The Speckled People (16 page)

My mother could not understand why Mr McNally would not prefer to lie down and sleep on the sofa instead of sleeping on the roof. She likes things to be done properly, in the right place, and the roof is no place to fall asleep.

Mr McNally was very friendly. He smiled and said the hole in the roof was not half as big as he thought it was. It
could have been much bigger. Some of the damage he had seen on other roofs was shocking, he said. He sat down at the table with the newspaper and looked at a list of horses’ names. Then he rolled the paper up and put it away in his jacket pocket and drank the tea. He ate some biscuits and then lit a cigarette. He was talking to my mother all the time and he asked her if she knew what the feeling was like not to be able to remember something, like the name of a horse or a football player. My mother nodded her head as if there was something she could not remember either. Sometimes, Mr McNally said, he thought he was losing his memory. He said it was the worst thing of all, not knowing what you couldn’t remember. Then it was time for him to go and he said he hadn’t eaten biscuits as nice as hers before. He said he was hoping there would be another storm soon, so he would have to come back and fix the roof again. My mother smiled. He hit me on the head with the newspaper and said I was a lucky devil, and after he was gone we counted the biscuits that were left over.

My mother smelled the blue smoke and looked out the window for a long time to see if she could remember what it was she had forgotten. But it was only something that she could not put out of her head. Something from the time in Germany that she had almost put away by writing it down in a diary for her children. Still, it came back again and again. Sometimes it was there at the back of her mind and she didn’t even know what was upsetting her, until she sat down and remembered. She smelled the smoke and thought about when she was trapped in the past, as if she were still unable to move on and she would never see the future. She would live her whole life in the same moment, when Stiegler was coming up the stairs, and it felt like helpless infinity. At first she tried to resist. She said she
would go to the police, but Stiegler said that it wasn’t a good idea for her to contact them because he had too many friends in the Gestapo. They would never believe her.

‘I’ll tell your wife,’ she said, but he wasn’t even scared of that.

‘I wouldn’t advise that,’ he said.

He had power in his words and she had none. Every night he came up the stairs and she would hear the sound of his breathing outside. She would see the door handle turning. Then he stood inside her room and she could not stop it or help herself. Sometimes she tried to believe that it was right and that this was the sacrifice she had to make in her life. There was somebody she knew who had joined the Nazi party just so that the rest of the family didn’t have to. So maybe she was going through this so that nobody else in her family had to endure it. It was all her own fault and she had brought it on herself. This is what she had wanted, she thought, what she had dreamed of so often. Maybe it wasn’t quite what she had imagined, but if you’re weak and stupid and have been misled, it’s still your own fault and you can only blame yourself for what happens next. If you can’t stop something at the beginning, then you may not be able to stop it later on either and you deserve everything that follows. So she was in a trap, with Stiegler coming to her room every night. He took off his clothes and placed them neatly on the chair. He even folded his tie. He even put each sock neatly into each shoe. He took off his watch and looked at it briefly before he hung it on the back of the chair. It was never too late to resist. She still felt that she could threaten to go to the police again. But he put that out of her head and closed off the last escape route that she had.

‘A lot of people are being taken away these days,’ he
said. ‘You don’t want to go with them, now do you? Nobody comes back, you know.’

Afterwards, when he put his clothes on again, he seemed to do everything in reverse order. The watch was first, the tie last. Then he lit a cigarette, every time, as if he wanted to keep her company for a while longer. He smoked his cigarette and sometimes he would tell her to smile. Where were all the smiles, he would ask, and then he looked at his watch and said he had to go. My mother sits in her chair and smells the smoke and stares out the window as if she will never escape.

I keep asking my mother questions about the future. What language do they speak there? Do they have cars and buses and streets like here? Will you have to walk any more or will people have legs like wheels? Will people be able to live without breathing? Will there be shops with machines outside where you put in a penny and twist the handle for chewing gum? Will there be money or will people just be able to draw things and sprinkle salt on the picture to make it come true? She stretches her hands out in the kitchen and says she can’t look into the future, only saints can do that. All she knows is that the future is far away and it will take a whole day to get there, first on a bus, then a train and then another bus. It might rain there a bit, she says, so she has to go out and buy a rain mac for each one of us.

Everybody is busy preparing for the journey. I watch my father making the last of the trolleys, concentrating hard with his tongue out the side of his mouth and saying nothing, only yes or no. Then I go upstairs and watch my mother laying everything out in rows on the beds first before she puts it all into the suitcases. We’ll be sleeping in new beds, she says, so we’ll need new pyjamas. Maria keeps counting and saying that there’s only one more sleep and one more bowl of porridge before we go. Ita keeps mixing up words in every language in her mouth, like
bye bye Baümchen
and
go go maidirín
. She is very kind to everybody and always wants to give you things, even things that you didn’t ask for. But you have to say thank you and then she goes off again to get something else. She goes around the house and comes back with a pencil and a cup and a broken umbrella. And those things have to go into the suitcase as well, my mother says, it’s all coming with us.

