The Sailor in the Wardrobe

by Hugo Hamilton

  When my mother talks about bringing people back to life, I know she is quietly thinking about Stefan. I think of Stefan out there in the West of Ireland, walking along the small roads in County Clare and Connemara, all the places I’ve been to, thinking that there is always something following him, like a shout in the air. He keeps walking and walking, but he will never get away from his own name, and his own family, and his own country. I think of him looking out at the sea, with nothing but the sound of the wind in his ears. And even though there is nobody around and he’s picked the loneliest place in the world where there is nothing for miles, he can still feel that people are after him. I think of him looking out at the Atlantic as if he’s been hunted like a rabbit and can’t turn back. He’s got no country to go back to.

  The Gardai said they would leave it for another week. They told us that they would be keeping an eye out for him in the meantime, but we knew it would be impossible to find somebody who doesn’t want to be found. We thought of him like the fugitive on the television series, always on the move to a new place. People in Ireland had disappeared to places like America and Canada, so they probably understood why somebody would not want to keep in touch. My mother sat in the front room a lot, thinking it was all her fault. She was wondering about all the things that might have happened to him, making up all kinds of accidents like falling off cliffs or breaking his leg on the side of a mountain and lying there starving and unable to pull himself down to the next village. She was starting the nightmare factory again.

  And then I decided I had to tell her that Stefan was trying to be on his own. I wanted to put her mind at rest and told her he wanted to get away from Germany, from his father.

  ‘He wants to disappear,’ I said to her.

  ‘What did you say?’

  I could see how shocked she was to hear this. She wanted to know exactly what Stefan had said to me.

  ‘You better be very clear about your answer,’ she said, ‘because this is a matter for the police at this stage.’

  I was not sure what I was going to tell the Gardai when they asked me. It was out in the open now. I told her that Stefan said he felt numb in Germany and maybe she felt the same when she came to Ireland.

  ‘He hasn’t spoken to his father for a long time,’ I told her.

  ‘He told you that,’ she said.

  ‘Not for over a year,’ I said. ‘He wants to get as far away from his home as possible and disappear. He wants to go underground.’

  My mother was silent for a moment. She was afraid of this German father-and-son war, because she must have heard it all from Tante Käthe. She said she knew there was trouble at home and now she was beginning to worry that Stefan was going to be a danger to himself out there around the Cliffs of Moher somewhere.

  ‘He doesn’t know the Irish landscape,’ she said. ‘It’s not like the German mountains. Sometimes the wind comes up on those cliffs and picks people off like an invisible hand.’

  She said she was constantly surprised by the wind in Ireland. After she got married to my father, he brought her on a honeymoon pilgrimage up to Croagh Patrick and she said she had to bend down and hold on to the rocks, otherwise the wind would have blown her down the mountain again. She was beginning to imagine the worst. She could not understand how Stefan could turn his back like that on his family, on the place where he grew up, on his own home.

  ‘Will he not get homesick?’ she wanted to know.

  But that was exactly what Stefan was trying to be, homesick. He was trying to learn that feeling.

  For a while the phone calls kept coming. My mother’s school friend was thinking of coming over to try and set up a search party, but my father said Ireland was far too big a place to start looking for somebody who might not want to be found. My mother was in tears on the phone every day, because at times they thought Stefan was dead already. Onkel Ted came out to say a special Mass. They were only waiting for the day when his body would be found and I can see it in her eyes, how heartbroken Stefan’s mother must be back at home in Germany.

  At night our house is very quiet now, like a church where everyone is praying for him to return. Everybody is trying to remember him back to life again.

  Then one day my mother was outraged, because she was on the phone to her friend and Käthe asked a question that seemed so thoughtless at this moment. She wanted to know if my mother had already given Stefan the ancient book from the time of Gutenberg. In other words, if Stefan was carrying the precious book with him. It seemed to my mother that Stefan’s mother didn’t even care about her own son as much as she cared about the valuable book, and if her son didn’t come back, she hoped that at least the book would be returned. My mother could not understand her. She said it was no wonder Stefan had never learned to feel anything.

  The Gardai had found no trace of Stefan and decided to make a public announcement. He was officially registered as missing and a message was broadcast after the news one day. We all sat around the breakfast room listening to the news in English until the message came at the very end, just before the weather.

  ‘Here is a Garda announcement for Stefan Haas, a German national believed to be travelling in the West of Ireland. He is urgently asked to contact his family or any Garda station.’

  It was great to hear that message being broadcast. I wished that I was Stefan myself. It was great to think of him hiding out there in the West of Ireland. I could imagine him hearing his own name being called out on the radio one day while he was sitting down to his dinner, maybe while passing by a public house with a radio on inside. I wanted to go missing like that and never come back. I could imagine him slipping away out of some town and the people looking after him, wondering if he was the German national they were all looking for. I could see him walking across the Burren, across the bogs of Connemara, trying to keep out of sight and moving further and further away from places where he might be spotted.

  The Garda message was broadcast again a week later, but slightly altered this time.

