The Speckled People (20 page)

‘Are you hungry?’ he asked.

‘No,’ we said.

We carried on for a while, but then he stopped again and sat down on a bench as if his legs couldn’t carry him any more. There wasn’t far to go, but instead he started talking and telling us things that he had never told us before. He said it was not true that he had rescued my mother because it was the other way around. If it wasn’t for her he would have joined the priesthood like his brother Ted. He said he once went to Rome to pray and ask God whether he should be a priest or get married. He went to see an Italian doctor who could hardly speak to him and used his arms a lot. The doctor said he should get married, because getting married and having children was the only way of getting rid of a limp. My father thought it was like God talking in broken English. He even cried and the doctor had to put his hand on his shoulder. Then my mother came to Ireland and rescued him from the priesthood. And that’s why he could not go up to the top of the Drachenfelz without her. After that he was
quiet and said nothing all the way back on the train to Kempen.

That night, back in Ta Maria’s house, I was trying to get to sleep and I thought of what it would be like if we all came to live in Germany instead and all had the same language. Nobody would ever call us Nazis. My father would have lots of friends and my mother would have all her sisters to talk to. My father would be more German and my mother would learn how to argue and make the rules, like her youngest sister Tante Minne. I lay there and saw different shadows on the wall. I was back in the black and white film that made my mother so afraid.

‘Please God, help me to get out of this,’ she wrote in her diary.

She didn’t know what to do any more. At night she prayed on her knees and walked up and down in her room. She was afraid of what was going to happen to her now. She was back in Düsseldorf, but she had nobody to speak to. She wanted to go home to Kempen, but she was afraid to make trouble for Ta Maria and Onkel Gerd. They had no money and they couldn’t support her. She was afraid of being a beggar with no work. She saw Stiegler in the office every day in his suit and she could smell his aftershave. She had not learned the words to describe what happened to her in Venlo. She could not trust any of the women in the office and she didn’t know how to go to the police either, because Herr Stiegler had lots of friends in the Gestapo and the Waffen SS. He could accuse her of not helping Germany and then she would be taken away instead. In the end, the only person she could go to was Stiegler himself, because she was only nineteen years old and sometimes you think the person you’re most afraid of is the only person who can help.

One day, she had the courage to go straight up to his desk after work. The typewriters were all silent. Herr Stiegler sat looking out the window while she spoke.

‘I’m glad you told me this,’ he said.

Then he asked her to go home, back to her apartment room. He told her to wait there for him and not to say a word to anyone. He would come and discuss it with her there. He said there was nothing to worry about because he would personally see to it that everything was all right. She was afraid it would start all over again. She could not let him come near her. But he was so calm and so confident that she began to think everything was fine. She knew everything was going wrong but she wanted to believe it was right. As if it was easier to believe a lie. She went back to her apartment and paced up and down the room that night, wondering if she should just run away, just go and start again in a new city where nobody knew who she was.

It was about midnight when Stiegler came to her apartment. She heard his footsteps on the stairs. He was very quiet because there were neighbours living in the other apartments. He entered her room carrying a pouch under his arm that was black and shiny, with a rubber band around it. He told her to lie down on the bed and sat beside her. He held her arm and asked her where all the smiles were gone. He held her chin with his thumb and forefinger and told her to relax, it would only take a minute and then everything would be all right again. This was the solution. He would give her a small injection that wouldn’t hurt at all. It might make her feel a little nauseous afterwards, but that would all pass over and she would be full of smiles and dimples and going out to the theatre again. She wanted to know what was in the injection and
he said it was a simple preparation, made of purely natural ingredients like vinegar and alcohol. He was already rolling up her sleeve and rubbing a little swab of alcohol on her arm. He said he had received it from a very good doctor that he was friendly with. It would make her strong. It would wipe away all the sickness and disgust. It was an injection against disgust.

‘There we are,’ he said, like a real doctor.

He was very kind and very polite. He sat with her for a while stroking her forehead and there is no defence against kindness, my mother says. He kept saying he admired her strength and her courage. He said she was very brave and very beautiful, a real German woman. She could smell the cognac on his breath. Then she fell asleep and when she woke up, he was gone. She felt dizzy and sick. She tried to stand up, then she kneeled down, and then she lay on the floor as if nothing mattered any more. Even though she vomited everything up and her stomach was empty, the pain kept getting worse. She left the room and staggered to the bathroom in the hallway, holding on to the wall as if she were on a ship. She tried not to draw any attention to herself, and then she started bleeding and crying silently at the sight of her own blood all around her. She was afraid that one of the people in the other apartments would come out and find her there.

