we were German at Christmas. We kneeled down to say thank you, and then my father put on the record of the Cologne Children’s Choir so that the whole house filled up with the bells of the Cologne Cathedral ringing out across the sea to Dublin. We might as well be in Kempen, my mother said, with the taste of
Pretzel
and
Lebkuchen
and marzipan potatoes rolled in cinnamon.

Later on, we went out to play in the snow. We built a snowman in the front garden, and it was only when we saw other children on the street that we realised where we were. There were marks where they had scraped snow off the pavement or off the walls and you could see Ireland underneath. A car had skidded, too, and left two black streaks on the road. We went from one garden to the
next looking for new untouched sheets of snow, where the ground was still under a dream. And when all the other children had disappeared inside for Christmas dinner, we went as far as the football field to see how deep the snow was there.

But then we were ambushed by a gang of boys. We had never seen them before and it looked like they had been waiting for us. We were trapped in the lane and couldn’t get home again. Maria and I ran away into the field through an opening in the barbed-wire fence, but they chased after us. The others had already caught Franz and pushed him up against the wall, holding a stick across his neck. They twisted his arm up behind his back and made him walk towards the field where Maria and I were caught, too, near a line of tall eucalyptus trees. One of them was forcing snow up under Maria’s jacket and she was starting to cry.

‘Leave us alone,’ she said, but they just laughed.

Franz said nothing. He just stood there and waited in silence. He was doing what my mother always said we should do, to pretend they didn’t exist. I did the same. I tried to pretend that standing in that spot in the football field was exactly what I wanted to do at that moment. I remembered what my mother said about fighting. Maria stopped resisting, too, and they gave up putting snow under her jumper because it was no fun any more. They were not afraid of anything. They pushed us back against the wire fence of the football field with sticks. The leader of the gang was not even afraid of the cold, because he picked up snow and caked it into a flat, icy disc while the other boys all blew into their cupped red hands for warmth.

‘Nazi bastards,’ he said.

They made a circle around us and whispered among themselves. One of the boys was pushing a dirty piece
of brown snow towards Franz with his shoe, saying that he was going to make him eat it. But Franz ignored him. I knew Franz was saying the silent negative in his head. Then Maria started crying and I wanted to cry as well only Franz stopped me.

‘Don’t indulge them,’ he said.

They repeated it a few times in a German accent. And for some of them it was a sign to start speaking in a kind of gibberish that made no sense. ‘
Gotten, Blitzen, fuckin’ Himmel
.’ One of the boys started dancing around, trampling a circle in the snow with ‘
Sieg Heils
’ and I suddenly wanted to start laughing. I thought they were very funny and I wanted to be Irish like them, to laugh and make up some of these stupid words, too, all the stuff they had collected from the comics and from films where the Germans were always losers. One of them tried to speak German by himself with his face all contorted with pain.

‘
Rippen schtoppen … Krauts. Donner und Blitzen, Himmel, Gunther-Schwein … Messerschmidt 
…’ he said in one long burst. Then he suddenly died in the snow, falling back and shaking as if he was riddled with bullets. ‘
Aaargh
 …’

I couldn’t help laughing. I could see myself as part of the gang, joining in and walking around the streets with them, laughing at everything. It made me feel soft in my tummy to think that I could be friends with them. But the leader didn’t like it. He wanted me to be the enemy and to see how tough us Germans really were. So he flung the snowball and it hit me in the eye with a flash of white, like a hard lump of icy stone. I couldn’t see anything and I rubbed my eye, but I didn’t let myself cry because I didn’t want to let my brother down. I showed them that nothing could hurt me and that Germans didn’t feel pain.

They continued to talk among themselves, trying to
decide what to do with us. I heard one of them say that we should be put on trial.

‘Yeah, put them on trial,’ they all agreed.

‘Guilty or not guilty?’

I knew that whatever they said about us we could never deny it. Whether it was true or not didn’t matter any more. They said things about the sinking of the Bismarck or the gas ovens but we didn’t know anything like that yet. I wanted to tell them what my mother said about the silent negative, but I knew they would only laugh at that. It was no use. We were at the mercy of their court in the snow. There was nobody else in the world to say who was right or wrong. Everybody was inside on Christmas day and we were alone on the white football field with a breeze pushing the tops of the trees behind us. Above the tall goal posts, the sky was grey and green again and it looked like there would be more snow. Low on the sky there were flashes of white or silver seagulls and I knew we just had to wait.

‘We have to go home now,’ Maria suddenly said, as if she could just bring this whole thing to an end by acting like an adult. She tried to move forward, but they only pushed her back again.

‘Execute them,’ one of them shouted.

They didn’t even have time for a trial. Maybe they were numb with the cold like us and wanted to go home to eat sweets and play with toys, so they decided to get on with the sentence and started to make snowballs. One of them said to pack them hard and another one of them included the discoloured piece of snow in his armoury, and when they all had heaps of white cannon balls ready beside their feet, we waited for the order and watched the leader of the gang raise his hand. It seemed like an endless wait. I thought of all kinds of things that had nothing to do with
being a Nazi. I remembered that the words in Irish for grey and green are the same. I thought of marzipan potatoes. And the peculiar skull-shaped design of plum pudding. I thought of the bell on the wall of my father and mother’s bedroom that didn’t work any more, and I thought of the three little dials on the gas meter under the stairs, until the hand eventually came down and a shout brought with it a hail of blinding white fire.

‘It’s only snow,’ Franz said.

He had his hands up over his eyes. Even after they were gone and the football field was empty and silent and it was already starting to get dark, he still had his hands up.

We might as well have been in Kempen, sitting in the front room eating Christmas cake, while my father lit the candles on the Christmas tree one more time. We sat on the carpet and played a game of cards where one person was always left with a picture of the black crow and had to be marked on the nose with a piece of charcoal, until everybody was a loser once and had a black nose. My father stood up and opened the door of the big bookcase to take out the bottle of Asbach Uralt. He took out the cork with a tiny, high-pitched squeak that sounded like a hiccup and poured two glasses so that the room filled up with a smell of cognac, along with the smell of pine needles and matches and candle wax.

‘A cognac-een,’ my mother called it. She liked to make things sound smaller than they were, like they did in Irish, too, because everything was better when it was small and harmless and less greedy. She sipped slowly and closed her eyes so she could think about what she was drinking. She said it was like a little kiss from God above. She laughed and said it again, like a tiny, little kiss from God.

My father then put on a record. He took it out of the
sleeve and made sure not to touch the music with his fingers as he placed it on the turntable. He frowned as he did it, but I knew that nobody could be angry, because it was Christmas. When he dropped the needle down lightly with his index finger, you could hear a crackle before the woman began to sing in German, a high voice that was so beautiful, my mother said, it was like silver coins falling down the stairs. And at the end, there was a single note that rose up so high in the air that it stayed in the room long after the song was over.

Sometimes a candle crackled and spluttered. And outside it was dark. I knew the football field was empty now and there was nobody out in the world. More snow was covering the footprints and it was easy to forget what happened. We had been executed but we were warm and there was a nice smell of the Christmas tree in the room, so it was easy to forget how cold and numb your hands could be outside. We had orange juice to drink and chocolate angels to eat. My father was putting on another record and my mother sniffed the cognac-een. Everybody was safe now and we were lucky to be German, but I knew it wasn’t over yet.