Then everything was packed and ready in the hallway. My father lined up the trolleys one by one—blue for Franz, green for me, red for Maria, and the pram at the back for Ita. Each trolley had a rope at the front and pictures on the side. Each trolley was packed with a colouring book, a box of crayons, plasticine, sweets, biscuits and a grey, plastic rain mac. Behind the trolleys and the pram were the suitcases all in a single line, like a long train ready to move out of the station. And before we went up to bed for the last time, I felt strong in my tummy because we looked back from the stairs and saw how close we were to leaving.

The next morning we got up and had breakfast very early. When it was time to go we all kneeled down in the hallway first to pray for a good journey, then my father carried each trolley down the granite steps, followed by the pram and the suitcases. My mother stood with us on the pavement, while he went back in to lock the front door from the inside. We heard the big bolt sliding across and waited while my father closed all the windows and doors in the house and made his way out the back door, across the garden wall and all the way around the lane to meet us again on the street. There was nobody up and nobody there to see the Irish-German train heading off into the future, nobody to hear us squeaking and rattling down the street
with my father out front carrying the suitcases, wearing his tweed cap and his own grey, plastic rain mac and with the umbrella hanging around his neck.

It took a long time to get down to the bus stop because one of the wheels came off Maria’s trolley and had to be fixed. But there was no shortage of time, my father said. The bus conductor stacked the trolleys carefully one on top of the other under the stairs, and then we were moving at last with a long ticket flapping like a white flag out the window. On the train we had a table where we could take out the colouring books and draw. In Galway we sat by the river and looked at swans while we were eating our lunch. Then we got the bus to Connemara and my mother said it was more like being on a roller-coaster because the driver had a cigarette in his mouth and drove so fast it was impossible to see around the next turn or over the next hill. She said the bus drove itself. Chickens were scattering off the road. Sometimes a dog ran alongside, barking and trying to bite the back wheel, and my mother called them
Reifenbeisser
, tyre-biters. People waved at the bus and one time an old man sitting in the long grass held his cap in the air without even looking up to see, as if he knew it was the bus passing by and everybody on the bus knew it was him. Once or twice the bus had to stop because there was a cow in the middle of the road that wouldn’t stop chewing. But then we were off again, going further and further into the empty brown land, full of rocks and stone walls that my mother said looked like a place on the moon.

It was the evening by the time we arrived and there was a man waiting for us. It was Seán De Paor, the postman, and we were going to stay in his house. He smoked a pipe and there was a smell of turf all around and sometimes you didn’t know which was which. The place was called
An Cheathrú Rua, which was true because that’s the Irish for ‘The Red Quarter’, the land that’s brown red all around. There were no road signs because everybody knew the names of the streets in Irish. We followed him up the road past the handball alley, up Bóthar an Chillín to his house, and all the way the trolley train rattled so much that people came out of their houses to tell the dogs to stop barking.

My father was speaking Irish all the time and laughing and I knew he would never be angry again. There was Fear an tí, the man of the house, and Bean an tí, the woman of the house. There were two boys called Seán and Máirtín who had never seen plasticine before. Everybody said lederhosen were the best trousers they had ever seen and wanted to know where they could be got. All the men wore caps like my father and asked you what story you had. Some of them even wanted to learn German, so my mother had to give them German lessons on the road through Irish.

It was like being at home in the place where we all wanted to be for the rest of our lives. Every day we went for long walks down to the sea, down to the beach beside the graveyard with all the Irish names. We met the old people who could remember as far back as infinity and didn’t even know any English, my father said. We didn’t understand them either because they spoke very fast with no teeth, but my father took photographs of them outside their houses with thatched roofs, to make sure they wouldn’t disappear. Sometimes we walked further up to Pointe, to the little harbour where the lobster pots were stacked up and where you thought you were standing on the furthest piece of land, looking right out across the bay to the Aran Islands, like black whales coming out of the sea.

This really was the future, my mother said, because
when we were playing on the rocks, there was lots of seaweed that looked like the tails of crocodiles and some like the tails of lions. We laughed and dragged the lion tails across the sand behind us. It was the future because sometimes the tide went out so far that you thought the sea had run away and disappeared altogether. The water drained away and left the land behind, silent and deserted, with black seaweed draped across the rocks like hair. As if everything had gone to sleep. As if we were the first people ever to discover this place. Sometimes there was nobody out under the sky and we didn’t see anybody for hours. It was the future because when we climbed up the hill it was like walking on the moon, with nothing but grey rocks and rusty brown colours all around. And behind us the black line of the coast going in and out as far as your eyes could see.

It was a place where you could live on your imagination, my mother said, a place where everything was simple and you didn’t need possessions, not like some of her sisters in Germany who had to own more and more things all the time, until they could only talk about what they didn’t have and what they still wanted. It was a place full of things you could not pay for with money, a place where you could be rich with nothing but silence and landscape. All you needed was sandwiches and milk and the wind at your back, she said, and my father repeated the same thing in Irish, only the other way round, with your backside to the wind.