Stiegler came back some hours later. He found her lying on the floor of the bathroom. Her face was white and he could hardly wake her up any more. He was worried that something might go wrong, that she might die maybe and then he would have to explain himself. He had to do things quickly now. There was no time to clean up the blood in the bathroom. He dragged her back to her room very quietly so as not to wake anyone up. He left
her on the floor and packed her belongings quickly into a suitcase. He lost no time on this and went straight out to arrange for a car to come and take her away. He had already discarded the needle and the doctor’s pouch in various bins around Düsseldorf. When the car arrived, he got the driver to come up and help carry her down the stairs.

She woke up once or twice and saw that she was dribbling on to Herr Stiegler’s jacket and there was a white mark on his collar like a new badge. Then they put her into the back of the car with her suitcase beside her and Stiegler handed the driver some money. She heard the engine starting with a growl. And as the car drove away she looked up and saw Herr Stiegler taking out his handkerchief to wipe his suit.

Then it was the time of the bees.

My father had been preparing for a long time, talking to other beekeepers on the phone and planning everything like a new business. He worked out how much he would have to spend on one side of the page and how much the bees would pay him back with honey on the other. He bought a jungle hat with a wire cage around his face and leather gloves that reached all the way up his arms, past his elbows. He bought the hives and the frames and a smoke gun where you could put in a piece of rolled-up sackcloth on fire and shoot smoke out through the spout to calm the bees down. Everything else was free. The bees would fly out from the roof of the breakfast room from morning till night and nobody could stop them collecting pollen.

On the evening they arrived, my mother got out her special tablecloth, as if the bees were coming to tea like relations from Germany or west Cork. It was like having a party because she put flowers on the table for them and bought lemonade, too. From now on we knew we would never be the same as any other family, because we had friends who were bees and everybody on our street thought the bees were sitting at the table with us eating bread and jam. We even said a special prayer for them, and when the bell rang we all jumped up from the table together
and ran to the front door. There was a tall man standing there with a straw skep in his hand. He smiled and spoke to my father in Irish. Then they both went up the stairs and through my bedroom, and we watched from the room above as my father stepped out the window on to the roof of the breakfast room with the cage around his head.

My mother had a picture in the diary of a man named John Glenn who was dressed like a beekeeper. He was the first man to go into orbit, but then he lost his balance in the bath one day and broke his middle ear and stayed in orbit for the rest of his life after that. My father looked like he was in space for ever when he came out in his overalls and his long gloves and with his heavy boots on. The tall man said there was no need to shoot smoke because the bees were very happy to come to our house. He banged the skep and threw them all out on a board where they marched into the new hive with their white tails up in the air.

My mother and father are not afraid to be different. Other families are getting a car and a TV and we want those things as well, but we’re German and Irish and have bees as friends. They say we’re lucky to be so different because bees were better for the world and better for us. Most other children don’t even know the difference between a bee and a wasp. The TV kills your imagination and makes you stupid. But I know the other boys are not stupid, they just don’t care if there’s a difference between a wasp and a bee. They don’t care about the famine either. They don’t care about coffin ships and they don’t care about concentration camps.

All they care is whether we can fight. They call us Hitler and Eichmann and they want to see if we can fight like Germans. They want to hear us saying aaargh and uuumph like they do in comics and films. We try and run away. One
day when they came after us, I ran one way and Franz ran a different way. I got home first through the football field, back along the lanes and in the back door. I didn’t know where Franz was. He came home later and stood at the front door with blood on his face and blood on his shirt.

‘
Mein Schatz
, what happened?’ my mother asked.

There was nothing we could do about it. She could not tell us to stop being German, so she brought Franz into the kitchen and began to clean up the blood on his face. She got some chocolate out of the press to make things better. She said it was good that we didn’t fight back because we are not the fist people. We are the word people and one day we will win them over. One day the silent negative will win them all over.

When my father came home he was very angry, because nobody is allowed to hit Franz except him. He examined the shirt with the blood on it and said he could not let it go. I thought it was great because he was going to pay them back for what they did to Franz. Maybe he would get the boys who did it and make them kneel down to ask God how many lashes. He put his cap back on again and went straight down the road to one of the small houses and my mother tried to hold him back by the elbow at the last minute to make sure that he would stay friendly.

