The Speckled People (25 page)

Onkel Ted came out and gave me a book called
Black Like Me
, about a man who changed his skin from white to black, just to see what it was like for other people. He said you have to be on the side of the losers, the people with bad lungs. You have to be with those who are homesick and can’t breathe very well in Ireland. He said it makes no sense to hold a stone in your hand. A lot more people
would be homeless if you speak the killer language. He said Ireland has more than one story. We are the German-Irish story. We are the English-Irish story, too. My father has one soft foot and one hard foot, one good ear and one bad ear, and we have one Irish foot and one German foot and a right arm in English. We are the brack children. Brack, homemade Irish bread with German raisins. We are the brack people and we don’t just have one briefcase. We don’t just have one language and one history. We sleep in German and we dream in Irish. We laugh in Irish and we cry in German. We are silent in German and we speak in English. We are the speckled people.

After that my father was killed by his own bees.

Every year in May the bees swarmed because they wanted a new place to live in, not just the same gardens and the same flowers and apple trees every time. Whenever there was a swarm, you could see it like a cloud in the air all around the house, with bees zigzagging like needles against the sky when you looked up. It was always a fine day, too, with the sun out and no rain. And they would never sting when they were swarming. My father said they were happiest when they were going off to find a new home because for them it was like going on their holidays to Connemara or Germany. You could stand underneath without any protection and not be afraid. You could watch the cloud until it started moving away from the house like a whirlwind. They would not go far at first, only up to a nearby tree where they would settle down and wait while the scouts went out to find a new address for them to live in. Then you still had a chance to catch them and bring them back before they emigrated and disappeared for ever. My father taught me how to do it. You could see the swarm like a black beard hanging in the tree and you could climb up with a straw skep and not be afraid to put it on top. You didn’t need to have gloves on or anything. The bees would think it was a new home and move in. Either that or you
could hold the skep underneath and shake the branch until the beard fell straight in. Then you put it on the ground and all the bees would settle down again. You had to be quick and calm at the same time. You had to do all this before the scouts came back with the new address and sometimes, when you thought you had caught them, the cloud would start swirling up in the air again and fly away over the roofs of the houses.

I was very good at catching the swarms when my father was out at work and he was good at making them move back into their old hives again as if it was a brand new home. But after a while the bees started getting very angry and they always wanted to go back to the country. My father said that maybe they were getting aggressive because of inbreeding. And one day, when he was out on the roof of the breakfast room checking the hives, they attacked him. I wasn’t there to stop it. I wasn’t there to do the sting-stopping trick with the tea towel and cracking the bees before they could do any harm. I was away, walking on my own all day, hanging around by the sea and thinking of going for a swim.

Nobody could stop what happened. My father was dressed for going on the moon with the cage around his head and the big gloves going up past his elbows. He was taking out the frames and trying to make sure they weren’t thinking of running away again, so then the bees all went mad. They zigzagged all around him like an unhappy cloud. My mother knew there was something wrong so she closed all the windows and told everyone to stay inside. Maybe my father was not meant to be a beekeeper. Maybe he wasn’t calm enough to be a father. Maybe the bees knew he was still fighting and thinking about the time when he was a boy and nobody liked him
except for his mother. Maybe they could feel anger in the air from the time when Ireland was still under the British, or when Ireland was free and could remember nothing but being under the British. Maybe they could smell things like helpless anger, because they kept trying to kill him. And then one of them finally got in under the cage around his head and stung his ear.

My father thought he would never hear music again as long as he lived, so he began to panic and dropped the frame in his hands. The bees jumped up in the air like a black cat. They were humming like a furious engine now. He tried to get the bee out of his ear but they were already stinging the leather gloves. Every time he tried to stop them from getting under his cage, he was only letting more of them in. He nearly fell off the roof trying to beat them off He shouted for help and climbed back in through the window to get away from them. My mother heard him calling and ran up the stairs with a towel, but there were bees all over the house by now. Everyone ran away to hide. Ita got into bed and covered herself up with the blankets and didn’t come out again. Bríd took Ciarán into the bathroom to play with water and locked the door for ever. The whole house was full of bees. They were in every room, buzzing at the window, trying to sting anything they could find, soft things like curtains and pillows and coats that smelled like us.

