The Speckled People (23 page)

My mother says it’s the hardest thing in the world to say that you’re wrong. She wants us not to be afraid to make mistakes, and, when we do our homework, never to use a rubber or tear a page out of the copy book. She wants everybody to honest and Onkel Ted comes out to the house specially because he’s a priest and he’s heard all the mistakes that have ever been made in Ireland. He always brings a book in German for my mother and you wouldn’t think he’s read it because it looks new. This time he brought a book about Eichmann and a book about a priest named Bonhöffer. They sat around the table in the breakfast room and didn’t come out because they had so much to talk about. We went into the front room instead to listen to the radio and there was a song we liked called ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine’. We listened to the radio with one ear and listened out for my father with the other, to hear if he was coming with one soft foot and one hard.

The next day, when my father was at work and we were at school, my mother went upstairs very quietly to her bedroom with lots of clean laundry. Bríd was still breathing up and down, so my mother sat her up in the
big bed where she could look out and tell her everything that was happening outside on the street like a newsreader, who was going east and who was going west. She put the light on because it looked like it was getting dark outside and the red houses on the far side of the street said it was going to rain. Bríd said there was a man from the corporation slicing the weeds off the path with a shovel. Miss Tarleton came out and threw some more weeds out on to the path while the man wasn’t looking. And a dog came walking into our garden because the gate was open, but he just scratched the grass and went out again.

My mother opened up my father’s wardrobe and put away lots of clean shirts and rolled-up socks. She left the doors open and started looking at all the things that belonged to him before they got married. She found the picture of the sailor with his soft eyes looking away that my father never wanted anyone in our house to see again. She found other pictures of my grandfather when he worked on ships that belonged to the British navy. She found the last postcard he sent home to his wife saying: ‘More homesick than seasick.’ There were rosary beads belonging to my grandmother Mary Frances and a box full of letters and lots of medals she got from the navy after he died on his own in a Cork hospital. There were more boxes of letters from people in America and South Africa who couldn’t come home again. There were letters that Mary Frances wrote to my father when he was going to university in Dublin so that he would never have to leave Ireland and get seasick or have to work in America. Letters that my father wrote home to Leap to say that he got the money and a list of all the things he had to spend the money on, like the rent and razor blades and a penny for Mass on Sunday. Letters from his mother asking him to send
home his clothes to Leap to be washed. Letters to ask him if he had heard anything from his brother Ted.

Bríd said it was raining and the man from the corporation left the shovel leaning against our wall. She said he was standing under the tree across the road taking shelter and smoking a cigarette. She said Mrs Robinson opened the door to hold her hand out and see if it was really raining, because there’s a clock in her hallway that tells the weather, but it’s not always right and you have to tap it with your finger. Bríd said it was raining hard now and there were big drops on the pavement and nobody on the street at all any more going east or west.

My mother sat on the floor and looked at photographs of my father before he was married. She found pictures of the time when Onkel Ted was becoming a priest and my father was becoming an engineer. She found German language lessons from Dr Becker and homework my father did. There were lots of things from the time during the war, when my father met Gearóid at university in Dublin and started the party called
Aiséirí
. There was a picture of my father walking down O’Connell Street at the head of a big march, holding a poster with the words: ‘For whom the bell tolls,
Éire Aiséirí
.’ There was another picture of my father and Gearóid in his tweed suit walking down Harcourt Street, smiling as if they were not afraid of the police.

There were boxes full of green leaflets to say what
Aiséirí
was going to do with Ireland if they were in control. They were going to stop people being greedy and getting rich on their own without sharing. People would not have to pay rent if they had to live with rats and not enough clothes or food for their children. Irish people would no longer have to go away and get seasick. They would get rid of all the
things the British invented like county councils and slums and postboxes with the crown. They would take back all the things that belonged to the Irish, like the rivers and the big houses and the six counties in the north. It was time that the Irish took back the factories and the shops and put up the Irish word
Amach
on the doors in the cinemas instead of Exit. They were fed up with Irish people changing their minds all the time and not knowing how to start up a new country from the beginning. They said it was time for Irish people to stop sitting down and staring out the window as if they got an awful fright. What they needed was a big strong leader, not like Hitler or Stalin, but more like Salazar, because he was a good Catholic and Portugal was a small country like Ireland with stone walls and poor people living on their imagination.