‘I’m not going down with fists,’ my father said.

Instead, he took the bloody shirt and brought Franz with him. When they got to the house and rang the bell, a woman answered the door and pretended that they had come to the wrong house. It was a funny thing to say, because the boy who hit Franz was hiding behind the banisters right beside her. My father smiled and said he didn’t come with fists, but he wasn’t leaving until somebody listened to him making a speech. So the man
of the house had to come out in his slippers and his sleeves rolled up and a tattoo of an anchor on his arm. He was very tall, almost twice the size of my father. He had twice as many children as my father and their house was not even half the size of ours. He was tired and he had a stubble on his face, and it looked like he had no time to listen to speeches from people in bigger houses. The television was on in the front room and he was missing half the football match. My father didn’t care how big the man was or how small his house was or if he watched TV all day. He wasn’t looking for revenge. He just held up the shirt with the blood on it and let the tall man look down at it for a long time.

‘This is your own blood,’ my father said.

Then he recited pieces that he remembered off by heart from books he had read. He said it was time to fight for the rights of small people and small nations. He said the reason we were all on our knees was that others thought they were so great. He said it was no use fighting each other all the time because then Ireland would never have its own inventions and its own language.

The man with the tattoo started scratching his belly. He thought he was back at school. He had no idea why my father was coming down to his house to start reciting things from books and saying a few words, too, in Irish with a bloody shirt in his hand. Maybe he thought it was like a new religion or a new political party looking for money. Maybe he thought my father was a Communist. And that was even worse than being a Nazi, that was like the nuclear thing, when the air is full of red dots and everybody stays inside for the rest of their lives watching television. The man with the tattoo started looking down at the sour sallies that were growing beside his slippers
at the door. Then my father said goodbye and insisted on shaking hands. He didn’t even mention the boy who hit Franz. He just left it at that. He even closed the gate after him, the gate that was never closed in its life before because the man with the tattoo and his whole family just left it open all the time and didn’t care how many dogs came into their garden to lift their leg and scratch the grass. As they walked away, my father told Franz not to look around.

‘Did you win them over?’ my mother asked.

‘They laughed,’ Franz said.

My mother said it didn’t matter because they were the fist people and you were right not to fight back, otherwise you would become just like them. My father didn’t even mind that they laughed and ignored his speech.

‘What matters,’ he said, ‘is that a small man was able to walk up to a big man and not be afraid.’

I knew it wasn’t over yet. I knew they would come looking for us again because I was Eichmann and I could do nothing about it. I wanted to be one of the fist people so that I could defend myself and not be afraid on the streets. From then on I wanted to be a real Nazi. I wanted to be so cruel and mean that they would be scared of me instead. In bed at night I thought of all the things I would do. I thought of bashing their heads against the wall. I thought of smashing a rock into some boy’s teeth. I would be famous all over the place. People would be afraid even to go swimming when I was out. I thought of them running away and hiding in doorways when they heard me coming, shivering at the sound of my name. Eichmann.

I started practising on my own. I learned how to do the evil smile. I learned to laugh like the Nazis do in films, slowly, while I was getting ready to torture somebody. I spoke English to myself in a German accent. I kept saying
things like ‘my friend’ and being so polite that people would be even more frightened when they realised that I was going to kill them. I stuck knives into puppets and grinned into the mirror. I threw rocks at cats. I practised torturing Franz and Maria. And one day, I even threw a chair at my mother and there was nothing she could do about it. So she left the chair there where it fell and said nobody else would ever pick it up again and it could stay there for a hundred years.

‘Why do you want to be one of the fist people?’ she asked.

‘It’s boring to be good,’ I said.

I wanted to be as bad as possible. When you’re bad you get a good feeling because people look shocked and worried and that makes you want to be even worse. If you’re good nobody looks at you.

‘I’m Eichmann,’ I said. ‘I’m going to kill people and laugh about it.’

She brought me into the front room and showed me a book where there was a picture of a boy in the street with his hands up in the air saying don’t shoot. She told me about a place called Auschwitz and how Eichmann was the man in charge of the trains for getting people there. She could remember Jewish people in Kempen. They were called ‘
die Jüdchen
: the little Jews’ because they lived in the small houses. She never saw any of them being taken away, but she said there was only one Jewish man who came back to Kempen after the war and he didn’t stay. He just came to look around once and then he left again and now there are no Jews in Kempen. She said they were our people. Our people died in concentration camps.