‘
Tóin in aghaidh na gaoithe
,’ he said.

So we laughed with our backsides to the wind and nobody ever thought of going home again. When it rained we got out our macs and sheltered behind the stone walls. The best shelter of all we learned from the
sheep, when we were so far away from any house or any walls and the rain came so quickly that we just copied them and crouched down behind the rocks. Sometimes we found shelter in a doorway and stood watching the rain coming down at an angle. There was nothing to say and I saw my father going into a dream as he stared out into the rain without a word. My mother, too. All of us dreaming and sheltering from the words, speaking no language at all, just listening to the voice of the rain falling and the sound of water gurgling between the stones somewhere behind the barn. Then afterwards you could see the steam rising on the road when the sun came out again as bright as ever and the water continued to whisper along the roadside like the only language allowed.

One day my father met a man at the harbour whose name was De Bhaldraithe, and he had invented a dictionary of English words in Irish. It was a great book, my father said, as good as the book about people talking in the graveyard, because now at last everybody could learn Irish again. And that night they were invited over to a house where people gathered around to drink whiskey and sing songs. My father told lots of stories in Irish and my mother had to sing a song in German. The man who made the dictionary knew some German, too, so he was able to speak a few words to her, because nobody could speak any English.

And after all the singing and talking, there was a discussion about the state of the Irish language and everyone agreed it was still alive, more alive than ever before. They said people were putting the Irish language in a coffin and bringing it to the graveyard, but they didn’t realise that people can still talk in the grave. One man said Irish speakers in Ireland were being treated like people from a foreign country, from another planet. But as long as there
were people like De Bhaldraithe and my father who made their own children speak it, the language would never die out. They drank whiskey and smoked pipes and passed around plates of ham sandwiches. It was a great night because nobody was laughing at the Irish language, except one woman who disagreed and said nobody could live on their imagination for ever. It was no use being poor, the woman suddenly said, and everyone in the house went so quiet that you could hear the turf hissing in the fire and somebody’s stomach murmuring. The woman said she was sick to death of seeing people coming down from Dublin for their holidays and all they wanted was the people in Connemara to stay living in thatched cottages with no toilets inside. What was the use in speaking Irish if you couldn’t put food on the table? But then my father made a speech in Irish that made everybody hold their glasses up in the air to him. He said he could see the woman’s point of view and it was no fun to be poor, but that’s why people in Dublin were busy working hard and making a sacrifice, too, so that Ireland could live on its own inventions and its own imagination. And in the end, he turned the argument around to say that toilets inside the house and food on the table were no good if you lost the language. Your stomach could be full but your heart would be empty.

They came home along the road in the dark when all the lights in the houses were already gone out. My mother says you could not even see your own shoes it was so dark. And one time, they stopped and whispered to each other because there was somebody standing right in front of them on the road just breathing and staring at them and not letting them pass by, but it was only a donkey that suddenly got an even bigger fright himself and ran off.

It was the best night of all, my mother said, except that
in the middle of the night something funny happened. My father had to get up and go to the
leithreas
outside. The toilets in Connemara were all outside in a small wooden house with lots of flies and a bad smell of newspapers that always made me want to get sick. Inside there was a big box with a wooden lid and a hole in it. Underneath there was a bucket that Fear an tí sometimes brought to a field nearby where he could empty it out and bury it all underneath the soil. That night my father had to feel his way along the walls to go out the back door into the darkness. He found the
leithreas
and locked the door shut behind him. But then, as he turned around, there was no wooden board and he fell right down with his backside in the bucket.

At first everything was silent. It was dark all around and everybody in Connemara was asleep. My father couldn’t lift himself out. He was stuck in the bucket with his legs hanging out over the wooden box and his pyjamas around his ankles. He had his shoes on, but no socks, and his laces were undone. He thought he would be stuck like that for ever, so he started calling for help in Irish. Nobody came and all he could do was to keep shouting and banging on the side of the shed, until there was so much noise, they said the dogs were barking as far away as Casla. Everybody in the house woke up and Fear an tí went down at last to rescue my father from the
leithreas.
He first had to break down the door to get in. Then he had to put his arms around my father to lift him out and get the bucket off his backside and tell everybody, even the neighbours across the road, to go back to bed, it was nothing at all. He offered him a cigarette and a pipe and some whiskey, but my father just said he was going back to bed and after a long time the dogs stopped barking and everything was quiet again.

In the morning we could see the door of the
leithreas
lying on its side and the lock broken. Nobody said a word about what happened. Maybe Fear an tí was afraid that my father had hurt himself and wasn’t saying anything. Maybe Bean an tí was even more embarrassed, because if they all spoke English and had a proper toilet inside the house, it would never have happened. Maria kept saying that she was never going to the toilet again as long as she lived. She was holding her knees together and we started pretending that we were falling into the
leithreas
all the time. Going down the stairs or walking around the house, Franz just suddenly said ‘Oh’ and fell down into an invisible toilet. We did it again and again and kept laughing.