My mother doesn’t understand very much about politics so she can’t tell the difference between the things that people say before elections. She knows they have nice hands and nice shoes and make lots of promises. She doesn’t understand what difference
Aiséirí
would have made if more people had thrown their hats up in the air for my father and not kept some of the things that the British left behind, like the trains and the courts and elections. She found notes for all the speeches on O’Connell Street, written in tiny handwriting on cards. But they made no sense. There were notes about laziness and blindness and immoral practices. Notes about greediness and money lending. Notes about bringing horses to the water and making them drink. About biting the hand that feeds you and rubbing salt into the wounds. There were notes about how silly it was to live in Ireland and not be Irish, notes about people still calling themselves British. People calling themselves Jewish, too. Notes about Jewish people
giving Irish people carpets and making them pay for the rest of their lives. Leaflets about an international conspiracy of Jewish bankers. One of the cards quoted a man named Belloc, asking if anybody had ever heard of such a thing as an Irish Jew. And then my mother found the newspaper that Gearóid was talking about. It was so old it was gone yellow and almost brown. The headline on the front page said: ‘Ireland’s Jewish problem’. The date on the top was 1946. There was a note in handwriting, too, from Gearóid saying: ‘doesn’t go far enough’.

When you’re small you know nothing and when you grow up there are things you don’t want to know. I don’t want anyone to know that my father wanted Jewish people in Ireland to speak Irish and do Irish dancing like everyone else. I don’t want people to know that he was foaming at the mouth. That the Irish language might be a killer language, too, like English and German. That my father believes you can only kill or be killed. It’s the hardest thing to say that you’re wrong.

One day when I was coming home from school I saw my father in the street. He was on his way home, too, buying a newspaper on O’Connell Street. He looked like a different man when he was outside, more like an ordinary Irishman going home from work, with his cap on and his briefcase in his right hand. I was standing beside a newspaper stand looking at all the books and the magazines. There was a book with a gun and a dead bird on the cover and I wanted to know what the story was inside. All the time the man was shouting ‘Herald-ah-Press’, with the newspapers under his arm. There was an echo coming from across the street where another man was doing the same thing, shouting ‘Herald-ah-Press’ back. When somebody asked for a paper, the man quickly took one out from the bundle under his
arm and held his hand out flat so that people could give him the money. They could take the paper out of his fingers and walk away home quickly without wasting any time. The man’s hand was black from the papers and there were black marks on his face.

Then I heard my father speaking right beside me. I got a fright because I thought he was coming to get me, but he was just asking for the
Evening Press
. He didn’t know I was there at all. I looked up and saw him standing beside me, putting the money into the man’s hand. I knew it was my father’s soft Cork accent. It was my father’s briefcase and I even knew what was inside – his flask and his rain mac and his book on Stalingrad, with the train ticket halfway through to show how much he had left to read.

‘Vati,’ I said. ‘It’s me.’

I waited for him to look down, but he didn’t see me. He was thinking of all the things he had not finished yet and all the things he was still going to do when he got the time. He put the paper under his arm and walked away. I wanted to run after him as if he was my father. I wanted to tug him by the sleeve of his coat. I wanted him to talk to me about things like films or football. But he didn’t know anything about that. And, anyway, I would have to pretend he was my friend and go all the way home on the train with him. We would have to talk Irish together, as if there was no other language in the world. Everybody would look at us. They would know that we were homeless and had nowhere to go, because we lost the language war. They would know that we were still locked in the wardrobe and didn’t know any better.