I wonder what it’s like for my cousins in Germany and if they still have to think about it every day like me. Is anyone
calling them Nazis on the street? Here I have to be careful where I walk, because if they catch me then I’ll go on trial and they’ll execute me.

‘I don’t want to be German,’ I said.

She had tears in her eyes and said the Germans would never be able to go home again. Germans are not allowed to be children. They’re not allowed to sing children’s songs or tell fairy tales. They cannot be themselves. That’s why Germans want to be Irish or Scottish or American. That’s why they love Irish music and American music, because that gives them a place to go home to and be homesick for.

‘It’s like a birthmark,’ she said.

It was time for us to go down to the sea and look at the waves, because she had to carry on with her work. She stood at the door to watch us going across the street until we disappeared around the corner. I knew I was in the luckiest place in the world with the sea close by. The sun was shining and you could smell the dust in the air. There were tar bubbles on the road and further along you could see a shimmer, as if the ground was rising up in the heat. Some of the shops had canopies that were flapping in the breeze. The boats were out on the bay and there was a haze over the harbour. We went swimming, Noel, Franz and I. We dived under the water for as long as possible. I knew I could stop breathing longer than anyone else. I could stay down there until my lungs nearly burst. I was the champion at not breathing and not speaking. I could hear the voices around the pool, but they were muffled and far away. Down there it was blue and calm, like being inside a cool drink.

Sometimes the bees come into my room at night. They go after the light because they think it’s daytime and they want to get as close to the sun as possible. They go mad
and whirl around the light until they crash into the bulb in the middle of the room and fall down. Then they pick themselves up and start again, whirling around and getting more and more excited and impatient, until you switch off the light and they move to the window instead. Then they buzz up and down the window for ages trying to get out to the light in the street, until they get so tired they drop down on the floor and crawl around in circles. They always go in circles when they’re dying, as if they’re trying to make themselves dizzy. You can’t let them out, and I have to sleep with my head covered up in case they come over and sting me in the middle of the night.

I know it’s the smallest things that hurt most because I got stung in the garden one day when I put my hand down on a bee in the grass. He had been hit by a drop of rain and was going mad in circles. When I put my hand down he stung me and after that nobody wanted to play on the grass any more. My father says that stings are good for you and we’ll never get rheumatism. If you want to reduce the pain, he says, you should take the sting out quickly to stop the poison going in. He explained that a bee sting is very different from a wasp sting, because a bee has a hook at the end of it and he showed it to us once under the microscope. He says we’ll soon get used to bee stings and won’t even feel them. And my mother says we shouldn’t howl so much every time a bee stings us because the neighbours will think we’re being tortured to death.

Sometimes when I’m inside the house I hear somebody screaming outside and I know it’s a bee sting. Maria or Ita or Franz, everybody has a different scream. And sometimes they scream before they’re even stung. If a bee goes near them they start shouting and running inside, as if they’re going to die. It’s not even the bee’s fault. They fly out
over the garden and come back with pouches so full of pollen, like heavy suitcases. And when the wind suddenly blows around the corner at the back of the house, they get pushed back down into the garden and find it difficult to pick themselves up again. Sometimes the wind blows them into somebody’s hair and it’s not their fault because they just want to get back up and carry the pollen home to the hive. Then they get tangled up in hair. You hear Maria or Ita screaming and running into the house even though the bee hasn’t stung yet and is only trapped and buzzing like mad, trying to get back out.

One day it happened to my mother and we invented a way of stopping the bee from stinging. My mother came running inside and shouting that there was a bee in her hair. She held her hair right to try and stop it from getting closer to her head. The bee was probably lashing out and stinging everything it could touch because it was trapped in a prison of hair, like a spider’s web with no chance of getting out alive. But as long as it didn’t get close to the skin, then there was still a chance of stopping it from stinging. She told me to get a tea towel and put it on the place where the bee was. I could feel the buzzing under my fingers and I pressed hard until the buzzing went up to a high pitch, like a motorbike far away. Then I pressed even harder until I felt a crack under the towel and the bee was dead. Nobody said anything about it afterwards, in case my father would get angry that we were killing all his bees. After that I was the expert at stopping stings. I was the sting stopper.