The Sailor in the Wardrobe

by Hugo Hamilton

  We knew that the play had caused a riot when it was first performed, because Irish people didn’t like themselves to be portrayed in this way. They didn’t like Synge for giving the Aran Islanders primitive instincts and immoral ways of speaking about themselves. It was the word ‘shift’ which caused all the trouble, a word used long ago for a woman’s undergarments. We knew that the riot in the Abbey Theatre had angered Yeats and provoked him to say ‘You have disgraced yourselves,’ a phrase we often used against each other in class. And we knew that the word ‘shift’ had taken on an entirely different meaning. Now it meant getting off with, scoring, or being successful with a woman. Packer would never have used the word himself, because it was a country term which, he said, came from dancehall culture, where shifting a woman meant getting her from the inside to the outside. But we knew it meant much more and implied end results that went far beyond that, something that involved making up any amount of lies and stories. We also knew that the verb ‘bréagadh’ in the Irish language had multiple meaning. It meant telling lies as well as courting or flirting.

  We got talking to some of the Killeany girls at the dancehall. They accused us of trying to grow fur on our chins to pretend that we were men. They asked if they could touch our faces and said they had felt more hair on the back of a door. We met them along the road or outside their houses, but rarely in the pub which was mostly frequented by men and tourists. They invited us into their houses for tea and barm brack, and Packer would keep talking for us all, telling great stories and turning us into amazing heroes with very interesting lives.

  One night in Tigh Fitz, Packer got talking to a Dutch girl who was staying on the island for the summer. She had been in a motorbike accident and had a plaster cast around her leg, sitting on the bench in the pub with her painted toes sticking out the other end. Packer was able to tell her that he had also been in a motorbike accident and had his leg in plaster for months. She was so beautiful that everyone wanted to talk to her and tell her any amount of lies. They watched her painted toenails twiddling around and told jokes and stories. The old men wound her hand around as they sang songs, but it was Packer who finally got his arm around her and helped with her crutches to make sure she didn’t fall over when she was leaving.

  The following day, we all went walking up to an ancient church above Killeany. We climbed the hill beyond the cottages with the Dutch girl and Packer following some distance behind us. She was wearing a red tartan skirt which flapped in the wind every now and again. Sometimes Packer called one of us back to carry her across the rocks. At the monastic ruin of Teampall Bheannáin, the breeze frequently revealed the entire stump of plaster. We looked at the crumbling walls covered in yellow lichen and understood for a brief moment how ancient this place was. Everybody was mostly keeping an eye on the Dutch girl and watching how Packer was talking to her.

  On the way back through Killeany that afternoon, we came walking by the cottages and saw hundreds of salted fish laid out along the walls to dry. Each one of the cottages had fishing implements outside, lobster pots, oars, and buoys. At the harbour, we saw some men and dogs sitting around on the small pier and I looked for a long time at them, comparing everything with our own harbour.

  We carried on walking past the cottages with Packer and the Dutch girl in front of us. The crutches were clicking slowly along the road, making it sound like a hospital ward in the open air. Now and again she stopped to take the weight off her hands, hopping around for a moment on her good leg and falling into Packer with her arms around him, looking back at us with a big smile and brown eyes. At one of the cottages, there was an old woman leaning at the gate, looking out at the sea and watching the slow procession going past. She began talking to us in Irish, first of all saying it was a fine day to be walking and doing nothing. She wanted to know where the girl was from and what happened to her leg. I explained that she had broken her leg in a motorbike accident and that she was staying on the island until the leg healed, before she went back to Amsterdam. The old woman began to laugh, saying there was not much to do on the island for a young woman with a plaster on her leg.

  By now Packer and the Dutch girl had already moved ahead along the road, while we were still listening to the old woman and answering her provocative questions with shrugs and smiles. She asked us why we had no girlfriends and what was wrong with all the island girls walking up and down the road, day and night, with no crutches.