I didn’t move. I didn’t run after him. I knew I was doing the same thing as he had done to his own father, the sailor. I stood still and heard the brakes of the buses
screeching. I saw the people in a long queue waiting. I saw the windows of the buses steamed up and the places where people rubbed a circle clear to look out. I heard the man shouting ‘Herald-ah-Press’ and the echo still coming back across the street over the traffic. I watched my father walking away towards the train station like one of the ordinary people of Dublin. I watched his limp and his briefcase swinging, as if I had never seen him before in my life.

One day a man put a bomb in a briefcase and went out to work, like my father. He looked at his watch because he had an important meeting to go to and he wanted to be there on time. It was a hot day and he brought a clean shirt with him as well. Before the meeting, he asked everybody to wait a few minutes so he could change his shirt first. They told him to hurry up and waited outside while he went into a room and clicked open the briefcase with the bomb inside instead of his lunch and his flask. He took out the shirt and started getting the bomb ready straightaway. It was two bombs really, but he could only fix the fuse on one of them, because he had been injured in the war and only had one arm, like Mr Smyth in the vegetable shop. He could only see with one eye, too, because there was a patch over the other one, but he was not afraid to die and he took out a small set of pliers and did his best. Everybody knows how long it takes to change your shirt, even if you only have one arm. He was taking so long that somebody came to the door to ask what was keeping him and then his hand started shaking, so he decided, in the end, that one of the bombs would be more than enough. He changed his shirt quickly and came out again with the briefcase in his hand. The empty sleeve of the missing arm was tucked into the pocket of his jacket, like Mr Smyth. He
didn’t have to shake hands with anyone and nobody knew what he was thinking either, because he was like Onkel Ted and not afraid of silence. They didn’t know that there was a bomb inside the briefcase for Germany, and when he got to the meeting where they were all standing around a table and looking at the map of the world, he gave the briefcase to another man and told him to put it as close to Hitler as possible. Then he walked away and heard the explosion right behind him. He thought Hitler was dead and everybody was free again, but that was a big mistake because, after all that trouble, Hitler wasn’t even hurt and came out with only a bit of dust on his uniform.

‘Make sure of it,’ my mother says. ‘For God’s sake, don’t just walk away and leave it to somebody else.’

The man who planted the bomb was arrested in Berlin very shortly afterwards. His name was Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and he was immediately taken out into a square to be executed by firing squad, along with some of the people who were on his side. Later on, his brother and all his friends were arrested, too, and put on trial for planning a puppet show against Hitler. They were put to death in a very cruel way and their children were taken away and given new names so they would forget who they were. One of the boys wrote his real name on the inside of his lederhosen, but they were all sent to a special school so that they would grow up as Nazis, and none of the puppets would ever try and speak against Hitler again.

Afterwards, Hitler went on the radio to tell everyone in the world that he was alive and still had two eyes and two ears and two of everything. In case there was a mistake and some people might not have heard the radio, they collected everyone together in halls and theatres and schools to tell
them that Hitler never felt better. My mother says that she was on a platform waiting for a train when she heard the news that he was not dead yet and the war was still on. Her sister Marianne was working in Salzburg and had to go to a big meeting in the opera house to be told what happened, as if they were about to hear some music. When everybody was sitting down in their seats and all the coughing and whispering stopped, an SS man came out on stage to make a speech. He said there was some bad news. Somebody had betrayed Germany and tried to kill Hitler with a bomb. But there was nothing to worry about, he said, because Hitler was still alive and could never be killed, not even by a bomb in the same room. Then Marianne stood up.

‘
Leider
,’ she said out loud for everyone to hear. ‘What a pity.’

The audience turned around to look at her standing up with her arms folded against the Nazis. Everybody in the whole opera house was waiting for her to be taken away and maybe even executed immediately. But then at the last minute, an older woman she had never seen before stood up beside her and spoke very calmly.

‘
Ja, leider
,’ the woman said. ‘Yes, what a pity such a thing can happen.’