My father was running through the hall with bees on his back and his arms. My mother was behind him trying to beat them off with the towel and getting stung herself as well. He was shouting and trying to get the cage off his head. They were both shouting, which is the worst thing of all because the bees know when you’re not calm. That makes them even more aggressive. They stung him around
his neck and close to his eyes and on his lip. They stung him inside his shirt, even under his arm, even in the other ear so that he couldn’t hear anything any more. Then my mother just flung open the front door and ran out of the house, out on to the street, with the bees still following. They escaped from the house and left the front door wide open. She pulled my father across the road and waved at the cars passing by. Neighbours ran back into their houses because they were scared of bees and scared of the Irish language. In the end, a woman stopped her car to take them down to the hospital. But even then the bees got in with them and kept stinging my father. Even when he got into the hospital they came after him and kept stinging until he stopped fighting and couldn’t say anything more. They were buzzing at the frosted glass of the hospital windows and around the neon lights. They were still trying to sting anything they could find, things like rubber tubes and plastic gloves. When the doctors and nurses started taking his clothes off they found bees underneath who were trying to sting him even though he was not moving any more. They found a bee right inside his ear. They counted 38 stings in all and that was more than anyone could live through with a bad heart.

When I came back I saw the front door open for anyone in the world to walk into our house. I knew there was something wrong because there was a hum in the hallway. Bees were at all the windows. They were dying on the floor and walking around in circles, making themselves dizzy. I knew there was something wrong because Ita was still under the bedclothes afraid to come out. Everybody was crying and you don’t want your father to die. You still want to be friends with him, otherwise you won’t like yourself very much either. I didn’t want to have a father who was killed by his own bees before I could talk to him.

My father worked all his life with the ESB. He helped to bring electricity to lots of places in Ireland like Connemara and Mayo and the Aran Islands. It was called rural electrification. My father was responsible for all the wires hanging between the lamp-posts all around the country. He was respected with his long Irish name, the name that nobody could pronounce but that everybody remembered. And then he had one last job to do before he died, he had to buy some high tension cables in Germany. He was the only one who could speak German in the ESB, so he was sent over to get the best value. He visited factories and admired all the German inventions. He travelled all around the country and said the Germans were great people. And that’s where he died. The bees followed him all the way and on the last day at Frankfurt Airport, when he was on his way back home again, they killed him. He was sitting down, ready to say goodbye to one of the men he was buying the cables from. Then he just fell over into the man’s lap, stung to death.

The phone call came in the afternoon. My mother came out of the front room with shadows around her eyes. She walked around the house as if she was lost and didn’t know where to go. His coffin came back to Ireland some days later. His suitcase, too, full of things that he had bought for us, presents from Germany to make up for all the mistakes.

I had seen other funerals before but I never thought it would be our funeral. At the church my mother looked so different. She’s my mother, but when I saw her crying, she was a child again. She was thinking of all the things that happened in her life after she was nine years old and her own father died. Now she’s an orphan again and everyone has to look after her. She was weak coming out of the church, so
Eileen and Tante Roseleen had to help her and hold her arms. There were lots of people outside the church that we didn’t know. People shook hands with me that I never saw in my life before and I never knew my father had so many friends. Everybody was looking at us and whispering with the foggy dew in their eyes. People said there was nobody like my father left in Ireland now. They said he was the last person to be killed by his own bees and Irish people were only interested in things like cars and televisions from now on. Onkel Ted was there to help my mother into the black car for all the family because she had nowhere to go home to any more. It looked as if she had just arrived in Ireland and didn’t know where she was.