  ‘Here is a Garda announcement for a German national named Stefan Haas who is believed to be missing in the West of Ireland. He is of tall, slim build and was last seen wearing a grey jacket and blue jeans. Anyone who has seen him is asked to contact the nearest Garda station.’

  Every time we listened to the announcement, I thought the description didn’t fit him at all. It was not the way I remembered him. They should have said he looks like Beckenbauer, then everybody would have spotted him immediately. They should have asked if anyone had seen Beckenbauer hanging around the West somewhere, maybe checking into some bed and breakfast under an assumed name, pretending that he had no interest in soccer at all, only hill walking. They should have asked people to keep a look out for anyone kicking pebbles or maybe kicking an empty packet of cigarettes along the street. Maybe somebody saw him walking through the fields decapitating a thistle or a ragweed with the tip of his shoe.

  Fourteen

  Things were starting to escalate at the harbour, another word we picked up from Northern Ireland. One morning we came down to find that one of Dan Turley’s boats had gone missing. He had already been out searching around the bay, but it was Packer and me who eventually found it out past the island and towed it back. It was badly damaged, lashed by the tide against the rocks, and had to be taken out of the water. The crane on the pier was brought into action and when the boat was finally turned over and placed on trellises for inspection, Packer said it looked like it had been mauled by a wild animal. There were scratch marks all over the bow and along the bottom. Here and there, the paintwork had been gouged and you could see the wet, sinewy wood, soft and yellow, like torn muscle underneath.

  Dan Turley said it would take a lot of repairing before it could go back into the water. He was full of anger, as if this was all part of the plot to kill him off at the harbour. You could see the vulnerability in his eyes as he stared at the savage bite marks and ran his hand over the damaged areas as if the boat had endured gr
eat pain, as if it was one of his children. He patted the bow and said it would be alright once we repainted it with red lead, anti-fungus paint. Then he turned away with a hurt look in his face, wishing he could get the animal who did this, wishing he could break his bones like twigs with his big steel hands.

  And then a few days later a second boat went missing. Dan was ready to kill somebody. Even though the harbour lads found the boat undamaged on the beach, Dan said he was being deliberately targeted. The people who were doing this were insiders who knew how to get to the moorings. They had to get to the lead boat first, which was tied from one pier to the other with long ropes, slack enough to allow the tide to go out. The ropes were often hidden underwater. Only a person with some knowledge of the harbour would have known how to get out to the other boats. The Gardai came to investigate and promised to keep an eye on the place, but Dan was not happy with that, and for two or three nights, he stayed hidden in his shed, sleeping on his bunk and listening to every sound outside. But there was no point in him being a watchman, he would have to stay there awake every night of the week, twenty-four hours a day.

  The harbour lads were repeating Dan’s words, saying they were going to crucify the man responsible. Nail him to the mast. Tie him to a lobster pot and sink the bastard. Already Dan had a fair idea who it was and stared around the harbour with great resentment, as if he would get his revenge some day soon. As he started fixing the damaged boat, his cursing increased.

  Packer decided we were going to go on a trip to the West of Ireland. He told Dan we would be away for a week or two and Dan took this as a further conspiracy that we would suddenly abandon him in the middle of his crisis.

  ‘Fecking off to the Aran Islands,’ he growled.

  I thought he might never want us to work for him again, but Packer was able to get around him, repeating the way that Dan said ‘feckin’ and ‘running off’ and ‘Off on your travels, like a pack a’ hooken gypsies.’ At last the harbour boys started laughing again, and making light of the whole matter of the stolen boats as if it was just a freak event.

  My father had nothing against me going to the Aran Islands. He was glad that I was going to a place where they still spoke Irish, but he didn’t know that Packer was involved. I had my own money and maybe my father thought it was good that he could have the house to himself for a while, because I was like an enemy within.

  Packer said it was going to be the first trip of many. We would travel all over Europe together, all around the world. He got a small gang of his best friends together from school and around the place where he lives, like an expedition to the Antarctic, with Packer as the leader and us as his crew, one with long hair and torn tennis shoes, another with glasses, carrying a coat with him every day, even when the sun was out. Another member of the expedition bounced along the street as he walked. Packer gave a running commentary on the trip, how we were going to discover the Aran Islands, how much beer we would drink, how many women we would meet, and how we were all characters in a big movie, Packer’s expedition to the edge of the Western World.

  The first thing we noticed going out to Aran was the light. It was coming from the opposite direction and felt strange. To us living in Dublin, on the east coast of Ireland, the world seemed to be turned around a full hundred and eighty degrees when we took the boat from Galway out to the islands. The white glimmer of sunlight that we expected to see when coming ashore was right there ahead of us on the way out to sea. It was like an inverted homecoming, something, Packer said, that was similar to getting on the plane in the autumn and landing somewhere on the far side of the world in spring. On the Naomh Éanna ferry out to Inishmore, it felt as though we were going backwards in time, travelling into the mirror. We were staring into the light over the Atlantic. We could barely see the shape of the three islands in the distance. We could smell the sea and the diesel fumes and feel the throb of the engines in everything we touched. We could hear the murmur of Irish being spoken around us on the boat and became aware, without saying it openly, that we were no longer facing east, towards London or Europe, but west, into an older, untouched world.