Then everybody thought it was just a mistake. Maybe Marianne wasn’t a woman against Hitler with her arms folded, but a woman so much for Hitler that she was not afraid to stand up and say it out loud. Before Marianne could say anything more, before she could say that she really wished Hitler had been killed by the bomb and that his two of everything had been blown to bits, the woman pulled her back down quickly into the seat and told her to stop trying to get herself killed.

My mother says it’s hard to tell that story, even it it’s
true. Nobody will believe it any more, because lots of people made up things like that after the war. Everybody wanted to prove they were against the Nazis and never said a word against Jewish people in their lives and even saved lots of them from being killed. If all the stories were true, then how come Hitler was alive for so long and there weren’t more Jewish people found all over Germany when the war was over. People who are guilty usually point the finger. It’s the people who really were against the Nazis who don’t want to boast about it. Most of the people who were against the Nazis disappeared and can’t speak for themselves.

In the book she got from Onkel Ted about Eichmann, there is a story about a German man who helped the Jews in Poland. He gave them guns against his own country, against Germany. When the Nazis found out what he was doing, they killed him straightaway. And afterwards he was forgotten by everybody because what he did was not enough to stop what happened in the end. He might as well not have bothered. Nobody wanted to know. All the books and films are about the bad people, my mother says, not the good people. It was the same with the man who changed his shirt and brought the bomb in a briefcase to meet Hitler. He was forgotten and he might as well not have bothered either, because so many people were murdered by the Nazis that it’s hard to think of anything else. He was not very good at making a bomb, because he was not very good at hating people. And it’s hard to start boasting about somebody who was not very good at killing Hitler or giving away guns against the Nazis or standing up with your arms crossed and saying it was a pity Hitler wasn’t dead.

There was fog everywhere outside that day. I looked
out the window of my mother and father’s bedroom and I thought it was like net curtains hanging down. The fog was waving a little. I could hardly see the houses across the street. I was listening to my mother and I didn’t know what country I was in any more. She was feeding the new baby on the bed, my small brother, Ciarán. When there was nothing more to say and she was finished telling about the bomb for Germany, we just listened to the foghorn for a long time and said nothing. Ciarán was smiling and shaking his head from side to side, trying to make himself dizzy and drunk. Ita and Bríd were playing with him and sometimes copying the voice of the foghorn until Ciarán laughed. Mrs Robinson pulled back her net curtains and looked out across the street at me and I waved, but she couldn’t see through the fog. She lets us watch the television in her house sometimes and I know what her house smells like. Everybody’s house has a different smell and some smells make you feel lonely and other smells make you feel like you’re at home. Miss Tarleton’s house smells like a greenhouse and boiling cabbage, and Miss Hosford’s house smells like a chemist. Mrs McSweeney’s house smells like toffee and shoe polish. The Miss Doyles’ flat upstairs always smells of beans on toast. The Miss Ryans’ house smells like washing and ironing and a bit of liquorice mixed in, and Miss Brown’s house smells like the mixture of soap and cigarette smoke and the smell you get at the back of the radio when it’s been on for a while. I don’t know what makes the smell of each house so different, but our house smells of being happy and afraid. Our friend Noel’s house smells like nobody ever gets angry because his father is a doctor and his mother never raises her voice and they have a dog. Tante Roseleen’s house smells of red lemonade and the place where Onkel Ted lives smells like a different country,
like the house with the yellow door and the custard, the place where you always feel homesick.

My mother said we would go down to find the foghorn when she was ready. We waited outside and you could not see the end of the street, only up to number six. She cleaned all the crumbs and bits of mushy biscuits out from the bottom of the pram and when she came out Ciarán was sitting up with a serious face and a hat on over his ears that has a big furry bobble on top. We walked down to the sea with Ita and Bríd holding on to the pram as if they were driving it. The cars and the buses had their lights on, even though it was daytime, and sometimes you could only see the yellow lights like a ghost coming through the fog. Everybody was travelling so slowly that you thought they were afraid of where they were going and what they might find in the fog.