After that it’s sometimes hard to talk to my mother. She says she should have fought back earlier. She says she was trapped by my father and could not escape. If she had the choice she would still be born in Germany and she would still come to Ireland, but she would have changed things and made different mistakes this time. People sometimes come to visit her and ask her if there’s anything they can do. Gearóid comes in his Volkswagen and his tweed suit, but she doesn’t want to see him. Some of the neighbours invite her over but they don’t always understand what she says in her German accent. Sometimes people come from Germany to visit and then the house fills up with the smell of cake again. But most of the time my mother prefers to sit in the front room and read books and write her diary, because that’s your only friend for life. To my children, she starts off again. When you grow up I don’t want you to say that you knew nothing.

My father is gone and our house is very quiet. The tall man came to take the bees away one day and there’s nothing on the roof of the breakfast room now. My father’s bee hat
and his bee gloves are in the greenhouse. All the things in the house that belong to him are still there. Nothing has changed. His books are on the desk with a train ticket halfway through to let you know how much he has left to read. His tools are there in the
Kinderzimmer
and there is a dining-room cabinet waiting to be finished. Everybody is afraid to touch anything. Upstairs, his shirts and his Sunday suit are hanging in the wardrobe. I can walk out of the house now any time I like and go down to the seafront. There’s nobody telling me what to do any more and what language to speak in. But sometimes I still think he’s going to burst in the door any minute. I think he’s back in the house and I can hear his voice full of anger.

You can inherit things like that. It’s like a stone in your hand. I’m afraid that I’ll have a limp like him. I’m afraid I might start sticking the tip of my tongue out the side of my mouth when I’m fixing something. I know I have to be different. I have to listen to different music and read different books. I have to pretend that I had no father. I have to go swimming a lot and dive underwater and stay down there as long as I can. I have to learn to hold my breath as long as I can and live underwater where there’s no language.

I know they’re still after me. One day when I was swimming on my own, they found me pretending that I was not a Nazi or an Irish speaker who was dying. They knew it was Eichmann gone swimming and diving underwater. There was a big gang this time and I couldn’t run away. There was nobody else around either to save me. No gardener. No old man swimming with pink skin as if the water was not cold. It was Sunday morning with the bells ringing and rain coming. They started throwing stones at me, every time I came up for air. So
then I had to come out of the water and they put me on trial.

I stood in the shed where you change. But I couldn’t get dressed because they started kicking my clothes around. They laughed and asked me questions I couldn’t answer. One of them had a knife and said he had ways of making me talk. They stood around, punching and kicking me to see if I was guilty or not.

I knew that was the reason why my mother came to Ireland in the first place. One day in the front room she told me that after the war she got a job in Wiesbaden with the American army. She worked in the de-nazification courts, she said, where they examined people to see if they were really Nazis or not. Before they could start working again and behaving like normal decent people, some of the Germans had to be put on trial and asked lots of questions to see what they had been up to in the war and if they had helped the Nazis. She had to make all the notes of what people said and then type them up afterwards. It was a good job and everybody said she was so lucky. Maybe she would even meet an American and get married. But one day, there was an old man before the court, a gynaecologist. He said he had no time for Hitler because he was only helping women with babies getting born. He said he didn’t care if babies were German or not, they were all good babies to him. But they didn’t believe him. In the end, a Jewish woman came home to Germany from England to speak up for him. She said he was always very friendly to her and that he helped her when it was difficult to have a baby. That should have settled everything, but afterwards when my mother was typing everything up, they came and asked her to change the words around. They wanted the Jewish woman to say he was always very angry and that he only wanted Nazi
babies. But my mother couldn’t. So then she wrote a letter to say that she would not work there any more. Everybody said she was mad giving up a great job like that with a flat in Wiesbaden and American food when everybody in Germany was hungry. But she could only think of the old gynaecologist sitting in court very quietly and not even trying to defend himself. He said he liked German music and German books, but that didn’t make him hate other people. He was one of the last good men in Germany and they were trying to turn him into a Nazi.

She left her job and went away, on a pilgrimage to Ireland.

My mother says there are enough guilty people and we don’t need to invent them. There are enough murderers left in the world today and we don’t need to make up Nazis that didn’t exist. And there’s no point in turning the Nazis into big film stars either, because then everybody will be blind to all the other things that are going on now.