  The old woman smiled. She was looking at us with humorous idleness, leaning lazily with her elbow on the wall. We could see the ancient teeth left over in her mouth and the deep lines across her face. We could see the marks of the weather and the wind and the rain around her sunken cheeks, but underneath, she had the expression of a young Killeany girl. Nothing could hide the mischief in her eyes as she watched us drifting away, calling out a final exhortation in Irish behind us.

  ‘Scaoil amach an deabhailín,’ she said with a wink. Let out the little divileen.

  It took us a while to work out what exactly she meant. We began to understand why we felt the world had been turned around for us. It was not just the direction of the sunlight. We had been misinformed by the landscape and all its lonely features, because all the things we had expected to come from London, from Europe, were found here on the Aran Islands in great plenty.

  ‘Let out the little deabhailín,’ Packer kept saying on the train home as if we were going to follow the old woman’s advice for the rest of our lives. It was his new phrase, the Irish for shift. He was the leader of the great expedition and he repeated the words like a souvenir all the way back to Dublin.

  When we got down to the harbour again, everything in the world was turned back around, a hundred and eighty degrees. Dan Turley was full of muttering rage, not only at us abandoning him, but at the fact that another boat had gone missing and this time not even been recovered. Dan had to get somebody to drive him down the coast, checking in all the different harbours halfway to Wexford, without finding anything.

  ‘I know who it is,’ he kept repeating. ‘I know the bastard.’

  Dan said it was always his boats that were missing, not Tyrone’s. And that said everything. By now the harbour boys had turned the place into a courtroom. They looked at everyone with suspicion, just like Dan, saying things about them that they had heard from other people. They collected gossip, lots of things that had nothing to do with missing boats at all. They were like the harbour conscience, like a jury muttering through the side of their mouths. They saw the schoolteacher and said she was having it off with the trawler man. They noticed his van parked outside her house, and how it meant her husband was away on business. They knew a man from the hill who came down to the harbour and said he was looking for planning permission to build apartments along the top of the cliff behind the harbour. How much did he have to pay in bribes in order to clutter up the most scenic place along the coast with ugly apartments, they kept whispering. Every new car, every wedding, every death, every accident and every drunk driving charge was discussed at the harbour.

  Packer said we were going to help Dan to find the person who was stealing the boats. His idea was that we would stay out all night and keep a kind of vigil at the harbour. The harbour vigilantes, he called us, without telling the rest of the harbour lads or even Dan.

  I had to sneak out the bedroom window after everyone had gone to sleep and cross over the roof with the beehives, down onto the wall and away around the back lane. My mother told me to put a schoolbag and extra pillows into my bed to make it look like I was asleep. She was helping me escape. At the harbour, I could not see Packer anywhere at first and he only stepped out from the shadow beside Dan’s shed when I started calling him in a whisper. He had already decided where we were going to hide. He said we would sit in one of the boats, the best place to stay unnoticed. They would never accuse us of stealing the boats because we had been away in the Aran Islands.

  We got out to one of the boats and settled down. He had two cans of
beer and I had brought sandwiches that my mother made. Packer was annoyed when he realized that my mother knew about me staying out all night.

  ‘Jesus. I don’t believe it,’ he said.

  But I told him it was alright, my mother knew how to keep a secret. And she wasn’t told about the whole vigilante idea. In any case, we were just sitting in the boat for hours, not doing anything against the law, just whispering. Packer was talking about the Dutch girl, saying he had got a letter from her asking him to come and visit her in Amsterdam. Then we listened to the sound of the water underneath the boats, and some of the masts clanging. The boats were moving back and forth, shifting around us like cattle in a barn. At one point, we saw the patrol car passing on the road, slowing down for a moment before it went out of sight around by the castle. But we didn’t care that nobody came, because we liked being out at night when everyone else was asleep.

  And then we saw somebody walking towards the harbour, a man brightening up and falling into shadow again as he passed under the street lights on the pier.