It was like a new fog country where everybody was quiet and saying nothing. There were no more far away countries like Germany or England or America, because you could not even look out across the sea. There were no waves at all and the ceiling was very low. It was like a small room with net curtains. Like a bathroom with the bath filling up and seagulls floating on top and the mirror steamed up and funny voices echoing around you. When we looked back we could not even see the road or the cars or any houses either. Nothing was moving. Not even a piece of paper. The trees were pretending to be dead and the foghorn kept saying the same word all the time.

‘Rooooooom …’ You could hear the word very clearly now. The same word all the time, as if it had only one word to say.

‘Rooooooom,’ we shouted back. ‘Room the rooooooom.’

I ran across the green park in front of the sea until my
mother and all my brothers and sisters disappeared behind me. I heard them calling and I walked back slowly, like a ghost walking out of the fog. My mother looked different. I thought it was somebody else and I had come back to a different place. She had her back turned, looking out towards the sea, like somebody from a different country that I didn’t know the name of and couldn’t talk to. There was a ship coming in very slowly with the lights on. There was no wind and no language, and the only word left was the word ‘room’. She stood at the blue railings with the brown rust, like an ordinary German woman.

We walked on towards the harbour and the foghorn kept getting louder and louder. We saw the lighthouse coming closer, too, and the light coming around every few seconds to point the finger at us through the fog. My mother said it was like a man carrying a yellow lantern. Bríd was afraid to go any further, so my mother changed her mind and said it was just the lighthouse winking at us. We counted the time in between each word from the foghorn and in between each wink from the lighthouse. We came to the place where you can shout into a hole in the wall and hear the echo. ‘Jaysus, what the Jaysus,’ Franz shouted and everybody else had to do it after him in a line, except my mother. ‘Room the room and Jaysus what the Jaysus and down you bully belly,’ we shouted. We walked all the way out along the pier and my mother said we had to be careful not to walk straight off the end into the sea.

We came to the place where there was a granite monument for the lifeboat men who were drowned while trying to rescue people from a ship, not very far away from the land. My mother said it was very sad to think of them getting up on a stormy night and leaving the house and
saying they would be back soon. We stood looking at the names of the men written up and thought of them going down into the dark water so close to home without saying goodbye to anyone. When we came to the place with the wind gauge on top, the cups were stuck and not even moving at all, just waiting for the wind to come back so it could start spinning again. Any of the boats we could see in the harbour were not moving very much either and the foghorn was talking so loud that we could not say a word any more. Bríd and Ita had their hands over their ears and we could not go any closer because Ciarán started crying. We sat down on a blue bench and my mother took out a bar of chocolate. There was nobody else on the pier. We were like the last family in Ireland, listening to the silver paper and waiting for the chocolate to be shared out.

If Hitler had been killed, then everybody would have said it was a good bomb, a bomb for Germany. Instead, they said the people who planned the puppet show against the Nazis were liars and betrayers. They were bad Germans who were not very good at hating people. It was a bad bomb, they said, a bomb against Germany and they might as well not have bothered, because nobody would even remember it. Sometimes a good bomb can be a bad bomb and sometimes a bad bomb can be a good bomb. But this was a useless bomb and everybody had to wait until all the good bombs started falling on Germany. Then the trains were on fire and the streets were full of people running. That was near the end of the black and white film that my mother was in. She had to work for the German army like her sister Marianne. Her other sisters didn’t have to, my mother says, because they already had children and Hitler didn’t want mothers fighting in the war. That was the time when all the good bombs were falling on the cities and people were
burned alive in their sleep, to make sure they learned how to hate the Nazis.

After the bomb that didn’t even hurt Hitler, Marianne thought somebody was following her all the time. She was afraid that what she said in the opera house put her in trouble and that everybody knew she was against the Nazis. When she walked through the streets of Salzburg she sometimes had to look around and check to make sure that nobody was behind her. Sometimes they’re after you because they think you’re a Nazi and you feel guilty and you can’t trust yourself any more. And then one day on her way home from work, she found out who was after her. It was the woman who stood up in the opera house and stopped her from killing herself.

‘
Leider
,’ the woman said and smiled.