  As we arrived on the pier in Kilronan, the afternoon sun was shining away towards the mainland. We walked up towards the American Bar which was like the island waiting room, where people looked out to see if the boat was coming in, where men spoke about the weather and decided whether the boat would go out again or whether you might be trapped on the island for another night. The people leaving the island were heading down towards the pier and the people arriving were filling their places at the American Bar. The tourists went straight out to the promontory fort at Dun Aengus, on foot, in pony and traps, or on rented bicycles. We were staying on the other side of the island at Killeany, so we made our way past the dance hall, past the low cliffs with the ivy, out along the road towards the small fishing harbour and the white strand which they call trá na ladies or the ladies’ beach.

  We explored the island over the next few days and memorized the empty landscape around us. We saw the small Aran fields and the high stone walls, made of sharp grey limestone rocks, designed to let the wind through. We noticed how the tarred road was always fringed with a line of white sand and grass. We smelled the turf smoke and heard the sound of enamel buckets as we passed by the houses. Here and there a dog accompanied us part of the way and we realized how little traffic there was on this road and what a novelty we must have been, the strangers from Dublin. We saw the air strip in the distance with a single red fire engine parked in the middle and around twenty-five island donkeys roaming freely on the grass. We were told that every one of them had an owner, but they had the freedom of the island to come and go as they pleased, laughing at everyone as they went. We ran after them and trapped one or two of them, riding them like in a rodeo, falling off as soon as they bucked with their ears down. We went out to the Glasen rocks and the cliffs facing into the Atlantic, and saw nobody out there, only the balls of foam floating in from the sea and the booming sound of the waves smashing across the terraced rocks beneath us.

  From time to time, I thought I would see Stefan out there on the cliffs, silently watching the sea. I thought he would be standing alone some distance away, at the very edge of the rock, looking down at the waves pounding into the caves, just staring as if he could never turn around again or go back to Germany.

  On the way back from the cliffs, we saw the men working in the fields. Sometimes we saw women and children walking along the road and we noticed that they took the side of the road, close to the wall, while we walked in the middle. Mostly we saw nobody at all and it was only after some days that we understood how empty this landscape really was, how hard it must be to live here, away from the mainland, away from the shops and crowded streets. At night, it was so dark that you could see the stars very clearly, not only the main shapes like the Plough, but a whole lacy spray of white in between. It was so dark sometimes that we had to hold our arms out in front of us and grope at the stone walls to make sure we were still on the road.

  In Tigh Fitz bar in Killeany, we heard the men speaking in Irish and telling great stories. We heard the story of how a plane once landed on the island during the First World War and how the cows and horses were all frightened because they were not used to the sound of engines and motorbikes. There was one horse driven mad for weeks, running crazy all over the island, day and night, with all the islanders trying to trap him and bring him back to his senses. When a young man with a rope tied around his waist finally crept up to put a harness on the horse in a moment of exhaustion, he went fully out of his mind and ran out into the waves on the beach at trá na ladies, taking the man with him.

  We heard other stories of drowning and stories of the supernatural. That’s my story, they would say. Not a word of a lie. We heard of the Hollywood director who came to Aran and found a brother and sister who were so handsome that he asked them to go back with him and spend the rest of their lives in the movies in America. When they were going a
way on the boat, waving at the people they were leaving behind on the pier at Kilronan, the brother suddenly changed his mind and jumped off to swim ashore again. He was rescued and pulled out of the water by his friends, while the sister stayed on board and went to America where she became a famous actress and they never laid eyes on each other again. Late at night, the men would start singing the old sean nós songs. ‘The Rocks a Bawn’ was like a hit single on the island and somebody had to sing it every night or nobody could go home. And the singer often needed to hold the hand of another living person while he sang, usually that of a stranger, winding it around like a barrel organ to keep the song coming.

  We had studied The Playboy of the Western World at school, so we knew that a man would invent any story around himself in order to attract the admiration of a woman. A man would fabricate his own biography in order to get shelter and belonging, he would turn himself into anything and fit himself into any image required of him in order to be accepted. We knew that the inspiration for the play by John Millington Synge came from a story of a man who once came to the island saying he had killed his own father with a blow of a spade and was then hidden by the islanders in a hole out by Kilmurvy, while the police were searching high and low for him.

  I wondered whether the people on the island would treat Stefan in the same way. If they had heard the Garda message going out on the radio, would they ignore it because they understood when a man wanted to go missing voluntarily? They knew full well, not by any description of his clothes or his appearance, but by the look in his eyes and the way he would spend his days staring at the Atlantic, that this was the German who didn’t want to go back, the man who had murdered his own father. They would say nothing, even keep him hidden from the Gardai, because they liked being on the side of the person who was trying to disappear.