  ‘Hark,’ Packer said, and I started laughing.

  Packer punched my shoulder to keep me quiet. We put our heads down to stay out of sight. The pier was behind me, so I left it to Packer to put his head up every now and again to see who it was, if we could recognize him. The man stood behind the upturned boat that was still being painted. He stood behind the crane for a moment, then moved forward to the edge of the pier.

  ‘It’s Tyrone,’ Packer whispered.

  We had got our man. I could already see us talking to Dan and talking to the Gardai. I could imagine them taking Tyrone away for questioning.

  ‘He’s coming,’ Packer said.

  We watched Tyrone bending down to untie the ropes on the pier, then pulling the boat in and going down the steps. We saw him getting into the boat, his own boat. He was standing up and he stopped for a moment to pull a bottle out of his pocket and drink from it, before he picked up the oar and began to scull his way along the pier. He was coming right towards us. I thought he knew that we were there all the time and that he was quietly coming to get us, that he would hit us with the oar or shout to let us know he was no fool and he knew what we were up to. For one moment, he was right beside us, standing up, talking to himself, humming.

  At the harbour mouth, he sat down and took out the second oar, then started rowing out slowly without a sound. He was so skilled at dipping the oars into the water each time, that they made no more noise than the water lapping against the granite steps. We had put him on trial. He was doing nothing other than taking out his own boat, slipping quietly out of the harbour, but we had already found him guilty.

  ‘Let out the fuckin’ deabhailín,’ Packer whispered.

  And then we started laughing so much that we could not even move. I had to put my head down on the seat of the boat because I was shaking so much and laughing without a sound. Packer repeated the phrase once more and we started laughing even faster than before. When we got back in to the pier, we were walking crooked and stopping every now and again to let out the laughter that was trapped inside us. We walked up onto the promontory field, above the harbour where they were planning to build the luxury apartments. For now we had the place to ourselves and sat looking out over the bay from up high. We could see Tyrone out there in his boat, with his back to the bow. He had tied up to the buoy of a lobster train, drinking from his bottle and smoking his cigarette. We could hear him starting to sing. He was sitting with his feet up on one of the seats, singing like an innocent man.

  Fifteen

  I know I will be judged by what the Germans did.

  When my mother’s job as a governess came to an end in Wiesbaden, when the American lieutenant and his family moved back to Vermont, they promised to find her a job with the American forces in Germany. She had spoken to them about wanting to become a chemist or studying law, so they found her a job as a court clerk in the denazification courts. Everyone in Germany had to prove their innocence after the war and the courts were set up to make sure that no Nazis would get back into powerful positions. Everybody had to fill in forms called ‘Fragebogen to state what they had done during the war years and whether they had belonged to the NSDAP. My mother had a clean sheet, except for one box which said she had joined the BDM, Hitler Youth for girls, but that was because she had no choice and she always told us she used the ‘silent negative’, as they called it in her family, withholding their allegiance to the Führer by expressing a silent resistance inside their heads. Her new job was to take notes of what was said in court and to type it up afterwards. She got a clothing allowance, a fine salary and an apartment all to herself, which was an unimaginable luxury at that time, she says. She had access to as much food as she wanted so that it was no longer a problem sharing it around Mainz and Rüsselsheim.

  After the war, people in many key positions had to go before a tribunal to demonstrate that they had not acted improperly during the Nazi years. Before they were allowed to take up their old jobs as theatre directors, hospital consultants or university professors, many of them were forced to make a case before the tribunal and my mother says she witnessed grown men break down in the court when they were told they could not work because of their Nazi past. She saw a bakery manager who had continued to run the bakery after his Jewish employers had been thrown out and who was then thrown out of work himself after the war, even though he had nothing to do with the changes and claimed he only made ‘Brötchen’ all his life. There were some people who still believed in the Nazis and other people who didn’t care very much one way or the other who was in power. There were lots of people who claimed they had just joined the party because they had to. My mother says it was usually the people who claimed they were innocent who were the most convinced Nazis and the people who acknowledged their guilt who were actually most innocent.

  The small courtroom held about fifty people at the most, she told me. The person on trial was normally accompanied by his relatives, because they were all affected by the outcome. My mother had never been inside a courtroom in her life before and it was just as she had imagined, with a few rows of benches for onlookers and other benches for the prosecutor and the judge. The people before this court had no lawyers and usually defended themselves. The tribunal was led by an American officer, but my mother says she was actually working for a German prosecutor named Willenberger, who conducted each case. My mother says Willenberger was a very clever man who kept the most interesting piece of evidence until the very end, when the person before the court was already convinced of their innocence, then he would drop the most devastating fact, something that would make the accused and his relatives turn white with shock. And then she told me how when a person got the all clear, you could see the family members embracing each other outside the court afterwards.

  Mostly it was only people who had obvious connections with the Nazis who were charged in the first place. You could see the hatred and resentment seeping through their statements, because they had been in control and now they were powerless. But sometimes there were marginal cases where it was hard to distinguish between being German and being a Nazi. Sometimes the difficulty for the tribunal was to choose between patriotism and Nazism.

  One day, my mother says, a well-known gynaecologist was brought before the tribunal to answer for his attitudes during the Hitler years. She cannot remember his name now, but he had been in charge of a delivery unit at a hospital in Frankfurt and was accused of being anti-Semitic. He was a very quiet man who hardly tried to defend himself at all, only answering each question very briefly and factually. He said he had never used his position against anyone. He said he was forced to join the NSDAP and now he was forced to renounce the party, when in fact he had no interest in anything at all but delivering babies.

  The prosecutor accused him of working directly for the Nazis, because every baby born in the Third Reich was a gift for Hitler. The gynaecologist then said children were not born Nazis. The arguments went
back and forward for days with the prosecutor saying that he delivered only Nazi babies and the gynaecologist saying he didn’t care what kind of babies he delivered as long as they were healthy. It was clear to my mother, who had to type everything up, that the arguments were going around in circles. Everybody was waiting for the final trick from the prosecutor, but this time it was the gynaecologist who waited until the last minute before bringing in his key witness. A Jewish woman had travelled all the way back from London to testify that she had had a baby boy while she was being treated by the gynaecologist. She said he knew the baby was Jewish, but had kept it secret.

  The prosecutor argued that he had heard from other patients that he was an angry man, but the Jewish woman said he was always friendly to her.

  My mother says it was very similar to the famous case of Wilhelm Furtwängler, the famous conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra who stayed in Germany and continued to conduct all through the Hitler years. For the Nazis, he was the great showcase for German music, but Furtwängler himself said he was only devoted to the music. But music was not neutral, my mother says, no more than babies were neutral, because everything became part of the war machine. When it became law that no Jewish people could take part in German culture, Furtwängler refused and stood up for his Jewish colleagues in the orchestra, sending letters to Goebbels personally to protect them and keep them working with him. Because Furtwängler was such a famous conductor, the Nazis went along with him for a while. But as time went by and the Nazis became stronger, he found himself having to conduct under the Swastika, with Goebbels and other leading Nazi figures in the audience. There is a well-known moment after one of those concerts when Goebbels came to shake his hand. Immediately afterwards, Furtwängler took out his handkerchief to wipe his hand. Maybe it was a true sign of how he felt about the Nazis and their concentration camps, or maybe it was simply a sign that he had sweaty hands after the performance. It made no difference because the great German conductor had compromised his music, just as the great gynaecologist had compromised his profession, even though there were a lot of good babies born during the Nazi times. My father says there is a recording he would love to hear of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony which was made during the war with the sound of bombs falling in the background and it goes to show that Furtwängler was not afraid to die for his music.